Finally. After years of being secretly married to his cousin, fathering her child, and bringing his second wife into the home of his first wife, Ibnou was caught red-handed. He had lied and schemed for as long as he possibly could, but now the truth was out, and he had no choice but to let Alice walk away with me and Ahmed.
The next day Alice took Ahmed and me shopping for new clothes for the beginning of the school year. I was going into fourth grade. She told us that we were moving out, finally leaving Ibnou and finally getting out of Brooklyn. We packed, and Ibnou didn’t protest at all. What we didn’t know then was that Tola was pregnant again—that Ibnou had a new family coming in right after us. We moved into a bedroom in my aunt Dorothy’s brownstone in Harlem. Three months later Tola gave birth to another son, and they eventually brought Malick to America along with an older daughter of Tola’s from a previous relationship. The five of them were a seemingly happy family. I can’t super tell as all of them were always just sitting around silently watching French news. Eventually, Ibnou married Tola here in America so that she could get her own green card.
Family Portrait LASERS!!! Weren’t the ’80s the best? Also, how perfect is my mom’s roller set?! And her eyebrows are arched all to be damned! Get into this BLACK QUEEN!
Courtesy of Gabourey Sidibe
Ibnou and Alice remained friends no matter what I had to say about it. He’d mistreated us all, hit us whenever he wanted, sent us to foster care, secretly married his cousin, brought her into our home, had a family with her behind our backs, and forced us to move to Harlem into a single bedroom with two twin beds while his new family took our place. Alice’s power to forgive astounded me. She still welcomed my dad into our home, and my dad was always around. He didn’t pay child support because, in addition to Tola, he went on to marry other women in Africa and have child after child.
Today Ibnou is in his sixties and still having kids. He has more children than we know of. He’s far from the guy who once threatened to glue my lips shut if I laughed too loud, and I’m not the little girl who could see only African, cabdriver, and boring in him. But our relationship is . . . complicated. I’m still trying to look at my relationship with Ibnou the way Alice does. She always says, “Don’t let anyone else take away your joy. If they don’t want to be with you or around you, let them go. Pick up your shit and keep going. You came into the world by yourself, and the next person’s lungs don’t help you breathe.”
She’s so smart. Even if she did marry someone whose mother looked exactly like her.
4
A Psychic Told Me So
Gabby, you’re a little bit psychic and a lotta bit psycho.
—Jussie Smollett
OH! I TOTALLY FORGOT to tell you that Tola was a psychic! At least that’s how she made her living. When Mom, Ahmed, and I moved out of our Brooklyn apartment and Tola moved in with Dad, Ahmed’s old room became her office. When I say office, I’m being generous. It was still mostly Ahmed’s bedroom, with his bed still in it. Tola would have her clients come into his room, and she’d sit on the floor while they sat on the bed or across from her on the floor. She had a satchel of cowry shells, and she apparently was able to read them in order to tell the future. When I was a kid, I believed this without question. I thought we all did, so I never bothered asking if she really was psychic or not. I didn’t think people could fake something like that. Aww! I was so young and innocent!
In the early days after they broke up, my parents made an attempt at shared custody. Ahmed and I would go back to Brooklyn on Friday after school and return to our aunt Dorothy’s house in Harlem on Monday after school. All weekend long, I’d be in our old apartment with its new furniture, new smells, new stepmother, new baby brother. The apartment I’d grown up in didn’t seem familiar without Mom in it. Without my family in it. There were a few pictures on a shelf of Ahmed and me, but they seemed out of place. We looked like two American children in the home of an African family. Dad and Tola spoke to each other in Wolof. I knew only a little Wolof from visiting Senegal and could not really understand what they were talking about. The only American voices around were mine and Ahmed’s, and neither seemed to count. We were the foreigners now. When Tola had her second son, my brother Abdul, teaching me to be a “good Muslim woman and mother” started being important again for Dad. So I had to help Tola with the newborn while Dad was driving a cab around New York City. That was fine by me. I loved Abdul and didn’t want to miss a second of watching him be a baby. Even though I was by then only nine years old, it was my job to tend to Abdul while Tola had customers.