by Mawi Asgedom
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. DID YOU DO THIS? DON’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.
YIIIIIEEEEEE. ALL THIS COMING FROM ADI FOR THE SAKE OF SCHOOL AND EDUCATION, ALL FOR NOTHING.
LISTEN TO ME, MY CHILDREN. I AM YOUR FATHER, RIGHT? THEN LISTEN. I KNOW THAT IN SUDAN, YOU HAD TO FIGHT OR THEY WOULD KEEP BEATING YOU DAY AFTER DAY. WE ARE NOT IN SUDAN ANYMORE.
HERE IN AMERICA, THEY TAKE A SIMPLE THING LIKE A BRUISE AND KICK YOU OUT OF SCHOOL AND EVEN THROW YOU INTO THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT. SO FROM NOW ON, LET THEM HIT YOU. COME HOME BEATEN AND BRUISED. DO 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 mod
el 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.
DO YOU THINK THAT I WISH HARM ON MY CHILDREN? WE HAVE NO CHOICE. WE ARE POOR.
IF YOU GET EXPELLED, WHO WILL DRIVE YOU TO YOUR NEW SCHOOL? IF YOU GET EXPELLED, WHO WILL GIVE YOU A SCHOLARSHIP? DO YOU THINK THAT THEY GIVE SCHOLARSHIPS TO STUDENTS WHO GET EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL?
REMEMBER THAT THIS COUNTRY RUNS ON COMPUTERS. ONCE YOU COMMIT THE SMALLEST CRIME, YOUR NAME WILL BE STAINED FOREVER.
SO I’M TELLING YOU: IF YOUR CLASSMATES COME AFTER YOU, RUN. IF 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.
I guess God must have heard my brother, because He sent some friends down to help him. A van pulled up, carrying four tall black guys. They looked like high-school students, maybe older. They strutted toward Jake with dangerous confidence.
“What’s going on here? Does someone have a problem with our brother?”
No answer. Confronted with someone larger than himself, the school bully became the school coward.
“Why are you so quiet now, you little punk? Yeah, you. Don’t look around like I’m talking to somebody else. I’m talking to you. If you touch this kid today or any other day, you’re dead meat. You got that? Good. Now get the heck outta here.”
Jake and his friends slunk away, never to be heard from again. They understood violence and they understood threats.
Those four rescuers? They were the older brothers of Tewolde’s friend Kawaun. Kawaun had told his brothers that all the white burnouts were getting together to gang up on his black friend, and his brothers had come down to help the black kid out.
When we were still in elementary school, my brother told me the most hilarious stories at night. They usually starred these five Chinese brothers who had moved to the United States. Each brother had his head shaved in the front and long hair in the back, sometimes braided. All five brothers lived together.
Tewolde spun his stories from the top bunk and I heard them in the bottom. They always featured the same plot: The five Chinese brothers craved peace and usually tried to mind their own business. But some ill-willed Americans would always mistreat them.
Like all Chinese people, the Chinese brothers had mastered kung fu, karate, and every other martial art. My brother and I believed this about Chinese people because of a TV show called Samurai Sunday that came on right after church. All the Chinese people in that show could really fight.
Tewolde’s Chinese brothers would be doing something innocent, such as watering their garden, and then, out of nowhere, their neighbors would insult them or hurl a rock through their window. Having no choice, the Chinese brothers would use their kung fu to beat up the Americans.
Eventually, it got so bad that the brothers had to whoop the whole town; every last citizen, five citizens at a time. It was a lot of work, but the brothers had no choice.
Sometimes I wonder why my brother and I loved the Chinese brother stories. I used to think it was because they were funny. Lately, though, I have come to believe that the brothers were more than stories. They were our kid way of dealing with our unfriendly world.
Even if we couldn’t beat up all of the cruel kids at school, the five Chinese brothers could. They could whip the kids, they could whip their parents, they could whip the entire town.
Celebrating Hntsa’s birthday the American Way. From left to right: A family friend, Tsege, Hntsa, Mehret, Tewolde, and Haileab.
DAYS OF MISCHIEF
Back in Sudan, on a day each year that every kid looked forward to, our little village erupted into a sea of flames.
We built a huge bonfire in the middle of the village. We gathered thick sticks and dipped them into the fire, pulling them out only after they had blazed into torches. Then we raced together from adobe to adobe.
Muslims and Christians, Eritreans and Ethiopians, bullies and prey — on this night, all of us forgot our differences and united. We ran from adobe to adobe, waving our torches fearlessly, chanting out our ancestors’ cry:
Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo
Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo
Akho akhokay, Berhan geday
Berhan neibel, Hoyo,
Himaq wisa, Hoyo,
Quincha wisa, Hoyo,
Tekwon ito, Hoyo.
Oh, new year, let it be a good one, all the evil leave us, let peace join us, let harvest come.
Our parents waited for us at their adobes and chimed in enthusiastically when we approached, “Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo! Hoyo Hoyo, Hoyo!”
They told us that in the old days, in the old country, before the rise of Mengistu and the Dergue and desolation, adults had passed out presents to the children during Hoyo Hoyo — money, candy, food, and even homebrewed liquor for the older kids.
But in our refugee camp, no one could afford to give presents to so many.
Presents or no, we still loved Hoyo Hoyo. On this one day, we embraced what we most feared on other days.
You can’t hurt us today, oh, fire. We say IMBEE! NO YOU CAN’T! Go ahead. Burn us and our adobes. Take our chickens and goats, and even our gardens.
For today, we are not refugees, we don’t live in adobes. No, we live back home among our people, and we c
elebrate our new year, and we dance with you like our forefathers before us.
When we came to America and heard of a strange holiday where children morphed into all manner of strange creatures, my siblings and I were puzzled. But eventually, we understood. This was their version of Hoyo Hoyo. Just like we did, they roamed from house to house and brought smiles to adults. Instead of Hoyo Hoyo, they chanted “Trick or treat!” Instead of fire, they flouted vampires, witches, and all of Hell’s creatures.
Our refugee village in Sudan could not afford presents, but this country gladly showered candy, fruit, even money on its petitioners. And not just a little bit of candy, but almost unlimited free candy — beyond our wildest dreams!
Declaring Halloween our favorite holiday, we convinced our parents that they should allow us to go trick-or-treating alone. By the second year, we had our strategy all figured out.
We raced all the way home from school through Wheaton’s quiet streets, arriving home before any of our classmates. After ransacking our parents’ closet for two pillowcases, we started out on our way — usually with hastily designed costumes. One year, I took a grocery-sized paper bag, poked two holes in it, and dubbed myself “Paper-Bag Man.”
We had two rounds. During the treasure round we did not knock on any doors. We ran from house to house, searching eagerly for baskets labeled “Please take one.” Without pausing, we snatched the baskets and dumped all of their contents into our bags.
We wondered sometimes, did adults really expect unsupervised kids to take only one piece of candy? What self-respecting kid would do such a thing?
We started round two right as most kids started their regular trick-or-treating. We joined them in running from house to house, crying out with our habesha accents: “Treehk ohr Treet!” We usually received our candy graciously and made sure to say “Tankooh.”
But we weren’t always nice. Each year, we singled out several round-two victims for some special fun.
One year we saw two white boys sitting on their front steps. They sat, talking softly, laughing, their bright, blond hair stirring in the early evening wind. Tewolde and I laughed as we sized them up, taking in their neatly pressed clothing and their bright, honest faces.
