Of Beetles and Angels

by Mawi Asgedom

  Still, my father had never known shyness. And he maintained his vigor. So he focused his energies elsewhere: on his homeland, on his neighborhood, on his family — though not always to our liking.

  When we kids were in elementary school, he started to wake us up at five in the morning so we could do aerobics.

  WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO SAY THAT YOU GREW UP? EH? How ARE YOU GOING TO SAY THAT YOU GREW UP IN WHEATON WHEN YOU DIDN’T TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ALL OF THE RESOURCES THAT YOU HAD AROUND YOU? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE BACK IN ADI WOULD DO TO BE IN YOUR SHOES? ANYTHING.

  We wanted to respond with some common sense — We’ll happily say that we grew up in Wheaton, and like everyone else in Wheaton, we want to be asleep right now.

  But that would have resulted in a near-death experience, so we did the aerobics.

  Other times, he led us to the Wheaton College track. We usually beat the dawn.

  IT IS IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO RUN EVERY DAY AND TO GET STRONG. YOU SEE THE LANES. THERE ARE EIGHT OF THEM. I WANT YOU TO CIRCLE THE TRACK IN EACH OF THOSE LANES ONCE.

  Like with the aerobics, we would have mutinied had we not harbored such respect for our good friend Mr. Quul-fee. Mr. Quul-fee was long and made of animal skin — he could usually be found around my father’s waist — and when he came to call, you cried.

  So we circled the lanes as fast as we could, racing each other, with my father timing each lap.

  But he did not just sit by and time us; he practiced what he preached. No matter how much his fifty-year-old frame ached, he always hobbled the two miles with us. He would walk part of it, if necessary, but he always finished all eight laps.

  YOU SEE, I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO DO SOMETHING THAT I WOULD NOT DO MYSELF.

  He pressed on. Before school, after school, on the week ends, at night, he never rested.

  YOU NEED TO GET USED TO WORKING HARD, SO WE ARE GOING TO CLEAN THE WHOLE HOUSE TONIGHT. WATCH ME AS I SWEEP AND MOP. WHEN I MOP, NOTICE THAT THE FIRST TIME THROUGH, I DO A PURE WATER MOP TO GET ALL OF THE DIRT OFF, AND THEN AFTER THAT, I MOP EVERYTHING AGAIN WITH DISINFECTANT.

  SELAMAWI, WHY ARE YOU PUSHING SO HARD WITH THE BROOM? YOU ARE SCATTERING THE DUST EVERYWHERE. I WONDER SOMETIMES: WHO ARE YOU GOING TO SAY TAUGHT YOU LATER ON WHEN PEOPLE SEE YOU SWEEPING?

  We learned how to sweep, mop, dust. We even learned how to make beds hospital-style, and after that, we were put to work outside.

  Among other tasks, we had to rake the long driveway that we shared with our neighbors. By the time we had finished clearing the leaves, we would look back to where we had begun and see a new collection of leaves building up. We would start again, going even faster, praying that we could beat the leaves and rush inside before they piled up again.

  “Babay, why are you making us do this? Our neighbors don’t even care, and none of their kids have to do it.”

  LISTEN TO ME, MY CHILDREN. IT IS PAINFUL FOR YOU NOW, BUT BELIEVE ME, THE DAY WILL COME WHEN YOU WILL THANK ME. FOR I AM TEACHING YOU HOW TO WORK AND HOW TO LIVE WELL WITH YOUR NEIGHBORS.

  THE DAY COMES IN EACH OF OUR LIVES WHEN THOSE AROUND US ARE ASKED TO TESTIFY AND TO TELL WHAT KIND OF CHARACTER WE HAVE DEMONSTRATED IN OUR PAST.

  I guess my father knew what he was talking about. When I was in eighth grade, our landlord raised the rent and we were evicted from our home on College Avenue. It looked like we would have to leave Wheaton.

  But the folks at the Marian Park housing development moved us up several years on the waiting list. Before they could do us this special favor, though, they had to ask our neighbors on College Avenue what kind of people we were. The day of character examination had come!

  Our wonderful neighbors, Linda Panther, Linda Slinger, and Peggy Hackett, said good things about us, and we moved to Marian Park.

  Not too long after we moved, my father decided to rake the many leaves next to Marian Park’s lake. This time, his desire to help his neighbors would get him in trouble.

  None of us kids were around, so my father tried to clean the entire lakefront by himself. He raked and raked and raked until the day had departed and evening had dawned. He finally finished raking and gathered the leaves into a huge, lightbrown mountain.

  Then he got his big boots. Wading into the water, circling slowly, gathering litter, debris, and fallen branches as he went, he cleaned Marian Park’s lake. By the time he finished, night had arrived and he had encountered his first major problem.

  He had created a mountain of leaves, litter, and sticks, but he could not figure out how to get rid of it. The mountain dwarfed the nearby Dumpster, so he could not throw away the leaves.

  He came up with a plan: He would burn the leaves down to nothing. He had started and managed many fires back in Adi, so keeping this one under control would pose no challenge.

  He started the fire and watched the leaves burn slowly.

  Suddenly, he heard sirens. Firemen rushed to extinguish my father’s blaze, and a policeman ran toward him.

  My father could not have been more confused.

  X CUES ME. I RAKE AND TRY TO FIX LEAVES. X CUES ME. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. NO, I AM POOR MAN, I AM DISABILITY. PLEASE, DO NOT TAKE ME TO THE HOUSE OF IMPRISONMENT. PLEASE DO NOT STAIN MY RECORD.

  The firemen had arrived so quickly because there was a fire station across from the main Marian Park entrance. They were stunned by my father’s explanation: that he thought he was doing his neighbors a favor by burning all the leaves for them.

  The law compelled the officers to arrest or at least fine him. But after talking to him, they instead obeyed the golden rule and gave him only a warning.

  YOU SEE HOW THIS TREACHEROUS WORLD WORKS? SOMETIMES YOU TRY TO DO SOMETHING GOOD AND YOU END UP GETTING PUNISHED FOR IT.

  Although we habesha refugees have scattered to every imaginable corner of the Earth, we occasionally gather by the hundreds at old banquet halls in Chicago.

  At each get-together, we come yearning for fellowship. We also search for news of the homeland, something we desperately sought before 1991, when the civil war between Eritrea and Ethiopia still raged fiercely.

  In the earliest days, at our very first party, the Chicago habesha kids jumped Tewolde and me in the hallway within minutes of our arrival. They had their own little gang.

  “You suburban commandos, we’re gonna beat your butt!”

  Tewolde and I ran into the closet, reappeared with brooms and started swinging at the city boys, wild as we could.

  Believe it or not, we ended up becoming friends in later years.

  We usually hung out in the hallways of the old buildings. When we grew tired, we would retreat to the main room and sit at a table with our other young friends. The adults would sit at their own tables, the women usually at different tables from the men.

  The dancing began around eleven P.M. and did not finish until four or five A.M. Before the dancing, though, they always had announcements, news sharing, and other preplanned programs.

  My father would interrupt the programs, rising and leaving his seat, heading right for the stage. He would take the microphone and start reciting geetmes, or rhyming poems.

  Being a child, I would cringe in embarrassment. “Who is that?” people would ask, especially the kids who lived in Chicago and did not know that he was my father. “Does anyone know where that crazy old man came from?”

  I kept my mouth shut, denying him, too ashamed to acknowledge him.

  He had a rare talent for rhyming in geetme, our culture’s spoken-word freestyle rap. He would go on for half an hour without pause.

  ISIKOOM DHO KITBAHALOO AKAHL GODOLO, AYNISIKUM INDEEKUM BEHAGOS NETEE MULUO KEYHEE BAHREE TIZELILWO.

  “OH, YOU, WHO ARE CALLED HANDICAPPED. AREN’T YOU THE VERY ONES WHO WITH BOUNDLESS JOY LEAP OVER THE EXPANSIVE RED SEA?”

  All listened in amazement, wondering who this eccentric old man was. Did he not fear to interrupt the program? Did he not realize that shouting into a microphone creates sonic hell? And how was it that he loved his homeland so much that he cou
ld sing-say half-hour geetmes about it?

  Some days he would write the lyrics ahead of time. But then his eyes would fail him and he would struggle to read his own writing, even when he held the paper right up to his bifocals. He would call my friend Abraham, who was my age but had come to this country later and could still read Tigrynia quickly.

  ABRAHAM, MY SON, ARE YOU HERE? PLEASE COME AND READ THIS FOR ME. Abraham would go up respectfully and read the rhymes, with my father’s hunched frame standing guard next to him.

  In my younger days, my embarrassment created a smokescreen that blocked me from hearing my father’s rhymes. But as I got older, maturity opened my ears and my heart, and the haze thinned. I started to feel his words and the spirit beneath them, and then I started recognizing his genius.

  I remember one time when his poetry rivaled that of Homer, Virgil, and Shakespeare. I waited until we got home and then asked him to repeat the lines.

  I have since forgotten those lines, but I can never forget the quiet, almost embarrassed shock that flooded his eyes when I asked him to repeat them. It was the shock of a man who had slowly been convinced by those around him that he had little to offer; a man whose new country had labeled him insignificant; a man whose opinion rarely mattered as it once had.

  It was the shock of a proud man who had metamorphosed into a beetle.

  Several years later, I ran into an old friend named Berhe at an annual Eritrean conference in Columbus, Ohio. I had met him when I was a boy — each year, he had helped drive my family to the conference.

  Berhe was thrilled to see me. He grabbed me, hugged me, and as is our custom, pelted me with questions.

  “How are you doing? How is your family? Your health? School? Your family? How are your parents and siblings? School? Your family? And you? How is your health? Mother? Father? And you? How are you?”

  “Dehaan,” I repeated, “we are fine. Dehaan, dehaan, dehaan.”

  I sat with Berhe and talked of old times. We laughed as we remembered stories of going to the Eritrean conference together.He told me of his wife and kids, and I congratulated him.

  Then Berhe started to tell me stories about my father.

  “Sima, Selamawi,” he began. “Listen.”

  “I went back to the homeland recently and ran into some of your father’s old friends in Tigray. Old-timers, dinosaurs from way back in the day. There are only a few of them left now — thirty years of war made sure of that.

  “The old-timers started to tell me stories of Haileab, the son of Zedengel, stories of the deeds that he had done and the people that he had helped. We sat in the tavern, and the tavern filled up, and more and more came. Many others, even younger ones, started to speak of him:

  “ ‘He walked through miles of winter mud to help my aunt give birth.’

  “’He saved my grandfather from the snakebite’s certain death.’

  “’He stitched my head up after the son of Tesfi busted it open with a stone.’

  “’He always gave what he could to the poor, even giving them animals during feast times so that they would not go hungry.’

  “ ‘His generosity knew no bounds. How we mourned when they came for him and he fled. For who was ever like him, like Haileab, our father and our friend.’

  “As I listened to all of these witnesses testify to your father’s love and his heart, I became overwhelmed with emotion. All of them regarded your father as a true hero. A generous, talented hero who served his people with great love and distinction.

  “I am glad that you and I were made to find each other today so that I could tell you all of these things. In my heart, I knew that it was you and your siblings who should have heard those stories, not me.”

  All throughout my childhood, I had witnessed my father’s metamorphosis. Watching him deteriorate, seeing him become dependent on others, feeling sorry for him and even feeling embarrassed, I had witnessed his unmanning.

  All that time, the thought had never occurred to me that my father had once been a hero. Or that he might still be a hero, tragic and flawed though he might be.

  High school track, anchor leg of the 4 ? 800 meters. I hang on to win the conference championship for Wheaton North.

  EYEING THE MOUNTAINTOP

  Growing up, I saw my parents welcome many guests into our home. It didn’t matter who the person was or how much they had. The poorest, most recently arrived refugee received the same welcome as the richest American. Sit down, please. Have some injera. Have something to drink.

  I used to think the whole world shared my parents’ philosophy. As I grew older, though, my eyes opened.

  I saw that most people used a different calculator. Beauty was external, money mattered, and so did skin color. I looked some more and saw that those who discriminated most, those who saw angels only when angels could help them, were often the ones who seemed to flourish.

  And I thought to myself, this seeing angels thing, maybe it offers only spiritual rewards. Maybe God will reward us in another land someday. Maybe the reward is in our hearts and in the kind of people we become.

  I was convinced, though, that the reward was not a material one.

  But that was fine with me. My brother had always looked for angels. I had watched him see angels in the least likely places, and wanted nothing more than to be like him.

  So I did my best to follow in his and my parents’ footsteps.

  I never could have imagined where those footsteps would lead me.

  As I got older, I knew that I had to take increasing responsibility for my family. I also knew that academic success would help me to help them.

  Even when I was older, though, I had always approached my schoolwork with the highest dedication. Starting in elementary school, I read books in my room until my father screamed at me to come out: YOU! HOW LONG ARE YOU GOING TO SIT IN THERE BY YOURSELF? IF YOU DO NOT LEARN TO MINGLE WITH PEOPLE, YOU WILL BECOME LIKE THOSE WILD ONES WHO NEVER SPEAK WITH ANYONE.

  But I kept reading. I read thousands of pages a week and cleared out whole sections of the Wheaton Public Library. The Hardy Boys. Encyclopedia Brown. And my favorite, Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators.

  Then I started on the biographies in the children’s section: Knute Rockne, Martin Luther King, and many others.

  As I read, my English improved dramatically. I graduated from Longfellow’s ESL program at the end of second grade, and by sixth grade, I was making the high honor roll.

  By then, though, some of my classmates had discovered the best way to hurt me — not with their fists, but with their words: Your father doesn’t even work, does he? How come you wore that shirt again? Nerd! Why you so poor?

  I started to see through that dangerous lie that all kids are taught: “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.”

  Sticks and stones can indeed break bones, but words can often do worse. They can stifle, destroy, and mutilate all of the beautiful, hopeful things inside of us.

  My middle-school classmates massacred my self-esteem. My grades dropped. I got my first D in eighth grade and started to wonder if I could make it academically. High school was fast approaching, and I feared that it might chew me up and spit me out.

  But the good thing about words is that they can also breathe life into our spirits. My brother and family encouraged me: Don’t give up. You’re smart enough. All you have to do is work hard and believe.

  My faith in God gave me confidence. And as I entered high school, I set my sights on the scholarship my parents had hoped for.

  I chose the hardest freshman schedule possible: advanced geometry, advanced English, advanced biology.

  But there was one advanced class that I couldn’t take: advanced world history. I wanted to take it, but there were only twenty spots available for our class of four hundred.

  Our performance on a middle-school test determined who could take the class. The test was loaded with absurd, abstract questions, such as: “If you were on Mars and you came a
cross a stream of liquid that you had never seen before, whom would you ask to help you cross it: a) a Psychologist; b) a Mechanic; c) a Nurse; d) None of the above.”

  I had never visited Mars; I didn’t make the cut.

  So I enrolled in intermediate world history with two hundred other freshmen. I knew what I had to do to earn a spot in the advanced sophomore history class.

  I scored the highest grade out of all two hundred students, setting the class’s curve both semesters.

  After the year ended, I asked my world history teacher and my counselor to move me up to the advanced class. They agreed.

  Still, I wasn’t sure how I would fare. Advanced U.S. history was one of the toughest classes in the school. A part of me wondered, too, if that placement test in middle school had been right. Maybe these white kids really were smarter than me. Maybe I couldn’t keep up with them.

  Advanced U.S. history would reveal the truth.

  Using the bench in my room as my desk, I stayed up night after night, rereading the chapters and reviewing my notes.

  I would get home from sports at 6 P.M., eat, help out around the house, and study until midnight. Then I would get up at 6 A.M. and do it all over again.

  The hard work paid off. I often got the highest grade in the class, and I carried an A through the entire first semester.

  I was getting straight A’s in all of my classes when my life changed forever.

  My best friend, my brother Tewolde, took a trip to Montana during Christmas break of his senior year in high school. He was driving near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at around 3 in the morning when a drunk driver, heading the wrong way, slammed into my brother and killed him.

  I cannot describe the grief that flooded our hearts that night.I cannot describe how it feels to wish that you could tell someone what they mean to you and to know that you cannot. I cannot describe what it feels like to realize that while your life has changed forever, you don’t understand what has happened.

  I remember asking myself: How can something this beautiful be stolen by someone else’s recklessness? If that’s what life was like, then what were we striving for, anyway?