So how on earth do you do this, Sri Lanka?
Mexico, are you coming or what?
Is it really true you sold a kidney to come to America, India?
Guys, just give Tshaka Zulu a break, the guy is old, I’m just saying.
We know you despise this job, Sudan, but deal with it, man.
Come, Ethiopia, move, move, move; Israel, Kazakhstan, Niger, brothers, let’s go!
The others spoke languages we did not know, worshipped different gods, ate what we would not dare touch. But like us, they had left their homelands behind. They flipped open their wallets to show us faded photographs of mothers whose faces bore the same creases of worry as our very own mothers, siblings bleak-eyed with dreams unfulfilled like those of our own, fathers forlorn and defeated like ours. We had never seen their countries but we knew about everything in those pictures; we were not altogether strangers.
And the jobs we worked, Jesus—Jesus—Jesus, the jobs we worked. Low-paying jobs. Backbreaking jobs. Jobs that gnawed at the bones of our dignity, devoured the meat, tongued the marrow. We took scalding irons and ironed our pride flat. We cleaned toilets. We picked tobacco and fruit under the boiling sun until we hung our tongues and panted like lost hounds. We butchered animals, slit throats, drained blood.
We worked with dangerous machines, holding our breath like crocodiles underwater, our minds on the money and never on our lives. Adamou got murdered by that beast of a machine that also ate three fingers of Sudan’s left hand. We cut ourselves working on meat; we got skin diseases. We inhaled bad smells until our lungs thundered. Ecuador fell from forty stories working on a roof and shattered his spine, screaming, ¡Mis hijos! ¡Mis hijos! on his way down. We got sick but did not go to hospitals, could not go to hospitals. We swallowed every pain like a bitter pill, drank every fear like a love potion, and we worked and worked.
Every two weeks we got our paychecks and sent monies back home by Western Union and MoneyGram. We bought food and clothes for the families left behind; we paid school fees for the little ones. We got messages that said Hunger, that said Help, that said Kunzima, and we sent money. When we were asked, You guys work so hard, why do y’all work so hard? we smiled.
And every so often we listened over the phone to the voices of our parents and elders, shy voices telling us what was needed. They had long since ceased to be providers for us; we were now their parents. Our extended families sent requests and we worked, worked like donkeys, worked like slaves, worked like madmen. When we hesitated, they said, You are in America where everybody has money, we see it all on TV, please don’t deny us. Madoda, vakomana, how we worked!
We had never seen such a big monster of a country—it was like there were many countries in it: Michigan, Texas, New York, Atlanta, Ohio, Kansas, DC, California, and so many others. We went to places and took lots of pictures and sent them home so they could see us in America. We took pictures outside the White House; we took pictures leaning against the Lady Liberty as if she were our grandmother; we took pictures at the Niagara Falls, at the Times Square; we took pictures with dolphins in Florida, took pictures at the Grand Canyon—we went everywhere and took and took and took pictures and sent them home, showing off a country that would never be ours.
And when those at home saw the pictures and wanted to come and see America for themselves, we said, Sure, buyanini, chiuyayi, you are welcome to come. We sent them monies for visas and tickets and they came. It was mostly the youth who came, leaving behind old people and children. They came in droves, abandoning the tatters that were our country. We did not think about mending the tatters, all we thought was: Leave, abandon, flee, run—anything. Escape.
And when they came to join us in America, hungry and hollow and hopeful, we held them tight and welcomed them to a home that was not ours. We smelled their hair and clothes, we begged them for news of our land—big news, small news, any news. We asked them to describe how the earth smelled right before it rained, to describe how after the rain, flying ants exploded from the ground like fireworks.
We asked, Is the City Hall still the same? The Tredgold Building? And Renkini? The jacaranda trees that line the streets in town—do they still bloom that dizzying purple? Is that crazy Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro still there? He prayed for me to get my visa, can you believe it? What about Main Street, does it still flow like a river, and does that blind beggar still sit outside Spar supermarket and sing Thabath’ isiphambano ulandele? We asked the arrivals all these questions and watched them as they spoke; we wanted to put our heads in their mouths to catch every precious word, every feeling.
And then came the times we called home, and young strangers answered the phone, and we said, Who are you? and they said, I’m Thabani’s son, Lungile; I’m Nyarai’s daughter, Tricia; I’m Prayer’s second child, Garikayi. We listened to these strangers and said, Jesus, Thabani is a parent now? Nyarai has a daughter now? Prayer is a parent now? When did it happen, when did all these children have their own children? That is how time went. It flew and we did not see it flying. We did not go back home to visit because we did not have the papers for our return, and so we just stayed, knowing that if we went we would not be able to reenter America. We stayed, like prisoners, only we chose to be prisoners and we loved our prison; it was not a bad prison. And when things only got worse in our country, we pulled our shackles even tighter and said, We are not leaving America, no, we are not leaving.
And then our own children were born. We held their American birth certificates tight. We did not name our children after our parents, after ourselves; we feared if we did they would not be able to say their own names, that their friends and teachers would not know how to call them. We gave them names that would make them belong in America, names that did not mean anything to us: Aaron, Josh, Dana, Corey, Jack, Kathleen. When our children were born, we did not bury their umbilical cords under the earth to bind them to the land because we had no land to call ours. We did not hold their heads over smoking herbs to make them strong, did not tie fetishes around their waists to protect them from evil spirits, did not brew beer and spill tobacco on the earth to announce their arrivals to the ancestors. Instead, we smiled.
And when our parents reminded us over the phone that it had been a long, long time, and that they were getting old and needed to see us, needed to meet their grandchildren, we said, We are coming, Mama, Siyabuya Baba; we are coming, Gogo, Tirikuuya Sekuru. We did not want to tell them we still had no papers. And when they grew restless and cursed America for being the greedy monster that swallowed their children, swallowed the sons and daughters of other lands and refused to spit them out, we said, We are coming very soon, we are coming next year. And next year came and we said, Next year. When next year came we said, Next year for sure. And when next year for sure came we said, Next year for real. And when next year for real came we said, We are coming, you’ll see, just wait. And our parents waited and they saw, saw that we did not come.
They died waiting, clutching in their dried hands pictures of us leaning against the Lady Liberty, graves of lost sons and daughters in their hearts, old eyes glued to the sky for fulamatshinaz to bring forth lost sons and daughters. We could not attend their funerals because we still had no papers, and so we mourned from afar. We shut ourselves up and turned on the music so we did not raise alarm, writhed on the floor and wailed and wailed and wailed.
And with our parents gone, we told ourselves, We have no home anymore, who would we go to see in that land we left behind? We convinced ourselves that we now belonged only with our children. And those children—they grew and we had to squint to see ourselves in them. They did not speak our language, they did not sound like us. When they misbehaved, we said only, No, Don’t do that, Stop, Time-out. But that is not what we wanted to do. What we wanted to do was get switches and karabha and karabha and karabha. We wanted to draw blood and teach red, raw lessons to last them lifetimes, but we feared being arrested for bringing up our own children like our parents had
brought us up.
When our children were old enough and we told them about our country, they did not beg us for stories of the land we had left behind. They went to their computers and Googled and Googled and Googled. When they got off, they looked at us with something between pity and horror and said, Jeez, you really come from there? They did not want to hear the stories our grandmothers had told to us around village fires, stories of Buhlalusebenkosi, how the rabbit lost its tail, Tsuro na Gudo. They would not be part of the horror we had fled.
We accepted many things as our children grew, things that baffled us because we had been raised differently. But we took it all and said, There is no journey without a price, and this is the price of the long journey we made those many years ago. When our children became young adults they did not ask for our approval to marry. We did not get bride prices; we did not get gifts. At their weddings we did not spill beer and tobacco on the earth, did not beat drums to thank our ancestors—we smiled.
Our children raised their families and we did not tell them what to do, how to bring up their children. They hardly came to see us; they were busy with jobs and their new lives. They did not send us monies like we had sent our parents. When we grew old, they did not beg us to stay with them. When we grew very old, they put us here in these nursing homes where we are taken care of by strangers, strangers who have left their countries just like we left ours those many years ago.
Here our own parents come to us in dreams. They do not touch us, they do not speak to us; they only behold us with looks we cannot remember. When we approach them, we find ourselves surrounded by oceans we cannot cross. We reach out, we yell, we beg, we plead; it’s no use. Always, we wake from these dreams groping for mirrors, wounds in our eyes; we see ourselves through searing pain.
When we die, our children will not know how to wail, how to mourn us the right way. They will not go mad with grief, they will not pin black cloth on their arms, they will not spill beer and tobacco on the earth, they will not sing till their voices are hoarse. They will not put our plates and cups on our graves; they will not send us away with mphafa trees. We will leave for the land of the dead naked, without the things we need to enter the castle of our ancestors. Because we will not be proper, the spirits will not come running to meet us, and so we will wait and wait and wait—forever waiting in the air like flags of unsung countries.
My America
When I’m not cleaning the toilets or bagging groceries, I’m bent over a big cart like this, sorting out bottles and cans with names like Faygo, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, 7-Up, root beer, Miller, Budweiser, Heineken. They are collected over at the front, where they have been returned for deposit, and then wheeled back here, where I have to separate the cans and put them in the rows of tall boxes lining the wall. When the boxes fill up, I pull out the giant plastic bags that hold the cans, tie their mouths, and pile them into a colorful mountain. The glass bottles go into small carton boxes that are supposed to be stacked separately.
You’re getting pretty good at this; I bet if we blindfolded you, you’d still net all them cans. I glance up from the cart to see Jim, the short, hairy manager, grinning from the door of his office. He has a cigarette in one hand, a phone cradled between shoulder and ear. I don’t smile at Jim, which is what he expects me to do, and just keep on with my business. I can shoot a can of Pepsi into a box on one end of the wall, land a Faygo somewhere in the middle, and finish with a Natural Light on the other end, all without pausing, without having to check the labels.
I am done with the cans and just getting started on the bottles when the woman comes from behind me, which is where the other entrance is. I watch her walk by without even giving me a glance, like she’s passing a rock. The way she twists, you would think she was maybe Beyoncé or Kim Kardashian, but she’s nothing but green eyes and a tanned plank walking on black heels. When she gets to Jim’s office he raises the phone cord and she slides under it and disappears inside before Jim slams the door shut. She is not even his wife; I know because I have seen the wife, always with their red-haired kid, who looks like a mosquito in tights.
It comes out of the bottle of Miller in my hands; I’m still standing there looking at Jim’s door thinking about what they are doing when I feel something crawling up my arm. One glance, and the Miller bottles are shattering at my feet, shards of glass dancing all over the dirty floor. By the time Jim rushes out of the office to see what’s happening, I’m standing on the table near the box-crusher thingy, screaming, my feet next to the microwave.
It’s just a cockroach, Jim says, turning around to give me a look, his voice sounding like he is really talking about just a cockroach.
Now it has parked itself next to a can of Heineken like it’s trying to hear what’s being said. It’s the most gigantic thing, coat a deep, shining brown, like maybe it’s coming from a spa. I cover my eyes when Jim lifts his foot to crush it. When I look again, he is sweeping it into a pan and carrying it to the big Dumpster near the entrance.
Come on, now, back to work, he says when he reappears. You don’t have cockroaches in Africa? Jim does this thing that gets on my nerves: he always speaks as if Africa is just one country, even though I’ve told him that it is a continent with fifty-some countries, that other than my own country, I haven’t really been to the rest of it to say what is what.
You’re just acting up, I know you’ve seen all sorts of crazy shit over there, he says, speaking over his shoulder. I open my mouth to tell him to leave Africa out of it, but he disappears back in his office and slams the door, so I just hold up my middle finger and then get down from the table.
The beer bottles are the worst. They will come with all sorts of nasty things. Bloodstains. Pieces of trash. Cigarette stubs drowning in stale beer the color of urine, and one time, a used condom. When I started working here, back in tenth grade, I used to vomit on every shift.
“Darling to the front; Darling to the front, please,” says the voice bleeding from the crackling intercom. I don’t need to be called twice; I’ll take bagging groceries or sweeping the store, anything that will get me away from the nasty bottles. I dump the Budweisers I’m holding back into the cart and head for the sink to wash my hands. I use tons of soap and extra-hot water because of the dirty bottles. When I pass the meat room with its terrible cold, I smile at the meat guy, who shouts something in his language and waves hi with a bloodied knife. I pause at the blue swinging doors with the sign Employees Only, fasten my apron tighter around my back, then I’m in the brightly lit store, the cold air licking me all over.
Hours later, I’m punched out and waiting in the hot parking lot for Uncle Kojo to pick me up. Megan, the talkative cashier, is sitting on the curb just to the side of the main entrance, texting her boyfriend and muttering about he should have been there ten minutes ago and how she is going to dump his trifling ass and this and that. Two police cars boil down the street, sirens wailing; now when I see a police car in this neighborhood, I don’t even look surprised. Across the street, at the park with the two-cents grass, the Occupy people are holding up their signs, Occupying. When I first saw their pretty little tents and food piled on tables, I laughed at how they were trying to pretend they knew what suffering was.
The parking lot is almost deserted save for Jim’s big blue van, a couple of cars, and a red bike. The old Jamaican guy with the fierce dreadlocks is rummaging through the Dumpster for bottles, a black trash bag slung over his shoulder, the golden head of a lion half visible on the back of his shirt. When he comes into the store all cleaned up and saying Rastafari this, Rastafari that, in his soft-spoken voice, his smile a brilliant, brilliant white, you wouldn’t know he fishes for bottles in the trash; here, you don’t even have to be a crazy to do that kind of thing.
I can’t believe that skinny bitch was whining about me being let off early today, Megan says, putting her cell phone inside her purse. I can tell from her brief silence that she wants me to say something, so I say, even though I know who she’s talking
about, What skinny bitch?
That Teresa.
Hmmn, I say.
Did you hear her? Talking about she needs to pick her sick son up and stuff, like hello, I want to go home as well.
Hmmn, I say.
And I know that clown Jim was gonna let her go too because he’s trynna get into her panties, she says.
Hmmn, I say.
I mean, she only just started working here and already she’s asking for favors. Who does that?
Hmmn, I say. Sometimes I don’t even bother coming up with proper words for conversation. It’s not necessary; some people are content to just talk by themselves. Now the two police cars head back up the street; the sirens are off, and there’s a black guy in the rear of each car.
It’s fourteen years I’ve been here and no newbie is gonna be going home before I do. Vicky can go first, ’coz she’s been here twenty years, so I’m real cool with her. But other than that, it’s not gonna happen, hell to the no. I have seniority, you know what I’m saying? I don’t know what Megan is saying but I still nod. Her phone beeps and she rummages inside her purse and fishes it out. A red card falls onto the ground. She doesn’t notice, and I don’t feel like opening my mouth to tell her; she just makes me feel tired with all her talk-talk-talk. I watch her read the text, eyebrows raised.
Son of a bitch, Megan mutters under her breath. I can tell from her knotted face and the vicious way she is punching her keypad that it is an angry message she’s sending. Then time flips inside my head and I’m picturing Megan all old and gray, bending over a cash register to punch at the keys, stopping now and then to shuffle to the back of the main counter to get lottery tickets and cigarettes for customers. Inside me, I have this strange feeling that I can’t explain, but it’s almost like I want to lie down and cry for Megan.
Then I’m not seeing Megan anymore but myself, bent over a bottle cart. My face, wrinkled with age, is now shaped like a can of pop, and my head is a lump of snow. I have to drag myself to the can boxes because I am so old I cannot throw anymore. When I feel a hand on my shoulder, I jump. Then I turn around and Jim is standing there grinning. He has this thing of just touching my body, like maybe he knows me like that, and I don’t like it.
We Need New Names: A Novel Page 19
