Africans from lots of different countries came to see Tola for insight into their futures. People from Senegal like her and Dad, people from Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, everywhere! For me, it was like a rainbow of all different shades and cultures of black and brown. Once while I was there, African Americans came! It was a Sunday. I remember because the two older black women had come straight from church dressed to the nines in church clothes. One wore all yellow with a white hat. The other woman wore all white with a black-and-white hat. I loved them. I was so excited to see another American in that apartment. It was as if I’d been lost in another country where I didn’t speak the language but then turned a corner and saw a McDonald’s and knew I’d be okay. When the church ladies arrived, Tola was with another customer so they sat in the living room with me while I watched The Kids in the Hall on Comedy Central and overfed Abdul. I was usually pretty quiet with the Africans who came for a reading. I liked speaking to them just enough to hear their accents and dialects, but then I usually returned to whatever TV show I was watching at the time, so conversation was minimal. Not on African American Day! I asked those ladies intrusive question after intrusive question. I asked why they wanted a reading, how they’d heard of Tola, and where their church was. They asked if Abdul was my child or my brother. Rude. They commented that my English was really good. I thanked them and told them that I had been practicing since I was around a year old. They seemed impressed but only because they didn’t realize I was being sarcastic. I loved those black ladies. Not only did they remind me of Mom and what our apartment used to feel like, but they helped me realize that Tola could be a psychic for all kinds of people. Somehow I had assumed she could only do readings for African people—that she was talking to African spirits who told her the secret futures of other African people. Remember, I was nine years old. But now it occurred to me that if she could do a reading for these black ladies maybe she could tell me what my future would be too!
One summer night after I had turned ten, I asked her to tell me my future. She laughed like I was cute and said yes. She got her cowry shells, and we sat on the floor in the living room while Dad watched French news on TV. (I swear to God he is always watching French news. He must really worry about what goes on there.) By now, Abdul was walking, but I was holding him hostage in my lap because I couldn’t feel him loving me if he wasn’t in my arms. Tola asked me what I wanted to know. What I really wanted to know was if I was ever going to have a boyfriend. I wanted to know if Thomas who lived in the building had a crush on me the way I had a crush on him. I wanted to know if I was going to get my period soon. But Dad was five feet away on the couch, so those questions seemed inappropriate to ask. Instead, I giggled and rolled my eyes. “I don’t know! The future! I just want to know . . . like the future and stuff.” She picked up her shells and shook them in her hand a few times and then dropped a few in a bowl she’d placed on the floor between us. She picked those shells up again, shook them again, and threw them into the bowl once more.
“I see a big future for you,” she finally said.
“Am I gonna be a therapist!?” I excitedly asked.
Tola didn’t understand what I had asked so she ignored it, and said, “You gonna be famous.”
Whoa! I didn’t see that coming at all. Sure, I had wanted to be a comedian when I was a little younger, but I’d given up on that dream when I was eight. I’d also never envisioned being famous that way. I had mostly wanted to be a comedian so I could go to nightclubs and travel.
“As a girl comic?” I asked.
Again, Tola didn’t understand my question, but she said, “No. I don’t know. But famous, yes!”
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you gonna be famous,” she reassured me.
This wasn’t adding up. By now, Mom was no longer a paraprofessional schoolteacher and was instead a prominent subway performer. (Hold on, I’ll tell you about this a little later.) She was making lots of fans down there, and Ahmed and I were sure that one day she’d be discovered, and then she’d be famous and on the radio, and we’d be rich, and Dad and his new stupid family, Tola included, would be sorry for making us move away and turning our old apartment into Little Senegal, and then Mom would adopt Abdul. Then we’d be happy. That was the plan. I thought that’s what Tola would see. I wasn’t sure how she’d come up with me being famous.
“Are you sure?”
She picked up the shells, shook them, and threw them in the bowl again.
“Yes. You gonna be famous like Oprah.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean my mom’s gonna be famous?” Tola looked down at the shells without picking them up again. She looked like she was really seeing something in those shells. Like she was watching something that she didn’t completely understand.
“Your mom . . . little bit. You. You are famous. Your mom is famous because you are famous.” Well, shit. I wasn’t sure why she saw me being more famous, but it seemed great to me! Great and suspicious.
“What else?” I asked, eager for more.
“You get skinny.” Now this was really starting to sound good.
“Word! Dad! I’m gonna get skinny!” I excitedly shared the news with him. He laughed one of his rare laughs.
“You gonna have twins when you grow up,” Tola said. “Two babies. Girl.”
Now she was getting out of hand. I let Abdul crawl out of my lap far away from me and my womb. I mean . . . it was possible. My maternal grandmother was a twin, I knew, so maybe they ran in my family. But twins sounded expensive. One baby was fun, but I didn’t know how I would afford two whole babies at one time.
“Will I be rich?” I asked.
“Mmhmm,” she answered.
“Oh, good. That’s good.” Stupid question. I was going to be famous. Of course I’d be rich, too! Duh! If Tola knew I’d be famous and rich, then clearly she was the greatest psychic in the world. And I was about to be skinny, too? No wonder every African in the city traveled to Bed-Stuy to see her. Bitch was spitting out straight facts!
“So, I’m gonna have a husband?” I asked. As if Dad would ever allow me to have kids out of wedlock.
“Of course,” Tola answered. “Your husband is a good Muslim man.” My face fell. If looks could kill, Tola would’ve been long gone. As an adult, I’ve known many great dudes who happen to be Muslim. But when I was a child, marrying a Muslim meant marrying my father. That was something I knew by the age of five I wasn’t going to do.
“You’re gonna be a good Muslim wife to a good African Muslim man,” Tola continued. That’s when I realized that she wasn’t really psychic. She couldn’t have been. I wasn’t capable of being a “good Muslim wife” any more than Mom was able to be when she was married to Dad.
I told Mom about my reading, and we laughed about it together. Twins? Fame? Me, a “good Muslim wife”? I figured that being able to laugh about it afterward was probably why people went to psychics anyway. Three years later, Tola gave birth to twins. Two girls. That was all the confirmation I needed: Tola might be psychic, but her sight wasn’t straight.
I maybe believe in psychics. I admit that. I believe some people have the ability to sense things in a clearer way than most. I believe that we all have a sense of intuition but some of us have an innate capacity to see something that has yet to happen. If that ability is so strong that you can actually charge people for it, I’m cool. Mom says that her mother was psychic. That if MaDear (that’s what my family calls my grandmother, ya know, like those Tyler Perry movies) said something would happen, it always did. Mom also says that when she was a little girl she found herself to be psychic as well. She said she would dream about a family in Africa that was just like hers in Georgia and that the dream felt like a memory, not a dream. But this scared her, so she prayed for God to take the power away from her and, according to Mom, He did. I just called Mom a few minutes ago to confirm all of this, and she says she doesn’t remember asking for God to take the power away. And that she would never say that she or her mother was psychic for sure. I still believe we are an intuitive family but that this intuition is just part of being a woman. Women get to give birth, and they get to know you’re going to screw up your life if you get a neck tattoo. Maybe being psychic runs in my family. More likely, thinking that you’re much more special and talented than anyone else runs in my family.