Behold the Dreamers Read online

  He didn’t say it; he had to keep his desperation from bursting through the thin layer of dignity it had been wrapped in throughout the interview. Clark smiled and patted him on the arm.

  Two

  “ONE AND A HALF YEARS TODAY,” NENI SAID TO FATOU AS THEY WALKED through Chinatown looking for make-believe Gucci and Versace bags. “That’s how long it’s been since I came to America.”

  “One and half years?” Fatou said, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. “You count half-years, too? And you say it, no shame.” She laughed. “Lemme tell you something. When you in America vingt-quatre ans, and you still poor, you no gonno count no more. You no gonno even say no more. No. You gonno shame to say anything, I tell you.”

  Neni chuckled as she picked up a Gucci tote so determined to pass as real it glimmered. “You’re ashamed to tell people you have been here for twenty-four years?”

  “No, I no shame. Why I shame? I tell people I just come here. They hear me talk, they say ah, she don’t know English. She musto just come from Africa.”

  The Chinese store owner rushed toward them. Take the bag for sixty dollars, he said to Neni. Why? Neni asked, contorting her face. I give you twenty. The man shook his head. Neni and Fatou started walking away. Forty, forty, the man shouted at them as they pushed through a throng of European tourists. Okay, come take for thirty, he shouted. They went back and bought it for twenty-five.

  “Now you look lika Angeli Joeli,” Fatou said as Neni walked with the bag on her arm, her curly weave flowing behind her.

  “Really?” Neni said, tossing her hair.

  “What you mean, really? You wanno look lika Angeli Joeli, no?”

  Neni threw her head back and giggled.

  How she loved New York City. She still couldn’t believe she was here. Couldn’t believe she was walking around shopping for Gucci, no longer a jobless, unwed mother, sitting in her father’s house in Limbe, sunrise to sunset, dry season to rainy season, waiting for Jende to rescue her.

  It didn’t seem like eighteen months already, perhaps because she still remembered much about the day she and Liomi arrived at JFK. She still remembered how Jende had stood at the terminal waiting for them, dressed in a red shirt and blue clip-on tie, a bouquet of yellow hydrangeas in his hands. She still remembered how they had embraced and held each other for almost a minute in silence, their eyes tightly shut to banish the agony of the past two years in which he had worked three jobs to save the money needed for her student visa, Liomi’s visitor visa, and their airline tickets. She remembered how Liomi had joined in their embrace, grabbing both of their legs before Jende had paused from holding her to pick him up. She remembered how the apartment—which Jende had recently found after almost two years of sharing a two-bedroom basement apartment with six Puerto Rican men in the Bronx—was that night filled with Jende’s laughter and her voice delighting him with stories from back home, alongside Liomi’s squeals as father and son roughhoused and tickled each other on the carpet. She remembered how they had moved Liomi from their bed to the cot in the middle of the night so they could lie side by side, do all the things they had promised to do to each other in emails and phone calls and text messages. And she still clearly remembered lying in bed next to Jende after they were done, listening to the sounds of America outside the window, the chatter and laughter of African-American men and women on the streets of Harlem, and telling herself: I am in America, I am truly in America.

  She could never forget that day.

  Or the day, two weeks after their arrival, when they were married at city hall with Liomi as their ring bearer and Jende’s cousin Winston as their witness. On that day in May 2006, she finally became a respectable woman, a woman declared worthy of love and protection.

  Limbe was now some faraway town, a place she had loved less with every new day Jende was not there. Without him to go for a walk on the beach with, go dancing with, or sit with at a drinking spot and enjoy a cold Malta Guinness on a hot Sunday afternoon, the town was no longer her beloved hometown but a desolate place she couldn’t wait to get out of. In every phone call during the time they were apart she had reminded him of this, of her inability to stop daydreaming about the day she would leave Limbe and be with him in America.

  “I dream, too, bébé,” he always said to her. “Day and night I dream all kinds of dreams.”

  On the day she and Liomi got their visas, she had gone to bed with their passports under her pillow. On the night they left Cameroon, she felt nothing. As the bus her father had rented to drive them—and the two dozen family and friends who came along to escort them—pulled out from in front of their house to begin the two-hour trip to Douala International Airport, she had smiled and waved at the neighbors and extended-family members who had gathered on the front lawn to enviously bid them farewell. She had taken a panoramic mental photograph of them, knowing she wouldn’t be missing them for too long, wishing them the same happiness she knew she was going to find in America.

  A year and a half later now and New York City was her home, a place with all the pleasures she desired. She woke up next to the man she loved and turned her face to see their child. For the first time in her life, she had a job, as a home health aide through an agency that paid her in cash, since she had no working papers. She was a matriculated student for the first time in sixteen years, studying chemistry at Borough of Manhattan Community College, never worrying about her tuition because she knew Jende would always pay the three-thousand-dollars-a-semester fee without grumbling, unlike her father, who unceasingly complained about his financial headaches and delivered a lecture about CFA francs not growing on mango trees whenever one of his eight children asked for money for school fees or new uniforms. For the first time in much too long, she didn’t wake up in the morning with no plans except to clean the house, go to the market, cook for her parents and siblings, take care of Liomi, meet with her friends and listen to them bash their mothers-in-law, go to bed and look forward to more of the same the next day because her life was going neither forward nor backward. And for the very first time in her life, she had a dream besides marriage and motherhood: to become a pharmacist like the ones everyone respected in Limbe because they handed out health and happiness in pill bottles. To achieve this dream, she had to do well in school, and she was doing just that—maintaining a B-plus average. Three days a week she went to school and, after classes, walked the school’s hallways with her bulky algebra, chemistry, biology, and philosophy textbooks, glowing because she was growing into a learned woman. As often as she could, she sat in the library to do her homework, or went to office hours to hound professors for advice on what she needed to do to get better grades so she could get into a great pharmacy school. She was going to make herself proud, make Jende proud of his wife, make Liomi proud of his mother. She’d waited too long to become something, and now, at thirty-three, she finally had, or was close enough to having, everything she’d ever wanted in life.

  Three

  HE WAS ON WHITE PLAINS ROAD WHEN THE CALL CAME IN. FOUR MINUTES later, he closed his flip phone and laughed. He pounded the steering wheel and laughed even louder: jubilant, bemused, incredulous. If he had been driving in New Town, Limbe, he would have gotten out of the car and hugged someone on the street, telling them, Bo, you won’t even believe the news I just got. In New Town, he would have known at least one person on the street with whom to share his good news, but here, on these streets of old brick houses and faded lawns in the Bronx, he knew no one he could run to and repeat what Clark’s secretary had just told him. There was a young black man walking with headphones on, banging his head to some kind of good music; three teenage Asian girls covering their mouths and giggling, none of them with a school bag; a woman rushing somewhere, pushing a fat baby in a pink umbrella stroller. There was an African man, too, but judging from his dark angular face and flowing grand boubou, he had to be Senegalese or Burkinabé or from one of the other French-speaking West African countries. Jende could not run out to h
im just because they were both West Africans—he needed to rejoice with someone who knew his name and his story.

  “Oh, Papa God, Jends,” Neni said when he called her with the news. “I cannot believe it! Can you?”

  He smiled and shook his head, knowing her question needed no response—she was merely as happy as he was. From the sounds coming alongside her voice, he could tell she was dancing, jumping, skipping around the apartment like a child bearing a handful of sweets.

  “Did she say exactly how much they’re going to pay you?”

  “Thirty-five thousand.”

  “Mamami, eh! Papa God, oh! I’m dancing right now, Jends. I’m doing gymnastics, oh!”

  She wanted to stay on the phone, rejoice together for at least ten more minutes, but she had to leave for her chemistry class. He kept on smiling after she hung up, amused by her joy, which flowed mightier than Victoria Falls.

  He called his cousin Winston next.

  “Congrats, my man,” Winston said. “Wonders shall never end.”

  “I’m telling you,” Jende said.

  “So, you, this bush boy from New Town, Limbe, you’re going to drive a Wall Street exec, eh? You’ll now be driving a shiny Lexus, instead of that chakara Hyundai?”

  Jende laughed. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said. “I just can’t even begin to—”

  His passenger in the backseat said something.

  “Hold on, Bo,” he said to Winston. He turned around and realized the woman was on her cell phone, too, speaking in a language he’d never heard while he was speaking in pidgin English interspersed with French and Bakweri—neither of them understanding the other, both of them inadvertently creating a quasi-Babel in a New York City livery cab.

  “What did you tell these people about me?” he asked Winston. “The man said I came to him highly recommended.”

  “Nothing,” Winston replied. “I only told Frank you drive a limo sometimes, and that you used to chauffeur a family in New Jersey.”

  “What!”

  “I lie, I die,” Winston said, snickering. “You think a black man gets a good job in this country by sitting in front of white people and telling the truth? Please, don’t make me laugh. I just didn’t want to tell you beforehand and get you even more nervous.”

  “Bo, you serious? But I didn’t have any of that on my résumé! How come—?”

  “Ah, you and your shocks. The man’s a busy man. I knew he wasn’t going to sit there asking you every kind of question. Frank’s his best friend. What? You’re not happy I told him?”

  “Happy?” Jende said in a near-scream, shaking his head and throwing it back. “I want to jump out of this car right now and come kiss your feet!”

  “No, thank you,” Winston said. “I’m interviewing some ngahs to do that for me.”

  “Yes, you are!” Jende said, guffawing. “I won’t get jealous, because Neni will kill me.”

  Winston laughed so hard, he snorted. “The one last night, Bo, let me tell you—”

  “But what are we going to do about this background check thing?” Jende asked. “The secretary says I have to give this thing, this rev … em … reve … reverencies?”

  “Don’t worry about that. We’ll fill out the forms together when I come over. I have some people for the references.”

  “I owe you, Bo … In short, I don’t even know how I’ll ever thank you.”

  “Just stop this thank you business right now, eh?” Winston said. “You’re my brother. If I don’t do it for you who will I do it for? Tell Neni to cook for me her special pepper soup recipe, the one with cow feet and chicken gizzards. That’s all I want. I’m coming over tomorrow evening.”

  “You don’t even have to ask. The food will be waiting for you, plus frozen palm wine and fresh soya.”

  Winston congratulated him again and said he had to get back to a brief he was working on. Jende continued driving around the Bronx, picking up passengers, dropping them off, listening to Lite fm, unable to discard the grin on his face. His cell phone beeped to announce a new text message. You just get your papers now, Neni wrote, and we’ll be all set!

  Isn’t that the truth, he thought. First a good job. Then papers. How good would that feel?

  He sighed.

  Three years: That’s how long he’d been fighting for papers in America. He’d been in the country for only four weeks when Winston took him to meet with an immigration lawyer—they needed to find a way for him to stay in the country permanently after his visitor visa expired. That had been their plan all along, though it wasn’t what Jende had said when he went to the American embassy in Yaoundé to apply for the visa.

  “How long do you plan on staying in New York City?” the consulate had asked him.

  “Only three months, sir,” he had replied. “Just three months, and I promise I will return.”

  And he had submitted evidence to back his claim: his work supervisor’s letter describing him as a diligent employee who loved his job so much he would never abandon it to go roam around aimlessly in America; his son’s birth certificate, to show he would never remain in America and desert his child; the title on a piece of land his father had given him, to show he intended to return and build on the land; a letter from the town planning office, which he’d paid a distant uncle who worked in the office to get for him, stating that he had applied for a permit to build a house; a letter from a friend who swore under oath that Jende wasn’t going to remain in America because they were going to open a drinking spot together when he returned.

  The consular officer had been convinced.

  The next day Jende had walked out of the consular office with his visa. Yes, he was going to America. He, Jende Dikaki Jonga, son of Ikola Jonga, grandson of Dikaki Manyaka ma Jonga, was going to America! He skipped out of the embassy and onto the dusty streets of Yaoundé, pumping his fist and grinning so wide an Ewondo woman carrying a basket of plantains on her head stopped mid-stride to stare at him. Quel est son problème? he heard her say to a friend. He laughed. He didn’t have a problem. He was leaving Cameroon in a month! Leaving to certainly not return after three months. Who traveled to America only to return to a future of nothingness in Cameroon after a mere three months? Not young men like him, not people facing a future of poverty and despondency in their own country. No, people like him did not visit America. They got there and stayed there until they could return home as conquerors—as green card– or American passport–bearing conquerors with pockets full of dollars and photos of a happy life. Which was why on the day he boarded an Air France flight from Douala to Newark with a connection in Paris, he was certain he wouldn’t see Cameroon again until he had claimed his share of the milk, honey, and liberty flowing in the paradise-for-strivers called America.

  “Asylum is the best way to get papier and remain in the country,” Winston told him after he had gotten over his jet lag and spent half a day walking around Times Square in astonishment. “Either that or you marry an old white woman in Mississippi with no teeth.”

  “Please, God forbid bad things,” he had replied. “Better you give me a bottle of kerosene to drink and die right now.” Asylum was the only way for him to go, he decided. Winston agreed. It could take years, he said, but it would be worthwhile.

  Winston hired a lawyer for him, a fast-talking Nigerian in Flatbush, Brooklyn, named Bubakar, who was as short as his speech was fast. Bubakar, Winston had been told, was not only a great immigration lawyer with hundreds of African clients all over the country but also an expert in the art of giving clients the best stories of persecution to gain asylum.

  “How d’you think all these people who gain asylum do it?” he asked the cousins when they met with him for a free consultation. “You think they’re all really running away from something? Puh-leez. Let me tell you something: I just won asylum only last month for the daughter of the prime minister of some country in East Africa.”

  “Really?” Winston asked.

  “Yes, really,” Bubaka
r replied, snarling. “What d’you mean, really?”

  “I’m just surprised. What country?”

  “I’d rather not mention, okay? It doesn’t really matter. My point is that this girl’s father is a prime minister, eh? She has three people wiping her ass after she shits and three more people dragging the boogers out of her nose. And here she is, saying she’s afraid for her life back home.” He scoffed. “We all do what we gotta do to become American, abi?”

  Jende nodded.

  Winston shrugged; a friend of his in Atlanta was the one who had referred him to Bubakar and spoken highly of the man. The friend had no doubt that Bubakar was the reason he was still in America, why he now had a green card and was only two years away from being eligible to apply for citizenship. Still, from Winston’s downturned lips, Jende could tell his cousin was having a hard time believing that the small man with extra-long hair flying out of his perpetually flared nostrils was an expert in anything, never mind the complex legal field of asylum-based immigration. The diploma on his wall said he’d gone to some law school in Nebraska, but to Winston his mannerisms must have said he’d gotten his real education via online immigration forums, the sites where many with aspirations for American passports gathered to find ways to triumph over the American immigration system.

  “My brother,” Bubakar said to Jende, looking at him across the bare desk in his ultraclean and perfectly organized office, “why don’t we start by you telling me more about you so I can see how I can help you?”

  Jende sat up in his chair, clasped his hands on his lap, and began telling his story. He spoke of his father the farmer, his mother the trader and pig breeder, his four brothers, and their two-bedroom caraboat house in New Town, Limbe. He spoke of attending primary school at CBC Main School, and the interruption of his secondary education at National Comprehensive Secondary School after he impregnated Neni.