by Dave Eggers
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?
And now he was sitting with me, and it was obvious that he was struggling with the predicament we both found ourselves in. He had not originally planned to become my sponsor, but within minutes he knew that if he left that day and simply wrote a check, I would be exactly where I had been before—lost and somewhat helpless. I felt terrible for him, watching him struggle with the decision, and in any other situation would have told him that money was enough. But I knew that I needed a guide, someone who could tell me, for instance, how to find treatment for my headaches. I stared at him and tried to look like someone with whom he could spend time, someone who would be appropriate to bring into his home, to meet his wife and twins, then under a year old. I smiled and tried to seem easygoing and pleasant, not someone who would bring only misery and trouble.
‘I love childrens!’ I said. For some time I could not remember to leave the s off the end of the plural for child. ‘I am very good with them,’ I added. ‘Any help you might give me, I will repay you in child care. Or yard work. I will be happy to do anything.’
The poor man. I suppose I put it on too thick. He was near tears when he finally stood up and shook my hand. ‘I’ll be your sponsor. And your mentor,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get you working, and get you a car and an apartment. Then we’ll see about getting you into college.’ And I knew he would. Phil Mays was a successful man and would be successful with me. I shook his hand vigorously and smiled and walked him to the elevator. I returned to the LBF offices, and looked out the window. He was emerging from the building, now just below me. I watched as he got into his car, a fine car, sleek and black, exactly beneath where I stood against the glass. He sat down behind the wheel, put his hands in his lap and he cried. I watched his shoulders shake, watched him bring his hands to his face.
Eating dinner at Phil and Stacey’s house was a very significant event; I had to make the proper impression. I had to be pleasant, thankful, and had to make sure that their young children liked me. But I could not go alone. I did not have my own car at the time, and so I asked Achor Achor to give me a ride to the house on his way to a meeting with some other Lost Boys. I washed and ironed the same shirt I had worn when I met Phil—it was the only appropriate shirt I had at that time—and I ironed my khakis. When Achor Achor and I got into the car, he informed me that he would be picking up two other Sudanese refugees, Piol and Dau, on the way.
‘What?’ I said, angry. I had planned for Achor Achor to walk me to the door, because I did not feel I could make it alone. And now I would be escorted by three Sudanese men? Would Phil and Stacey even open their door?
‘Don’t worry,’ Achor Achor said. ‘We’ll leave after we drop you off.’
We parked the car on the street and walked up the footpath. The house was enormous. It was the size of a home reserved for the most exalted dignitaries of Sudan—ministers and ambassadors. The lawn was lush and green, the hedges trimmed into cubes and orbs.
We rang the bell. The door opened and I saw the shock on their faces. It was Phil and Stacey, each holding one of the twins.
‘Heeeey,’ Stacey said. She was petite and blond, her voice clear but uncertain. She looked to Phil, as if he had neglected to tell her there would be four Sudanese for dinner, not one.
‘Come in, come in!’ Phil said.
And we did. They closed the door behind us.
‘I hope barbecue is okay with you guys,’ Stacey said.
I turned to Achor Achor, to give him a look that would urge him to leave, but he was too busy marveling at the house. It was obvious that Achor Achor and Piol and Dau had already forgotten about whatever meeting they had planned. They were staying for dinner.
Inside, the house was more impressive than from the exterior. The ceilings seemed thirty feet high. There was a light-filled living room, and a staircase that wound to the right and to the upstairs rooms, with a balcony overlooking the living room. The bookshelves led high up the walls, and there was a gigantic television in the corner, imbedded into the shelving. Everything was white and yellow—it was a bright and happy place, full of air. On a peninsula of marble extending from the kitchen, there was a silver bowl, shimmering and full of fresh fruit.
We walked to the back porch, where Phil inspected the grill, on which six hamburgers were laid, darkening. I tried to smile at the babies, but they were not immediately smitten with me. They looked at me, with my eggplant skin, my oddly shaped teeth, and they wailed.
‘It’s okay,’ Phil said. ‘They cry around everyone they meet.’
‘You’ve had hamburgers before?’ Phil asked us all.
Achor Achor and I had eaten at restaurants before, and had had hamburgers in our time in Atlanta.
‘Yes, yes,’ I answered.
‘And you know what’s inside a hamburger?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Achor Achor said. ‘Ham.’
It sounds like an easy joke, as do so many of our mistakes, the many holes in our understanding, and they were often funny to Americans. We did not know how the air conditioning worked when we first moved into our apartment; we didn’t know we could turn it off. For a week we slept with all of our clothes on, covered in blankets and towels, every linen we owned.
We told this story to Phil and Stacey, and they liked it very much. Then Achor Achor told him the story of the tampon box. There was a different pair of Lost Boys, who had recently been taken shopping for the first time, at an enormous grocery store. They had fifty dollars to spend, and had no idea where to start. Along the way, they had picked out a very special box and put it in their cart. Their sponsor, a woman in her fifties, smiled and tried to explain what was in the box, which was in fact tampons. ‘For women,’ she said, not knowing how much they knew about women’s anatomy and cycles. (They knew nothing.) She thought she had accomplished her task, only to find that the men wanted the package anyway. ‘It is beautiful,’ they said, and they bought it, took it home and displayed in on their coffee table for months.
We tried to be polite about our eating, but there were many new foods on the Mays’s table, and we could not know what was a danger and what was not. The salad seemed d
ifferent than the salad we had eaten before, and Achor Achor would not touch his. The vegetables looked familiar, but had not been cooked, and Achor Achor and I preferred ours cooked. All fresh vegetables and fruits were problematic for us; we had not been fed such things in our ten years in Kakuma. I drank the milk placed before me. It was my first-ever glass of Western-style milk, and it caused a good deal of problems for me in the ensuing hours. I did not know then that I had become lactose-intolerant. I was at war with my stomach for my first year in America.
Finished with his dinner, Phil dropped his cloth napkin on the table.
‘So do you guys have expressions that you use, like, Dinka words of wisdom?’
I looked at Achor Achor and he at me. Phil tried again.
‘Sorry. I’m just interested in proverbs, you know? For instance, I might say, ‘a stitch in time saves nine,’ and that would mean…’ Phil paused. He looked to Stacey.
Stacey offered no help. ‘Well, I don’t know what that one means. But do you know what I’m asking for? Like something your parents or elders would say to you?’
The four of us Sudanese shot each other glances, hoping one among us would have a satisfactory answer.
‘Excuse me,’ Achor Achor said, and walked to the bathroom. Once down the hall, he cleared his throat loudly. I looked to him; he was gesturing for me to join him. I excused myself, too, and soon Achor Achor and I were whispering furiously in the Mays’s bathroom.
‘Do you know what he wants?’ he whispered. There was an urgency to this matter, just as there was always an urgency to matters in those early days. We thought our whole world might hinge on every question, every answer. It seemed possible to us both that if we didn’t please Phil here, he might change his mind about me, and refuse to help me at all.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought you would. You’re better at Dinka than I am.’ This was true. Achor Achor’s command of the language and its dialects and idioms has always been far greater than my own.
In five minutes together in the bathroom, we gathered two proverbs that we thought might fulfill Phil’s needs.
‘Here is one,’ Achor Achor said, sitting down to the table. ‘It was spoken by an important official in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement: ‘Sometimes the teeth can accidentally bite the tongue, but the solution for the tongue is not to find another mouth to live in.’’
Achor Achor smiled and we all smiled. No one but Achor Achor knew what the proverb meant.
After the plates were cleared, Achor Achor, Piol, and Dau left, and Phil asked me to stay so we could talk. Stacey brought the babies to their room, and said goodnight. Phil and I walked up their grand staircase, to the babies’ playroom. I had never seen so many toys in one place. It looked like a day-care center or preschool, but for dozens of children, not just two. The walls were painted with murals, pictures from children’s books—fairies and flying cows. There were stuffed animals, three-dimensional puzzles and a dollhouse, everything in white and pink and yellow. At the far end of the room was a large adult’s desk, on which sat a laptop computer, a phone, and a printer. ‘Home office,’ Phil explained. He told me it was mine to use whenever I needed it.
There was only one chair in the room, so we sat on the floor.
‘So,’ he said.
I didn’t know what to do so I said what I wanted to say, which was, ‘It is God’s way that we have met.’
Phil agreed. ‘I’m glad.’
I asked about the pictures that had been painted on the walls, and Phil told me about Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty, the Big Bad Wolf, and Little Red Riding Hood. As the room darkened, Phil turned on a lamp, the light flowing through a slowly turning series of silhouettes. Salmon-colored horses and lime-green elephants galloped across the walls and windows.
‘So I think you should tell me the whole story,’ he said.
Since I had arrived in Atlanta, I had not told it all to anyone, but I did want to tell Phil Mays. He was a very good man, it seemed, and I knew he would listen.
‘You don’t want to hear it all,’ I said.
‘I do. I really want to,’ he reassured me. He was holding a stuffed horse and he put it down on the floor next to him, standing it carefully on its legs.
I was satisfied that he was serious so I began to tell him the story, from those first days in Marial Bai. I told him about my mother in her sun-yellow dress, and about my father’s shop, about playing with the hammers-as-giraffes, and the day the war came to Marial Bai.
It became a ritual. Every Tuesday, I would come to dinner, and after dinner, Stacey would take the twins to bed, and Phil and I would sit on the floor of the playroom and talk about the war in Sudan and the journey I had made. And on the days we did not do this, Phil helped me with everything else.
Within a month we had set up a bank account for me and I was given an ATM card. He arranged driving lessons for me, and promised to co-sign on a car loan when I was ready. With Stacey and the twins, we went to the grocery store, and they explained what sorts of food I should be eating at each meal. Before that trip, I had never eaten a sandwich. Achor Achor and I were not exemplary cooks, and we had eaten only one meal each day; we knew no other way, and worried constantly that the food would run out. It continually amazed Phil, I think, how little we knew, and how he could not assume that we knew any of the things he took for granted. He explained the thermostat in the apartment, and how to write a check, and how to pay a bill, and which buses took you where. Eventually he did cosign for my Toyota Corolla, which greatly eased my commuting time. I was able to get to the furniture showroom, and then to Georgia Perimeter College, in less than a third of the time I had been spending on the bus. I did not miss taking that bus.
All along, with Phil, the learning curve was steep but I stayed with him and Phil seemed not overly burdened; he appeared genuinely pleased to explain the most basic things, like boiling water on the stove or the difference between the freezer and the refrigerator. He approached each problem with the same careful and serious tone of voice, and seemed only frustrated by the fact that he could not do more. In particular, he was troubled by Achor Achor. Achor Achor had no such sponsor—he shared one, a woman in her sixties, with six other Sudanese, and it was not the same as the concentrated attention I was getting. Achor Achor never said a word about it, and I said nothing, but it was obvious to all of us that he sorely needed Phil’s help, too, and it was just as clear that Phil could not do it.
Achor Achor had been in the United States eighteen months longer than me, of course, and was far more advanced in his adjustments to life here. He had a car, and a regular job, and was taking classes at Georgia Perimeter College. He was also a leader among the Sudanese in Atlanta and was constantly on the telephone, mediating between disagreeing parties and organizing and attending gatherings, in Atlanta and elsewhere. After I had been in Atlanta for some time, I attended my first major gathering, this one held in Kansas City, and this is where I met Bobby Newmyer.
The conference had been dreamed up and organized by Bobby Newmyer, and the point of it was twofold: he was a movie producer who wanted to make a film about the Lost Boys experience, and to talk to us about the project. Secondly, he wanted to establish a national network for the Sudanese in America, whereby we could exchange information and resources, lobby the Sudanese and U.S. governments, and send funding and ideas home to southern Sudan.
Thirty-five of us were brought to Kansas one weekend in November 2003, and it was something to see. We were each given our own rooms at the Courtyard by Marriott, and there was a detailed schedule of events over the course of three days, culminating with a large gathering in the events room of the nearby Lutheran church. But being faithful to the schedule proved impossible. Everyone arrived at different times, different days, and a good portion of the attendees could not find the hotel. And when everyone was finally gathered, there was too much catching up necessary. We had been given a conference room at the hotel, and it took us two hours simply to become reac
quainted with each other. There were Sudanese there who had been resettled in Dallas, Boston, Lansing, San Diego, Chicago, Grand Rapids, San Jose, Seattle, Richmond, Louisville, so many other places. I knew most of the men from Kakuma or Pinyudo, if not personally, then by reputation. These were prominent young Sudanese men; they had been speaking out and organizing since they had been teenagers.
When we had caught up and settled into our seats that first morning, we met Bobby Newmyer, whom Mary Williams had told me about. Mary was, in fact, the person who first spoke to Bobby about the idea of a feature film about our lives. And now he was greeting all of us, as we sat in a half-circle, all in our best suits. I immediately noticed how unlikely he looked for a powerful man who had arranged this gathering and had produced many popular Hollywood movies. His hair, a mixture of red and brown and blond, was unkempt, and his shirt was untucked, misbuttoned. He spoke for a few minutes, a bit hunched over—he always seemed to walk or stand at an angle—and then seemed eager to hand over the proceedings to one of his associates, a woman named Margaret, who would be writing the screenplay to the movie Bobby intended to make.
She stood and very clearly explained the plot of the story she was trying to tell, and it seemed reasonable enough to me. But not to the other attendees. It became complicated very quickly. There were questions about who would benefit from the movie. There were questions about why one version of the story would be told, and not another. One after another, the Lost Boys representatives stood up and made their case. If you have not heard a Sudanese speech, I must explain that when we stand to speak, our comments are rarely brief. Some say it is the influence of John Garang, who was known to talk for eight hours uninterrupted and still feel like he had not made his point. In any case, the Sudanese of our generation very much like to speak. If there is any topic being discussed, it is highly likely that all the people in the room will weigh in, and that each person might need five minutes each to express himself. Even in a small gathering such as this one in Kansas, comprising only thirty-five of us, that meant that any given subject, no matter how trivial, would be subjected to two hours of speeches. Each speech will be similar in structure and gravity. The speaker will first rise, straighten his suit, and clear his throat. Then he will begin. ‘I have been listening to this discussion,’ he will begin, ‘and I have some thoughts I must express.’ And what will follow will be part autobiography and will concern points that likely have already been well covered. Because each attendee will feel it necessary to be heard, the same points are usually heard half a dozen times.
