by Okey Ndibe
When she was done telling her story, Karen turned to me. Her silence conveyed all the eloquence of her inquisitiveness. What was she to do next? Was hers a fool’s errand, bound to futility? What course was she to take in order to realize her cause? The wordless torrent of her questions, transmitted by something quizzical in her demeanor, frightened me. It was as if she considered me a deep-seeing mystic, a sage, an avatar. I was under pressure to come up with answers, and to do so fast.
I had a lucky spark of inspiration.
“You don’t have to travel all the way to Nigeria to find your father,” I said.
She gave me a sharp, inquisitive look.
I didn’t want to tell her about Nigerians’ idiosyncrasies, the likelihood a “foreign” woman inquiring about a man would raise all kinds of suspicion, trigger silence, even deliberately misleading information. I just didn’t have the right codes to convey that information, nor was I sure she’d know how to absorb, digest it.
“I think I can find out about your father,” I said. It was hard, a strain, to utter the words “your father.” In normal circumstances, the words would be uncomplicated, would evoke filial bonds. But not in this circumstance: the woman before me nearly thirty without ever having met the man who fathered her. She hadn’t seen a single photo of him, didn’t have the faintest idea how he looked. She could walk past him on a street, busy or abandoned, and yet have no inkling his blood flowed in her veins. The only way she could imagine how he looked was to stand before a mirror, look hard at herself, and let her mind wander and wonder, conjure him in her own image.
“How?” she asked.
“I’ll use one or two newspapers.”
Karen was enrapt as I laid it all out for her.
First, I explained my premise. I was certain that a man who was a graduate student at Fordham in the late 1950s would have achieved significant social status on his return to Nigeria. Lots of people would know him.
I would ask one of my best friends, C. Don Adinuba, to write a short note that would be published on the letters page of the Nigerian Guardian newspaper. The note would simply state that C. Don had a message for Emmanuel U, a graduate of Fordham University. It would add a request that anybody who knew Emmanuel U should write to C. Don with the man’s address. If Karen’s father reached out to C. Don himself, he would be told that an American woman, apparently his daughter, was looking for him. If C. Don got the contact from somebody else, he would pass the information to Karen through me.
Nnaji instantly liked my plan. Karen seemed intrigued, but in no hurry to endorse it. She asked question after question. I gave short or long, sinuous answers, depending on the question. Nnaji said he had to run off to a meeting.
“Have you eaten lunch?” Karen asked me. She was clearly reluctant to end the discussion.
“No.”
“Why don’t we go to lunch,” she proposed.
I smiled to indicate my eagerness. I had been in America for four days, and I was meeting my first generous American.
Let me insert a note of cultural information. In Nigeria, when somebody invites another—or even others—to a meal, it is understood that the inviter will pick up the tab. However, it is unusual for a Nigerian woman to treat a man to a meal in a restaurant. For that matter, it is not common practice for a Nigerian woman to buy a man much of anything. This reality flashed through my mind the moment Karen invited me to go out to lunch. I thought, Well, she’s an American woman. And American women are supposed to be “liberated.”
We walked a short distance from Nnaji’s office, to a restaurant at the University of Massachusetts Campus Center. Karen and I ordered sandwiches, soup, and a soda each. Karen settled down to eating, but I could hardly bite into my food. The reason was her stream of questions. As I talked, she ate. Once I paused to take a bite, she would ask another question—and then get me going.
At a point the questions began to tax my patience. I considered making up a story about another engagement, and running off. But a part of me annulled the scheme. This woman was kind, she had done for me what few Nigerian women had ever done—buy me a meal. I coaxed myself into staying put, paying her back for her grace and generosity with patient attention to her questions.
The waitress came round to ask if we wanted to order anything else. We both said no. A moment later, the waitress leaned in between us and left a bill. She placed the tab equidistant between Karen and me, as if she didn’t wish for either of us to have an unfair advantage snatching it up.
I hardly glanced at the bill. Karen had invited me to eat, and I had fulfilled my obligation. Paying for the food and drinks had nothing to do with me.
“We have to go,” Karen announced, pulling out her purse and simultaneously motioning toward the bill.
I had long wanted to rise and leave, so I was quick in agreeing it was time to go. But why, I wondered, had Karen pointed to the bill? I thought, Since America has weather as strange as winter, perhaps its people have even stranger customs. Perhaps, before an American pays for your meal, they want you to see how much they are paying. I made a point of gazing at the bill. Then, looking up in Karen’s direction, I said, “Thank you.”
She ignored me, even asked one or two other questions. Then she said, more emphatically, “We gotta go.”
I nodded my agreement.
She pulled out some dollar bills from her purse and then gestured again toward the bill.
I pride myself on reading signs. I was certain that this American, before paying for my meal, wanted to be sure that I knew exactly how much she was spending on me. Once this dawned on me, I took the bill, held it away from my face, my brow furrowed in feigned concentration. Convinced that I had met my benefactor’s bizarre expectation, I posted the bill back on the table. Then, turning again to Karen, I said, again, “Thank you.”
She swiftly swept up the bill. She inclined it halfway in my direction, as if there were not enough light and she had to slant the paper so I could see it clearly. Then using her finger to underline the point, she said to me, “You owe four dollars and twenty-five cents—plus tip.”
In an instant, my first meal with a “generous” American turned into a moment of profound cultural disorientation. I was meant to pay for a meal, even though she had suggested it—she had, in light of my Nigerian cultural experience, freely offered me the meal?
My trouble was compounded. As a Nigerian, I didn’t know what “tip” meant. Nigerians do not tip. In fact, the whole idea of paying more than the cost of my food struck me as absurd. Far from paying more, Nigerians would quibble, haggle, and harangue their way to a lower bill.
“Look here, madam,” they might say, addressing a food seller. “This your food no be am o. I no dey pay ten naira. Na only five I dey pay.”
“Customer, pay eight,” the food vendor might say. “Next time, I do you better.”
“Six naira, no more, no less,” the customer would offer.
“Oya, pay seven.”
But the three-letter word “tip” was the least of my problems. I just found out I owed more than four dollars—and I didn’t have a dime on me.
I felt too embarrassed to tell Karen that I had no money on me, and that I had presumed on her philanthropy. Caught in an awkward situation, I racked my brain for a way out that would save me some dignity. I stood up and began searching the pockets of my denim pants for what I knew wasn’t there. I found nothing, as it was not a miracle day for me.
“I believe I left my money in Professor Nnaji’s office,” I lied to Karen. “Why don’t you pay for both of us? Then we will return to Nnaji’s office and I will give you my portion of the bill.”
For the first time since I met her, an angry expression came over Karen’s face. She seemed to wonder why on earth any person would go out to eat without having money in his pocket. Perhaps she regarded me as the world’s most contemptible freeloader. Which w
as fine, for I thought even worse of her.
She paid, still seething, a closed look seizing her face. We walked back to Nnaji’s office in unaccustomed, stunning silence. Karen didn’t ask one question. I was preoccupied with how to find money to pay her, in no mood to chatter.
Nnaji’s door was ajar, and I was relieved to find him in his office. In Igbo, I asked if I could have a word with him. He followed me just outside his office while Karen sat and waited.
“I’d like to borrow ten dollars,” I said shortly, urgently, feeling it was best not to launch into any lengthy preamble.
A point of cultural information: Among Nigerians, asking a friend for “a loan”—especially of a small sum—was often a matter of polite form. Everybody, giver and taker alike, understood quite well that the money would likely never be repaid. Nnaji was not, by any strict definition, a friend of mine, but he was the Nigerian I had grown closest to. Though I asked him for a loan, I might as well have said, Give me the damn money.
He obliged.
The cash in my hand swept away the embarrassment I had felt at the restaurant. With a sudden boost to my confidence, I called Karen out.
“In Nigeria,” I said, in a didactic tone, “when you invite somebody out to eat, you imply an offer to pay for their meal.”
“That’s not how it’s done in America,” she replied, without missing a beat, as if she had anticipated me and had rehearsed that comeback.
“I just found out,” I said, hoping that my face registered dismay, if not disgust. I held out the crisp ten-dollar bill Nnaji had given me. “Here’s ten dollars. I’m paying for both of us today. But please, don’t ever invite me again to eat, unless you’re willing to pay.”
She took the money and ran. I walked back into Nnaji’s office.
“Do you know why I needed to borrow money?” I asked him. Then I told him of the drama at lunch.
Nnaji laughed and laughed. He stood up and sat back down and clapped and pounded the table and wiped tears with the back of his hand. At first curious, and then infected by his mirth, I laughed along.
At last, Nnaji collected himself. Regarding me with an amused expression, he said, “My brother, you’ve just been exposed to what Americans call going dutch.”
“I’ll continue to go Nigerian,” I vowed, provoking him to another round of laughter.
(Since this experience, whenever an American friend invites me out to a restaurant, I always say, “Wait, there’s a story.” Then, after relating the “going dutch” narrative, I add, “The moral of the story is that I’m offering to pay, unless you insist.” The story always elicits guffaws. In the interest of full disclosure, I might as well reveal that, most of the time, I get treated to a free breakfast, lunch, or dinner.)
Despite being upset with Karen over the lunch fiasco, I proceeded with my promise to help track down her father.
I rang C. Don up and told him the entire story about Karen’s search for her father. He agreed to write a note for publication in one or two papers.
C. Don’s note went awry. Instead of merely asking to be contacted by anybody who knew the whereabouts of Emmanuel U, he spilled the whole story. His note revealed that an American woman was looking for her father and then gave the man’s name.
Within two days of the publication, Emmanuel U himself sent a terse note to C. Don. His tone was incensed. It must have seemed as if a ghost he thought he’d interred in the dim past intruded on his life. The rhythm of the life he had established for thirty years, apart from Karen’s mother and Karen, had been rudely, unexpectedly upset. He demanded that C. Don obtain Karen’s mother’s name and Karen’s date and place of birth. C. Don rang me with news of the latest development. Immediately, I contacted Karen. She seemed both ecstatic and anxious.
Satisfied that Karen was his daughter, Mr. U wrote directly to her. It was an unusual letter, compounded of acceptance and recrimination. It turned out that, on his return to Nigeria, the man had taken a job in the civil service. He had risen to the top of Nigeria’s bureaucracy, and then retired. His natal community then chose him as their traditional ruler, a revered but largely ceremonial post.
In his letter to Karen, the man suggested that C. Don’s letter in the newspaper was designed to embarrass him, to inflict grave emotional pain on him and his wife. Before he would establish any relationship with Karen, he insisted, his immediate trauma had to be addressed. In fact, he said members of his traditional cabinet demanded an explanation from everybody involved in the whole affair. That meant, above all, me.
My initial inclination was to declare myself done with the matter, in no mood to be drawn any further into a situation fast evolving into a tense, near-farcical drama. But Karen entreated me. She pleaded that I allay her father’s suspicion that she, C. Don, and I had hatched a plan to tarnish his image—and cause him pain. If I didn’t, she reminded me, the man would take it out on her, refuse to meet her. All her efforts, mine, as well as C. Don’s, would be wasted.
I relented. I wrote a letter couched in a penitential tone to her father. I explained that there had not been any intent to debase him or wrinkle up his life. C. Don had simply made an innocent, if careless, mistake by adding details I had asked him not to share in the newspaper note.
My reassurance seemed to work magic. The man contacted Karen again, this time in a more conciliatory tone. In a few months, he said, he and his wife would be visiting Boston. Four of their children, all sons, lived in Boston or locations nearby. He would want to meet her during his visit.
Several months later, Karen rang to tell me her father was in Boston, and she was headed there to meet him and the rest of his family. She sounded excited, but I suspected she was also a bit apprehensive, just masking it. I was proud I had played a big role in solving her paternal puzzle, but I felt uneasy for her. For some odd—or altogether understandable—reason, my unease had to do with Karen’s personality and appearance. She favored torn, bleached denim and sleeveless shirts that appeared purchased for next to nothing from some nth-power cast-off clothing store. She was sinewy skinny and loved to flex her arms and invite people to feel her steely muscles. I wondered how her cultivated bohemianism was going to play with her father, his wife, and their sons. Middle-class Nigerians tended to be more formal in their fashion choices. Many of them would frown on sartorial eccentricity.
Karen called me after her trip to Boston. Her voice, bereft of excitement, told all. Things had not gone quite as she’d imagined or hoped. One question had been answered: she had finally seen the resemblance between her biological father and herself. But the weightier question, whether there was a prospect of fashioning some vital, even usable, filial relationship—or how to go about it—hung in the air. The atmosphere in Boston was somber. Her father said she was welcome to visit him in Nigeria—if she could put the flight ticket together. Her father’s wife stayed mostly distant, taciturn.
Karen’s half brothers were not as reticent or guarded as their parents. The three oldest ones told Karen that the newspaper piece that called out their father had caused their mother undeserved pain. They had grown up with no inkling that Karen was somewhere out there, related to them by blood. It was too late, they told her, for them to get accustomed to the idea that she was their sister, indeed their oldest sibling. They had decided to move on with their lives apart from her, as if she had not, in a breathless bolt, bounded into their circle.
The youngest son made a different call. He hugged Karen and told her he treasured her as a sister.
Fitting The Description
Around noon on Friday, December 23, 1988, I planted myself in front of a huddle of passengers underneath a Plexiglas-covered bus stop located close to the post office in the center of Amherst, Massachusetts. I was waiting for one of the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority buses that ran shuttles to destinations within Amherst and to surrounding towns. I was going to have a meeting with Bart Nnaji at his UM
ass office to discuss African Commentary.
I had been in America for a mere thirteen days. My body had made little progress habituating to the bone-piercing cold. Dressed for winter, I looked unaccustomedly bloated, ridiculously oversize in a fleece-lined winter jacket over several layers of shirts and a wool sweater. Gloved hands tucked inside the pockets of my jacket, I distracted myself by blowing air through my mouth. In those early days in America, I often entertained myself, when outside, by watching the stream of vapor that spooled from my mouth and nostrils.
I don’t remember the trigger, but I suddenly raised my eyes at the traffic paused in front of the bus stop, waiting for the traffic light to turn. My eyes met the stare of a police officer waiting in his cruiser.
The instant our eyes met, I remembered my uncle’s warning: Americans did not stand for somebody looking them in the eye. And here I was, looking a police officer dead-on in the face. My heart quickened, jolted by fear. Immediately, I swept my eyes upward, as if some strange thing floating in the air had caught my attention. The gesture was swift and dramatic. It was a wordless way of assuring the officer that, in locking eyes with him, ever briefly, I had not meant any provocation. I needed him to realize that I had made an innocent mistake, committed an inadvertent act.
Even though I had quickly averted my gaze, I still monitored the officer’s vehicle with the corner of my eye. The traffic light turned green. The officer pulled forward and then turned right onto a street beside the post office. I heaved a sigh of relief worthy of a man who had dodged a bullet.
