Behold the Dreamers (22 page)

She stood up from the sofa as she spoke and took a seat at the dinette, irritated by his declaration and not wanting to sit next to him anymore. He seemed taken aback by her sudden anger, infuriated that she dare challenge him on the matter.

“You think I don't care about my children?” he asked her. “You think I won't do anything for us to stay in America?”

“No!” she said, jumping up from the chair and pointing her index finger directly at him. “I don't think you will fight till the end for us to remain here. I think when the time comes, you'll give up, because you care too much about your pride. But I'll do whatever I need to do for us to stay in America! I'll go sleep on a church floor, no matter if I have …” She ran to the bedroom and sat on the bed, next to her sleeping daughter.

“What are you crying for?” he said, having followed her and looking angrily at her from the bedroom doorway. “What are those stupid tears for, Neni?”

She ignored him.

“You think I don't want to remain in America, too? You think I came to America so that I can leave? I work as a servant to people, driving them all over, the whole day, sometimes the whole week, answering yes sir, yes madam, bowing down even to a little child. For what, Neni? What pride are you talking about? I lower myself more than many men would ever lower themselves. What do you think I do it for? For you, for me. Because I want us to stay in America! But if America says they don't want us in their country, you think I'm going to keep on begging them for the rest of my life? You think I'm going to sleep in a church? Never. Not for one day. You can go and sleep on the church floor all you want. The day you get tired, you can come and meet me and the children in Limbe. Nonsense!”

He slammed the door behind her and left her whimpering in the bedroom.

Alone in the darkness she cried herself to sleep, Timba on her bosom, Liomi on the cot beside the bed. When she woke up early the next morning, Jende was in the living room, sleeping on the sofa.

C
HRISTMAS
WAS
THREE
DAYS
AWAY
AND
THE
DARKNESS
THAT
HAD
FALLEN
upon the city appeared to be on hiatus, outshone by the radiance of lighted trees at Rockefeller and Lincoln centers and the mesmerizing displays in shops along Fifth Avenue. Throughout the boroughs, there were steady, if faint, glimmers of hope shining through the windows of apartments where people lived with the belief that the good times would soon return. Even the despondent willed themselves to the streets, to hear something or see something or go someplace that would remind them that Christmastime was here, springtime was ahead, and in no time it would be summer in New York City again.

“Welcome and a very merry Christmas to you,” the pastor Natasha wrote in an email to Neni. “I'm so glad you were able to stop by at Judson, and I'd so love to get a chance to know you more. Please schedule a time to come to the office for a little chat.”

Neni scheduled the meeting for the next day and told Jende nothing of it.

In the church office, she met the assistant pastor, a redheaded and bearded young man from New Hampshire named Amos. He told Neni he used to be a Buddhist monk before deciding that progressive liberal Christianity was more aligned with his beliefs than Buddhism. Neni was curious about the difference between the two but thought it wise not to ask—asking might lay bare her ignorance about religion and spiritual matters and expose her true motive for coming to the church.

In private, the pastor Natasha was a more subdued woman than the fiery preacher who had stood at the pulpit and spoken about the need for a revolution that would shake the country to its core. Her mid-back-length gray hair was straight and side-parted, and Neni couldn't help admiring her courage in growing her gray hair long, and for leaving it gray in a city where there was no shortage of salons eager to rescue middle-aged women from grayness. There were framed pictures of happy families on the bookshelves in her office, families of all kinds: two fathers and a baby; two mothers and a toddler; an old man and an old woman and a dog; a young man and a young woman and a newborn. Natasha told Neni they were all congregants in the church. She asked Neni about her family and what brought her to Judson. I think I want to become a Christian, Neni responded, to which Natasha replied that she did not need to become a Christian to join the Judson family. Neni was relieved, though she still wanted to become a baptized Christian—what if the people at the Full Gospel Church near her house in Limbe were right about heaven and hell? She wanted to be on the safe side so she could get into heaven if it ended up being real. Her family didn't go to church (except for a brief period after her father lost his seaport job), but she believed there was a God with a son named Jesus, though she had a hard time believing that people speaking in tongues were truly possessed by some Spirit. You can believe whatever you want, and we'll accept you here, Natasha told her. We take everyone. From anywhere. We don't care if you believe in heaven and hell and pearly gates. We don't even care if you believe that the best way to get to heaven is by subway or Metro-North or LIRR, she added, which made Neni laugh.

Over tea, they spoke about motherhood and marriage. So open was their conversation about the sacrifice of dreams in parenthood and the loss of self in marriage that Neni went further than she thought she would and told Natasha about Jende's asylum case. She told her about their argument on Sunday and the shame she would experience if she had to return to Limbe; the sense of failure she might never escape for not having given her children a good life, a life full of opportunities, the kind of life that would be all but impossible for them to have in Cameroon. Natasha listened and nodded, allowing the stricken woman to release months' worth of tears. She offered Neni a tissue and took Timba when—perhaps sensing her mother's distress—the baby began to cry, too.

“The American immigration system can be cruel,” she told Neni, rubbing her knee, “but Judson will stand and fight with you. We will stand with you till the end.”

Neni Jonga walked out of Judson and into Washington Square Park that afternoon with the lightness of a beautifully crafted kite. There was a man playing a flute on a bench, and a young woman in a black down jacket playing a violin. She smiled as she walked through the park listening to them—she hadn't realized until then how divine classical music was. On the other side of the park, beneath the arch, a group of young people held placards, chanting and protesting the bailout. Bail us out, not our oppressors! Why are you using our taxes to destroy us? Death to Wall Street! Paulson the Antichrist!

Neni stood by the empty fountain and watched them, admiring their passion for their country. One of them in particular was a pleasure to watch, a dreadlocked young white man who was prancing and shaking his fist at their absent foes. Someday, Neni thought, if Judson could help them stay in America, she would be an American citizen and she would be able to protest like that, too. She'd say whatever she wanted to say about powerful people and have no fear of being thrown into prison the way dissidents were being thrown into prisons in some African countries for speaking out against abominable authoritarian regimes. She wanted to skip around the park, rejuvenated by the hope that had been handed to her by a compassionate woman of the cloth, but she couldn't—Timba was waking up from the cold, and she had to pick up Liomi from his last day of school and cook dinner.

When Jende came home from work at close to midnight, she hurriedly dished out his food and sat at the dinette as he took off his jacket, unable to wait any longer to tell him the amazing news of how the people of Judson would help them stay in America.

“I went down to the church in the Village today,” she began after he'd had a few bites of his dinner.

“What for?”

“It wasn't for anything. The pastor sent me an email to welcome me and said I should come for a visit, so I went.”

“You didn't think you should tell me before going?”

“I'm sorry. You were angry the last time I went. I didn't want you to get angry again.”

He glared at her and returned to his potatoes and spinach. She pretended the look wasn't half as nasty as he intended it to be. She had to forgive him easily these days or her marriage would be doomed. She just had to, because he hadn't been the same man since the day the letter for the deportation hearing arrived. The weight of the letter was crushing him, she could see; he was now a man permanently at the edge of his breaking point. No longer did he reach over to stroke her hair while she nursed the baby. He did not care to playfully punch Liomi in the ribs. The husband who seldom uttered words like “stupid” and “idiot” was now throwing those words left and right, in moments of rage and frustration, directing them at nameless Immigration officials, his lawyer, his family in Cameroon, his son, and, most of all, his wife. He scolded his mother for asking for money to patch the kitchen wall and barked at Liomi when the child asked if his father could take him to an arcade. He pushed his food away if he thought it didn't have enough salt or pepper, and ignored phone calls from his friends. It was as if the letter of his court appointment had turned him from a happy living man to an outraged dying man intent on showing the world his anger at his impending death.

“The pastor told me that the church will help us stay in the country,” Neni said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Our
papier situation
. I told the pastor about
it
—”

“You did what!” he said, banging the table.

She said nothing.

He pushed his food aside and stood up.

“Are you crazy?” he said, pointing to his temple. “Are you losing your mind, Neni? Have you lost your mind? How dare you discuss my
papier
situation with those people without asking me first? Have you really lost your mind?” He was fuming and breathing heavily. Beneath him, she sat like a lamb before a teeth-baring lion.

“What's wrong with you? What is wrong with you these days? You think you have the right to go about discussing something like that with other people without asking me first? Do you know who these people really are? You think because you go to their church for one day you can tell them my private business? Eh, Neni? Are you crazy?”

She did not offer an excuse. She knew she had gone too far—Bubakar had warned them to guard their immigration story and share it with no one. You tell person say you no get paper, the lawyer had said, the day you get palaver with them, they go call Immigration, report you. “No one except me, you, the Almighty, and the American government should know how you entered this country and how you're trying to stay in it,” he had cautioned them repeatedly. He knew of the consequence of their scheme being leaked to the government by a hateful individual: It could spell the end not only for them but for him, too.

Neni had agreed with the lawyer's advice; she believed in the value of keeping certain matters private to protect from negativity and malice. To her, it was not only wise but easy—keeping crucial facts concealed was as effortless to her as singing. Back when she was a teenager, she had told no one besides Jende about her pregnancy with their deceased daughter. She had waited to tell even her parents until she was five months along, tactfully hiding her growing belly with oversize
kabas
and handbags. It was equally easy for her to hide their immigration travails in New York. Except for Betty and Fatou, she told no one. When asked by other friends about her family's legal status, she dodged the question by casually saying that their papers would be arriving very soon.

Despite her shame, she had told Natasha about their plight because she believed there were Americans who wanted to keep good hardworking immigrants in America. She'd seen them on the news, kind Americans talking about how the United States should be more welcoming to people who came in peace. She believed these good-hearted people, like Natasha, would never betray them, and she wanted to tell Jende this, that the people of Judson Memorial Church loved immigrants, that their secret was safe with Natasha. But she also knew it would be futile reasoning with a raging man, so she decided to sit quietly with her head bowed as he unleashed a verbal lashing, as he called her a stupid idiot and a bloody fool. The man who had promised to always take care of her was standing above her vomiting a parade of insults, spewing out venom she never thought he had inside him.

For the first time in a long love affair, she was afraid he would beat her. She was almost certain he would beat her. And if he had, she would have known that it was not her Jende who was beating her but a grotesque being created by the sufferings of an American immigrant life.

On Christmas morning they ate fried ripe plantains and beans but exchanged no gifts since Jende did not want Liomi believing that the giving and receiving of material gifts had anything to do with love. Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn't get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do to you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart. Liomi had protested, but on Christmas morning, as on all the previous Christmas mornings of his life, he got no gifts.

In the afternoon they ate rice and chicken stew, like most of the households in Limbe. Neni made
chin-chin
and cake, too, using the cake recipe she'd relied on in Limbe in the days when she baked over a blistering fire in an iron pot filled with sand. The night before, while the whole family was on the sofa watching
It's a Wonderful Life
, Jende had thought about inviting Leah to spend the day with them, since she was probably all alone in her Queens apartment being that she had no husband or children or living parents. He hated to think that Leah would be alone on a day when everyone should be with someone, but he didn't want to ask too much of Neni, because he was certain that if Leah accepted his invitation, Neni would cook seven different meals for the American coming to her house, and he knew he would feel bad that she was doing it while also taking care of Liomi and the baby. So he merely called Leah in the morning to wish her a merry Christmas. He told her work was going well, then listened as she told him about her plans to go to Rockefeller Center during the day, speaking excitedly, as if going to stand in the cold and look at a tree was such a wonderful thing.

For the rest of the day he told Liomi stories and rocked Timba to sleep after her feedings. No one came to visit them the way people did in Limbe, going from house to house, saying, “Happy, happy, oh!,” and yet it was a happy Christmas for him, far happier than his first Christmas in America.

On that day he had lain on his upper-level bunk bed all morning and afternoon in the basement apartment he shared with the Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, the weather outside too cold for a walk, the people on the streets too unknown to celebrate the specialness of the day with. With Winston gone to Aruba to vacation with a woman he was dating, he had no one to eat and laugh with, and reminisce with about the Christmases of his boyhood, which always involved too much eating, too much drinking, and way too much dancing. Lying in the dark room, he had pictured Liomi in the red suit he'd sent for him to wear to celebrate the day; he'd smiled at the thought of his son strolling around town and proudly telling everyone who asked that his clothes were from his papa in America. He imagined Neni taking Liomi to New Town, to wish a happy Christmas to his mother who must have prepared a meal of chicken stew with yams and another meal of
ndolé,
as well as a dish of plantains and
nyama ngowa.
He yearned to hear their voices, but there was no way for him to talk to them—the telephone lines from the Western world to much of Cameroon were overcrowded and bursting with the voices of those like him, the lonely and nostalgic, calling home to partake in the Christmas merrymaking, if only with their words. Frustrated, he had flung his calling card away and stayed in bed until four o'clock in the afternoon, making only one call, to his friend Arkamo in Phoenix, a call that did nothing to lessen his lonesomeness because Arkamo was having a grand time at a Cameroonian party, thanks to living in a city with a large close-knit Cameroonian community. After a shower and a dinner of Chinese leftovers, he had sat by the window in the common area, wrapped in his twin comforter and looking outside: at the weather so dull; at the people so colorlessly dressed; at the happy day slipping away so quickly and crushing him with longing.

Five days after Christmas, he returned to work, only to find there wasn't much to do. Clark was at a hotel, Anna told him when he called to ask her why the boss wasn't picking up his phone; he was going to do most of his work from there, she added. Cindy was taking time off from work (probably since the day of the tabloid story, Jende guessed, since Anna had called him the day after, while he was on his way back from dropping Mighty off at school, and told him that he didn't need to come to the Sapphire because Cindy would not be needing a ride to her office). The only person who needed to get around that day was Mighty, to his piano lesson and back. All Jende had to do, Anna said, was take Mighty to his teacher's building on the Upper West Side, hand him over to Stacy, who was meeting him there, and then bring Mighty and Stacy back to the Sapphire an hour later, unless Mighty wanted Stacy to take him to do something else, which was unlikely, since Mighty wanted to do nothing this winter break except sit alone in his bedroom. Jende could go home after that and the rest of the holidays would be equally light because, Anna said, whispering in a frightened voice, there was no way of knowing how long Clark would stay at the hotel or how much longer Cindy would keep herself locked in the apartment now that she wasn't even going out to do things with friends, being that her drinking was getting worse and poor Mighty now has two parents who— Anna caught herself before she could say too much and said she had to go.

“Mighty, my good friend,” Jende said after Mighty had settled in the backseat. “How was your Christmas?”

“I don't wanna talk about it.”

“Okay, okay, there is nothing wrong with that. You do not have to tell me, except for one thing—did you get to Skype with Vince?”

“Yeah, Mom called him.”

“How is he?”

Mighty shrugged and did not respond.

“He is having fun over there? Did he tell you some good stories about India?”

“He has dreadlocks.”

“Dreadlocks?” Jende asked, almost laughing at his visualization of Vince with dreadlocks. He liked the look of white people with dreadlocks, but Vince Edwards, son of Clark and Cindy Edwards, with dreadlocks? The look on Cindy's face must have been worth taking a picture of.

“Yes,” Mighty said. “He has, like, some funny-looking dreadlocks.”

“Really? Did he look good with it? I'm sure he still looks very handsome, right?”

“I don't know.”

Jende decided it was best to leave Mighty alone. He clearly did not want to talk, and attempts to cheer him up seemed to be making him only sadder.

“They fought in the kitchen last night,” Mighty said suddenly, after minutes of silence.

“Who? Your mommy and daddy?”

Mighty nodded.

“Oh, Mighty, I am so sorry to hear. But remember what I told you about married people fighting? Your mommy and daddy fighting does not mean anything bad. Married people like to fight sometimes. They even shout and scream at each other, but it does not mean anything, okay?”

Mighty did not respond. Jende heard him sniffle and hoped he wasn't crying again—the child had cried enough.

“I heard my mom crying, throwing stuff at the wall … I think it was glasses and plates, they were breaking. My dad was shouting for her to please stop it … but she was …” He pulled a tissue from the pack of tissues Jende was offering him and blew his nose.

“Your parents are going to be friends again soon, Mighty,” Jende said, not only to convince Mighty but to convince himself, too.

“She was saying, ‘I don't ever wanna see his face again.' She was telling my dad that he had to get rid of him, get rid of him right now, or else …”

“Get rid of who?”

“I don't know, but she was screaming it over and over. And my dad was saying, ‘I won't do it,' and my mom was screaming that he had to, otherwise she was going to do something …”

“I'm so sorry to hear all this, Mighty. But your mommy, she was just angry, right?”

“She was very angry. She was crying and screaming so loud.”

Jende exhaled and shook his head.

“I couldn't sleep,” Mighty went on. “I covered my head with my pillow but—”

“They did not say the name of this person?”

Mighty shook his head. “But I think it was Vince.”

“Vince?”

“Yeah, my mom was really upset about the dreadlocks. She said he looked like a hooligan.”

“No, Mighty,” Jende said, laughing lightly. “There is no way your mommy will ask your daddy to get rid of Vince. Your mommy loves you and Vince a lot—”

“They're going to get a divorce!”

“No, please don't say that,” Jende said, holding the steering wheel with one hand and reaching behind to rub Mighty's leg with the other. “Do not say these kinds of things and make yourself angry. They will be happy again. It is just how grown people are. They will be friends again.”

“No, they won't! They're getting divorced!”

“Please do not make yourself sad worrying about things that will never happen,” Jende said as he struggled to drive with one hand. “Everything will be all right, Mighty … Everything will be all right … Everybody will be all right … Please wipe your eyes.”

When they got to the building on Eighty-ninth Street and Columbus, Stacy came out to get Mighty. Jende watched as the boy forced a smile and told Stacy that yes, he was super-excited about the piece the teacher had planned for the day.

Jende got back in the car after Mighty and Stacy had left, and called Winston, who, thankfully, picked up his phone on the first ring even though he had barely picked it up since the day he went to Houston to visit Maami.

“Ah, Bo, you and your worries,” Winston said after Jende told him about Cindy wanting to get rid of someone. “She could be talking about ten different people. Maybe she was talking about—”

“It has to be me,” Jende said, shaking his head in disbelief. “There is no other man who works for her. Anna is a woman, Stacy is a woman, her assistant is a woman. Everyone except me.”

“Then maybe it wasn't someone who works for her. Women like her, they have all kinds of people who do different kinds of things for them. Doctors who take care of their wrinkles, people who do their hair, people who do their decorations—”

“You really think she would be screaming in the middle of the night to tell her husband to get rid of the person who does her decorations? Ah, Bo …”

“Okay, okay, fine. But I just don't want you to worry, that's all. You cannot hear a story from a little child and start shaking like a leaf, eh? Don't do this to yourself. You keep acting like this and tomorrow a heart attack will hit you, let me warn you. You don't know anything. You don't even know if the child heard correctly, eh?”

“Without this job, what will I do? My whole body is shaking. What am I going to do if they—”

“Hey, what is all this
sisa
for? Eh? Listen, if you're so afraid, I can call Frank and ask him. If Cindy wants Clark to fire you, Clark will not hide it from Frank. And I can ask Frank to help you convince Clark.”

“Yes, please, that'll be the best idea. He's the one who helped me get the job. And he likes me … Please do that. Every time I drive him and Mr. Edwards together, he is nice to me.”

“So there's nothing for you to worry about. I'll call him tomorrow, okay?”

“I don't know how to thank you, Bo.”

“Give me your firstborn son to be my servant,” Winston said, forcing Jende to laugh.

After he got off the phone, Jende leaned his head against the headrest, closed his eyes, and told himself to think of only good things. His father had always told him that: Even when things are bad, think of only good things. And Jende had done that as often as he could during his darkest days—while in prison after impregnating Neni; after his daughter had died late one night and Neni's father had ordered her buried first thing in the morning, denying him the chance to say goodbye; after Neni's father had denied his request to marry her for what seemed like the hundredth time; after he'd gotten a call from one of Neni's sisters, seven months after he arrived in America, telling him that Neni and Liomi had been involved in a bus accident on their way to visit Neni's aunt in Muyuka. In those moments he had done only what was in his power and thought of the countless number of good things that had happened in his past, and the many good things that were highly certain to happen in his future.

He'd done it when he felt powerless, like during those four months he'd spent in prison in Buea, waiting for his father to borrow enough money to convince Neni's father to request his release. Everything about prison had been far more horrendous than he'd imagined: the cold mountain air, which made his skin itch and had him shivering from evening to morning; the inadequate portions of barely palatable food; the dormitories packed end to end with snoring men every night; the easily transmittable diseases, like the dysentery he'd caught, which had lasted two weeks and kept him writhing all day from stomach cramps and a high fever. It was during the nights of his illness that he thought about his life, about what he would do with it once he was released. He couldn't think of anything he wanted more than to leave Cameroon, move to a country where decent young men weren't thrown into prison for minor crimes but were instead given opportunities to make something of their lives. When he finally got out of prison—after his father had given Neni's father enough money to cover Neni's maternity bills and the child's expenses for the first year of life, and after Pa Jonga had promised that Jende would stay away from Neni indefinitely—Jende returned to Limbe, determined to start saving money to leave the country. He got a job at the Limbe Urban Council, thanks to his friend Bosco, who worked there, and began putting away as much as he could every month for a future with Neni. For a year after his release, though, Neni wanted little to do with him, first because of her father's threat to kick her out if she continued wasting her life on Jende, and later because of her grief over the dead baby. Jende finally won her back—thanks to his bimonthly hand-delivered love letters splattered with words like “indefatigable” and “pulchritudinous”—but his dreams of a life for them in America always seemed farther than the nearest star when he compared his savings to the cost of an airline ticket. It was only thanks to Winston's job as a Wall Street lawyer, more than a decade later, that he was able to get the funds to journey to America to start a new life.