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Shortly after Helene Cooper moved to the United States, a teacher asked where she was from.

Cooper said she was from Liberia. The teacher asked where that was.

"West Africa," Cooper said.

"You're from Africa?" the teacher replied. "You sound like you're from Boston. Why don't you have an African accent?"

"Some people had a preconceived notion of what an African sounded like," Cooper said in a telephone interview. "But I had had friends who were Americans, and I knew how to copy their accents. All I wanted to do was sound like everybody else."

Cooper was part of the Americo-Liberian elite, descendants of free American blacks who colonized the Tennessee-sized country beginning in the 1820s. She had attended an American-run school in the Liberian capital of Monrovia. She had grown up reading "Little Women" and Nancy Drew, and listening to Michael Jackson and the Commodores. She had even been to the United States before to visit family.

But in 1980, a band of soldiers led by Samuel K. Doe, a master sergeant in the Liberian army, overthrew the government, killing the president and most of his cabinet. In the ensuing chaos, her mother was raped. Her family fled first to Knoxville, Tenn., and then to Greensboro.

Now a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, Cooper recently penned a memoir, "The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood." The book paints a picture of what Liberia was like in the 1970s and also details Cooper's high school years in America, her adventures as a journalist and her trip back home to look for a long-lost foster sister.

Very African, very American

A 1983 graduate of Dudley High School, Cooper spent two years in Greensboro before going on to UNC-Chapel Hill, where she majored in journalism. Her book is peppered with Liberian English, a sort of creole laced with old African and American phrases, but over the phone the 42-year-old betrays no trace of an accent and indeed sounds like she was born and raised a Yankee (though not necessarily a Bostonian).

Liberia is in many ways like a little piece of America on the hump of Africa. The nation's flag with its red and white stripes and blue field in the upper left hand corner is based on that of the United States. The Pledge of Allegiance is almost identical to the American one. And the capital is named after U.S. president James Monroe.

Now, however, the country is struggling to recover from a decade and a half of civil war.

In 1989, Liberian warlord Charles Taylor staged an uprising, and one faction after another went on a killing spree. The violence at times verged on the surreal with child soldiers dressed in wigs and wedding gowns. In the book, Cooper described one militia leader who went by the nom de guerre Gen. Butt Naked, and whose "battle attire included sneakers, a gun and sometimes a lady's purse." The civil war officially ended in 2003 after Taylor was deposed. Democratic elections took place in 2005, but the security situation remains precarious, and U.N. peacekeepers are still stationed there.

The place Cooper remembers from her childhood, though, was one drenched in '70s chic: school dances set to the American soul hits of the day, afternoons spent watching Bruce Lee flicks, big Detroit-made automobiles on the road, "Saturday Night Fever"-style fashions on display.

"It was very African, but at the same time very American," she said. "We were a poor country on a poor continent. All around me were villages where children were running barefoot. There were market women in the street. But it was also very vibrant. And so it always felt, at least to me when I was a kid growing up in the '70s, that Liberia was just full of life and energy and colors and scents."

Her father, John, ran a succession of businesses, including a shipping firm. Her mother Calista's family boasted several high-ranking government officials, including Minister of Foreign Affairs Cecil Dennis. The book's namesake house had 22 rooms, marble floors, a rock wall and servants. She attended the American Cooperative School, whose student body included the children of U.S. diplomats and missionaries.

Cooper's great-great-great-great-grandfather Elijah Johnson came over on what she describes as Liberia's version of the Mayflower, the Elizabeth. The ship, which sailed out of New York in February 1820, was the first to bring free blacks to Liberia in a scheme devised by a group called the American Colonization Society.

"There was a huge growing class of free blacks in the United States at that time," Cooper said. "But a lot of whites didn't like the idea of having freed blacks at the same time that you had enslaved blacks, because they thought that that was setting a bad example for the people who were still slaves. And so there was this back-to-Africa movement started to get rid of them."

In 1847, Liberia became independent. But the colonizers set up a two-class system in which they took the reins of government and business, as well as large chunks of land, leaving the native Africans effectively disenfranchised.

For the most part, Cooper said she was unaware of her country's social tensions while growing up.

"We were very opposed to the apartheid system they had in South Africa, but we didn't make comparisons to that when I was growing up," she said. "Because what we had wasn't a legalized type of system. It was more of an unofficial class system that you see in so many third-world countries."

When she was 8, Cooper's family took in a native girl named Eunice Bull, a practice common among well-off Americo-Liberians.

A member of the Bassa tribe, Eunice initially had trouble fitting in, trying twice to run away. But Eunice and Cooper discovered they had plenty in common, most notably their fear of sleeping alone. Each night Cooper would drag a mattress out of her room and sleep with Eunice and sister Marlene in the same room. Cooper likens their relationship to that of any other pair of sisters, talking about boys, telling scary story stories at night, goofing off at church. But though the two were very close, Eunice didn't tag along when the family traveled abroad, and she went to a less expensive private school.

Hard transition

In the predawn hours of April 12, 1980, native soldiers broke into the home of President William Tolbert, bayoneted him and announced, as Cooper wrote, that "Liberia was now under new management." On April 22, Cooper's 14th birthday, 13 of Tolbert's cabinet members were taken to a beach, tied to poles and shot. In the book, Cooper writes that the bullets kept missing her cousin Cecil Dennis, until an angry soldier took an Uzi right up to his face.

Several days earlier, soldiers came to her home and threatened to rape her and her sisters. Her mother told the girls to go upstairs and lock themselves in a bedroom. When she came back upstairs, she got in the shower and told them, "Those damn soldiers gang-raped me."

They soon decided to leave for Knoxville where they had family. Eunice and Cooper's father stayed behind. Before boarding the Pan-Am flight out of Monrovia, Cooper told Eunice to take care of her Nancy Drew books and said that she, too, would be coming to the United States soon. More than 20 years would pass before they saw each other again.

With no friends in her new home, the transition was a difficult one for Cooper.

"That year in Knoxville was awful," she said. "I used to hide in the library at lunchtime, because I was afraid to go into the cafeteria. ... And we were pretty traumatized. The coup had just happened. My family had just been attacked."

The next year, her mother returned to Liberia to settle some business affairs, and her father came to the United States. He moved his daughters first to Durham, where Cooper briefly attended Jordan High School, and then to Greensboro.

On her first day at Dudley, she was about to head to the library during lunch when she decided to go looking for her chemistry classroom. She found some students in there and began talking to them.

"All of a sudden, there was somebody at school I could hang out with," she said.

She joined the drama club and the High I.Q. team and became interested in journalism.

But her father had trouble making ends meet. In Greensboro, he was a certified public accountant, but spent a great deal of time on the phone with Liberian friends "chasing the next big deal." Eventually their house in Woodlea was repossessed.

"There was always going to be another big deal that would come through and bring in $150,000 and it'd be a big windfall and then we'd be fine," Cooper said. "He was brilliant, one of the smartest people I'd ever known ... my dad was definitely an entrepreneur, but also irresponsible. So I remember for the longest time, my mother was the one scrimping, pinching and saving money, and my dad was bragging that he'd lost $1 million by the time he was 30."

Her mother's thriftiness, though, allowed her to save enough money to send her daughters to college.

Return home

After graduating from UNC in 1987, Cooper went to work for the Providence Journal in Rhode Island, and eventually became an international trade correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. While on assignment during the first day of the U.S. led invasion into Iraq in 2003, the vehicle she was in was crushed by a tank.

"I had thought I was dying and that I was dying in the wrong war," she said. "As it turned out it was nothing more than a really bad neck injury, but I said, 'I've got to go home.' "

When she returned to Liberia later that year, she found the buildings in Monrovia riddled with bullet holes and the streets covered with garbage. The road leading into her family's property was covered in vines. Looters had stripped the home of most its fixtures, and squatters had taken up residence.

But while in Liberia, Cooper also reconnected with Eunice, with whom she had lost contact when the postal system failed in the 1980s. Eunice had initially fled after surviving an aerial bombardment in 1992, but had come back shortly thereafter. In the years since, she had gotten married and was working in a clerical position at a Firestone rubber plantation. She was also trying to track down her son, whom she had sent to Gambia during the war. Eventually she found him living in London.

Cooper now lives in the Washington area. She helped cover North Carolina as a reporter in the Atlanta bureau of the Wall Street Journal in the early 1990s, but has not spent much time in the Piedmont Triad since high school.

"It's hard to imagine going back and not being swamped by memories of my dad," she said. "For all his flightiness, he really did take care of us."

Still, her reminiscences of the area are mostly fond ones.

"Greensboro, in many ways, I feel like it saved me," she said. "In Knoxville I was such a geek, I was miserable. We had nothing, we were in a horrible apartment. And when we got to Greensboro, I was expecting the same thing. But I was so much happier, because finally again I was starting to find myself. And in Greensboro I was able to concentrate a little bit more on just being a teenager."

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com