Of Beetles and Angels (4 page)

R
IGHT NOW, WE ARE AMONG THE POOREST IN THE LAND.
N
EITHER YOUR MOTHER NOR
I
WILL FIND GOOD WORK BECAUSE WE LACK SCHOOLING.
W
E WILL HAVE TO WORK BACKBREAKING JOBS, WE WILL NEVER FULLY UNDERSTAND OUR RIGHTS, AND OTHERS WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE OF US.

B
UT IF YOU, OUR CHILDREN, WORK HARD AT SCHOOL AND FINISH THE UNIVERSITY, MAYBE SOMEDAY YOU CAN HELP YOURSELVES AND HELP YOUR FAMILY, TOO.

My parents may not have known much about this country, but they knew that the university cost more money than they had.

They had a solution, though. They told us that if we were among the best students in the land, we could earn scholarships and attend the university for free — in spite of our race and background.

Y
OU ARE POOR AND BLACK AND WE CANNOT BUY YOU THE RESOURCES THAT OTHER PARENTS CAN.
B
UT IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH DESIRE TO OUTWORK ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS AND YOU NEVER GIVE UP, YOU WILL WIN THE RACE ONE DAY.

What’s both beautiful and scary about young children is that they will believe most anything that their parents tell them. If our parents had told us that black refugees growing up on welfare in an affluent white community couldn’t excel, we probably would have taken them at their word.

But they told us that we could do anything if we worked hard and treated others with respect. And we believed them.

Sometimes, though, faith was not enough. No one taught us that lesson quite like our classmates at Longfellow Elementary School.

They had never seen anything like us, with our thick, perfectly combed afros, our perfectly mismatched clothing, and our spanking-new XJ-900’s, bought from Payless ShoeSource for under seven dollars a pair.

My brother Tewolde and I patrolled the lower-grade playground for the hour-long lunch recess. Kindergarten met for just a half-day, so my sister Mehret went home before recess.

Most of our classmates treated us nicely, others ignored us, and the rest — well, we could only wish that they would ignore us. We may not have understood their words, but we always understood the meaning behind their laughter.

“African boodie-scratcher! Scratch that boodie!”

“Black donkey! You’re so ugly!”

“Why don’t you go back to Africa where you came from?”

We were just two, and they were often many. But they had grown up in a wealthy American suburb, and we had grown up in a Sudanese refugee camp. We were accustomed to fighting almost daily, using sticks, stones, wood chips, and whatever else we could get our hands on. So it was usually no contest, especially when the two of us double-teamed them, as we had done so many times in Sudan.

Sometimes, though, our classmates found us alone. One time, a brown-haired, overweight third-grader named Sam cornered me along the north fence of the playground.

All about the school, kids played soccer, kickball, and foursquare. There was but one supervisor to monitor the hundreds.

I don’t remember what I had done to infuriate Sam; maybe it was something that Tewolde had done, and I was going to pay for it. Whatever the reason, Sam wanted to teach me a lesson.

He bellowed at me, getting louder with every word, until his face blossomed red. He bumped me against the fence and gripped the railing with his thick, chunky hands, sandwiching me in between.

I pushed against him desperately and tried to wiggle out, but he kept squeezing harder and harder, until the metal fence began to tear into my back, leaving me unable to breathe.

I searched for the supervisor but could not spot her. Nor could I see my brother. Fearing that Sam meant to squeeze all the life out of me, I started to cry for help. He squeezed even harder.

I think one of my brother’s friends must have told him that Sam was suffocating me, because through the tears, I saw Tewolde exploding toward us. He came charging from the other side of the playground with all the fury of an angry bull.

Tewolde was half Sam’s size but he showed no hesitation. Without slowing, Tewolde leaped up, cocked his hand back, and smashed it against the side of Sam’s thick head.

Sam slumped to the asphalt and started to cry. But my brother had only started. He clenched his teeth and pounced on Sam’s outstretched body, battering his face with punch after punch until Sam started to bleed.

I saw the supervisor coming toward our side of the playground, so I grabbed Tewolde and pulled him off. “Come on!
Nahanigh,
Tewolde! We have to go! Come on, before the supervisor sees us!”

Many battles later, my brother graduated to the upper-grade playground and left me to fend for myself. By then, my younger sister, Mehret, was on my playground. But she was small, too small to fight.

Mehret was so small that one day the strong wind picked her up and slammed her into the fence. My father berated the school administrators for not doing more to help her. But what could they do? She was small, and the wind was strong.

With time, I started to make friends through the soccer games at recess. Although my parents could not afford to put me on a team, Sudan had taught me well, with my days spent playing
kiesoh igre,
or
ball of foot.

My brother met a good-natured white kid named Brian Willmer who lived right up the street from us. Brian became my brother’s best friend and a great friend to everyone in our family. He came over to our house often, always telling us that we should send pictures of Hntsa to baby modeling agencies because he was so cute.

We made other friends, too, and started to fit in better. But the old enemies did not disappear. They had new ammunition, too. Every day, the TV news would broadcast explicit footage of famine-stricken Ethiopians.

“Hey, Salami! You look so skinny. Let me know if you need more food. You want another sandwich? How about some extra milk? I don’t want you to starve.”

It was even worse for my sister Mulu, who had to brave high school by herself. Her classmates drew skeletons on her locker and even serenaded her with the popular famine fundraising song, “We Are the World.” She fought back until Wheaton North suspended her.

Tewolde and I even had confrontations with the only other Africans at our school: big, puffy-cheeked Frank and small, silent Mbago, a pair of brothers from Nigeria. Both were in second grade with me, even though Frank was three years older than the rest of our class. How could that be?

None of us knew for sure, but we knew that he wasn’t too bright. He used to pay other second graders to do simple math problems for him — five minus three, eight minus four, six plus seven — all for two cents a problem.

Even though we were from different countries, we still should have been brothers, defending and helping each other. But like our brothers in Africa, we were making war when we should have been making peace.

I tried to avoid them by playing on the opposite side of the playground.

But Mbago always provoked me. I think he disliked me because I was poor and looked it, and he was ashamed to be African with me. When Frank was there, I had no choice but to let Mbago call me any names he wanted. But whenever I found Mbago alone and he said anything mean to me, I always pounced on him and made him cry.

Invariably, he would return with Frank. They would corner me far away from the supervisor, when I least expected it, and beat on me until I had escaped or they had had enough.

They lived just down the street from us, less than one block away, so one day my bro and I hid in some bushes and waited for them with long, lean sticks in our hands. We would show them, Sudanese-style.

We sprang on them.
Slash. Scream. Slash.
They ran desperately.

But we were faster and cut them off. And Tewolde let out his anger. “Don’t you ever touch my little brother again or you’ll get it even worse!”

We strutted back home, victorious, even laughing as we recounted the incident.

But then we thought of whom they might tell, and our laughter stopped in a hurry. We retreated into our house, afraid of what we had done.

When we heard the frenzied knocking on our door, we knew that our time was up.

Their parents stood outside, guarding bruised and teary-eyed children. My parents yelled out in anger for us to appear. D
ID YOU DO THIS?
D
ON’T YOU DARE LIE OR
I
WILL MAKE YOU LOST RIGHT THIS MOMENT!

Lifting us by our ears, my parents screamed at us and threatened us until the Nigerian parents had been appeased. Then the parents began talking about Africa, immigration, and all of the things they had in common.

“Would you like some
injera?
How about something to drink? That’s all you are going to eat? How about some tea? Please. Visit us anytime you want. Of course not! Do not call first. You know that our people do not believe in appointments; come over whenever you want!”

Our families became close friends.

As Tewolde and I got older, the violence at school continued. So we kept defending ourselves — until the school administrators had no choice:

This notice is to inform you that your children are fighting almost every day. Especially Tewolde. If they continue to fight with their classmates, we will have to consider expelling them from Longfellow Elementary School.
Signed, Ms. Cobb, the principal.

My father sat, saying nothing, as he was known to do in moments of great crisis. Then he proclaimed his iron verdict.

Y
IIIIIEEEEEE.
A
LL THIS COMING FROM
A
DI FOR THE SAKE OF SCHOOL AND EDUCATION, ALL FOR NOTHING.

L
ISTEN TO ME, MY CHILDREN.
I
AM YOUR FATHER, RIGHT?
T
HEN LISTEN.
I
KNOW THAT IN
S
UDAN, YOU HAD TO FIGHT OR THEY WOULD KEEP BEATING YOU DAY AFTER DAY.
W
E ARE NOT IN
S
UDAN ANYMORE.

H
ERE IN
A
MERICA, THEY TAKE A SIMPLE THING LIKE A BRUISE AND KICK YOU OUT OF SCHOOL AND EVEN THROW YOU INTO THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT.
S
O FROM NOW ON, LET THEM HIT YOU.
C
OME HOME BEATEN AND BRUISED.
D
O NOT EVER FIGHT BACK.

My brother and I were dumbfounded. At best, we had expected screaming; at worst, the leather belt. But we had never imagined a betrayal of this magnitude. Our father, our model of toughness, should have known the importance of standing up for yourself.

We begged. We pleaded. We reasoned. What if they knock our teeth out? What if they make us bleed? What if they break our bones? If we let one kid beat us up, they’ll all beat us up.

D
O YOU THINK THAT
I
WISH HARM ON MY CHILDREN?
W
E HAVE NO CHOICE.
W
E ARE POOR.

I
F YOU GET EXPELLED, WHO WILL DRIVE YOU TO YOUR NEW SCHOOL?
I
F YOU GET EXPELLED, WHO WILL GIVE YOU A SCHOLARSHIP?
D
O YOU THINK THAT THEY GIVE SCHOLARSHIPS TO STUDENTS WHO GET EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL?

R
EMEMBER THAT THIS COUNTRY RUNS ON COMPUTERS.
O
NCE YOU COMMIT THE SMALLEST CRIME, YOUR NAME WILL BE STAINED FOREVER.

S
O I’M TELLING YOU:
I
F YOUR CLASSMATES COME AFTER YOU, RUN.
I
F
I
EVER HEAR THAT YOU HAVE BEEN IN A FIGHT, FEAR FOR YOUR BEINGS.
I
WILL MAKE YOU LOST.

We feared my father more than anything in the world, so as difficult as it was to stop fighting, we stopped fighting.

We learned to take taunting and small beatings. There were a few isolated incidents, though, where we had no choice but to defend ourselves.

There was the time that I was in fourth grade and my brother had graduated to middle school. Our neighbors, the Panther family, gave my sister Mehret rides home because they had one extra seat in their station wagon. That left me to make the one-mile walk from school by myself.

One day, two of my classmates, a light-skinned black kid named Dennis and a skinny white kid named Marc, jumped me on the way home. They would have given me a black eye and maybe more, worse than anything that awaited me at home. So I tightened my face into an angry scowl.

Feigning toward Dennis, I kicked Marc, hard as I could, XJ-900 right in his groin. Marc hunched over and whimpered as he fell to the ground. Dennis tried to run, but I caught him. I made sure that there would be no next time.

Dennis and Marc were easy pickings, but a year later, my brother met a more serious challenge: Jake Evans. Tough, mean, and unstable, Jake was the deadliest kid at Franklin Middle School.

He was the school’s head burnout, one of those heavy-metal white kids who did drugs and didn’t care about anything. He struck fear in the hearts of the entire student body. And he hated my brother.

Jake started telling everyone in the school that my brother’s days were numbered. I rarely saw my brother tremble, but he trembled when he heard Jake’s threat. He was right to tremble. Jake had about eighty pounds and a foot on him.

But what terrified us wasn’t Jake’s size. It was his illegal-length switchblade. We knew Jake had it because we had seen him practice with it, setting up targets in the grass near Triangle Park, hitting dead center almost every time.

Even if my brother could have taken Jake, Jake had seven or eight burnout lackeys who followed him around. My bro couldn’t possibly survive all of them and their knives.

Eventually the day came, as in one of those movies where everyone knows that a student is going to get whipped after school.

My brother fidgeted all day long, trying to figure out an escape route. But there was none. Too many people were watching him, talking about the fight. At the end of the day, everyone followed him home, including Jake.

Jake and his friends surrounded Tewolde about a block away from the school. My brother had a few friends around, but not nearly enough to save him. So he made a desperate prayer:
Dear God, please save me. Dear God, please save me. Dear God, just don’t let them use their knives.