Midnight (21 page)

The smell of chopped peppers, garlic, onions, and tomatoes plus several secret ingredients of Umma’s filled our apartment on early Sunday afternoon. After a great meal, Naja and I walked to the store to pick up various Sunday newspapers. When we returned, Umma excitedly announced, “Leave your shoes on. I have a chance to take some measurements from the family members of the wedding party.”

“On a Sunday?” Naja asked Umma.

“I know. It’s a rush job. Because of everyone’s schedule, so many of us working two jobs, it turns out that Sunday is our best option. I just got the call from Yaella. The earlier I get these measurements done, the more comfortable they will feel. One of the women even works on Sundays. Now her sister says I have less than two hours to get over to the Bronx to take her measurements before the woman is off to work again.”

Naja and I listened and waited. Umma spoke as she rushed around.

Ever since Naja was born, Sunday in our apartment was reserved as family day. The rule is, no matter what we do, we do it together on Sundays. Usually, we relax at home, reading, listening to music, or conversing with one another. In the spring and summers, we go to the park or to a special event that’s of interest to us. On crunch time, Umma sews and Naja and I remain in the apartment along with her, doing
one of our own hobbies. I never minded family day. Sometimes it was the only day where we could catch some real rest. Sundays slowed me down.

Once we arrived on our new Sudanese customer’s Bronx block, without even looking at the numbers on the small houses I assumed their house was the white one with the aluminum siding and green trimming. It was the only house on the block with a gate around it. I knew if a Sudanese-born man came to this country along with his family, once he got a good look at the crazy Americans and the way that they live, his first priority would be to protect his family. Placing a gate around his property was a small way to separate or distinguish his loved ones from the influence and lifestyles of their American neighbors.

As we walked down the length of their block, my prediction turned out to be true.

“A-Salaama Alaikum,”
the voice came from the other side of the fence before we even reached to push the gate open. A Sudanese youth around seventeen years young with a soccer ball in his hand greeted all of us as he opened the gate and welcomed us in. A second, older son also ran up. They were all smiles, the sincere way people back home greeted one another. I had lost that all-day, automatic natural smile years ago, and now greeted most males with suspicion instead.

Their father welcomed us through their front door. Like many Sudanese men he was tall. Brown skinned, he had the nappy curls of a North African male. He embraced me, which was customary. At first I felt uncomfortable. When I’m holding I don’t fuck around with no hugging.

Then I felt a warmth from my past, where men in a family and even in a neighborhood were all each other’s security and not opponents. Where a man greeted a next man warmly and genuinely without even an ounce of perversion.

Most important, their father was respectful to Umma, and
praised her reputation and good works. He kept a respectful distance and a proper gaze and immediately brought forth his wife, who whisked Umma away to some rooms in the back of their home.

In an open area up front, he invited me to sit with him and his sons. Almost immediately a young daughter arrived to collect my jacket. She was covered from head to toe. I didn’t even look directly at her. I did watch the direction in which she carried my jacket. I watched her hang it up in a closet, then close the door. Now that I knew where she was headed with it, I felt relieved. I wouldn’t want her to find anything in my pockets that she could hurt herself or anybody else with by accident.

While Mr. Salim Ahmed Amin Ghazzali was there, we spoke only in Arabic, really a familiar Sudanese Arabic Creole.

“Business has been good for you and your family,” he asked.

“It’s building slowly,” I responded truthfully.

“No, son, it was not a question. I know your business is good because I have heard and seen so many good things about Umma Designs.”

“Thank you,” I replied.

“Allah has blessed me to own two taxis. So I meet a lot of people in this city. One day I collected a very smartly dressed woman from Kenya. I recognized through my rearview mirror right away that she was wearing cloths with a Sudanese design and influence. I wanted to know, but did not want to ask her. Then I thought about the fact that my wife would surely want to know where she bought such nice materials. The Kenyan woman spoke so highly of Umma Designs, yet she did not have your business card available and could not remember the telephone number by heart.

“I thought to myself, ‘Hey, that’s how it goes. You pick up a passenger once and never see them again! If you don’t get
whatever information you might need from them right then and there, you lose out.’ Believe it or not, this happened to me a few times with your company. After the third time, I looked up Umma Designs in the telephone directory, planning to order a gift for my wife. Eventually I dialed up 411. But, nothing!” He smiled, holding his hands up. He was one of those men who spoke with his hands.

“It’s a small family business with excellent products and services. We haven’t expanded as of yet. We have more than enough customers so far. Your account is very important to us. We are certain that you will be more than pleased with everything that Umma Designs has to offer,” I said slowly and thoughtfully.

“E-Wallah!”
he said, gesturing with his hands at his sons. “Well said! Are you boys listening? If I could only get the two of you to represent me like this young man represents his family business,” he said, impressed.

“In the taxi business, father?” his older son asked. “But you have sent us off to school!” the older son respectfully defended.

“Yes, but there is after school,” the father replied sternly.

“We must study, father. Even you have said this,” the older son reminded him.

“We do work for you on Saturdays, father,” the young son added.

“No matter! Your father will work four jobs, drive two cabs all at once, as long as all six of my children become doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Where do you go to school, son?” He turned his conversation toward me.

It was his first in a series of questions he hurled my way. I remained respectful and elusive. Each time I guided the conversation back to the business at hand, collecting the necessary information for his nephew’s wedding. And, of course, working my way toward the required five-thousand-dollar deposit.

While their father spoke, his sons were almost completely quiet and obedient in his presence. In our tradition, a son cherishes his father. The most important thing a son can do after submitting to Allah is to listen to and obey his father and work very hard to become worthy of the father’s love and acknowledgment.

I understood these two sons.

One of them had on red pants. The other was wearing orange pants. They better hurry up and figure out how to get with the New York styles, I thought to myself. They could not play behind the gate of their house forever. They would never be able to mix or survive in these hoods wearing bright colored pants, tight T-shirts, and bootleg sneakers. If the wrong niggas caught them in the wrong neighborhood, the first beatdown would be based on style alone, separate from whatever else the attackers wanted to steal or do them. They were easy targets.

Less than half an hour in, another sister appeared, fully wrapped in a mustard-colored thobe. She was a pretty teenaged girl named Sudana, who had beautifully shaped eyes, colored like an African wildcat’s, hazel with a deep dark-brown perimeter. All I could see were her eyes and her smooth and flawless skin, the type that our women had from eating olives and dates and other natural foods. Her hair was completely covered. The whites of her eyes were brilliant white, just like her perfect teeth. Her slim fingers were wrapped around a wooden serving tray, which she placed in front of me, offering in English, “Would you like coffee, tea, or a cold drink?” all of which she carried in on the tray along with Sudanese sweets. I was not hungry. But I could not refuse her.

She reminded me of the incomparable beauty of Umma’s female friends back home. They used to visit her on our estate, and because I was just a child, they would unwrap
themselves, some removing their veils and relaxing in my presence. They underestimated me because of my youth. Yet I studied them and noticed every single detail and difference in each one of them—their eyes and even the length of their eyelashes, the curve of their cheeks and lips, the length of their necks, and the shape of their shoulders. I could even push it further and reveal to you that sometimes I closed my eyes and challenged myself to identify each one of them by their scent alone.

I developed a careful eye for feminine elegance. The way a jeweler could pluck just one clear diamond out of a fistful of flaws, I could look at tens and hundreds of women, I thought, and choose one whose cut, shape, and quality were superb on the outside, and clean and clear on the inside. For me, with observing and being attracted to females, everything mattered and measured: the look, the voice and sound, the rhythm of the walk, the manners of expression, the balance between modesty and beauty, the depth of the conversation, the words she spoke and the way she spoke them, the feeling of her presence, the depth of her concern and admiration for me, the way she interacted with my friends and family, and simple things like what she actually did with her life from day to day.

From being born Muslim, African, and Sudanese, I learned to enjoy seeing less of a woman and imagining more. So that in America when a woman shows me too much, or is too fast and too obvious, or too empty, it kills the power of her mystery, freezes my imagination, and poisons my natural attraction.

Some of the American girls seemed to think I was cold. But like a jeweler, I was a hundred percent certain when I was seeing something fake, flawed, or cheap. And I was not attracted to it, even though it might have one or two good parts.

I liked seeing Sudana. She made me feel at home. She was subtle, sweet, and careful, not a high-powered vacuum cleaner like the American girls who came at me all day long, titties first and ass out, nice looking but way too much way too quick, only to find out she’s really nothing at all.

I figured Sudana was about fifteen. Back home, she and I could get married any day now, unless we chose to delay our family life and work by attending college. The thought made me smile. Seconds later, reality dropped on my head. We were all here in the U.S. and every single familiar thing we did and believe would be considered wrong and outrageous.

After serving me, the guest, and her brothers and father, she left the room.

We enjoyed our cold drinks, Mr. Ghazzali enjoyed his tea and we all ate the small homemade pastries. Conversations ranged from the high price of American living, to first encounters with Americans, the horror stories all taking place in Mr. Ghazzali’s taxi cab. He spoke of meeting weird passengers such as women dressed like men, with male mannerisms and yet the breasts and hands of a woman.

He spoke of cursing, angry mothers and females who smoked outdoors and did everything else outdoors for that matter, which none of us had ever witnessed in the Sudan.

He spoke also of male passengers who were dressed like women, or dressed like men except for some strange feminine behavior or things like wearing two earrings and lipstick or eye makeup and sometimes even wigs. He tried but could not really imitate or begin to capture the way the men spoke and altered their deep voices as if they were the same as women. Or the way they giggled and blushed. After his first couple of fares with such “men,” he admitted pressing on the gas pedal and speeding off whenever he saw such bizarre men hailing his cab. He’d rather lose the money than have them as passengers. “The American she-men are the greatest disgrace
against everything we have ever known. And the Black ones in particular are most embarrassing,” he said.

Growing more grim, he spoke of the African cabbie who got murdered by a shameless Black American drug addict who got away with twenty-seven dollars and robbed a father and husband of at least twenty-seven more years of life and love.

He spoke of monster mothers who threw their kids into his backseat and dragged them out when it was time to go. Also, mothers who screamed and cursed at even their youngest children and had no patience, and not even one trace of love.

His sons must have felt as bad as I was feeling now. The older one introduced the topic of the World Cup, which he must have known would excite his father, the soccer fan, and ease the melancholy mood he was falling into on that Sunday afternoon.

After a full hour, I saw the father check his watch. I assumed it was because of the upcoming afternoon Asr prayer.

“Yes, in America, I have to use the clock for prayer times.” He laughed a little. “Back home, the call to prayer surrounded us all, didn’t it?”

He stood up and made the call to prayer. We all washed our hands, face, and feet, which is required before prayer.

For the first time on American soil, I performed the salat standing and then kneeling beside Muslim men, three of them and myself. Seven women prayed behind us, his wife and four daughters, plus Umma and Naja.

I felt filled with emotion as we recited our prayers and did our
rakas.
To look to my left seeing the other Sudanese men, and then to my right reminded me of being with my father, brothers, and friends. I did not dare turn around and look at Umma. I knew somehow, she must be back there spilling two or three tears.

Mr. Salim Ahmed Amin Ghazzali and I wrote up a contract. It was nothing complicated, just a simple agreement using simple words. When it was complete, both he and Umma placed their signatures at the end of the document.

With no hesitation, he paid me the five-thousand-dollar deposit on Umma’s services. He even made a joke.