Refugee High

by Elly Fishman

  The three arrive at Sullivan. A security staffer tells them to wait in the library. Stepping into the hallway causes Belenge’s entire body to tighten. His breath quickens and his legs seem to move only in slow motion, as though pushing through wet, heavy earth. Power has so long been used to thwart, not help, them. Even the blue suit magic can’t quicken Belenge’s step. Belenge trails Gloria who walks toward the library.

  They settle into the small metal chairs at the end of the long, rectangular table in the center of the room. They wait as the room fills with Sullivan staff. When the table is near full, Sarah begins the meeting, but she soon turns it over to Antoine Livingston, who explains that the school still has not identified the boys who beat up Esengo before the boy was shot. He asks Belenge to help in the matter. That confuses Belenge. As though reading his mind, Gloria, who has asserted herself as Belenge’s advocate, tries to divert the request. She tells Antoine she believes two of the Congolese boys had already been questioned. Nonetheless, Belenge tries to answer.

  Through a translator, Belenge explains that in the weeks before Esengo was shot, two boys tripped him and confronted him in the cafeteria during lunch and again on the school steps at the end of the day. He explains that he does not want to return to Sullivan because he fears the boys will target him next, especially because he’s already been bullied. Intentionally, or not, Belenge is a step ahead of Gloria. By talking, and heightening the threat against him, he ups the chances of being transferred out of Sullivan.

  “Hold on,” says Sarah, confused. “I thought this meeting was supposed to be about how to help Belenge, who feels he’s failing in school?”

  Gloria contradicts the notion. She explains that she hopes this meeting will help identify a solution that will allow the boys to feel safe again. In her opinion, she explains, transferring the boys to the nearby Mather High School is likely the best option. Tobias remains quiet.

  Matt stiffens across the table. Mather is hardly a better sanctuary for refugee students, some of whom transferred from Mather because they found the school unwelcoming or overwhelming. Sullivan is the school with programs in place to acclimate students like Belenge and to work with their families. The fact of this meeting exhibits as much. At Mather, Belenge could lose the support Matt can muster for him. He also knows that losing Belenge and Asani to Mather High School could quickly spiral into the loss of upwards of ten refugee students, who would all lose that support. The Congolese refugee community is tight knit. If one family pulls their kids from Sullivan High School, others will surely follow. If such events do indeed unfold, the impact on Sullivan could be grim. The economy of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) operates by a simple calculus: more students means more money. Ten students leaving could mean losing as much as $60,000 from the school budget, roughly equal to a first-year teacher’s salary. The fragility of the refugee students’ world can infect even the best supports they have in the United States.

  Tobias looks up. His eyes, normally puffy and glassy from sleeplessness, alcohol, or the potent cocktail of the two, are sharp. He pushes his chair back from the table and stands up. His small frame looks even smaller under his oversized winter jacket. He raises his hands, which are marked by deep grooves and calluses formed from years working as a carpenter and long hours packing slabs of meat.

  “No one here is Belenge’s father,” he fumes in Swahili. “I am his father and he needs to return to school tomorrow. If he is going to die, it is in the hands of God.”

  Tobias’s outburst leaves Belenge in shock. The boy cups his hands over his face and begins to cry. For much of Belenge’s life, Tobias has remained aloof. Though Tobias rarely speaks about the past, Belenge understands that his father lost a part of himself when he left the Congo in 1996. For the Bembe, the connection to the soil of one’s homeland is spiritual as well as physical. The earth is guarded by the spirits of ancestors, in Swahili commonly called mizimu wa mababu, who ensure the generations remain tied to their land. Belenge knows few details about the brutality Tobias witnessed. But he knows his father well enough to understand that he would never have left the Congo if it wasn’t a matter of life or death, and the fact that all but one of Tobias’s surviving children have never touched Congolese soil weighs heavy on him. Tobias himself will never feel whole until he returns to the Congo. Now Tobias spends much of his time trying to forget these traumas. He drinks them away; he prays them away. He buries them deep beneath the surface. Or, he tries to fit them into God’s plan, which can feed his rage more. It’s a rare occasion that Tobias’s ghosts morph into explosive, violent anger. When that happens, Belenge retreats. But here, at Sullivan, Belenge cannot hide.

  Tobias walks toward the door of the library, threatening to leave. Before he pulls the door open, someone asks him to sit back down. He complies but remains irate.

  “I will not sign a form for Belenge to change schools,” he says, adding that he recognizes the school’s care for his son. “If Belenge is not back at Sullivan tomorrow, he cannot live in my house. I came to America to give him an education. He can go back to Africa if he does not come back to school. Belenge is a baby; he is not a man.”

  This is final. The group around the table spends the last few minutes of the meeting discussing logistics. A neighborhood watch group has offered to drive the Congolese boys to and from school each day. Josh plans to work with Belenge on his anxiety. Sarah will discuss Belenge’s missed work with his teachers. Everyone agrees that Belenge will return to Sullivan the following Monday. The school, they promise him, will do everything they can to support him and make him feel safe. And be safe.

  _______

  Back in the car, Gloria offers to drop Tobias at work. He’s picked up a daytime shift at the meatpacking factory where he normally works nights. When she pulls into the parking lot at the Bruss Company, Tobias turns to her and thanks her. He then opens the car door and disappears inside the long low-slung factory. Gloria drives Belenge back to Mama Sakina’s apartment. As soon as they enter the building, Belenge can smell wafts of garlic, onion, and hot oil. The smell relaxes him. He’s home.

  Thanksgiving

  Sitting in the back room of the library, Sarah opens a chocolate chip cookie from the 7-Eleven that stands just a few blocks north of Sullivan. The cookie is half her favorite lunch menu: Diet Coke and sugar. Leaning back in her chair, Sarah looks at her phone. There’s a text message from a teacher. One of her new Rohingya students has locked herself in the bathroom and she hasn’t been able to coax her out. She knows Sarah is the woman for the job and has reached out in hopes that Sarah can retrieve the girl and bring her back to class.

  Keyed up on caffeine, Sarah marches across the hall and pushes open the swinging wood door to the bathroom. The bathroom is the unofficial lounge for refugee girls. But the Rohingya girl is there to hide, perhaps because she’s been treated badly or feels out of place, or because there’s been some trigger at the school that caused her to freak out.

  Just inside the door, several girls chatter in Arabic as they crowd around a small mirror mounted on the wall. Their pink and purple backpacks have been piled into the corner as the girls reapply their eyeliner and lipstick and adjust their head-wear. They appear unbothered by the dank air and smell of sewage. Sarah greets them as she passes and makes her way down the bathroom aisle, looking for a door that remains latched shut. When she reaches it, she knocks on the stall. The girl, just over five feet tall, who arrived with a recent wave of Rohingya refugees, opens the door. Sarah doesn’t know the details of her story. She often knows little about the new students who come her way, and even the students Sarah knows well keep their secrets buried. As well as this, there are the regular high school anxieties like gossip and sidelong glances that can be enough to send someone into the bathroom. She may have arrived in Chicago by way of Malaysia, where she would have been isolated from a school system that does not permit Rohingya children to attend. If she came from one of the overcrowded settlements along Bangladesh’s Cox’s Baza
r, a thin strip of land that now precariously holds three hundred thousand Rohingya refugees, she likely lived in thatched bamboo housing, and spent her days working to keep a tiny square of land from sinking in the mud. Sarah can only guess. But today is the school’s Thanksgiving dinner, and she takes her cue from the day.

  “Honey, you can’t hide in the bathroom,” says Sarah. “When you don’t come to class, you can’t learn from your peers and they can’t learn from you. And they want you to be around.”

  The girl looks up at Sarah, so she continues. “Don’t hide in the bathroom,” she says. “If you need to hide, hide in the library.”

  The Thanksgiving holiday holds special meaning for Sarah. Growing up, Sarah moved around a lot. By the time she was fourteen, she had lived in five cities including London. Her stepfather served as a marine and retired from the navy when Sarah’s family moved to Chicago. In Chicago, Sarah’s mother worked as a public middle school teacher for twenty years. Sarah considers Chicago home because it’s where she and her three siblings threw out her stereo boxes. Throughout the years, no matter where Sarah and her family landed, her mother always invited those without Thanksgiving plans to their family table.

  After Sarah returns the Rohingya girl to class, she heads back to the library where she still has half a cookie to eat. When she walks into the office, students fill nearly every chair. The group, who call Sarah “Mom,” congregate here at the same time every day. For many, eating lunch in this small, cramped space is the closest they come to having a family meal, as many of the jobs available to new refugees—cleaning airplanes at O’Hare International Airport or late housekeeping shifts at hotels, for example—require working through the evening and into the night. Sarah knows this, and encourages students to join in.

  Today, the group includes Alejandro, who’s watching a soccer game in Germany while slowly making his way through a bag of Doritos. Alejandro spends more time in the ELL office than anywhere else in the school. Much of the time, he sits, watching a game or scrolling through YouTube videos. Sometimes, he simply lays his head on the table and sleeps. The room is a haven. Next to Alejandro sits a freshman girl who occupies herself taking selfies. Danny Rizk walks in, laptop under his arm and Nalgene water bottle in hand, and plunks down onto his seat. The motion causes the back of the chair to kiss the carpet. He recites the lyrics to Kendrick Lamar’s “Element” to himself, but loud enough for the room to hear. After several rounds of “I don’t give a fuck,” Fatima Peters, who works as an ELL reading tutor, looks up from her laptop when she hears the word “goddamn.”

  “Danny! You are sitting next to a former Catholic school teacher; you can’t say GD.”

  “My cousin is in that gang,” the freshman girl adds. “GD. I like to add K to the end, and he’s like, don’t disrespect me like that.” She goes on to narrate a long, meandering story about her family’s gang affiliations. She explains that her exboyfriend was killed by a rival gang last spring and she was in the hospital room when he was pronounced dead. She offers the story with little emotion or flair. When she finishes, she returns to her phone.

  Sarah is only partially listening. She’s looking over a string of text messages. Her attention is required on the other side of the building where she’s deputized ELL students to put up decorations for the Thanksgiving feast.

  Sarah quickens her pace as she walks toward the first-floor community room. She began introducing her students to American Thanksgiving the second year she taught ELL at Sullivan. Sarah saw how the mythology of Thanksgiving paralleled the journey of her students, and when she shared America’s foundational story with them, she asked the refugee students to share their own stories, too. Now she hopes to expand that exchange to the broader neighborhood and Sullivan community.

  But when she reaches the community room, Sarah stops in the doorway.

  “Shit,” she says, holding her hand up to cover her mouth and nose. The room stinks. “Did something die in here?”

  The stench is a potent contrast to the giddy students waiting to festoon the room with streamers.

  But dealing with the smell will have to come later. Sarah first needs the students to put up the decorations so she can cross the task off her list. Sarah passes out yellow, orange, and red paper streamers and boxes filled with paper leaves and bags full of glitter to a group of students who sit waiting for instructions.

  “You like this?” she asks, rhetorically. “CPS trash decorations? You guys have to figure out how to make this look nice. I can tell you the streamers should stretch across the ceiling.”

  Speaking in a jumble of languages, the students reach into the boxes and pull out supplies. They start with the streamers. A Rohingya boy scrunches a pile together in an attempt to make a less-than-elegant centerpiece for a table.

  “No!” shouts an Afghani girl grabbing the material from him. She unravels the mess of paper and carefully twists each strand around another, as though shaping a giant, multicolored paper Twizzler. The boy looks on with curiosity. Without saying a word, the girl hands him one end and points to the wall.

  “There,” she says. “Put there.” She walks the other end of the streamer to the opposite wall. She tells a friend to grab some tape. Once both sides are taped to the wall, the two, now working as a unit, pick up another set of streamers and repeat the process.

  A few minutes later, Matt walks in. “It smells like something died in here,” he says, holding his fingers to his nose. “We used to have that problem in my old school. You never forget that smell.”

  He turns to Sarah who, along with several plastic-glove-wearing students assembles ten place settings at each table. “I think we’re at thirty-eight languages, right?” he asks her. He’s spent the morning preparing his opening remarks for the dinner. “This CPS count says we have thirty-five countries, but that can’t be right. Shouldn’t we have the same number of countries and languages?”

  “No,” answers Sarah, “because you could be from Burma and speak Burmese or Rohingya depending on your background.”

  He nods and jots down the correction on his paper.

  Over the course of the next hour, the room begins to come together. Five twisted streamers hang over the tables, giving the room a boost of color. But despite the addition of color and sparkle, the room still reeks.

  Sarah deputizes Danny and Josh to handle the smell.

  “Could be the possum who lives in the basement?” asks Danny, walking around the room in order to identify if the smell becomes more potent in certain spots.

  “No, I think Pocco is still alive,” says Josh. “There’s also Chester the mouse from the library. Maybe he made his way over here and died.”

  The Sullivan building is filled with creatures living just out of sight. Many Chicago public schools, especially those housed in hundred-year-old buildings, struggle to keep rodents, vermin, and pests out of the building. But with a leaking roof and ramshackle gym with aging rafters, and a basement of warrens, Sullivan’s animal kingdom thrives, and dies.

  _______

  An hour before Sullivan’s Thanksgiving is set to start, the community room has been transformed into a festive banquet hall. Each of the twelve round tables has loaves of homemade bread hollowed into cornucopias, all of them designed and baked by students under the guidance of a Rogers Park volunteer who taught the teens how to make them. Each cone is stuffed with symbolic bounty including chestnuts, a Western symbol of prosperity; tangerines, an Eastern symbol of luck; and Medjool dates, a holy fruit used to break the Ramadan fast and one that’s mentioned twenty-two times in the Qur’an. Each cornucopia sits surrounded by hand-colored paper flags from Myanmar, Syria, Iraq, and Somalia, among other countries. The tables are dusted with glitter and the stink has thinned thanks to an army of fans and an assortment of Febreze products. In the hallway, long picnic tables have been set up for the spread of food. Paper pumpkins and pilgrims hang from the edges of the tables, and a handwritten sign that reads “Welcome to Sullivan Thanksgiving
” is taped to the center.

  Among the first to arrive is a community member—a drum-circle-leading, left-leaning Jew and Sullivan alum—with a giant roasted turkey. He tells Sarah he wasn’t even sure a twenty-five-pound turkey would fit in his oven, but sure enough, it did. He’s trailed by several other older Rogers Park residents who grew up in the neighborhood and attended Sullivan themselves. Sullivan’s alumni network boasts over three hundred members, the bulk of whom graduated before 1970. Many of them are Jews, and children of Holocaust survivors, and to them, Sullivan was a place where strict teachers pushed them to success. It was also a place that made them street-smart. They’re grateful, and they’ve come to pass their affection forward.

  With each guest who arrives, the spread of food expands: Waldorf salad, cranberry sauce, tin trays full of roasted tomatoes, avocado and grapefruit salad, cornbread, a vat of mashed potatoes. Just before 7 p.m., students begin to filter in. Sarah asked each of the students to invite their parents, but she had little expectation that any would show. Some parents are deterred by the language barrier. Others have no school experience themselves, and even for those who have, they’ve been taught that home and school function as two distinct, separate worlds.

  No students come with their parents in tow. Nearly all of them, however, carry a homemade dish prepared by their mothers. Despite their parents’ absence, each family, no matter how little they have, has found a way to express their gratitude. One Syrian junior drops a massive plate of maqlubeh, an upside-down chicken and rice dish layered with roasted vegetables, almonds, and poultry. The dish, a stunning architectural feat, fills nearly a quarter of the table. A Somalian senior, dressed in a floor-length, flowing mustard dress with a matching hijab, carries a platter of sambusas, or fried stuffed dough pockets, and places them at the end of the table. Two Afghani siblings arrive with beef and chicken kabobs, both halal, paired with peanut sauce and sliced cucumbers.