How Dare the Sun Rise

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

  My school that year was different from the one I had attended for those few horrible weeks of sixth grade. This school, Thomas Jefferson High, was another public school, a sprawling brick compound. It was for kids in the seventh through twelfth grades, and the students were mostly immigrants and refugees. Once again, I had no friends there. Still, I knew a little more English this time around. I hoped things might go more smoothly because I had a better sense of what to expect.

  But no. Seventh grade started out even worse than the sixth. The kids were more unfriendly. They gave me hostile looks. There was a group of girls who would ask me random questions so they could make fun of the way I spoke when I replied. They would repeat the words I said, mocking my accent and laughing hysterically. They seemed to find this game entertaining. I stopped answering their questions. I started taking English-language classes, hoping that would help. But every day was a fresh hell. I hated school. Other immigrant kids got picked on too, especially Muslim girls who wore modest clothing, such as long skirts and baggy shirts. Any kids who were different became targets.

  At the same time, I could sense that the kids around me were hurting in their own way. Many of them seemed angry, unhappy, and poor. They didn’t live in the glittery America I had imagined. They wolfed down their food in the cafeteria at lunch, as if they were starving, and I realized they probably had little food at home. But I didn’t see why they felt a need to be so mean to me. I went home anxious and upset at the end of each day, but I couldn’t talk to my mom about it because she wasn’t familiar with my new environment. And she had tremendous problems of her own, working in the grueling factory by day and visiting my dad at night.

  We went to the hospital to see him every evening. His condition remained unchanged. We would say a few words to him, then sit there for hours. The doctors never gave us good news. All we heard was: “No changes. No changes.” Sometimes church members would stop by and pray. Over the weeks, the doctors began asking my mom if they should pull the plug. His chances of waking up grew slimmer. Mom said no.

  At home, my siblings and I had to help Mom figure out the bills because she was busy working and didn’t have time to learn English. She needed our help to translate. I was getting better at English. Sometimes it felt like I was the parent, teaching her things.

  It was all too much. I grew angry at the world, furious at God. I lost my faith. I decided there was no God and that everything my parents had told me about him was a lie. I thought no one loved us and no one cared, least of all God. My family was falling apart. People from church would ask, “How are you doing?” I hated that question. How were we doing? We were doing terribly. I listened to people praying to God and thought: You’re all fools. God won’t help you.

  I decided I would never go to church again. I told myself that if my dad died, I would not cry. I would stop feeling anything at all. I was very angry. I hated my life.

  School continued to be a minefield, with kids shunning and mocking me, and I dreaded going there every day. There was one girl named Chantelle who tried to talk to me, but she spoke so fast, I could hardly understand her. She was from Tanzania but had managed to assimilate into American culture, as she had been in the States for about three years. She seemed confident and brash. She covered her hair with a head scarf and wore modest skirts, in keeping with her cultural roots, but she spoke English in a way that sounded American. She sounded like the African American kids—in other words, the black kids from America. I was quickly learning that I was not considered African American, even though I was from Africa and I was living in America. My words came out sounding different from theirs. In fact, as I began to learn and speak more English, the African American kids started accusing me of sounding “white.” And they did not consider this to be a good thing.

  I didn’t understand the difference between black and white. Growing up in Congo, being black was not an issue for me. My skin color was something I never thought about. I didn’t understand why sounding “white” would be considered bad among black kids, or even what it meant to sound white. No one was teaching me how to speak English one way or the other, “black” or “white.” I wondered if I would ever learn to talk the right way. And I wondered what the “right” way was. Seventh grade was the first year when I realized how far from home I had come, and how far I had to go to learn my new world.

  I didn’t talk about it much with my siblings. We were all trying to work through our own challenges. Everything was new to all of us. I’ll never forget Adele’s experience with culture shock at a high school track meet. She was set to run in a competition, and then a gun went off to mark the start of the race. No one had told her to expect a gunshot. She thought someone was shooting at people. She ran off the field.

  As for me, at least one thing was going my way: My hair was finally growing longer, so I could start braiding it and shed the scratchy wig.

  I tried my best to block out the angst—the kids at school, my dad in the hospital—and focus on my studies. I did well in my classes, especially in math and science, which confounded some of the other kids, since my English was still raw. I kept plugging away at the language, and my English-language teacher, Mrs. Khoji, took a personal interest in me. She truly cared about her students and got to know them personally. She saw how hard I worked with my studies, and how I struggled to fit in socially. And then she did something special for me: she helped me apply to a private Catholic girls’ school, Our Lady of Mercy, for the eighth grade.

  I went to Mercy to take an admissions test. The school was a different world from Jefferson, with a leafy campus straight from a movie: The main building looked like a castle, surrounded by a sprawling lawn of freshly cut grass. The girls wore uniforms and looked confident and content. I was intimidated. As much as I despised Jefferson, at least I was in the same boat as my fellow students, who were mostly poor like me. Still, the prospect of going to Mercy excited me. I had a flash of hope. But I remained angry at the world.

  NINETEEN

  ALMOST THREE MONTHS AFTER DAD WENT into a coma, I came home from school one afternoon and heard the news: he woke up.

  We rushed to the hospital. His eyes were open. His hands were moving. He could nod his head, but he couldn’t speak. He was still beat up, and hooked to the machines. His head remained wrapped in bandages. It was hard to look at him in that state, and I was nervous about talking to him. He looked different, distant, haunted. It reminded me of when Heritage came home, all bloody from serving as a child soldier, and I was afraid of him. Mom saw me eyeing my dad shyly.

  “Hold his hand,” she said. I walked up to him and grabbed his hand, then quickly let it go.

  Mom looked so happy that Dad was back with us again. The entire family was overjoyed. We could finally breathe. But my dad looked so vulnerable, it pained me to think that he had finally reached a point where he could help his family, only to end up helpless himself. The doctors warned us that Dad would have gaps in his memory. They advised us to be careful talking to him. They said that instead of telling him a lot of things about the past, we should try to help him remember things on his own.

  He remained in the hospital through the winter months, working to regain his memory and physical movement. He gradually began to talk, but he was mixed up about where he was and what had happened. Soon it became clear that he had lost serious chunks of his memory. I grew more comfortable being around him, but wondered if he would ever be the same.

  He came home with us to recuperate that spring. At first, he was disoriented, like a ghost of his former self. We had to remind him of so many things. He would misplace items around the house. He would ask us a question and we would answer, and then he would ask the same question thirty minutes later. It was a difficult time. I wanted my strong, invincible dad to come back, the man who dodged gunfire in the massacre and escaped with bullet holes in his shirt collar. But I realized he still was that man: He had survived not only a massacre, but a devastating body blow from a vehicle that h
ad nearly taken his life. He had fought his way out of a three-month coma. He was, indeed, invincible.

  We learned that the van had hit him at a crosswalk. He was crossing the street with his bike, when the van hit him and drove away.

  Over the weeks, my dad’s memory returned, and his personality started to come back too. Being home, surrounded by his loved ones, helped him regain his sense of self. I was curious about what it had been like to be in a coma, and I peppered him with questions.

  “Dad, how did it feel when you were in the coma?” I asked. “Were you aware that you were alive?”

  “I was aware of my existence, but I did not know where I was,” he said. “I didn’t know if I was still on earth, or somewhere else.”

  “Could you hear us talking to you?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I did not hear your voices. But I did have dreams.”

  He was in the middle of one of those dreams when he finally awoke, he said. He was dreaming that he was at a church event we call a “crusade,” a big prayer gathering.

  One of my dad’s doctors was from Kenya, and he became a friend to our family. He told us the best markets to find African food, and introduced us to other African families in Rochester. I met an African woman named Mariana who helped me braid my hair. The braids were super-tight and hurt my head, but they looked good. Having the right hair was an important step toward fitting in.

  At school, things were looking up. My English-language teacher, Mrs. Khoji, came to my house to tell me that I had received a scholarship to the Catholic school for eighth grade. She said the school had the highest of standards and that I would like it there. I couldn’t stop grinning. I said good-bye to my seventh-grade hell.

  That summer, I hung around with Mabel and my youth-group friends. Mabel attended a suburban public school, so I didn’t get to see much of her during the school year. One day, the youth group invited me along for an overnight party that sounded weird to me—a camping trip. I had never heard of camping. I imagined we would go to the woods and hike and swim, then go to sleep in a bed in a house. When I heard that we would be sleeping on the ground for three days, outside, under a tent, I thought that was insane. People did this on purpose? It sounded like a refugee camp. Goodness, I thought. Are these people so bored, so privileged, that they want to sleep outside on the ground instead of in their comfy beds? I didn’t understand why people would want to get bitten by bugs all night when they had a more luxurious option. I wondered if people understood that some people have to live their lives sleeping on the ground in camps.

  My friends tried to convince me that camping was fun, a way to escape from stress. If you really want to get away from stress, I thought, why not turn off the phones, read a book, go swimming? Some of the kids had swimming pools in their backyards.

  On my first night of camping, I woke up in a bloody sleeping bag. I had gotten my period for the first time. I couldn’t believe the timing. Of course my first period would wait to arrive until I was sleeping outside on the ground in the middle of the woods, surrounded by boys. It couldn’t have happened the day before? I crept out of the tent, found Mabel, and whispered the news.

  “Congratulations!” she said.

  “No, this is a nightmare!” I said.

  I knew that everyone in the camp would find out within minutes, including the boys—mortifying. I was so embarrassed. I was afraid I would be leaking blood everywhere. What if no one had any products? And there were two more days to go at the campsite. I knew I would hate camping.

  Mabel called a chaperone over, a woman we called Miss Trish. Mabel explained what had happened, and Miss Trish looked a bit taken aback. I was fourteen years old, so maybe she thought I was a late bloomer. She hugged me.

  “Oh sweetie, congratulations!” she exclaimed. “You’re a woman now.”

  I wanted to tell her to keep it down. I hadn’t given much thought to getting my period, although I knew it would come one day: I had older sisters, after all. But I was always too busy riding bikes and climbing trees to think about it.

  We were supposed to go swimming that day at the camp, and I worried that I would turn the lake red. Miss Trish went around asking girls if they had any products for me, until finally she found some. She kept smiling and congratulating me, her voice booming. We had to wash my pajamas and sleeping bag in the lake. Sure enough, all the boys knew my secret. But they looked as embarrassed as I did.

  By the time I started eighth grade, I had developed boobs and hips, and I started wearing bras. I thought, okay, that’s one thing I’ve got going for me. My sisters made fun of me—even more so when they saw how embarrassed it made me. The tomboy in the family was growing up.

  TWENTY

  IN EIGHTH GRADE, I ENTERED A DIFFERENT world. My new school, Our Lady of Mercy, was a polite and proper private Catholic school, with girls in plaid skirts and navy polo shirts. The halls were orderly, not filled with chaos like my last school. At this point, I could hold my own speaking English. The kids seemed friendly. They were mostly white. They did not seem openly hostile toward me, like some of the kids at my last school, although I could see certain girls sizing me up, judging me. At Mercy, I began to understand a lot of things about America—and about being black in America.

  I made three new friends quickly: Leah, Mackenzie, and Shantavia. Leah and Mackenzie were white, both shy. Mackenzie looked like a Disney princess: She was petite and sweet; she looked like someone who would walk around with a halo of cheerful birds singing over her head. Shantavia was black and super-smart, a bit nerdy. They were kind to me, and patient. When they discussed things like American TV shows and pop culture, I would have no idea what they were talking about. I hadn’t grown up watching American shows, and I didn’t get the references. I tried to catch up by watching plenty of TV, but I had a long way to go. There were so many cultural disconnects, but my friends accepted me. They hadn’t really hung around one another until I came along, and we became our own little group.

  Things got a little weird once we started eating lunch together. That’s because the black girls generally sat together in the cafeteria. They had white friends, but at lunchtime, the black girls all hung out together, sitting in their own group. I could sense that they felt I should be sitting with them, but also, they knew I didn’t really belong. I didn’t belong with the white kids either. I could feel that mysterious divide between black and white again, just like at my last school, and I didn’t understand the reason for it. In the cafeteria, my friends and I sat at the end of the table where the black girls sat. Shantavia was friends with the black girls but sat with us; she had always done her own thing. Gradually, I got to know the black girls from sitting at that table.

  The black girls spoke with an urban lingo I did not know, and they sometimes said I sounded “white,” just like the kids at my last school had said. When they said this to me, I would say, “What do you mean?” It was frustrating. I started to think: Am I not being a good black person? I really wanted to fit in with them. I wanted to be black and to make black friends—I wanted to be friends with people who looked like me. I wondered if they assumed I was from a wealthy white district because of the way I spoke. Of course, that could not have been further from the truth. Eventually, I started trying to sound “black” when I talked to them. I’m sure I sounded ridiculous. It’s amazing that they didn’t laugh me out of the school. Still, I kept trying. It got to a point that I would switch the way I spoke, depending on whether I was talking to someone black or white, except among my good friends. I was hardly even aware that I was speaking differently to different people. I was trying to belong in both groups, but I belonged in neither. I looked black, but I sounded white.

  I also noticed that the white and black kids talked about different topics, and read different books: The black girls read popular black teen novels; the white girls read Harry Potter.

  I realized that race was a very big deal in America. There were so many expectations about how I was suppo
sed to act, who I was supposed to be. I couldn’t figure out my identity. No one said, “Here’s your manual. Here’s how to be black.” I was not well versed in American history, but I had learned the basics in school in Africa. I knew things like the names of presidents and states. I knew that slavery had happened, but I didn’t know all the details. I couldn’t say how many times Martin Luther King Jr. had been arrested. It wasn’t part of my history.

  And the American kids knew nothing of my history in Africa. Some of them seemed to assume I had grown up in a jungle. One day, a girl asked, “Sandra, were you surprised when you saw shoes for the first time in America?” I was so offended and embarrassed, I cried. As if I had never seen a pair of shoes until I came to America! One of my teachers, Mr. Desain, overheard the conversation and told the girl her remark was inappropriate, and she had to apologize.

  The girl’s comment was not unusual. Kids often asked me things like that. I would be sitting in the lunchroom and someone would ask, “What did you wear in Africa?” Guess what: We wore clothes! We drove around in cars! And planes go there too! Sometimes I would have a little fun with my answers, saying, “We wore grass skirts and bras made of leaves. We go from place to place by swinging around on vines like Tarzan. I had a pet lion and a pet elephant, and they lived together in a mud hut. My parents were so wealthy, my siblings and I each had our own individual mud huts, if you can believe it. Oh, and I had a monkey that talked!”

  Sometimes the kids would ask if I believed in God, and they seemed dubious when I said yes, as if there were no religions in Africa.

  I suppose it’s not so surprising that the kids thought people from Africa were from Mars. The images of Africa on American TV were all the same: There were the ads for charity groups showing a white lady holding a starving black child, flies landing all over the kid. Indeed, Africans might be poor, but we know how to swat flies. Then there were the features focusing on some remote and obscure rural tribe. And if Africa ever made the evening news, it was because of a disease outbreak. The news reports made it seem like we were people from a different planet, people from “over there.” We are all human beings. Yes, Africa has many problems, but there is so much beauty, so much goodness too. In America, the images of Africa make it seem as if it is a place where only bad things happen. Conversely, in Africa, the images of America make it seem like it is a land so divine, only good things happen.