The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by Clemantine Wamariya

  Copyright © 2018 by Clemantine Wamariya

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Portions of this work first appeared in Matter (medium.com/matter), as “Everything Is Yours, Everything Is Not Yours,” on June 29, 2015.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Still I Rise” from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wamariya, Clemantine, author. | Weil, Elizabeth, 1969- author

  Title: The girl who smiled beads : a story of war and what comes after / Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Publishing, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 20170458714| ISBN 9780451495327 (hardcover) | ISBN 0451495322 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451495334 (paperback) | ISBN 0451495330 (paperback) | ISBN 9780451495341 (ebook) | ISBN 0451495349 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wamariya, Clemantine. | Rwanda--History-- Civil War, 1994--Refugees. | Refugees--Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

  Classification: LCC DT450.437.W36 A3 2018 | DDC 967.57104/31 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045871

  Hardcover ISBN 9780451495327

  Ebook ISBN 9780451495341

  International Edition ISBN 9780525574378

  Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Cover design by Michael Morris

  v5.2_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note from the Authors

  Epigraph

  Clemantine and Claire’s Route

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  For Claire and for Mukamana, who taught me how to create and live in my own umugani

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

  This is a work of nonfiction. A handful of the people in the book have been given pseudonyms; otherwise, everyone is identified by their real names. We have worked hard to be accurate and, just as crucial to a book like this, emotionally honest. But memory is flawed and idiosyncratic, and many of the events described here happened decades ago to a child under intense stress.

  Every human life is equally valuable. Each person’s story is vital. This is just one.

  “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?”

  —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

  PROLOGUE

  The night before we taped the Oprah show, in 2006, I met my sister Claire at her apartment in a public housing unit in Edgewater, where she lived with the three kids she’d had before age twenty-two, thanks to her ex-husband, an aid worker who’d pursued her at a refugee camp. A black limo arrived and drove us to downtown Chicago, to the Omni Hotel, near where my sister used to work. I now can’t think about that moment without also thinking about my own naïveté, but at the time all I felt was elated.

  I was eighteen, a junior at New Trier High School, living Monday through Friday with the Thomas family in Kenilworth, a fancy suburb. I belonged to the church youth group. I ran track. I’d played Fantine in the school production of Les Misérables. I was whoever anybody wanted me to be.

  Claire, meanwhile, remained steadfast, herself, a seemingly rougher bargain. Unlike me, she was not a child when we got resettled in the United States, so nobody sent her to school or took her in or filled her up with resources—piano lessons, speech therapists, cheerleading camp. Claire just kept hustling. For a while she made a living throwing parties, selling drinks and hiring DJs who mixed American hip-hop, the Zairean superstar Papa Wemba, and French rap. But then she learned it was illegal to sell liquor without a license and she started working full-time as a maid, cleaning two hundred hotel rooms a week.

  All I knew about the show we were taping was that it was a two-part series: the first segment showed Oprah and Elie Wiesel visiting Auschwitz, God help us; the second featured the fifty winners of Oprah’s high school essay contest. Like the other winners, I had written about Wiesel’s book Night, his gutting story of surviving the Holocaust, and why it was still relevant today. The book disarmed me. I found it thrilling, and it made me ashamed. Wiesel had words that I did not have to describe the experiences of my early life.

  I’d dictated my essay to Mrs. Thomas, as she sat in her tasteful Midwestern house—gracious lawn, mahogany floors—at a huge computer that took up the whole desk. “Clemantine,” she’d said, “you have to enter. I just know you’ll win.” Mrs. Thomas had three children of her own, plus me. I called her “my American mother” and she called me “my African daughter.” She packed my lunch every day and drove me to school.

  In my essay I said that maybe if Rwandans had read Night, they wouldn’t have decided to kill one another.

  * * *

  On the way to downtown Chicago, Claire and I had the inevitable conversation—is this happening? this is so weird—which was as close as my sister and I got to discussing what had happened to our lives. If we absolutely had to name our past in each other’s presence, we’d call it “the war.” But we tried not to do that, and that day we were both so consumed by all the remembering and willful forgetting that when we arrived at the Omni and the bellhop asked, “Do you have any bags?” we realized we’d left all our clothes at home.

  Claire took the L back to her apartment, where a friend was watching her children—Mariette, who was almost ten; Freddy, who was eight; and Michele, who was five. I stayed in the hotel room, lost.

  Harpo Studios gave us each a $150 stipend for dinner. It was more than Claire’s monthly food stamp allowance. When Claire returned we ordered room service. We woke at 4:00 a.m. and spent hours getting dressed.

  * * *

  That day, for the show, the producers directed us to the huge studio. Oprah sat onstage on a white love seat, next to tired old Elie Wiesel in a white overstuffed chair. He was alive, old but alive, which meant the world to me. He kept looking at the audience, like he had a lot to say but there was no time to say it.

  In this nice studio, in front of all these well-dressed people, Oprah’s team played the video of Oprah and Elie Wiesel walking arm in arm through snow-covered Auschwitz, discussing the Holocaust.

  Then the producers ga
ve us a break. We sat in silence. Some of us were horrified and others were crying.

  After that, Oprah said glowing things about all the winners of the essay contest except me. I told myself this was fine. Fine. I hadn’t really gone to school until age thirteen, and when I was seven I’d celebrated Christmas in a refugee camp in Burundi with a shoebox of pencils that I’d buried under our tent so that nobody would steal it. Being in the audience was enough, right? Plus, I kept wanting to say to Oprah: Do you know how many years, and across how many miles, Claire has been talking about meeting you?

  But then Oprah leaned forward and said, “So, Clemantine, before you left Africa, did you ever find your parents?”

  I had a mike cord tucked under my black TV blazer and a battery pack clipped to my black TV pants, so I should have suspected something like this was coming. “No,” I said. “We tried UNICEF…, we tried everywhere, walking around, searching and searching and searching.”

  “So when was the last time you saw them?” she asked.

  “It was 1994,” I said, “when I had no idea what was going on.”

  “Well, I have a letter from your parents,” Oprah said, as though we’d won a game show. “Clemantine and Claire, come on up here!”

  * * *

  Claire held on to me. She was shaking, but she kept on her toughest, most skeptical face, because she knows more about the world than I do, and also because she refused to think, even after all we’d been through, that anybody was better or more important than she was. When we were dirt poor and alone, she’d be in her seventh hour of scrubbing someone’s laundry by hand and she’d see on a TV an image of Angelina Jolie, swaggering and gleaming, radiating moral superiority, and even then Claire would say, “Who is that? God? You, you’re human. Nothing separates me from you.”

  I have never been Claire. I have never been inviolable. Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times, that I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused. But that day I leapt up onto the set, smiling. One of the most valuable skills I’d learned while trying to survive as a refugee was reading what other people wanted me to do.

  “This is from your family, in Rwanda,” Oprah said, handing me a tan envelope. She looked solemn, confident in her purpose. “From your father and your mother and your sisters and your brother.”

  Claire and I did know that our parents were alive. We knew they’d lost everything—my father’s business, my mother’s garden—and that they now lived in a shack on the outskirts of Kigali. We talked to them on the phone, but only rarely because—how do you start? Why didn’t you look harder for us? How are you? I’m fine, thanks. I’ve been working at the Gap and I’ve found it’s much easier to learn to read English if you also listen to audiobooks.

  I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. Then Oprah put her hand on mine to stop me from unfolding the letter. It was a huge relief. I didn’t want to have a breakdown on TV.

  “You don’t have to read it right now, in front of all these people,” Oprah said. “You don’t have to read it in front of all these people…” She paused. “Because…because…your family…IS HERE!”

  I started walking backward. Claire’s jaw unhinged in a caricature of shock. Then a door that had images of barbed wire on it—created especially for this particular episode, I assume, to evoke life in an internment camp—opened stage right and out came an eight-year-old boy, who was apparently my brother. He was followed by my father, in a dark suit, salmon shirt, and tie; a shiny new five-year-old sister; my mother in a long blue dress; and my sister Claudette, now taller than me. I’d last seen her when she was two years old and I still believed my mother had picked her up from the fruit market.

  I’d fantasized about this moment so many times. In Malawi, I used to write my name in dust on trucks, hoping my mother would see my loopy cursive Clemantine and realize that I was alive. In Zaire, I’d saved coins so I could buy my parents presents. In Tanzania, I’d collected marbles for my older brother, Pudi, who wasn’t there for this reunion. Pudi was dead.

  Claire remained frozen for a moment. So I, in my TV clothes and blown-out hair, ran toward my Oprah-produced family, arms outstretched. I hugged my brother. I hugged my father. I hugged my tiny little sister. I hugged my mother, but my knees gave out and she had to pick me up. Then I hugged her. I hugged Claudette, my little sister, little no more. I walked across the stage and hugged Oprah. I hugged lovely, weathered Elie Wiesel.

  The cameras were so far away that I forgot I was participating in a million-viewer spectacle, that my experience, my joy and pain, were being consumed by the masses, though I was aware enough to realize that everybody in the audience was crying.

  * * *

  A few hours later, though it seemed like minutes, we found ourselves on the sidewalk outside the studio, and my family took a black limo north to my sister’s apartment. She lived in the front unit of a squat brick low-rise, across the street from the L tracks and a block away from an abandoned wooden house with a gable roof, a once fantastic, now forgotten home that I hoped would someday be ours. I would put everybody in it. We would be a family again.

  Nobody talked in the car. In the apartment, nobody knew what to do either. My mother, in her long blue dress, kept sitting down and standing up and touching everything—the living room walls, the TV remote—and singing about how God had protected us and now we must serve and love him. My father kept smiling, as though someone he mistrusted were taking pictures of him. Claire remained nearly catatonic: rocking, stone-faced. I thought she’d finally gone crazy, for real.

  I sat on Claire’s couch, looking at my strange new siblings, the ones who’d replaced me and Claire. They looked so perfect, their skin unblemished, their eyes alight, like an excellent fictional representation of a family that could have been mine. But they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them, and the gap between us was a billion miles wide.

  I fell asleep crying on Mariette’s bed and woke still wearing my Oprah shoes.

  * * *

  The next day was Friday. Of course, I didn’t go to school. We needed to start making up for so much lost time. Yet I couldn’t look at my parents—they were ghosts.

  I felt gratitude, yes. Oprah had brought my parents to me. But I also felt kicked in the stomach, as though my life were some psychologist’s perverse experiment: Let’s see how far we can take a person down, and then how far we can raise her up, and then let’s see what happens!

  Saturday, my family, along with the Thomases, drove up the lakeshore to the Chicago Botanic Garden, where we stared at the Illinois lilies and roses. We all wanted these to be beautiful links to the lilies and roses in Kigali, threads knitting this present to that past, but everything was awkward, and it felt as though cameras were still following us around. Sunday we did Navy Pier—the gaudy Ferris wheel, the sticky cotton candy, all the tourist stuff.

  My father kept smiling his fake, pained smile. Mine probably looked the same: a smile covering a scream. Claire barely said a word. Then, Monday morning, my parents and new siblings left on the flight back to Rwanda that Oprah’s people had booked for them, and Mrs. Thomas picked me up as usual at Claire’s apartment. I had no idea how to make sense of what had just happened. So I just ran out to her Mercedes and she dropped me off at school.

  1

  When I was a regular child, I lived in Kigali, Rwanda, and I was a precocious snoop. My nickname was Cassette. I repeated everything I saw or heard, including that my sister Claire, who was nine years older than me, wore shorts under her skirt and played soccer instead of doing family errands after school.

  When she did follow directions—go buy tomatoes, pick up six Cokes for guests—she spent only a quarter of the money my mother gave her, because Claire, even at fourteen, could look out for herself. She
understood value. She knew confidence was currency. She realized that if she told the tomato vendor she’d pay him less today but return every week and buy only from him, he’d accept the bargain, she’d pocket some money, and they’d both walk away happy.

  She also knew life was harder and more costly when I tagged along. I talked too much. I tattled. I asked too many questions. I also had a lisp and was difficult to understand. Claire made fun of me, how my tongue got in the way. She told me to repeat words, and laughed.

  We lived in a gray stucco ranch house on a gravel road, up the hill from the market, near one of the few tennis courts in the city. The houses in our neighborhood sat close together, each with a red roof and fenced with creosote bushes, thick and dense, and trimmed weekly into tidy partitions.

  In our backyard was an outdoor kitchen, with a big sandbox in which my mother buried carrots and sweet potatoes to shield them from the heat and make them even sweeter. In the front yard stood a mango tree, old and wet, with sturdy leaves. You could sit in it and it would hug you. Every day when we came home from school, Pudi and I climbed up and stood in the branches, in what was then my whole world, shaking the leaves, pretending the tree was a bus that would take us to Butare, where our grandmother lived, about three hours away, or even to Canada.

  My mother was short and curvy and regal and poised, with high cheekbones, like my grandparents, and bright white teeth with gaps between them, which Rwandans consider beautiful. We have a word for it in Kinyarwanda: inyinya. She’d fallen in love with my father and they’d decided to marry against his family’s wishes.