Wilmot of Helena

July 24, 2020·27 min·2 clips

At a rebel checkpoint in Liberia, a friend warned Wilmot Collins that soldiers were executing anyone who started walking with their left foot—because only trained soldiers march left-right-left.

Helena is a hard place to blend into. It has about 30,000 people, snow through much of the year, and only 159 African Americans. Wilmot Collins is one of them. He is also the mayor. The host meets him there, where his public life in Montana sits strangely close to the story he carries from Liberia. His childhood was more than hardship. Collins remembers parents who worked for Firestone, rubber trees tapped for tires, and weekends spent traveling between cities for baseball. There was comfort in that life. His family did not have to struggle, he says, and the memory still has motion in it: work, travel, ordinary pride. Then the story tightens. By the time he reaches Ghana, he and his wife are filthy, hungry, and depending on the small mercy of five dollars for a cab. He cannot prove his name. At the SOS Children's Village, the person in charge asks for identification, and Collins has to admit he has none. So he asks for witnesses. Children he once taught are brought in. When they see him, they cry before he understands why. The mirror explains it. For the first time in six months, he sees himself: a full-grown thirty-year-old man down to ninety pounds. The crying makes sense then. The children remember a well-built, happy teacher. The man in front of them looks close to starvation. Help arrives without ceremony. The village takes them in, puts him back in a classroom and his wife in a clinic, while she starts looking toward America through the Helena family she still knows.

As heard by us

A quietly forceful portrait of a Liberian life that ends in Helena, with the long road between left intact.

Wilmot Collins's life story lands because it never loses track of the hard facts: a comfortable childhood in Liberia, then starvation, displacement, and a long, bruising route to the mayor's office in Helena, Montana.

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Why you'd press play

A mayor's life story that starts in Liberia and lands in snowy Helena.

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