2006 - What is the What (23 page)

I had only been in the country a few months, and there I sat, in a suit, courtside at a professional basketball game. Picture it! Picture twelve refugees from Sudan, all of us wearing suits, all of these suits one size too small, donated by our churches and sponsors. Picture us sitting, trying to make sense of it all. The confusion began before the game, when a group of twelve young American women of many skin colors, well-built and wearing leotards, fanned out over the empty basketball court, and they performed a hyperactive and very provocative dance to a song by Puff Daddy. We all stared at the gyrating young women, who put forth an image of great power and fierce sexuality. It would have been impolite to turn away, but at the same time, the dancers made me uncomfortable. The music was the loudest I have heard in my life, and the spectacle of the stadium, with its 120-foot ceiling, its thousands of seats, its glass and chrome and banners, its cheerleaders and murderous sound system—seemed perfectly designed to drive people insane.

Shortly after, a different group of cheerleaders began shooting T–shirts far into the stands, using devices designed to look like submachine guns. I stared at the guns, which stored ten rolled-up T–shirts in their barrels, and were capable of launching the shirts forty or fifty feet into the air. These young people, cheerleaders for the Atlanta Hawks, were trying to inspire the crowd, giving away clothing and miniature basketballs, though their task was a difficult one. The Atlanta Hawks team was playing the Golden State Warriors, and because neither team was winning that season, there were only a few hundred people occupying the stadium’s seventeen thousand seats.

A good percentage of the attendees that night were Sudanese—one hundred and eighty of us—and twelve had been chosen to sit right near the court with Manute Bol. There we were, watching the basketball game next to one of the tallest men ever to play professional basketball. It was a strange thing, this night in my life, and it should have been positive, all of it, but it was not, and the first sour note was sounded when one of the Lost Boys, who had not been given a courtside seat, found his way to us, and began complaining loudly, even to Manute, about the unfairness of it all. And while this young man, whose name I will not mention, railed about this injustice, it was Mary’s name that came up, again and again, as the source of the trouble.

‘How can she do this?’ he demanded. ‘What right does she have?’

I had a very low opinion of this man on this night. Finally he was asked by an usher to return to his seat, and, embarrassed, we turned our attention back to the court. As the dancers continued, a few of the Atlanta Hawks players, all of whom looked far larger in person than on TV, jogged in their enormous shoes over to Bol to shake his hand. Bol remained seated, for it was evident that standing was not as easy for him as it once was. We all watched Bol speak to the American players, most of whom said a few words to accompany a quick handshake, and went back to their teams. A few of the Hawks players let their eyes wash over us, Bol’s guests, and they seemed to deduce immediately who we were.

It was at once heartening and shaming. We were, as a group, healthier than we had ever been before, but next to these NBA players, we looked frail and underfed. Even our leader, Manute Bol, with his small head and huge feet, resembled an oversized twig pulled from a tree. Everyone from Sudan, our group’s appearance implied, was starving, was poorly built. No suits could be made to give us the illusion of ease and comfort in this world.

This game was the beginning of a celebratory evening in honor of our collective birthdays, all organized by Mary and her volunteers. After the game, we celebrated our birthdays in the CNN Center next door. Mary had pulled strings with Ted Turner and we were given space, and the sponsors brought fried chicken, beans, salad, cake, and soda. The Lost Boys Foundation had held a similar party for everyone the previous year, before I had arrived. Why were we all celebrating our birthdays on the same day? This is a good question, and the answer is fascinating in its banality. When we were first processed by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, at Kakuma, we were assigned an age as accurately as aid workers could determine, and were all given the same birthday: January 1. To this day, I do not know why this is the case; it seems like it would have been just as easy for the UN to pick different dates at random for each of us. But they did not do this, and though many boys have chosen their own, new, birthdates, most of us have accepted January 1 as our date of birth. It would be too difficult, anyway, to alter it in all of our official documents.

At the party, we men, some of whom had come from as far as Jacksonville and Charlotte, talked among themselves and with our sponsoring families. For each of us refugees, there were one or two American sponsors. The sponsors and sponsor-families were almost uniformly white, though they were nevertheless socio-economically diverse: there were young professional couples, older men wearing trucker hats, senior citizens. But the majority of the Americans present cleaved to a certain type of woman, between thirty and sixty, capable and warm, the sort one expects to find volunteering at a school or church.

To see all these men there—it was tremendous. I could glance across the crowd and see a pair of brothers I had coached in soccer when we were teenagers. There were boys I knew from English classes, another from my Kakuma theater group, another who sold shoes in the camp. This was the first time I had gathered with more than a dozen or so boys from Kakuma, and it almost knocked me over. That we had all survived, that we were all wearing suits, new shoes, that we were standing in a cavernous glass temple of wealth! We greeted each other with hugs and open smiles, many of us in shock.

There was one group among us who were dressed differently than the rest, wearing sweatsuits, visors, baseball hats and basketball shirts, accentuated with gold watches and chains. These men we called Hawaii 5-0, for they had just returned from Hawaii, where they were working as extras in a Bruce Willis movie. This is true. Apparently one of the Lost Boys Foundation volunteers knew a casting director in Los Angeles, who was looking for East African men to serve as extras in a movie directed by an African-American man named Antoine Fuqua. The volunteer sent a photo of ten of the Atlanta-based Sudanese men, and all ten were hired. At the party, the ten had recently returned from three months on the islands, where they stayed at a five-star hotel, had all of their necessities taken care of, and were paid generous salaries. Now they were back in Atlanta, determined to make clear that they had been somewhere, were now of a different caste than the rest of us. One of the them was wearing a half-dozen gold chains over a Hawaiian shirt. Another was wearing a T–shirt bearing a screened photograph of himself with Bruce Willis. This boy wore this shirt every day for a year, and had washed it so many times that the face of Mr. Willis was now threadbare and ghostly.

As Hawaii 5-0 preened and postured, the rest of us were strenuously trying to appear unimpressed. At best, we were happy for them, or could laugh with them at the absurdity of it all. At worst, though, there was jealousy, plenty of it, and again the blame came down to Mary. It was she, it was rumored, who engineered the selection of those who had gone to Hawaii, and who was she to wield such power? The seeds of the demise for the Lost Boys Foundation were sown that night. From that date forward, Mary could do nothing right. I do not think that the Sudanese are particularly argumentative people, but those in Atlanta seem, too often, to find reason to feel slighted by whatever is given to any other. It became difficult to accept a job, a referral. Any gift, from church or sponsor, was received with a mixture of gratitude and trepidation. In Atlanta there were one hundred and eighty pairs of eyes upon us all at any point, and there seemed never to be enough of anything to go around, no way to distribute anything equitably. It was safer, after a time, to accept no gifts, no invitations to speak at schools or churches, or to simply drop out of the community altogether. Only then could one live unjudged.

Later there was dancing, despite there being only four eligible women present, and only two Sudanese among them. After the dancing, Manute Bol made his address. Towering over us, he was stern and pedantic, giving his speech first in Dinka and then in English, for the benefit of the Americans assembled. He urged us to behave while in the United States. He insisted that we become model immigrants, working hard and seeking a college education. If we conducted ourselves with dignity, restraint, and ambition, he said, we would be well-liked by our American hosts, and our success would encourage the U.S. government to bring more Sudanese refugees to America. It was up to us, he explained, to be the light from which hope sprung for the Sudanese still in the camps and suffering in Sudan.

‘Remember that time is money!’ he urged.

He paused for effect.

‘You cannot be late in America!’

Another long pause.

Manute spoke in bursts, beginning each sentence with a few loud words, which then gave way to a quieter tumble of afterthoughts. As he spoke, we all stood, silent, nodding. Our respect for Manute Bol was enormous; he had done everything he could to bring peace to Sudan. He had been, just a few years earlier, encouraged by the government to come to Khartoum, where he would be installed as Minister of Sports and Culture. Being loyal to his country and seeing this as an opportunity to bring more of his people’s interests to the attention of the Islamic government, Manute accepted and flew to Khartoum. Once there, he was told the job would not be his unless he renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. He refused, and this proved disastrous. It was an embarrassment for his hosts, and according to legend, he barely made it out alive. He bribed his way out of the country and returned to Connecticut.

‘You’re not longer on African time! Those days are over!’

We were not being told anything new. In conversations with any of us, it would have been clear to him that we were hell-bent on getting a college degree and being able to send money back to Sudan.

‘Make your ancestors proud!’ he barked.

Mary watched all of this while busily unwrapping food, thanking sponsors, cleaning up, shaking hands. It was the last time I remember her seeming somewhat happy while working on our behalf. I came to know Mary well in the following months—it was she who joined me in watching
The Exorcist
—and she confided in me about her difficulties with the other Sudanese she sought to serve. They yelled at her; they questioned her competence, often invoking her gender as explanation for her ineptitude; a fallback for many Sudanese men, I admit. With every new charge leveled against her—that she squandered the donations she received, that she played favorites, on and on—she retreated further, and of course had no choice but to favor those Sudanese who were not actively trying to discredit her. I remained supportive of her, for I saw that much of what the Sudanese had in Atlanta had come through her work. I admit that I benefited from the patience and compassion I showed her. The principal gift she directed my way was named Phil Mays.

Though there were many sponsors like yourselves, Christian neighbors—well-meaning churchgoers who had been moved by the plight of the Lost Boys—after a few months in Atlanta, I had no sponsor, and the three months of rent provided by the U.S. government was about to expire. I suffered under constant headaches and often could barely move; the pain could be blinding. I wanted to begin a life, and needed help with countless things: a driver’s license, a car, a job, admission to college.

‘Phil will help with all that,’ Mary said as we waited one rainy day at the Lost Boys Foundation office. She patted my knee. ‘He’s the best sponsor I’ve found.’

Most of the sponsors were women, and I knew much antipathy would come my way once it became known that one of the very few men available was being handed to me. But I didn’t care. I needed the help and had already given up on the politics of the young Sudanese in Atlanta.

I was very nervous about meeting Phil. I am not joking when I tell you that we all believed, all of us Sudanese, that anything could happen, at any time. In particular, I allowed the possibility that I might arrive at the office of the Foundation the morning of our meeting and be immediately turned over to immigration officials. That I would be returned to Kakuma or perhaps some other place. I trusted Mary, but thought that perhaps this Phil Mays was an agent of some kind who disapproved of our conduct thus far in the U.S. Phil told me later that he could see it in my posture: supplicating, tense. I was grateful for any hour in which I was welcomed and not in danger.

I waited in the lobby, wearing blue dress pants, which I had been given by the church. They were too short, and the waist was far too wide for me, but they were clean. My shirt was white and fit me nicely; I had ironed it for an hour the night before and again in the morning.

A man stepped out of the elevator, wearing jeans and a polo shirt. He was pleasant looking, in his thirties, appearing very much like the average white man of Atlanta. This was Phil Mays. He smiled and walked toward me. He took my hand between his two hands, and shook it slowly, staring into my eyes. I was even more certain that he intended to deport me.

Mary left us alone, and I told Phil a brief version of my story. I could see that it affected him deeply. He had read about the Lost Boys in the newspaper, but hearing my more detailed version upset him. I asked about his life and he told me something of his own story. He was a real-estate developer, he said, and had done very well for himself. He was raised in Gainesville, Florida, the adopted son of an entomology professor who left academia to become a mechanic. His adoptive mother left the family when he was four and his father reared him alone. Phil had been an athlete, and when he could not perform at a college level, he became a sportscaster, a job he held when he graduated. Eventually he went to law school and moved to Atlanta, married, and opened his own office. When he was a teenager, he discovered he had been adopted, and eventually went looking for his biological parents. The results were mixed, and he had always had questions about his life, his origins, his nature, and the nurturing he received. When Phil read about us and the Lost Boys Foundation, he was determined to donate money to the organization; he and his wife, Stacey, had decided on $10,000. He called the LBF and spoke to Mary. She was thrilled with the prospect of the donation, and asked Phil if he might like to donate more than money, that perhaps he’d like to come down to the office and possibly donate his time, too?