Mohammed’s place was a compound of small clay houses surrounded by a thorn-stick fence on the edge of Bamako. It was a reproduction of three village homes, he told me proudly, but close enough to the center of the city so he could commute daily to work. He shouted into one of the houses, which had no glass in the windows and only a curtain for a door, until a woman emerged holding a bundle of clothing in her arms. “She is my first wife,” Mohammed said. “She can move in with one of the others, and you will stay in her house.”
“How many wives do you have?”
“Only three. Come.”
The walls, ceiling, and floor of the house were made entirely of mud, but the place was immaculate. I had never seen dirt polished so smooth and clean. I had a wooden bed with a colorful cloth thrown over it, and a jug of water on a table. Outside in back was a pit latrine that was as spotless as the house and entirely free of odor. Mohammed told me I was welcome to stay as long as I liked.
I eagerly accepted his invitation to travel with him in his official capacity around the country, inspecting farm projects. I would play with the kids in the various villages we visited and wander in and out of his lengthy meetings with local community groups.
J.P. in Mali, 1984
As we drove, Mohammed behind the wheel of a big gray Land Rover, he talked about the challenges facing African families in putting enough food on their tables. It was a lecture that extended over many weeks and many hundreds of miles, and the gist of it was this:
The global agricultural market, he explained, was entirely geared to give maximum advantage to American and Western European consumers. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—backed by the United States and Europe, their biggest donors—demanded that their client countries, as a condition of receiving loans, divert land from growing locally consumed food to growing the same commodities—cotton, coffee, various grains, and so on—for the sole purpose of creating oversupplies globally that would in turn drive down prices and help keep global inflation at a minimum by producing cheaper food to be sold in our supermarkets and restaurants. In the case of other commodities, massive U.S. government subsidies to Midwestern farmers and a dizzying array of trade barriers allow American agribusinesses to dump cheap products on African and other countries that just can’t compete pricewise. Millions of small-scale farmers in developing countries in Africa and elsewhere are impoverished, and their families are needlessly hungry and poor so that Americans and Europeans can pay a penny less for a cup of coffee or a dime less for a t-shirt.
He told this story—in precise, fine-grained, example-backed detail—in a lilting, rolling West African accent entirely devoid of bitterness. Mohammed wasn’t blaming me; he wasn’t really blaming anybody. To him, this was simply how the world worked. But as I finished my time with him, the implication was clear: Now that I knew all this, what was I going to do about it?
4. Welcome to Somalia
MICHAEL MATTOCKS
Something changed in the life of my mom’s boyfriend Don; I was too young to know exactly what. But when I was almost nine years old, he started smoking crack. My mother started drinking with him. There’d be times I’d come in the house and they’d both be in the living room, all fucked up, and skinny little Uncle Artie would be, like, “Gimme that ear,” and checking my pockets for change so he could get drunk too.
The summer I turned nine, we moved from Southeast up to North Capitol Street in Northeast D.C. Southeast had been like the country, with the yards and the creek and all, but North Capitol—that was the city. Don and Artie came with us, and two of Aunt Evelyn’s kids came too. My mom got a little welfare check every month, and they probably wanted a little piece of that and a place to stay. Somehow we got this big-ass house at 1420 North Capitol, a tall brick townhouse painted gray-blue. Had six bedrooms, which was good, because by then it was Sabrina, me, James, David, Elsie, André, and Tyrell as well as Mom, Don, Aunt Evelyn’s two kids, and Uncle Artie.
We moved while J.P. was away in Africa, and I worried he wouldn’t be able to find us.
Living on North Capitol Street, man, that was big time. The sidewalk was real wide in front of the house, and North Capitol, shit, it’s like six lanes of traffic whizzing by. All that playing in the park and catching crayfish in the stream like we did in Southeast, that was over. We were in the city now for real. We were just a few blocks from Sursum Corda, the baddest housing project in the whole city—maybe the whole country. Man, that motherfucker was tight. I was scared moving up there, I’ll tell you the truth. We could see people selling drugs, and hear gunshots at night; you didn’t hear that shit in Southeast. One night I’m standing on the corner and see this big flash and hear a loud BOOM about half a block away. A big guy was down in the street with a big hole in his stomach and little pellet marks all around his crotch and thighs. Somebody’d shot him with a sawed-off; I could hear him talking to the ambulance crew. That’s the kind of shit went down up there.
We started at a new school, and the other kids teased us because of what we wore. I had three sweat suits—red, black, and blue. I’d mix and match them, but everybody knew that’s all I had to wear and ragged my ass about it. The other kids were all wearing Nikes, and me and James were still in these raggedy-assed no-brand-name shoes. I had that pair of Nikes that Mr. P had bought me, but I’d grown out of them by now. James would cry when they teased us, and then he’d go off and get into a big-ass fight and get his ass kicked. Sabrina was off at junior high so she couldn’t protect us. It was up to me, and I didn’t like that. Like I said, I don’t really like to fight. I never did.
Then one day that big ugly tan car pulled up, and there was J.P. My mom had memorized J.P.’s mom’s number, and she called and gave her our address, so J.P.’s mom then gave it to J.P. Me and James piled into the car, and it was like it always was. We went down there on the river behind the Watergate Hotel, bought our little worms from the vending machine, and the whole day slid by. On the way home J.P. spied a big empty parking lot and pulled in there to let me drive his car. Man, I felt like a king behind the wheel of that big car, even if I could barely see over the dashboard. I drove that motherfucker all over that parking lot with James yelling, “Gimme a turn! Gimme a turn!” in the back seat. J.P. didn’t let him—James wouldn’t have been able to reach the pedals!—and James of course took it as some kind of put-down and threw a complete fit, kicking and screaming and whipping on J.P. with his little arms. There were times I wondered why J.P. kept coming back to us, the shit James put him through.
We always stopped to eat, and that day J.P., as usual, had a big stack of books and papers he brought in with him. Me and James were eating and shooting straw-papers at each other, and J.P. was studying on them books and papers like his life depended on it. It was Africa stuff; I remember lots of pictures of skinny little black children and bony cows.
On the way back to North Capitol, J.P. starting up his questions, like he always did. This time, though, they had an edge to them. “How you doing in school?” he asked me, and I’m sure I said what I usually said, which was, “Fine.” Truth was, I hated school. I wasn’t the smartest motherfucker in the room, and I was bored all the time, and we had those damned kids putting us down for being shelter kids with no-name shoes. Usually, J.P. would let me leave it at “fine,” but this time, he really pressed in. “What do you mean, fine?” he asked. “What grade do you have in math? In social studies?” Like that. I must have giggled, or blown off the question some way, because J.P. got sharp with me in a way he didn’t usually do. “I’m not joking around, Michael,” he said. “What do you have in math?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably a D.”
“School’s important,” J.P. said in a kind of scolding voice I’d never heard him use. He sounded disappointed with me all of a sudden, and I didn’t know why. “You’re not a little kid anymore,” he said. “It’s time you learned a little accountability. Your mom sends you to school for a reason. School is your job, a
nd doing your work well is what it means to be a man.”
“I’m a man!” I said. “Some day I’m going to buy my mom a house!”
“You’re not going to buy your mom a house after making D’s in fifth-grade math!” J.P. shouted back, really raising his voice.
I didn’t know where all this was coming from all of a sudden. For a moment, it flashed on me that J.P. was dying; it was like he was trying to leave me with some last words. Turns out, he wasn’t dying, but he was getting ready to check out a little bit. Africa was about to draw him away from us big time, and I think he knew it. On that ride back to North Capitol that day, it felt like J.P. was trying to cram a whole lifetime of being a big brother into fifteen minutes.
We pulled up in front of the big blue-gray house, and I popped the door to get away from him. But he jumped out and came around the car with his arms opened wide. “Hey buddy, come here,” he said, and gave me into a big hug. My head only came up to his chest. He held me for a long moment and I let him do it; J.P.’s were the only hugs I got. I think he was apologizing for coming down on me in the car. Or maybe he was saying goodbye.
Michael in “the fleshmobile” (with J.P. showing him how to drive)
JOHN PRENDERGAST
After three months in Mali, it was good to get back to my decrepit apartment in the old Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia. The elderly ladies who sat in their aluminum lawn chairs on the sidewalk all day waved and shouted my name as though I was a son returned from the wars. The old vets on the first floor invited me in and tried to get me to have a shot of Canadian Club. Even the mysterious fugitive on the third floor was glad to see me.
It was weird coming back to America, to the abundance and the endless choices. I found myself paralyzed and overwhelmed by the options that a simple grocery store offered. I avoided shopping whenever possible. Bought the same food from the same fast food joints, no longer comfortable going to nicer restaurants or even to large supermarkets. I stopped buying new clothes, getting what I absolutely needed during occasional thrift store visits in South Philly. I stopped using air-conditioning and any other creature comfort. This austerity lasted for years. My only escape from the self-denial was going to the movies, sometimes with my little brothers but often alone, where I would spend hours, buying a ticket and then sneaking into another one or two for a double or triple feature.
Congressman Gray let me come back to my old job in West Philly—helping constituents get their SSI checks, their veterans’ benefits, their subsidized rents. I could still summon the old interest in American urban poverty, but something fundamental had changed. I remember helping one old man trying to sort out his troubles with the VA. He had worked at one company nearly his entire adult life and was living all alone on Social Security and a tiny pension, and he had a number of health problems. He had nobody, and no skills for navigating the enormous federal bureaucracy—a very deserving constituent, and just the type of citizen that I’d launched a career to try to help. But as we sat there, knee to knee, in his humble little kitchen, I couldn’t help thinking: He eats every day. He doesn’t have to walk farther than the tap to get all the fresh water he wants. He has a roof over his head. He doesn’t have to worry about starvation, war, and village burnings. And he lives in a country with a reasonably functional bureaucracy and impartial courts, at least in principle. Compared to the people I’d just spent a few months among, he seemed fortunate.
How could the United States, with all its abundance and opportunity, do so little for those people I had seen in the Saharan Desert communities who were fighting a daily battle with hunger and thirst? The United States has to do more! Sorting out the terrible injustices inflicted upon people affected by deadly wars and unfair global food markets now seemed the most important thing in the world to me. And until that happened, getting more aid to Africa became an absolute obsession. Food! Medicine! Clothing! Tools! Money! I knew there existed an apparatus to deliver aid to developing countries, but I didn’t know anything about it.
I found myself confused. This old man and the others I was assisting in West Philly were no less deserving of help than they were before my trip. But were they the people I most wanted to help? I was no longer sure. Now I hungered to figure out the bureaucracy of foreign aid the way I’d once yearned to understand the way services were delivered to poor folks in America. My grazing, nomadic brain was getting ready to run me full speed down an entirely new path.
The most important thing to me was getting back to Africa as quickly as possible. Its pull was so strong that I sometimes felt that a big rusty hook had been embedded under my sternum and was dragging me forward. I began going through the District of Columbia telephone book, looking for any organization with the word “Africa” in its title, hoping to find one that might sponsor my return trip. I finally came upon a group called Operation Crossroads Africa, which organized trips for young Americans to do service work in Africa. I signed on without even asking where they’d send me or what I’d have to do when I was there. All I knew was, it was a way to get back to the continent.
The time I’d spent in Mali was the longest I’d been away from Michael and James since I’d met them. When I returned from this first trip to Africa, I didn’t bring them presents because I had no money to buy anything in the places I’d visited. And it wasn’t like they were expecting anything; nobody in their family had ever traveled overseas, let alone brought home souvenirs. The same was true for Khayree and Nasir.
What they wanted was me, and I had this deep foreboding in my heart that they were going to get less and less of me in the months and years to come. Africa was drawing me away. I knew it then. It wasn’t anything I could explain to them either. We had no frame of reference. I thought that trying to describe what I’d seen in Mali, and how I thought I might be able to make a difference, wouldn’t have made much sense, since I was just trying to understand it myself.
It was a serious problem looming before me: the conflict between my growing responsibility to Michael and James, as well as Khayree and Nasir, and my newfound mission to help tackle the unfairness I had encountered in Africa. The old superhero complex was taking over, enveloping me in its spidey web of self-delusion. I believed I could do anything and everything. So naturally, when I’d begin to feel the prickling of a very realistic sense that my work in Africa was going to change my relationship with the boys, I wrapped it up in unrealistic optimism and shoved it under the rug. Of course my newfound interest in Africa wouldn’t change my relationship with my little brothers. I could do anything; I could work on causes in Africa and remain as present and important in the lives of these little boys as ever. Right?
What came out of my mouth, though, was a kind of desperation to have as much effect on the boys as I could during my weekend visits to Michael and James in D.C. in the little time that I thought I had left with them. Until then, our whole relationship had been built around play. I’d let them lead. You want to go fishing? We’ll go fishing. You want to go to the park? We’ll go to the park. I was just a big playmate, giving them a break from the grim circumstances in which they lived to have a little fun. To the extent that I was trying to “change” them, it was passive, as a role model. And there was something a little cookie cutter about it all. Everyone got the same inquiries. To a lesser extent, the same was true of Khayree and Nasir too. Firing a bunch of questions gives the interviewer all the control, and doesn’t leave much room for sharing. The responder is vulnerable, opening up, believing there’s interest, while the interviewer may not be fully listening or diagnosing, dissecting, and determining his or her subject. I was definitely giving them a break, but maybe playing was all I could handle. Perhaps I was modeling my father in a way I wouldn’t have acknowledged or even imagined back then.
Now, though, I felt a compulsion to cram into our relationship a new, more active role for myself. I no longer had the leisure to wait for them to acquire my drive and middle-class values by osmosis. If I were going to have the las
ting effect on these boys that I wanted to have, I needed to be more direct about it.
At least that’s what I thought. As soon as I tried it, though, I could tell the boys didn’t like it, and it introduced a new adversarial note into our relationship that didn’t do it any good.
I didn’t have long to think about it because after a few visits to see the boys in D.C., I had to leave again for Africa with the young do-gooders and adventurers. I suddenly found myself with a group of young Americans in Zanzibar in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which is where the organization rather randomly assigned me to go. Zanzibar has many unique qualities. It is an idyllic tropical island off the coast of mainland Tanzania, heavily scented with the cloves that are its main export (in the region’s saddest chapter, slavery was an earlier export “industry”). It has been a regional trading hub from at least the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, welcoming merchants from lands as far away as the Arabian Peninsula. The main city is a delightfully colorful warren of shoulder-width whitewashed streets, open-air markets, and street vendors selling chunks of smoked octopus and crispy-hot samosas. It is a fascinating, sensual place to visit with picturesque beaches and a complex history, and the students I was with were smitten. I, of course, was in no mood for fun in the sun; I was on the trail of the world’s greatest injustices.
Our assignment was to help build a school—a kind of Habitat for Humanity project ten thousand miles from home. It was a good group of young people, serious about their work, but I couldn’t help noting the irony of importing Americans, at great expense, to do manual labor in Africa. After all, one thing Africa has in abundance is people. I liked hanging around some of the international aid agencies, watching how aid really ended up on the ground in Africa. Each office had a dear elderly lady whose sole function seemed to be to fetch tea. Some had very savvy Zanzibari field employees actually implementing the projects around the island. I occasionally went out into the field with some of these aid workers to see their projects. A village well here, a fish farm there.… There were some great projects, but it seemed like little raindrops in an ocean of unfairness.
Unlikely Brothers Page 8