Midnight (7 page)

The urgency pushed me to ask Umma to relax in the hotel room and venture out on my own. I listened as she recited a list of things she wanted and we needed. I put some of our money into my pocket. Then I left to go make it happen. In the evenings I would return and give her the items I had purchased. Also I gave her an update on some of the things that happened in my day, careful not to mention anything that would disturb or upset her or cause her to know how people here tried to boss and cheat a young kid as if I couldn’t count or think straight.

Brooklyn is where I discovered a row of Arab-owned stores, where the spices Umma cooked with back home were available for sale: cardamom, ginger, turmeric, coriander, cumin, cayenne, mustard seeds, fennel, and a host of hot peppers. There were dates, tamarinds, apricots, eggplant, okra, lentils, and chickpeas. There was an assortment of Middle Eastern and African flours, which she would use to prepare our breads. They even had a barrel of pumpkin seeds. I picked up a bag as a treat for Umma, who ate and enjoyed them back home from time to time.

When I brought my info and a few treats back to the hotel and spoke of the row of Arab-owned stores, a supermarket, a take-out falafel shop, a jewelry store, and the mosque, Umma wanted to see the places for herself.

She chose to explore the Brooklyn mosque first.

When we entered, an Arab man greeted me and ignored
her. When I asked if we could make prayer, he welcomed me and pointed Umma toward a closed door, which led to a dark, damp basement area where women were designated to pray separately from the men. We were used to men and women praying separately in one space, women behind the men. We were not accustomed to males praying on one level, leaving the women down below. It was the cold winter season outside and colder in the dungeon. It was unsuitable for any woman, especially a pregnant one. He expected Umma to go down there alone. I grabbed her hand to escort her out of there.

Umma turned to the Arab man and, speaking in Arabic, stated, “Do you think that because you are in America that Allah cannot see you and what you are doing?” He seemed surprised that we spoke his language. He never answered her question though. As we left Umma said, “America, where Muslims play and do what they would never do back home.” Now she was content to keep our prayers privately. She never asked about the local mosques again.

Brooklyn was also the place where I discovered a bookstore that let me order books printed in Arabic. It was a rainy day. I was amazed at the unfamiliar combination of cold temperature and the freezing downpour of ice water onto my shoulders and back. I stepped under the canopy of one of the stores and stood shivering and facing a bookstore named The Open Mind, built on the triangular tip of two intersecting blocks. I shot across the street and entered a place with thousands of books for sale neatly arranged in a tight maze of tall shelves. Aside from the books, the place appeared to be empty.

As I looked around at the headings—Mysteries, Biographies, Hobbies, Adults Only, Entrepreneurs, Magazines, and Children’s—I was interrupted by a short Jewish man wearing wire-framed glasses and a mustache. He folded his arms
across his chest like some adults do when they are trying to establish authority over a child. I didn’t respond to it because I didn’t look at him as a parent or guardian over me.

“No school today?” he asked. I ignored his question and treated him like a bookseller because that is what he was. If he was a good one, I was planning to be a book buyer.

“Do you have a book series called
The Amazing Adventures of Akbar
?” I asked. He repeated the name of the series aloud and scrunched up his face like he was trying to solve a difficult math problem. “I have a children’s section over there to the left. But I don’t believe I have ever heard of this series,” he admitted. “Thanks anyway.” I turned to leave. “Wait,” he said, calling behind me. “I can order the books for you if you’d like.”

I must have looked skeptical because he continued to try to convince me. “Ten days to two weeks. I’ll have them right here in my store for you,” he said. “Do you know the name of the author?”

“Yes, it’s Bashir Hussein. The series is written in Arabic,” I told him.

His face lit up. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“Where are you from?” I turned the question around on him.

“No, really,” he asked me again.

“I just came from the number two train,” I answered him.

He smiled, unfolded his arms, and threw up his hands saying, “Bravo! Okay, kid, you win. I see you’re a tough one. But you like books, so I like you. Come back in two weeks and I will have your series for you. If not, then I’m not Marty Bookbinder!” He held out his hand to me. I shook it.

Two weeks later when I returned to The Open Mind, I entered the store and walked around quietly, wondering how this guy survived in this business when I had yet to see him with a customer besides myself. I saw him shoot past me in
the maze of shelves without acknowledging that I was standing there. I took that to mean he did not get the books I ordered and didn’t feel like facing me. I turned to walk out.

He shouted after me, “Hey, I have your series.”

Surprised, I turned back around and followed him to the section where he kept the new books shelved. Naturally I smiled as I saw volumes one through twenty-one of the series my father first chose for me right there in front of my face in this foreign land. “I’ll take volumes fifteen through twenty-one,” I told Marty.

“That’s seven books,” he said to me. I thought it was a dumb comment that implied I either did not know that already or could not count for myself. “Each book is seven-fifty,” he said.

I put my fifty-two dollars and fifty cents on the counter plus eight percent sales tax. “Put them in a bag, please,” I said.

“What about the other volumes?” he asked.

I picked up my bag and answered, “I read them already.” I left the store thinking of how much I hate to be underestimated.

“Wait a minute.” He followed me. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Maybe next time,” I told him.

“That’s an interesting name.” He laughed. “Listen, please come again. I’ll teach you how to play chess. Do you play chess?” he asked.

“Chess? Maybe next time,” I said again.

Down that same block, I found a friendly Jewish realtor. I explained to her that my mother didn’t speak any English, but we were looking for a place to stay. She was the one who eventually led Umma and me to the Brooklyn projects, into a three-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor. She showed it to us like it was the ideal place for the ideal price.

She charged us three months’ rent in advance. Somehow,
only two months’ worth of the money we gave her counted. The third month’s rent, she said, was her fee for locating the apartment for us.

The bottom line was we were never suspicious that the realtor had led us into a hell reserved for poor Blacks. We didn’t know about the crime rate, the condition of African Americans, hostile policing, illegal drugs, welfare, food stamps, or Medicaid. All we knew was the monthly rental price was an amount that we could afford to pay without Umma having to work for the first year while she gave birth to and began breast-feeding and raising the baby, who my father assured us was a daughter.

With the keys to our new apartment in my hands, I went in and scrubbed the walls, toilet, and tub with Dettol. I swept, washed, and waxed the floors in every room. I cleaned all of the windows. I taught myself how to use the stove and oven. I cleaned it out as well as the refrigerator. The job took so long to complete that I never made it back to the hotel where Umma was hand-washing and hang-drying her favorite cloths and packing our few belongings. She did not trust the hotel laundress to do the job.

I spent my first night alone in the apartment with the windows slightly open so the cold breeze would clear out the antiseptic smell of all of the detergents. On the hard, newly sparkling floor, I lay down and listened to the sounds and noises of elevator doors opening and closing, my neighbors walking, and children running through the hallways and even more milling in the streets.

Lying there with a view of a starless sky as black as ink, I thought about my Southern Sudanese grandfather. I had learned not to fear the darkness and the unknown spending summers side by side with the boys of his village. Learning and playing and training with more than twenty or so boys my same age gave me crazy confidence. When we would hear
the sounds of the creatures of the night, we did not fear. They had a crew and we had a crew. We knew from watching the boys who were older than us that if we worked together, we would rule over the animals instead of them ruling over us. I felt extra secure in this village. After all, my own father was born and raised there, and my grandfather was the only man greater than him.

My grandfather taught me to see in the dark. Not just to look, but to see. He would sit so still in the dark of the African night. He was so black that only a trained eye could distinguish him from the atmosphere. So he would play on it. I would walk into his large hut. He would have the lamps off on purpose. I would move around feeling as though I was completely alone in there. Suddenly he would grab me with his rough hands. His deep voice would fill the room. When he would laugh at my foolishness in not being able to see him, only his white sparkling teeth would reveal his actual location. “What if I were the King Cobra?” he would ask with the threat animated in his voice. He played these games with me until I learned to pay attention, to see in the dark, to not bump into anything in my surroundings because I needed to form a mental picture of it.

Since Umma was asleep alone in the hotel, I made sure I was back in Manhattan by the time she opened her eyes and in time for prayer.

Dialing the combination that unlocked the hotel safe, I took Umma’s jewels, the few we managed to bring from back home, and wrapped them in one of her colorful silk scarves. I carried them on my back secured in my backpack. She folded the remaining cloths, which had now dried, and packed our few pieces of luggage. We checked out of the hotel once and for all, paying a large amount of American dollars.

Inside of seven days Umma transformed our small Brooklyn apartment into a very modest Sudanese home.
The first thing she did was fill each room with the powerful scent of sandalwood from back home. From the ceiling to the floor she hung newly purchased lavender curtains to cover the living room windows and even the clean but bland off-white walls. She handmade huge, colorful, bejeweled suede purple pillows and placed them onto the sparkling floors. Aside from a beautiful dark-brown walnut table that we purchased from an antique shop on the other end of Brooklyn, we had only a few selected pieces of furniture. I admit that when we would return from the outdoor coldness, Umma’s fragrances and the color scheme she selected would warm us right up.

Buying a music system for the living room, a special grill and hot plate for Umma to cook breads and Sudanese food the way she wanted to, plus a serving tray and coffee and tea sets, as well as ten-pound bags of long-grain rice and an array of beans, olives, grains and vegetables, honey, yogurt, fruits, fresh-cut flowers, and Halal meats brought the cost of moving in way beyond what we had projected.

We also ended up having to hire movers to pick up our furniture and bed sets because most of the stores wouldn’t deliver to our neighborhood. “We don’t go over there,” various store owners insisted. It was our first hint that something wasn’t right.

Even though our new surroundings inside our apartment looked great and were soothing, an unspoken sadness weighed heavy on our hearts. More than anything, we knew not to speak on any of it. It was as if just a simple mention of what was actually happening in our lives would bring the ceiling crashing down onto our heads.

After our telephone was installed, I would see Umma pick up the receiver and, one by one, dial several long-distance phone numbers. The only thing was, there would never be a conversation, only her gripping the telephone and sitting
silently and waiting and eventually hanging up and saying nothing to me of what was going on. In her room she would be writing furiously. She would stop the instant I appeared. She would put her papers to the side or in a drawer and not speak on it. I was not concerned about the content of her writings. It was only her I was concerned about, her feelings and exactly how to make a true smile spread across her face again as it always had back home.

Very soon Umma confided to me that she would have to find a job. At the same time, she wanted to sign me up to start in an American school. But she also realized that she could not do both. She needed me to help her search for a job. She needed me to speak English to them and translate their English back to her.

I was against the idea of her working while carrying my sister. I felt my father would not like it either. But if she was going to be traveling outside to meet potential employers, I was definitely going along with her. So when she was six and a half months pregnant, I found a job for Umma working at a fabric factory, a building located inside a group of warehouses where women, most of them foreign, worked on industrial machines lined up in rows.

I spoke to the manager there who offered Umma parttime work due to her pregnancy, at three dollars per hour. He said if Umma was good, she could be bumped up to full time after she gave birth. I liked that there were mostly women working there on the floor where all the sewing was being done. I did not like that all the bosses were men. Back home, Umma’s clothing business was run, from top to bottom, exclusively by African women.

The best part about the Russian-born Israelis who ran the factory was that they didn’t make a big deal about Umma’s Islamic attire. And when I explained that Umma couldn’t speak English, one of the bosses asked, “Does this look like a
talking place to you?” “Show up on time, work fast and work hard, that’s it,” the second boss chimed in.

So I escorted Umma to the factory each time she went, and picked her up at the end of every workday. We rode the trains together. At work and in public, she remained covered from head to toe, beneath a
hijab
and behind a
niqab
veil. No one could see her, except me. Her modest clothing gave me a chance to grow up without having to fight grown men all day, every day. Her modest clothing kept me from having to hurt anybody, especially on my Brooklyn block.