by Okey Ndibe
My nerves were shot to pieces. Much of it had to do with the turbulence. A virgin in transcontinental air travel, I translated each shiver of the aircraft as a calamity about to happen. My fear was compounded by the seemingly endless, dark, and bottomless waters of the Atlantic Ocean below. I was also a non-swimmer who could sweep gold for the fastest time to the bottom of any pool.
I imagined the ocean seethed that particular day, sinister and grumpy. I couldn’t expunge from my mind the idea that some mysterious force, kin to the monsters of the Bermuda Triangle, could suck the plane clean from the night sky and into all that implacable, churning waste. Silently I resolved that, if I made it alive to America, I would stay put. I would never risk that dreadful passage all over again. Never.
My uncle had warned me against looking Americans in the eye but he had not prepared me for winter, the rudest, most savage challenge I would face in America.
After a long, nerve-shattering flight, the Nigeria Airways plane began its unhurried descent to JFK International Airport on December 10, 1988. It was a sunny, cloudless day. Through the aircraft’s window, I looked down, half in awe, half in dread, at huddles of skyscrapers, a crisscross of bridges over a shimmering expanse of water, a maze of streets and highways that carved up and contained New York City’s sprawl. Then the aircraft’s tires met the tarmac. I felt a swell of relief. The flying beast roared and rattled as it barreled forward and then cut off the chase. I couldn’t believe it; I was in America. Finally, one of my dreams as a youngster was realized.
The long, winding line to the immigration desk moved too slowly for my comfort, but there was nothing to do but wait. I clenched and unclenched my fists to keep calm.
Then, suddenly, I stood in front of an immigration officer. He held up my passport and peered at the photo. Then, as he looked in my face, I quickly fixed my gaze on the flat plane of the cubicle.
“You’re here on business. What business exactly?” he asked.
“To attend a conference,” I said, scrupulously avoiding eye contact.
“And how long is the conference?”
“One week.”
“Do you have any other plans?”
“No.”
He stamped my passport and held it out to me. After picking up my lone, small suitcase—I had packed light, on purpose—I stopped at the customs station. Tucked away in my suitcase were two or three bags made from crocodile skin. A cousin of mine, who lived at the time in Weymouth, Massachusetts, had advised that I bring them. He could find me buyers who would pay several times the amount I spent on the bags. A hard-faced customs officer unzipped my suitcase and pulled out the bags.
“You’re not allowed to bring these in,” he said in a flat, censorious tone. He tossed the bags aside, rezipped my suitcase, and waved me on.
I had a sinking feeling, the more intense because I felt powerless to argue. But I was determined to conjure a lively spirit. I set for the exit sign, a willful bounce to my gait. Chinua Achebe had arranged for Chudi Uwazurike, a Harvard-educated Nigerian sociologist at City College, to meet me. The man would be waiting at the arrival lounge, Achebe had told me. It would be easy to find him, Achebe added, as he would be holding up a piece of paper with my name scribbled on it.
My name on a piece of paper! The idea struck me as grand and charming, as if I were being inducted into the roll of the famous.
Achebe hadn’t warned me of the sight and buzz of a humanhive. Dozens of people held up papers or small boards in the bustling promenade, the names of arriving passengers typed or scrawled on them. Twice I walked the length of the aisle, looked in vain for my name. Then it dawned on me: perhaps Uwazurike was supposed to pick me up outside the arrival hall, not inside.
The exit doors parted as I approached, and I pushed my cart outside. I knew, instantly, that I had erred terribly; I had walked, willy-nilly, into an air ambush. I felt surrounded, stormed by a swirling gust of arctic air. The sting of it forced me to halt. Here I was, a lifelong tropical being, buffeted by air so frigid it seemed to drill its way to my marrow. Nothing in the vocabulary of my experience prepared me for this assault.
I pirouetted, faced the arrival lounge. Thankfully the doors parted again, to let me back in. I pushed the cart to an empty seat and plunked down. As I sat there, mystified, I looked around me, watched people. A ceaseless procession of people walked in, walked out of the lounge. Everybody else wore winter gear, complete with caps, hoods, mufflers, and gloves. To me, in a light cotton shirt underneath a sport coat, the others were padded up. Their world, from all appearances, still had its center, life its familiar rhythms. My own center had disappeared. I was marooned in an unspeakably cold place. My agitated mind churned with questions that had no calming answers. What could have happened to Uwazurike? I knew that many Nigerians had an elastic sense of time, hence the phrase “Nigerian time.” It meant that an appointment that was set, say, at 1 p.m. could take place anytime from then till 6 p.m. Was Uwazurike one of those adherents to Nigerian time? If so, how many hours would I wait before he showed up? Once he came, how would he and I recognize each other? There were lots and lots of people in the airport lounge, travelers and their escorts and goodness knows who else. Achebe had not given me a physical description of Uwazurike, and I doubt I had been described to him.
A worse scenario: What if Uwazurike had forgotten about me altogether, or had had to make a last-minute trip out of the city? What if he never showed up?
I had two telephone numbers on me. One was for a cousin who lived somewhere in Massachusetts, the other for Bart Nnaji. If the day wore on and my host didn’t show up, I was going to call my cousin or Nnaji. Yet, this thought brought me little comfort. I didn’t know how to use the pay phone. It was worse: I didn’t even have any US currency to use to make a call.
With time, a heaviness began to press itself on my eyelids. My body, leaden, slowly slipped toward sleep. I began to tap my shoes on the floor, a desperado’s effort to shake off sleep. It was a tough battle. I was afloat in a half-conscious, half-asleep state. Everybody else seemed grotesquely inflated and alien-like, mini-astronauts dressed for space. How long was I in that state, slipping and rising, embroiled in a feud between weary body and desperate will? How long did I try to fend off that creeping power that, seizing limb after limb, deadened me?
“Are you Okey?”
The words smashed into my woozy consciousness. It had come from my left flank, the voice. A light-skinned man had his eyes trained on me.
“Are you Okey?” he asked again.
I affirmed with a nod.
“Professor Chudi Uwazurike,” he said. He offered his right hand. I extended mine for the handshake, his grip American-firm. “Have you been waiting for long?”
“About an hour,” I said. It had certainly been longer; in fact, had seemed like days.
“So sorry. I had a class. And then I was trapped in traffic. Very heavy traffic.”
I was too relieved to mind his lateness.
“Let’s go,” he said. That instant, he paused and gave me a sharp, quizzical look. His perplexed expression was that of a man who’d suddenly discovered something odd, if not grotesque, about my person. “Where’s your jacket?” he asked.
I pointed to sport jacket I was wearing.
“No, I mean your winter jacket,” he clarified.
Winter jacket? Winter jacket? I shrugged.
“Wow, this is all you brought?” He shook his head, gesturing at the jacket. A look of disbelief, a suggestion of alarm, seized his face.
Why, nobody had warned me to gird against this foe called winter. Did Uwazurike’s expression mean that winter had laid ambush for me, ready to pounce the moment I stepped outside?
“You have arrived on a very cold day,” he volunteered.
The information stung. In fact, I took it personally. America had chosen to be chilly, frost mannered. It had flung it
s harsh arctic air at me.
I was not altogether ignorant about winter. Or, to be more specific, I was not new to the word. Back in Nigeria, I had gone through a phase when I read lots of American writers—Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, John Steinbeck, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner. I was also quite fond of Time and Newsweek magazines, copies of which I sometimes bought from street vendors. The Lagos Island office of the United States Information Service stocked a variety of American newspapers, magazines, and books. I used to frequent USIS for one event or another, to see some of their friendly staff or to borrow books. As a roaming reader, I had encountered the word “winter” in numerous books, on numerous occasions. But I never lingered on the word, I never dwelled on it, nor did I ever pause to really, deeply, experience it.
I had always thought that winter was the American version of what the Igbo call ugulu, otherwise more widely known across West Africa as harmattan. Harmattan is a dry cold wind that emanates from the Sahara Desert and sweeps through much of West Africa from the latter part of the -ember months through to March.
Growing up in Nigeria, I had witnessed many harmattan seasons. The harmattan brings fine granules of dust that cause coughs, redden the eye, color the skin ashy, and lend the atmosphere a patina of grey. It also gives the air a tinge—a mere tinge—of cold. At the height of the harmattan season, the temperature drops in the mornings, hovering around fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. In tropical Nigeria, that’s what we call cold.
Whenever I had come across the word “winter” in print, I mentally transposed “harmattan” in its place. Why would I pack a special winter jacket for my trip to New York City when my people had never needed to invent a harmattan jacket? The entire arsenal of our combat against ugulu-grade cold consisted of Vaseline (to sheen up dry, scaly skin), a sweater (usually worn by the very elderly and children), a handkerchief (to ward off dust), and a pair of sunglasses (to protect the eyes from airborne sand).
Harmattan pretty much left you alone, unless you provoked it. And the gravest act of provocation was to take a cold bath or shower early in the morning. The body and cold water were at war during harmattan. The touch of cold water on the skin made you wince, whistle, whoop, and jump. If you knew what was good for you, you warmed your water before bathing.
“You have to wear this,” Uwazurike said. He pulled off and handed me his padded winter jacket, hooded, fleece lined, down filled. I wore it, complete with the hood. I suppressed a laugh—amused by how closely I resembled a space-bound astronaut.
We dashed through the parking lot to his car. The instant he started the engine, a steady whoosh filled the car. It was, I realized with astonishment, the rush of heated air. What a novelty, I thought. In Nigeria, all but the poorest car owners had air-conditioning installed in their vehicles.
I brooded while my host drove through the light-suffused night. Taking in the scenes that whirled past, I had the sensation that we were headed into the vast violent belly of a strange implacable city.
My chest was tautly wound, leaden. I felt a sharp sense of loss and danger. The pilgrim’s plaintive prayer rose in my mind: Home, sweet home; there’s no place like home. I had read somewhere that President John F. Kennedy, following a particularly difficult summit with his Soviet rival, Nikita Khrushchev, had declaimed, “It’s going to be a long cold winter,” or words to that effect. Suddenly, I understood the archaic anxiety contained in that phrase. I had stepped from my warm natal home into the friendless frigidity of an alien land.
After the ordeal at the airport, Uwazurike’s home felt cozy and warm. It struck me that its elegance did not depend on lavishness of space but on the tastefulness of its interior, the congruence between space and utility. In it, I experienced another first. Back in Nigeria, people of means almost always owned air-conditioned homes or apartments. And yet here I was in my host’s apartment, heat wafting out of every vent.
In my first letters to friends and relatives in Nigeria, I strained to find the language to convey what winter felt like. No, ugulu, the harmattan, couldn’t stand near—much less beside—winter. In the end, I figured out the only comparison they could relate to: Winter, I wrote, was akin to living inside a refrigerator.
Sleepless in New York
My first night in the United States brought little respite. I had endured eleven hours aboard a Nigeria Airways flight, confined in a tight seat, wedged uncomfortably between two other passengers, one a middle-aged man with a beer belly who snored as a gorilla might, the other a young woman who stayed awake for most of the trip, a curious sneer fixed on her face, as if she were at war with the world in general for subjecting her to the plight of flying economy.
By the time the plane touched down in New York, my body had had enough of the ordeal. I felt ravaged. I sorely needed rest, but sleep was hard to come by.
Uwazurike’s wife had greeted me warmly as I walked into their house, a step behind her husband. Moments later, Chudi Uwazurike showed me to a guest room. Folded neatly and placed at the foot of the bed were a towel and a washcloth, a bar of soap resting on top of them.
Their sight reminded me of a practice I had learned from my parents. Whenever a visitor arrived to stay at our home, my parents would ask one of my siblings or me to hoist a bucket of water to the outdoor bathroom. Then they would invite the visitor to go and “wash off the journey.” My parents observed the same rite of ablution. On returning from any trip, they’d say, in a tone of urgency, “Let me wash off the journey.” As a youngster, I had been intrigued by that habit. It fixed in my mind the idea of a journey as wearying, an exercise in the accumulation of grime, soot, and sweat. A bath revitalized travelers’ limbs, cleansed their pores, and rejuvenated their spirits.
As if he read my mind, Uwazurike asked if I wished to take a bath right away.
My hosts’ bathroom was so clean you could eat in it. Its air had a hint of scent. For sure, some wealthy people back in Nigeria also had such pristine bathrooms, but I had never been in one. For me, then, the bathroom seemed an advertisement of America’s power, prosperity—and excess. There were numerous bars of soap in it, different shapes, sizes, and fragrances. Which one to use? I palmed each one, relished its solidity, held it against my nose, and breathed in. I could not decide. Not to worry, I used two or three. There were also several bottles of shampoo and conditioners. I lathered my hair with each. The showerhead gushed a jet of warm water. The shower soothed me, washed away my weariness. I overstayed in the bathroom, delighted to bask in American excess.
Thereafter, Uwazurike’s wife treated me to a delicious Nigerian-style dinner of stewed chicken and rice. It was a perfect first supper in America. And I washed down the food with a glass or two of orange juice, the first time I ever savored the sweet, pulpy drink.
After dinner, we watched TV on a huge screen. Uwazurike flicked from one channel to another, news, sports, a movie. I had never seen TV like this, what seemed like an inexhaustible parade of channels, a bottomless variety. I was amazed by the largeness of the screen and the remote control in Uwazurike’s grasp that seemed to conjure up this or that program. Like the soaps and shampoos, the sheer multitude of TV channels was a proclamation both of America’s spoiled-rotten prosperity and robust diversity and freedom. It all left me both in awe and dismayed. When Uwazurike invited me to choose what I wished to watch, I felt a slight panic attack. Politely, I declined my host’s invitation. Any channel he chose would serve me, I said.
During advert interludes, Uwazurike brought up one issue or another about Nigeria. I found out he was a passionate political pontificator, and he knew and even schmoozed with some of Nigeria’s biggest political players. His anecdotes and insights intrigued me. I relished the manner of his enunciation, his air of professorial certitude.
At last, my hosts said I must be jet-lagged. Being my first intercontinental trip, I had no familiarity with what being jet-lagged entailed. I felt fatigued, my body so
mewhat out of sync, but I didn’t feel sleepy. Rather, my mind was alert, agitated. I could not quite articulate what I had expected America to look and feel like, but the America I had seen in my first few hours was somewhat stranger, more mystifying than what I had imagined. Could I ever establish harmony with this America? Could I make peace, ever, with the frosty monster called winter? Would I ever get used to the sheer vastness and spectacle of the American terrain? With America’s dizzying parade of material objects? And with that frenetic, no-pause, hurry-on, don’t-give-a-damn-about-you stride with which Americans—at least the ones I saw in New York—walked?
Were the Uwazurikes old friends, I would have implored them to tarry with me for a while longer, urged them to keep vigil with me another hour or two. But their tone suggested finality. They had stayed up way past their turn-in time. In referring to my being jet-lagged, they were in fact telling me, the best way they knew, that they were tired. I had to, as the Igbo people say, use my tongue to count my teeth. My hosts had been generous, and they were due their rest. They deserved their sleep, needed their bodies refurbished to take on the challenges of another fast-paced, grueling American day.
I rose, thanked them again for the trouble of picking me up and for the meal. I said my good nights and shambled off to the guest bedroom. The room was warm, the bed comfortable. I sneaked under the soft, padded bedsheet, legs pulled up, as if I aimed that my chin and knees touch. It was the fetal pose of a man cowering in a corner, terrified of some vicious monster.
Finally alone, ensconced in bed, I could not keep my mind from its wandering. I looked in vain for that ecstasy of arrival, all but wiped away by that first savage brush with winter. My body, as though touched anew by frozen fingers, shook violently.
I was always a sound sleeper. In fact, I’d been known to plunk down on a couch in a room filled with exuberant dancers and blaring music, and nod off. My first night in America, I yearned for that facility to slip, easy, into sleep. I wished I could float away to forgetfulness, transported to a state where warmth—or a dream of it—was possible.
