Neni watched the perpetual sparkle in Fatou’s eyes dim as she said this, and she knew her friend was serious; for the first time that afternoon, she did not mean what she was saying as a joke. Fatou missed her parents, especially now that they were in their eighties and needed her and her two brothers to take care of them. She and her brothers worried about them, but there wasn’t much they could do from far away—one of her brothers was in France, the other in Oklahoma. Her parents had to depend on distant relatives to take care of them using the money transfers Fatou and her brothers sent every few months. They had to live like people who had never borne children, which shamed Fatou every time she got a call from a relative saying one of them had fallen sick and money was needed to take them to a hospital. Fatou always sent the money within a day, even when she had a bill due: What else could she do?
After twenty-six years, she was ready to stop braiding hair for a living and go back home, but the decision wasn’t hers alone to make. And even if Ousmane wanted to go back home, her children were Americans who had never been to their parents’ homeland. All seven of them, the three in their twenties and four teenagers, wanted nothing of living in West Africa. Some of them didn’t even consider themselves African. When people asked where they were from, they often said, oh, we’re from right here, New York, America. They said it with pride, believing it. Only when prodded did they reluctantly admit that well, actually, our parents are Africans. But we’re Americans, they always added. Which hurt Fatou and made her wonder, was it possible her children thought they were better than her because they were Americans and she was African?
Fifty-eight
THE BAKWERI PEOPLE OF LIMBE BELIEVE AUGUST IS A CURSED MONTH. The rain falls too hard and for too long; rivers rise up too high and too fast. Dry days are few; chilly nights are many. The month is long, dreary, and hostile, and it is for this reason that many in the tribe do not marry, build houses, or start businesses in August. They wait for it to go away, along with its curses.
Jende Jonga, a Bakweri man, believed nothing in curses.
August or no August, it was time for him to go back home, and that was that. Walking through the streets of New York during his last days in America, he couldn’t bring himself to feel sad about leaving or wish his experience were ending differently. Enough was enough. He wanted no more of life in a roach-filled apartment in a Harlem neighborhood of fried chicken joints, storefront churches, and funeral homes where young men in cornrows and saggy pants perpetually lingered outside, mourning one of their own and carelessly spitting in his direction. He wanted no more of climbing five flights of stairs to share a bed with his daughter while his son slept in a cot inches away. He wanted no more of smiling for appearances as he stacked dishes and polished silverware, and he certainly wanted no more of riding the subway from work late at night, arriving home sweaty, greasy, and drained.
To him, living such a life for another year would have been the curse. Not recognizing when to go back home would have been a curse. Not realizing that he would be happier sleeping in a bedroom separate from his children, going to visit his mother and his brothers whenever he wanted, meeting his friends at a boucarou in Down Beach for roasted fish and beer by the ocean, riding around in his own car and sweating outside in January … that would have been the curse.
You’re really sure you’re not going to miss America? his friends at work asked him repeatedly. Not even the football? He laughed every time they asked. Maybe a bit of football, he would reply. And cheesecake.
Neni, for her part, could summon no joy as the date of their departure drew close. Her tears flowed without provocation on the subway, at Pathmark, in Central Park, in the apartment in the middle of mundane chores. She felt no excitement at the thought of being reunited with her family and old friends, only apprehension at the notion that she might never be happy in Limbe as she’d been in New York. She worried that she might have too little in common with her friends, being that she was now so different from them, being that she had tasted a different kind of life and been transformed positively and negatively in so many different ways, being that life had expanded and contracted her in ways they could never imagine.
Though she looked forward to seeing her mother and siblings, she dreaded seeing her father, whom she’d last spoken to in May, when he’d called to tell her that his illegitimate son who lived in Portor-Portor Quarters was in the hospital and money was needed for medicine. Neni had said they had no money to give and her father had yelled at her. How can you say you have no money when your brother is dying in the hospital? he’d said. But he’s not my brother, Neni had yelled back. Her father had hung up when she said that and she hadn’t bothered to call back to find out how the boy was faring. The boy wasn’t her brother and he was never going to be her brother. She couldn’t bring herself to care if he lived or died.
For her children, Neni wavered between joy and sorrow—joy for the beautiful things Cameroon would give them; sorrow for the things it wouldn’t. They would grow up in a spacious house in Limbe, learn to speak French, master how to dance to makossa music. They would live near doting grandparents and too many uncles and aunts and cousins. They would dress up in their finest outfits on Christmas and New Year’s and walk around town with their friends, laughing and eating chin-chin and cake. They’d never wonder why their mother preferred to shop at the dollar store or why their father seemed to always be working. Liomi would go to BHS Buea with the children of the elite; he could still become a lawyer like his uncle Winston. Timba would spend her girlhood dancing under the moonlight with her friends, singing Gombe gombe mukele mukele on nights when clouds made way for the stars to shine. She would learn to chant, Iyo cow oh, njama njama cow oh, your mami go for Ngaoundéré for saka belle cow oh, oh chei! She would go to boarding school at the prestigious all-girls Saker Baptist College, where for eight months a year she would be locked behind iron gates, hidden from boys and made to study alongside girls destined to become doctors and engineers.
In Limbe, Liomi and Timba would have many things they would not have had in America, but they would lose far too many things.
They would lose the opportunity to grow up in a magnificent land of uninhibited dreamers. They would lose the chance to be awed and inspired by amazing things happening in the country, incredible inventions and accomplishments by men and women who look like them. They would be deprived of freedoms, rights, and privileges that Cameroon could not give its children. They would lose unquantifiable benefits by leaving New York City, because while there existed great towns and cities all over the world, there was a certain kind of pleasure, a certain type of adventurous and audacious childhood, that only New York City could offer a child.
Fifty-nine
BETTY HOSTED A FAREWELL PARTY FOR THEM IN THE BRONX. MOST OF their friends, who had been with them from their arrival in the city through Timba’s birth and Pa Jonga’s death, were there. Winston and Maami were there, as well as Olu and Tunde, the instructor—who stopped by with his equally fine Asian boyfriend on the way to another party, to hug Neni goodbye—and Fatou and Ousmane, whose broomstick legs Neni at once thought of the moment he walked through the door wearing faded mom jeans; imagining what they looked like forced her to smile her first real smile of the evening.