How Dare the Sun Rise

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

  My teachers at Mercy didn’t treat me any differently than the other students, and I appreciated that. They knew I was a refugee, but didn’t know the details of my past. They assumed I was intelligent. They didn’t talk down to me. But sometimes, I wished they wouldn’t call on me in class. I did not like to speak in class like I did back home, when I was the confident star student. In America, I was embarrassed about my accent, and worried I wouldn’t find the right words in English. I dreaded getting called on to answer questions. I would sit there silently, sweating. But my teachers pushed me hard, and now I can see that this was a good thing.

  One day in history class, my teacher talked about America’s history of slavery. During the lesson, the white kids glanced around at the black kids; there were just a few of us in the class. I think the white kids were curious, or perhaps they were afraid that we would be offended by the topic. I didn’t know how to react when they looked at me. I wanted to say, “Why are you looking at me?” It seemed as if they assumed that as a black person, I was a speaker for all black people. But I was learning the history of American slavery myself. At the same time, I didn’t want to come off as clueless. I didn’t want the black kids to say, “She doesn’t know how to be black.” I worried that I would never be black enough.

  And then, something unexpected happened in history class, and my classmates had an opportunity to understand something about me. We watched Hotel Rwanda, the movie about the bloody genocide in Rwanda that left as many as a million people dead. My teacher, who knew a little about my past, had warned me beforehand that the film would be difficult to watch, but I wanted to see it. As I began to watch it, however, I became so emotional, I had to leave the class. The movie brought me back to the atrocious conflicts I had witnessed in my own life, and I needed some air. I walked the hallways, went to my locker, and then returned to class later.

  “Is everything okay?” my teacher asked me.

  “It’s a little too close to home,” I said.

  The kids in my class were shaken by the movie too. You could see it on their faces. They asked, “How could something like this happen?” I’m glad my teacher showed us the film. It’s important for schools to expose kids to difficult topics like that, to help them understand what’s going on in the rest of the world. I realized that my classmates cared when they saw the images of human rights abuses and war. They just hadn’t been tuned in to what was happening.

  Since I was the only one who could speak to war in Africa, I shared a little of my story with the students for the first time. The kids were blown away. They had no idea what I had been through. I’m not even sure if they really believed me.

  “No way,” they said.

  But I think, on some level, we came to an understanding that day.

  TWENTY-ONE

  OVER THE WEEKS, AS I LEARNED MORE ABOUT American history, I started to understand more about what it meant to be African American, and the ongoing and complex fight for equality. But I was still very confused. I noticed that on TV it seemed as if black people were always committing crimes. In fact, it seemed like black people were solely responsible for crime in America. On news shows and on fictional shows alike, it was a constant parade of black people getting arrested and thrown in jail. The images were so negative, I was sort of scared of being black. Those images did not represent me, or the black girls I was meeting at school. I wondered if black people in America were mostly bad. I thought that perhaps I needed to prove to white people that I wasn’t like the criminals I saw on TV. It made me question so many things.

  I started doing my own research and talking to the African American girls at school, engaging in conversations with them at lunch. The black girls were on top of any news stories involving race and discrimination, such as controversial police shootings, and they also discussed the kinds of everyday hurdles that black people face in America. I was impressed by their knowledge. There were three girls in particular who always had insightful things to say: Taryn, Sadaris, and Tae’lor. My white friends, Leah and Mackenzie, listened intently to the discussions. They were such good listeners. They were learning with me. I began to gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of race in America. I learned that the way black people were portrayed on TV certainly did not reflect the much more nuanced and complicated reality. I learned about tensions between black people and the police. I learned how black parents would warn their kids to be careful around the officers, because a black kid could get shot for simply running down the street. I learned how black parents would advise their kids to keep their driver’s license somewhere accessible, so they wouldn’t have to dig deep for it, lest the cops think they were reaching for a gun.

  I also noticed that the white girls in school seemed afraid of the black girls, worried that they would get beaten up if they crossed them. But the black girls were the sweetest, smartest, nerdiest kids. They could never beat anyone up. Still, there was that perception that they were scary or dangerous.

  And one day, I had my own experience of being perceived as “bad” simply because I was black. I was shopping in a Banana Republic at the mall with my friend Leah, and a clerk was following us around the store, keeping an eye on us.

  Finally, the clerk told us, “There’s nothing here for you.”

  “Okay,” I said, and we left, embarrassed and confused.

  Perhaps the clerk thought we had no money because we were teenagers. But I had seen other teens in the store, and they hadn’t been asked to leave. Outside the store, Leah, who is white, was fuming.

  “You realize what just happened, right? She thinks you’re going to shoplift because you’re black,” she said.

  That thought hadn’t even occurred to me.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I was dressed nicely, as always. I looked like a teen girl. I did not look like a criminal. But I was black. I’ll never forget that moment. And incidentally, that store clerk totally blew it—Leah’s dad had given her money for the shopping trip. We were ready to spend it.

  On that day, I realized it didn’t matter how I saw myself, because other people saw my skin color. Before I came to America, I was Sandra. I was a student, a daughter, a sister. I was African, Congolese. Did I ever define myself as black? No. My skin color didn’t determine who I was as a person. Everyone was black. My interests, my beliefs, defined me. My skin color was simply a fact about me, like the fact that I like candy. If you ask who I am as a person, I wouldn’t say, “I like candy.” That’s not a fundamental thing that describes me. But in America, my skin color did define me, at least in other people’s eyes. I was black. I was black first, and then I was Sandra.

  I had grown up in a war zone, but life in America, I realized, was a different kind of war zone.

  I began talking to my parents about what I was learning from my African American friends at school. Mom and Dad had seen all the negative portrayals of black people on TV. They didn’t know what to think. They weren’t meeting a lot of different people like I was. They were working hard, dealing with their issues.

  Mom continued to be the breadwinner, working in the factory while my dad recuperated from his injuries. It was still hard for me to accept the fact that my larger-than-life parents seemed so small in America, so under the radar. Mom took a second job cleaning a movie theater, and I helped her on the weekends.

  The movie theater was awful. I could not understand why people would buy giant buckets of popcorn, only to dump them on the floor. We had to clean the theater overnight, after the last show, so the place would be ready for moviegoers the next day. I would go to the theater around ten thirty at night with Mom and my cousin Claudine. We would wait for the last show to end—usually around midnight—and then sweep and mop the floors and scour the bathrooms. People left the toilets in such a mess. They never stopped to think about the fact that someone else had to clean up after them—the unseen people like us at night. It took hours to clean that grimy theater, as there were several screening rooms, and we would ge
nerally finish around six in the morning. If there had been a big premiere the night before with a lot of people attending and throwing things on the floor, we would be there until eight in the morning.

  My mom did this several nights a week, from Sunday to Thursday—after working all day at the factory. It was a physically demanding job, reaching under the seats in the theater to scrape up goo, scrubbing toilets in the bathroom. By the end of the night, I often felt like my body would give out. But Mom would do that backbreaking job and then go straight to work at the factory the next morning. She did all of this without complaining. She did her work with such grace and resilience, never a gripe. Watching her inspired me to do well in school so I could help her financially one day and she wouldn’t have to work so hard.

  But I had my bratty moments too. I still had to help my parents translate the bills and other documents at home, which got on my nerves. One time I tried to explain a cable TV bill to my mom when she thought she had been overcharged. She was impatient.

  “Call them. Tell them they’re charging too much,” she said.

  I called the cable company, and someone there explained the bill. It turned out we were not being overcharged. I tried to explain it to Mom, but she wasn’t buying it.

  “Why are you being so nice to them?” she asked. “This is money!”

  Then she got on the phone and spoke in broken English, saying, “I no pay! I no pay!”

  I wanted no part of that.

  Sometimes I would have to make phone calls pretending to be my mom. I would call the home insurers, the credit-card companies. If someone asked me something that I didn’t know, I would have to say, “Hold on a second,” and then I would ask Mom for the information. I always had to know my parents’ passwords for email and other accounts, in case of any problems.

  I’m sure it pained my parents to have to ask their kids for help. It must have been hard for them, but I didn’t realize that at the time. Back home in Congo, my parents understood everything, and they taught me. Now it was the other way around. I taught them. Every time they asked me to translate a bill, I’d groan about it.

  I hated the fact that I couldn’t be a normal kid, like the kids around me. Their parents were in charge, and they understood how things worked. My friends’ parents drove them everywhere, while my own family didn’t have a car. My friends got allowances from their parents, a concept I had never heard of. I was leading a double life, trying to be an American kid at school but coming home to teach my parents English and help them pay the bills. Kids aren’t supposed to teach their parents. Essentially, everything my parents knew about American culture came from me. But I still knew so little myself.

  Adding to the cultural divide, my fellow students were pretty well off. They’d say things like, “I need to get good grades or I won’t get a car for my sixteenth birthday.” Really? Your own new car, for your birthday? I didn’t even have a cell phone, which of course made me the biggest dork around.

  Dad tried to do everything he could to help Mom and the rest of us around the house, like getting up early each day to make breakfast for everyone. That would ordinarily be considered “women’s work” in my culture, and some men would never do it, no matter the circumstances. They would expect the woman to do everything. My dad is different from so many men in my culture. Sometimes he would tell us how his property would be divided among all of his kids if he passed away, not just given to the boys, per the tradition. Another example of his awesome feminism.

  But I would soon test his limits.

  TWENTY-TWO

  AS I TRIED TO ASSIMILATE INTO AMERICAN culture, tensions between my parents and me grew. Clothes were one issue. My parents didn’t want me wearing short-shorts, which was fine with me—I didn’t want my butt hanging out of a tiny pair of shorts—but my friends would come to the house wearing them, and Mom couldn’t help but comment. She was good-natured about it; she understood that American culture was different from ours, but still, my friends would come over and she would shake her head. Dad would never say anything, but Mom would say, “Leah, no, no, no,” and point at her legs. Or she would pull Mackenzie’s shirt down over her shorts to try to cover more of her legs. I would say, “Mom, cut it out!”

  I told my friends that my mom said these things out of love. “She might not love your outfit, but she loves you,” I said.

  Luckily, my friends had a sense of humor about it. They came to expect that when they showed up at my house, my mom would tsk-tsk their outfits. Sometimes they would dress more modestly, like in a knee-length skirt, and say proudly to my mom, “Look!” She would nod approvingly, and they would giggle.

  One day I tried to wear a little sundress to church. I walked out of the house, smiling and feeling all cute. Dad just gave me this look. I guess I was showing too much leg. He didn’t have to say anything.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m not going.”

  “Good,” he said.

  I stayed home.

  I wanted to be like my American friends. They went on dates with boys, which my parents did not want me to do. My friends’ parents actually drove them on dates and dropped them off at the movie theater or a café, because the kids weren’t old enough to drive. In Africa, we didn’t casually date the way teenagers do in America. If a young couple had a relationship in Congo, there was an end goal—marriage. You didn’t just date someone for the heck of it.

  One day my mom and I talked about dating. She told me, “Your friends in America do this because it’s their culture. It doesn’t mean you have to do it.” She wanted me to stay within our cultural lanes. Ideally, she wanted me to marry someone from our culture one day too.

  “Mom, I’m going to marry a white man,” I prodded her. “And what are you going to do about it?”

  “Over my dead body,” she said. “Sandra, you won’t do it. You know you won’t. You need to have a traditional wedding.”

  It’s not that Mom had anything against white people; she just thought our cultures were too far apart. For one thing, she thought white people had small, subdued weddings, not major celebrations like in our tribe. She got that idea from an American woman my brother Heritage had dated. The woman was white, and she wanted a small wedding at an inn. The relationship caused a lot of anxiety for my mom, and she and Heritage clashed over it many times. Heritage was the first among her kids to date outside the culture. He was an adult, and there was nothing my mother could do about it. Still, Mom was always nice to the woman. She tried her best to deal with the situation. I’m sure she was relieved when they broke up.

  I kept pushing her. “Mom, my best friends are white, and you love them,” I said.

  “Your friends are your friends—you’re not marrying them,” she said. “I love your friends, but you’re not going to spend the rest of your life with them.”

  Still, I didn’t argue with my parents too much about dating in high school. I had to pick my battles. I had to talk them into so many things, like going to friends’ parties. In Congo, teens did not throw their own parties. We would go to parties held by relatives, not by other kids. Everything I was experiencing in my social life in America was new to Mom and Dad. It all had to be negotiated.

  My parents and I were growing in different directions. Of course, most teens feel misunderstood. But I considered myself to be genuinely misunderstood because my parents and I were not having the same life experiences: They had not grown up in America. They had not gone to an American high school. They could not guide me.

  Things that are the norm in the States, like tampons, were new to my mom. Women wore pads back home. When Adele realized I was wearing tampons, she worried that they took your virginity. It’s a common belief in different cultures. When I wanted to wear a bikini to the beach, Mom was appalled by the concept. “You’re going to show that much skin?” she asked. Eventually, I wore the bikini.

  We had some major negotiations over a formal dance at school. I tried to convince my parents that I needed an expensive dre
ss—two hundred dollars—to wear to the event. My siblings were sitting there listening to this request, laughing. In addition to the dress, I would be asking a boy to the dance. I went to a school for girls, so I would have to ask a boy. My parents were taken aback. A dance? A dress? A date?

  “You want to spend that much money on a dress for one night?” Mom asked. “Would you ever wear it again?”

  “If you want to dance, why don’t you dance right here?” Dad said. “We have plenty of space in the living room.”

  Mom thought that was a good idea. “Yes,” she said. “Why don’t your friends come here? They could sleep here.”

  “Where would they sleep?” I asked.

  “In your bed,” Dad said.

  I rolled my eyes. I’d had sleepovers with Leah and Mackenzie, but I would not be hosting a school dance in my living room. My brothers would be messing with us all night. They always got involved with my slumber parties, getting my friends to play African card games, teaching them dance moves and then laughing at them. It was actually kind of fun, and my friends embraced it. But a dance in the living room? No.

  My parents agreed to think about it. They didn’t want me to be excluded. They had to choose their battles just like I chose mine.

  Over the next few days, I tried to get more strategic in my tactics. Instead of saying, “Mackenzie’s mother lets her go to dances,” in which case my mom would say, “You are not Mackenzie,” I would say, “It’s normal for kids to go to dances.” I would continue, “You don’t want me to be a social outcast, right? You don’t want to look at me sitting here, with no social life and no friends, until the end of time, right?”