“I’m only saying that—”
“You think it’s easy to get a job like that? You think it’s easy for someone like me to get a good job like that? Were you not here when I sent out one hundred résumés for all those chauffeur jobs on the Internet and no one called me back? You know I only got the job with Mr. Edwards because Mr. Dawson likes Winston very much and he trusted Winston to recommend someone good. I got the job only because of Winston, not because of myself. Okay? So stop talking like someone who has no sense.”
She could tell she had incensed him. She tried to rub his shoulder to atone for whatever she had said to infuriate him, but he pulled away and stood up.
“Please, bébé,” she said, looking up at him. “We’re going to be fine, right?”
He walked out of the room without responding and went into the kitchen. When she went to join him, she found him opening and shutting drawers and cabinets.
“Bébé, what are you looking for?”
“You need to know something, Neni,” he said, turning to face her. “You need to know that much of what has happened to get us here is because of Winston. You understand? If Winston didn’t offer to pay the rest of Bubakar’s fees, you know we would not have as much money saved right now. We will have nothing if it wasn’t for my cousin paying for almost all of Bubakar and my immigration fees, helping me find a good job, helping me find this apartment! But if things start to get too bad for us in this country, you have a student visa, I have the government trying to deport me, you need to stay in school to keep your student visa, we start running out of money, one of us gets seriously sick, who are we going to turn to? Winston is going to have a child. He’s going to get married. Have more children. His little sisters are finishing Buea University next year and then he has to bring them over here. We will no longer have Winston to turn to left and right. And even if we could, I am a man! I cannot continue waiting for my cousin to rescue me all the time.”
“But no one knows how God works. Maybe, one way or another, you can get another job driving someone else, eh?”
“You’re not listening to me, Neni. You’re not listening! Forget about how God works, okay? Because even if I try again to look for a job as a driver, do you really think a big man on Wall Street will hire some African man from the street just like that? With this kind of economy, all kinds of people are looking for a job like that. Even some of those people who used to wear suits to work on Wall Street are now looking for jobs as drivers. Nothing is easy anymore. How do you think I’m ever going to get another job that pays thirty-five thousand dollars?”
“Maybe you can—”
“Maybe I can do what?”
“There are other things—”
“Why are you arguing with me? Is it that you don’t believe me? You should have been with me last week when I saw this man who used to drive another executive at Lehman Brothers. We used to sit together outside the building sometimes; he was a fresh round man. I saw him downtown: The man looked like he had his last good meal a year ago. He has not been able to find another job. He says too many people want to be chauffeurs now. Even people who used to be police and people with fine college degrees, they want to be chauffeurs. Everyone is losing jobs everywhere and looking for new jobs, anything to pay bills. So you tell me—if he, an American, a white man with papers, cannot get a new chauffeur job then what about me? They say the country will get better, but you know what? I don’t know if I can stay here until that happens. I don’t know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America.”
Fifty
SHE WOULD NOT BE LEAVING. NEVER. SHE WOULD NOT BE RETURNING TO Limbe.
For years she had stayed in her father’s house doing nothing but housework, first too grief-stricken and shamed to return to school after dropping out and then losing her daughter; later—when she was ready to return, four years after the baby’s death—unable to do so because her father didn’t think it was worthwhile paying for an almost-twenty-year-old to attend secondary school. He had suggested she apprentice as a seamstress, which she was opposed to because, she told him, she’d never imagined herself sitting at a sewing machine five days a week. Fine then, he’d said to her, stay at home and imagine yourself doing nothing for the rest of your life. It was only when Liomi was one year old that he finally agreed to pay for her to attend evening computer classes, after she’d convinced him that acquiring basic computer skills might help her get an office job. After the year of classes, though, she’d been unable to get a job because there were too few jobs in Limbe, never mind one for a young woman who hadn’t made it as far as high school. She had been bored and frustrated at home, unable to have any sort of independence because she was financially dependent on her parents, unable to marry Jende because her father wouldn’t let her marry a council laborer and unable to do anything about it because both she and Jende believed it wrong to defy a parent and marry against his or her wishes.
By her late twenties, all she could think about was America.
It wasn’t that she thought life in America had no ills—she’d watched enough episodes of Dallas and Dynasty to know that the country had its share of vicious people—but, rather, because shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and The Cosby Show had shown her that there was a place in the world where blacks had the same chance at prosperity as whites. The African-Americans she saw on TV in Cameroon were happy and successful, well educated and respectable, and she’d come to believe that if they could flourish in America, surely she could, too. America gave everyone, black or white, an equal opportunity to be whatever they wished to be. Even after she’d seen the movies Boyz n the Hood and Do the Right Thing, she couldn’t be swayed or convinced that the kind of black life depicted represented anything but a very small percentage of black life, just like Americans probably understood that the images they saw of war and starvation in Africa were but a very small percentage of African life. None of the folks from Limbe who had emigrated to America sent home pictures of a life like the ones in those movies. Every picture she’d seen of Cameroonians in America was a portrait of bliss: children laughing in snow; couples smiling at a mall; families posing in front of a nice house with a nice car nearby. America, to her, was synonymous with happiness.
Which was why, on the day Jende shared with her Winston’s offer to buy him a ticket so he could move to America and eventually bring her and Liomi over, she had wept as she composed a five-paragraph email of gratitude to Winston. She began watching American movies like Stepmom and Mrs. Doubtfire not only for leisure but also as advance preparation, envisioning a future in New York where she would finish her education, own a home, raise a happy family. Though she’d been surprised to learn upon arrival that not many blacks lived like the ones in the sitcoms, and virtually no one, black or white, had a butler like the family in The Fresh Prince, the realization had done little to change her impression of what was possible in America. America might be flawed, but it was still a beautiful country. She could still become far more than she would have become in Limbe. In spite of her daily hardships, she could still send pictures to her friends in Limbe and say, look at me, look at me and my children, we’re finally on our way.
But now, after coming so far for so long, with only two semesters left at BMCC before she could transfer to a pharmacy school, Jende wanted her to return home. He wanted to drag her back to Limbe. Never.
“But what you gonno do?” Fatou asked as she braided Neni’s hair.