How Dare the Sun Rise

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

  “I’m from Senegal,” he said. “I speak a little French. I can try to help you understand what people are saying.”

  Abdul and I struck up an instant friendship. Ms. Wilson sat me next to him in class. He would quietly tell me what the teacher was talking about during the lessons, doing his best to use French. He would also translate for Ms. Wilson when she needed to communicate something directly to me. Abdul was helpful, but it should not have been his responsibility to make sure I was learning in school.

  Those first days of school were a perplexing blur, but I remember the feeling clearly: pure misery. I looked different from the other students with my buzz-cut hair and used clothes, and I wanted desperately to blend in. I wanted long hair. None of the black girls wore their hair short like mine. No one wore their hair in its natural state either. The girls straightened or relaxed their hair, or wore long braids or weaves. Some wore head scarves. I needed long hair. I needed braids.

  Fortunately, the semester was drawing to a close. In June, I escaped the dreaded school for the summer. I shed my winter coat, mittens, and boots. I hated those boots. In fact, I hated shoes in general. I had spent my childhood wearing flip-flops—my feet felt free. Shoes trap you. You always have to take them off, put them back on, tie the laces—so much effort. I’d much rather be in flip-flops. I was thrilled that summer had come. I was learning a little English from watching TV, especially the cartoons, which were easy to follow. I would listen to the words and watch the facial expressions and reactions to figure out what things meant. I tried to muster some optimism that the next school year would be better.

  My family left our temporary housing for a house in another inner-city neighborhood, which seemed even rougher and poorer than the first. We had a dilapidated blue home with two stories, four bedrooms, and creaky stairs. If you walked downstairs at night, you woke up the entire household. It was an immigrant neighborhood, mostly black and Hispanic.

  The neighbor kids threw rocks at us. They called us nasty names, like “bootie scratcher.” They made fun of my short hair, calling me a boy or claiming I had cancer. I couldn’t always understand the insults, but you can tell from people’s body language when they’re saying something crude. One time Alex attempted to communicate to a mother that her kids were harassing us and calling us names. To try to explain, he made a rock-throwing motion with his arm. She dismissed him and allowed her kids to keep doing it. Where was our American dream?

  I began to realize that maybe it didn’t matter where you lived in the world, that people are people everywhere, not so different after all.

  We were not prepared for the inner city. The caseworkers had taught us how to call 911, and we learned how to write our address on a piece of paper in case we got lost. My family had also been warned not to go out after dark, but we didn’t understand why. None of us knew the range of dangers that lurked in a desperate neighborhood. I had thought we would be safe in America. We had a home phone but no cell phones. We were vulnerable, although we didn’t know it.

  There was a group of older guys who hung out on our street, and they always made a point to talk to me. They would say, “Oh, you’re so pretty!” I would reply quietly, “Thank you.” In my culture, you’re not supposed to ignore people who are older than you. You’re supposed to speak to them. It felt wrong not to respond. But they put me on edge. I had not forgotten what another man had done to me. Thankfully, these guys never gave me any trouble beyond the catcalling.

  The neighborhood was plagued with crime, and sometimes the police would come in their cruisers, sirens blasting. The first time I saw the officers, with their guns and uniforms, I thought there must be a war on the way. Back in Congo, police officers and military officers were basically the same—and they came when there was war. They didn’t make house calls about fights or loud noise. Eventually, I got used to the police presence in Rochester. I was relieved that we didn’t have to flee our home for safety.

  One bright spot in our neighborhood was a little store run by a Jamaican family, selling clothing, hair accessories, and other items. The Jamaicans were always kind to us. They seemed to understand how to deal with people who weren’t American. They didn’t mock or shun us. They were relaxed, friendly people, always willing to chat, unlike the Americans in our neighborhood, who seemed more closed off. I liked to tag along with my brothers to the shop and hang out.

  My parents, meanwhile, were looking for a Christian church, specifically a Free Methodist church like the one we had attended in Africa. We went to different churches on Sundays to try them out, even though we couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. We wanted to find a church we loved. And then we found the New Hope Church, and our prayers were answered.

  The first time we went, we were greeted warmly, and we felt right at home. But we were perplexed at how short the service was. In Africa, you go to church on Sunday knowing you’re not going to get out until the sun goes down. Nobody makes plans on a Sunday back home. It’s all about church, all day. In America, the service was just about an hour and a half long. But I was into it—no all-day church! The service was also surprisingly quiet and mellow. Back home, church is loud.

  Pastor Linda, a white woman, quickly became one of my favorite people. She was compassionate and kind, and she and my mom became good friends, even though they couldn’t communicate well. They seemed to have a deep understanding and respect for each other.

  Linda began driving us to and from church every Sunday. If my family needed anything, the church members were there to help, taking my mom shopping or helping us run errands. Linda advised me to stay alert in my neighborhood and to always be sure to tell my mom where I was going. I took her advice, even though it seemed odd. Back in Africa, I didn’t tell my mom every time I went somewhere. There, everyone knew everyone on the block. If Mom didn’t know where I was and needed me for some reason, she could easily find me. All she had to do was step outside and ask around. She would find me in about five seconds.

  My parents were having a difficult time parenting in America because they didn’t know the language or the culture. I began asking Linda things I would ordinarily ask them, like about words and phrases I had heard people use. Her kids were grown, and she spent a lot of time with my siblings and me, answering questions, helping us with homework, offering advice. She was a calming voice. My family trusted her. She liked to sing, and she taught me a song called “Blessed Be Your Name.” It was the first song I learned in English. One day, she and Princesse and I were singing it with her in her living room, and I started to cry.

  There was a refrain in the song that made me think of Deborah: “You give and take away. You give and take away. My heart will choose to stay. Lord, blessed be your name.”

  “What’s the matter?” Linda asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  But she was so warmhearted, I decided to confide in her that I missed my little sister. Linda didn’t know exactly what had happened to Deborah, but she consoled me, saying, “God has a plan, even though you can’t see it at the moment.” Her guidance and faith were soothing to me. She reminded me of all the wonderful things I loved about church and community. I thought about how being Christian doesn’t mean that everything is perfect all the time, or that you don’t face any struggles. In that moment, I really thought about what God meant to me personally. I had been angry at him, but I decided to give him another chance.

  Linda found an African market and tried to help us get the spices and foods we liked. She would do research and bring us different kinds of foods, asking, “Do you eat this?” One day, she took Adele and me shopping in a mall and let us pick out clothes. I loved the mall, so sleek and flashy, filled with shoppers and treasures. This is awesome, I thought. And the clothes didn’t smell.

  On Sundays after church, Linda sometimes drove us over to her house for a visit. She lived on the bank of a lake, in a beautiful neighborhood with fancy houses and perfect green lawns. I didn’t have to be a genius
to notice that the white-people neighborhood was much nicer than our neighborhood. I didn’t understand why our neighborhood felt more dangerous than hers. I wondered if it truly was more dangerous, or if it just felt that way. And if indeed it was more dangerous, what was the reason?

  One afternoon, Alex took a kayak out on the lake at Linda’s house by himself, and so, as usual, I followed his lead. I jumped in my own kayak, thinking if he could sail the lake, so could I. But I had no idea what I was doing. I drifted out too far and couldn’t get the kayak turned around. I kept floating farther and farther out. The water out there was too deep for me to swim back, and I started crying. Mom was calling to me from the shore. She was crying too, and I’m sure she was thinking: We didn’t come all this way for you to drown in this lake.

  Linda sent some people out in a speedboat to pick me up and bring me back ashore. I think it was a sign of things to come.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE TAUNTS FROM KIDS IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD continued, mainly focused on my short hair. The kids made me cry, and I could not make my hair grow fast enough to stop the insults. I hated to step outside the front door. To shield myself from the jeers, I decided I needed a wig. I wanted to fit in and look like everyone else. I thought the wig would be the answer to my problems. I started talking about it all the time to my parents.

  “All the kids have hair,” I said. “They think I’m a boy.”

  I kept making a fuss about it. Anytime we went to a store and I saw a wig or extensions, I would point them out, ever so hopefully. My parents didn’t seem to get why this was important to me. So I kept talking about it. Finally, an uncle who had recently resettled in America told me, “Okay, let’s go.” He took me to a beauty salon, and we found a cheap wig—curly black synthetic hair. It made my scalp and the back of my neck itch like mad. It gave me rashes on my skin. But I felt so much better about myself when I wore it. I endured the scratchiness and dressed it up with headbands and scarves.

  The idea of beauty in America was new to me, and it was troublesome. The message I heard everywhere—from television, from people at school—was that I should exercise and eat healthy food so that I could stay skinny. Back home in Congo, we didn’t really think about body size. Most people I knew were at a healthy weight. And being skinny was not something a child aspired to be. I started to feel pressure to look like what America considered beautiful. My dad helped me navigate the turmoil.

  “Beauty is in your head, not on your body,” Dad would say.

  He never ceased to tell me about the importance of education. He said to stay focused on my schooling, not to get caught up in nonsense. If I skipped a meal, he lectured me, telling me I shouldn’t listen to outsiders and their skewed views on beauty. If I worried about my hair, he said, “You are beautiful with short hair, without any alterations to the way you were made.” My dad is probably the reason that I am a feminist. His voice was a powerful one, though I couldn’t help but listen to the voices at school and on TV.

  I found a few kindred spirits in the church youth group. The kids there didn’t want to kill me—how novel! They actually wanted to get to know me. I became friends with a girl named Mabel, a white girl who was intelligent and tried valiantly to speak with me, even though I still knew little English. She worked with me, helping to teach me some words. I began to think maybe America wasn’t so bad. Maybe there was hope.

  For my thirteenth birthday in June, a woman from our church named Rosemary threw me a party. We didn’t really do birthday parties or birthday cake back home. Birthdays weren’t a big thing. In Congo, we celebrated major holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, not birthdays. And I didn’t love cake. It tasted so sweet and, well, cakey. But the party was generous, and I appreciated the gesture. Rosemary helped me pick out a white dress and red heels for the party. I wore my new outfit and wig, feeling spiffy. She had four daughters, and I hung out with the younger ones at the party, even though we had some communication challenges. I was touched by how many people came to celebrate with me.

  That summer, I practiced English by watching cartoons, and spent as much time as I could with the youth group. I was surprised at how hot the summer months were, when the winter months had been so frigid. Everything felt extreme in America. But I was still gleeful at being free of the coats.

  Mabel rapidly became my best friend. She invited me everywhere and helped me feel like I belonged. One night, she invited me over to her suburban home for a slumber party. Her house was enchanting. The kids each had their own individual bedrooms, full of their favorite things. I had never had a room to myself. Each bedroom had its own personality. In her room, Mabel had posters of her favorite singers plastered across the walls, along with piles of brightly colored yarn everywhere, since she was in a bracelet-making phase.

  Mabel seemed truly interested in my life. She had some inkling about my past from the older people at church, who knew we were refugees, but she never pushed me to talk about it. She was waiting for me to do it in my own time. And that night, I confided in her. We sat in her bedroom and I found myself opening up, telling my life story, or as much as I could communicate. I didn’t give her all of the atrocious details, but I expressed how sad I was.

  Even within my own family, we hadn’t really spoken about the massacre. We hadn’t talked about Deborah. It was too painful, too fresh. No one knew how to bring it up, or the language to use. I had never said aloud that Deborah had died. At Mabel’s sleepover, I said it for the first time. Mabel had made me feel comfortable and loved. She was my closest friend, and I knew she would support me, no matter what I said or did. And then I started crying, and couldn’t stop. Saying the words out loud to another person made it more real, more permanent. I knew, of course, that Deborah had been gunned down, but I still had some vague, inexplicable sense that she would come back one day, as if she had taken a trip somewhere.

  I hadn’t yet opened my mind up to the past. My brain wasn’t ready to process it. I had been too busy trying to survive after the attack, moving to America, attempting to navigate middle school. My family had never had any kind of therapy to deal with the trauma. I struggled to accept that the massacre was real, that all those people died in the camp, that kids were killed or orphaned.

  Mabel tried hard to make me feel at home on the night I told my story, and I appreciated her kindness. We formed a lifetime bond during that slumber party.

  My parents were trying to find their way as well. They both got jobs in a factory, packaging clothes. They learned how to take a city bus back and forth. Early on, Mom got lost and had to write down her address to show people, so they could point her home. The factory hours were long and tiring, and the work was tedious. It was painful to see my parents come home looking so worn out. But they never complained. They did what they had to do.

  I hated seeing them that way. I thought about how Mom had run her own business in Congo, how Dad had always held good jobs. It was a wake-up call for all of us: As refugees in America, we were at the bottom of the heap. Your credentials from your home country don’t matter. You could come here with a college education, like Princesse did, and it wouldn’t mean anything. She had studied international relations in college in Rwanda. She had held a job in the government. But it didn’t count in America. She would have to go to college again. People in America don’t care about college degrees or careers from Africa. Princesse had worked so hard to get that education. We had been through so much to get our golden ticket to America. But we were invisible.

  And then one night, just before I was due to start seventh grade, our world turned upside down again. It was a warm August evening, just turning dark, and my dad got on his bike to go pay the electric bill. He should have been back home quickly, but he wasn’t. My mom began to worry.

  “Where is he?” she kept asking. “Where could he be?”

  We all stayed up late, sitting in the living room, waiting. Dad didn’t have a phone with him. We couldn’t imagine where he had gone.

  H
e did not come back.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE POLICE KNOCKED ON OUR DOOR AROUND one o’clock in the morning, while I was asleep. I awoke the next morning to hear the news. Princesse said the police had come and tried to talk to Mom, but she couldn’t understand them. Mom had called for Princesse, who spoke the best English because she had studied it in college. The officers told Princesse that our dad had been in an accident. A van had hit him while he was on his bike, and he had been taken to the hospital.

  At first, we all thought it must have been a minor incident. And then we saw him in the hospital.

  He was completely bandaged from head to foot, hooked up to all kinds of machines, with tubes and wires everywhere. His brain and spine had been damaged. He was unresponsive, in a coma, lying in a bleak hospital room that reeked of medicine. I was in disbelief. We had survived a bloody massacre and traveled to the other side of the world, only to have Dad die in America? He had done everything to get us here, to start a new life for the family and give us a future. I was so devastated, I couldn’t think. I thought my heart would crack open. I couldn’t imagine my life without my wise, gentle father. Hadn’t we been through enough? We talked to him, telling him we loved him, hoping he could hear us.

  “Dad, blink if you can understand us,” we implored. He didn’t blink. Mom had that despairing look on her face like she did after the massacre. She prodded me to talk to him. I didn’t know what to say to someone who wasn’t responding. He looked dead.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said, holding his hand. I looked back at Mom, unsure what else to say. She cried and cried.

  While my dad lay in a coma, I had to start school. I did not allow myself to think about how my father might never wake up again. I knew that if I let my mind go there, I would not be able to function. I pushed it out of my head. My brain, and my heart, simply could not face it.