She stayed by her tío Santiago’s side for the rest of the day, even though her abuela remarked that he should tell “the little girl” to go play with kids her own age. But she pretended not to understand, especially because Tío Santiago ignored the comment, too.
On one of the rare occasions when Nur was not with her tío Santiago, she saw him across the room chatting with Sam. Desperation suffused her body, and she felt a sudden and intense hatred of Sam. Nur ran to Tío Santiago, pulling him away, taking full and sole ownership of him with such resolve that Santiago went with her outside where they could speak in private.
“Nur, are you okay, darling?” Santiago said.
Tears that formed behind her eyes but refused to fall were gathering in her belly.
“I have a bellyache,” she said.
Santiago crouched to face his niece. “Is there something else, Nurita?”
“I don’t want you to talk to Sam!” Nur blurted those words, unsure where they came from.
“Okay, I won’t talk to him. But can you tell me why?”
The full weight of her secret pressed on her. Her lips quivered, as if her body’s way of coaxing tears that needed to fall. Her breathing quickened and she stiffened. All the words she wanted to say collected in a stagnant cesspool inside her belly. “I don’t know. My stomach really hurts, Tío,” was all she could muster.
“Have you eaten, Nurita?” Santiago asked and she answered with a slight shake of her head.
“Let’s sneak off to the park and get some hot dogs. But we can’t be gone long or your mom will be upset with me,” Santiago said.
They left through the backyard and walked two blocks to the park. While they were eating their hot dogs, Santiago asked gently, “Nurita, has Sam or anyone ever hurt you or asked you to do something you didn’t think was good?”
“No.”
Keeper of Seekrets. Never Tattle. Never Squeal.
“Nurita, this is our family, but no matter what they say to you, only believe that you are wonderful.”
Nur nodded. “Okay, Tío.”
He smiled and added, “And when you’re older, do what I did. Get away from them as quickly and as far as you can.”
Tío Santiago left that night, without saying good-bye to Nur. She heard the big fight and knew that it was at least partly about her. It happened after Tío Santiago tucked her into bed. She could hear loud voices alternating between English and Spanish. Her mother said Santiago didn’t know shit about shit and should stick to being a loser, drug-addict hippie. She said he could talk about her parenting when he became a real man and had kids or at least got a job. Tío Santiago asked her if she knew when was the last time Nur had a meal or even a bath. He said she smelled as if she hadn’t bathed in a while. Nur’s mother told him to fuck off.
“What is wrong with this family?” Santiago yelled, and then he said the words that became solid objects the moment they hit the air. Words that became a fixture in Nur’s life: “She’s not an old shoe you can tuck away or throw out when you feel like it.”
There it was. An old shoe. The lurking thing inside her, always there, ready to be a bellyache, suddenly took form in the shape of a tattered old shoe. It walked up and down Nur’s body as she lay motionless. The old shoe stopped precisely on her belly. There were more voices and then she heard Sam say, “Why is a grown man like you spending time with a pretty little girl, anyway?”
There was a long silence, then a thud and the sound of things breaking before Nur heard her mother scream, “Get the fuck out of my house!”
Doors were slammed and anger seeped into Nur’s room from the space under the door and through the keyhole, crawling along the walls, curling her body on itself, and painting her sleep with dread of “the big day” tomorrow.
In the morning, she walked slowly into the hair-raising silence of the house, where she was first greeted by Sam. He was pouring juice into a glass; his left eye was swollen and bruised. The rest of the family was sitting around the table and they all turned to look at Nur.
“Where’s Tío Santiago?” Nur asked, her words tiptoeing amid the stillness.
Her mother turned away. Nur didn’t know if she should sit down or retreat. Her heart beat faster and harder in her chest. Sam did not speak. She had messed everything up with Sam, and now Tío Santiago was gone. What had she done? Her body trembled.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Nur said.
“Go back to your room. You were determined to ruin this day from the start and now you got what you wanted.” The words clawed at Nur and thickened the air as she sat on her bed, hungry, then lay down, then sat again. The old shoe walked around in her stomach and everything began to hurt. But she stayed in her room, until Sam came hours later with a sandwich, chips, juice, and cookies. She stared at him apologetically, sorry for turning on him. Sorry for hating him.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” she said.
“It’s okay, my princess. It’s good this happened so you can see for yourself who really loves you and who is going to stick by you,” Sam said, and Nur flung her arms around him.
“I’ve missed you,” he continued, but Nur did not react. “They’re leaving for the rehearsal in a little while and you and I can join them late, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good girl.”
He left. Nur ate in her room, happy to ignore the commotion downstairs until there was the sound of a front door opening and closing, followed by car doors opening and closing, car engines starting and fading. Then, there was a silence cracking with the creak of stairs under the weight of someone’s feet. She put her book on the bedside stand, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. She steadied her fists in her lap, staring at them as the footsteps reached the top step, which creaked the loudest.
Sam walked into her room, “Hey, princess,” he said.
Nur was ill throughout the wedding but didn’t dare mention the pains in her belly or the fire in her pee, and the next day, she was immobilized by fever. Sam brought her soup and kept checking on her.
“I love you, Nur, you know that, right?”
“I love you, too.” Even at the young age of nine, Nur wondered how love could occupy the same space as hatred.
“You remember that lady from the DSS?” Sam asked.
“Yeah.”
“She came to the house earlier. Your uncle Santiago is trying to cause trouble between us. He’s jealous of what you and I have.”
“No he’s not!” Nur mustered as much defiance as her limp body would allow.
“Well, you saw how he abandoned you. Who is the person who always stands by you and sticks up for you, Nur? No one will love you like I do, and you have to make sure that you don’t say anything that is going to break up our family,” Sam said.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She’s jealous that I love you so much.”
“Sam, my stomach really hurts and the walls are moving.”
“I’ll go get you some ginger ale. That usually helps.”
A while later, it could have been minutes or hours, Nur awoke to shouts downstairs. She could hear her mother, Sam, and other strange voices, but she didn’t have the strength to get up. The voices came nearer and began up the stairs. She thought she recognized the voice insisting, “Sir, we have a court order. If you don’t get out of my way, you will be arrested.”
The source of those words came into Nur’s room. “Nzinga!” Nur yelled her name, but no sound came out. Nzinga rushed to her bedside, “Jesus lord! Nur?” Then she turned and yelled in her wonderful accent, “Call an ambulance. She’s burning up.”
Nur blinked, feeling the warmth of her lids slide over her eyes.
“Jesus lord, she’s soaking in sweat and urine. What’s wrong with you people!” Nzinga panted as someone lifted Nur from the bed.
“I’m really cold,” Nur whispered. As she was carried down the stairs, she glimpsed Sam, tears in his eyes. Outside, she caught sight of a policewoman holding her mother’s arms. H
er mother was screaming at someone. It was Tío Santiago.
Nur closed her heavy eyelids again, returning to the dream that had been interrupted by the commotion. There was a river. A girl named Mariam and a boy named Khaled with a streak of white hair who was teaching Mariam to read. She knew them well from her jiddo’s stories long ago. “Nur, it’s good to see you again!” Mariam said.
“Will you teach me, too?” Nur asked Khaled.
“You’ll learn to read Arabic in college, Nur,” Khaled said, and he pointed in the distance to a handsome young man tending to bees. “There’s your jiddo.” Nur’s heart swelled. It burst from her chest and flew. She chased after it, calling to the young beekeeper in the distance, “Jiddo, jiddo! Jiddo, jiddo! It’s me, Nur.”
She kept calling for him and felt a hand on hers. A woman with an accent called to her, “Oh, baby girl …” She looked around and saw Nzinga’s metallic blue gele first, then her kind face. There were beeps and lights and white walls. Tío Santiago was there, too.
They spoke, then he kissed Nur’s forehead. “You’re going to be all right, Nur.”
Doctors kept her two more days in the hospital to “make sure the infection has completely cleared.” It had been “pretty bad,” they said. She was a “lucky girl,” because the infection had gone from her tushie all the way into her “kidneys.” Her “vagina was bruised inside,” like someone had “done something to it.” Could she tell them “how that happened”?
She mustered an emphatic “No!” when they asked if her Tío Santiago had hurt her. “It was Sam!”
They didn’t make her tell everything. She was allowed to draw pictures to show what Sam had done to her. She thought she had to draw what she had done to Sam, too, so she did, and it made Nzinga cry.
Soon it was time to leave the hospital, with Nzinga once again in her life. This time, at the ripe age of nine, she refused to go until someone brought her secret book and Mahfouz, her bear. Nzinga got them. And on her first night in a new foster home, Nur snuggled with Mahfouz, staring at the cover of her book, contemplating the words Jiddo and Me, trying to remember the tenderness that had been. She thought of an old shoe and sensed inside her body there littered so many islands of crusted uncried tears. She looked at the still unopened book and put it aside. Nearly fifteen years would pass before Nur would open that book again, as she searched her memories for Tío Santiago, Jiddo, and a boy named Khaled with a streak of white hair.
TWENTY-SIX
More than two decades would pass before Teta Nazmiyeh finally heard the stories of Nur’s life. When Teta looked into those mismatched eyes, she felt as if time had folded on itself, and she gave glory to Allah. She said the most luminous light is found at the other end of darkness. And she said that Nzinga was one of us, that she would always have a home in Gaza.
Nzinga had been in the United States almost two years when she was assigned the case of a little girl named Nur whose sole guardian, her grandfather, was seriously ill. Her task was to secure temporary housing for the girl while she attempted reunification or placement with relatives.
The first time she met Mr. Mamdouh Baraka and his granddaughter at Charlotte Mercy Hospital, the old man said things to her like, “Thank you, my daughter,” and “Yes, my child.” It surprised her to hear an Arab man use African linguistic mores that make relatives of strangers. They spoke for a while, and when the little girl had gone out of the room, he gripped her hand, begging with all the force he could gather, “Please help my granddaughter get to our family in Gaza if I don’t make it out of here.” He showed her the paperwork and flight arrangements, and gave her the name of an old friend in California who could communicate with his sister in Gaza, since Nazmiyeh couldn’t speak English.
Nzinga looked at him, unsure of herself, and in the shadows trampling his face was the weight of exile’s untouchable loneliness. Specks of age pushed into skin, Muslim Palestinian skin, consigned to peripheries and inferiorities. Displacement had warped his soul and the possibility of leaving his granddaughter alone there deposited in his eyes a wild fear.
Nzinga saw it all and stayed at the hospital longer than she had planned. “I will do everything I can for Nur,” she said to the grandfather, “I promise you.”
When the sad day came and went, and Nzinga finally met Nur’s mother, she understood why Mamdouh had insisted that Nur be sent to her family in Gaza. The mother had little interest in her daughter, claiming to be financially unable to care for Nur, until Nzinga was obliged to inform her that Nur’s grandfather had a significant life insurance policy put into a trust fund for Nur’s sustenance and education.
Nzinga tried, but she could not make a compelling case for Nur to be sent to live with relatives in another country when her biological mother would take her. Besides, the state would not allow Nur’s travel outside of the United States as long as she was a ward of the court. There was nothing Nzinga could do but hand Nur over to her mother. And it pained Nzinga, even if it did not surprise her, that four years later, she was tasked, once again, with finding a home for Nur. After six temporary foster homes and six different schools over the course of two years, a permanent space opened up for Nur at a Southern Baptist children’s home in Thomasville, North Carolina, called Mills Home.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Nur had everything we wanted. We thought all Americans did. But for all the security and freedom and opportunity she had; for all the learning and good grades; for all the ways she excelled, Nur was the most devastated person we knew. There was no place in the world for her to be. She could be tolerated, maybe even accepted, as long as she was good. But when she wasn’t, she was sent away, abandoned. So she was always trying to be good, submissive, and she panicked when someone got upset with her. Life burrowed holes and tunnels in her. It filled her with an immense silence that grew teeth and claws that cut her from the inside.
Mills home was a campus of twenty “cottages” set up by the Southern Baptish Church. Each cottage had a set of “house parents” who cooked for ten to fifteen children.
Nur was twelve years old when Nzinga drove her there on a warm summer day. She noticed that Nzinga had put on weight since the last time she had seen her and she wanted to call her a fatty. She thought about all the mean things she could say to Nzinga. Something about her stupid braids, maybe. But words always got stuck in her throat. She could write them down later. On paper she could tell herself how much she hated Nzinga for moving her from one shitty foster home to another.
“Nur, I know there is terrible hurt inside of you,” Nzinga broke the cold silence. “And it didn’t help that it has taken so long to find a permanent placement for you.”
Placement. Nur was fluent in the jargon of Child Welfare. She was a case of “neglect and sexual abuse without possibility of reunification.” It had taken a lot of effort on Nzinga’s part to get that classification for Nur so she didn’t have to go back to live with her mother. But Nur wondered sometimes if that wouldn’t be better than bouncing from one school to another. Always being the new kid who either got bullied or who made friendships that were torn like paper in short order.
Before Nur went to her first foster home, Nzinga had given her a prayer mat with salat clothes. “Your grandfather wanted you to continue to pray as you did together and I gave your mama the mat and clothes he had entrusted to me,” Nzinga had said. “But I figure you never got it since I haven’t seen you pray like you used to in the hospital with your grandfather.”
Nur thanked her for the gift. But her new foster mother made it clear that hers was a Christian home and demanded Nur hand over the rolled up mat. Nur never got it back.
“I’ll get a requisition from the county to get you a new prayer mat and salat clothes,” Nzinga said the day she picked Nur up to take her to the second foster home. “I should have known better than to put you with that family. I’m sorry, Nur.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want a stupid prayer mat anyway,” Nur said.
The second fos
ter home was a three-story row home in Charlotte, where six other foster children lived under the care of a kind elderly woman from Jamaica. She and Nzinga embraced when they arrived. Nur did not react or respond. She stared at whatever inanimate object she could find, a place for her eyes to sit and rest. Her foster mother was kind and Nur adapted to her new home, which started to feel like family. She made friends at her new school and soon began to thrive.
But eight months later, Nzinga arrived to move her once more. All the kids were being moved. Their foster mother’s trip to the hospital the day before had left her disabled from a stroke. None of the kids were allowed to visit her and Nur never saw her again. Just like that, family was formed and dismantled, forever.
The third through sixth foster homes were a blur, blending together into a single incident where some older kids pissed in a cup and poured it on her while she slept, then accused her of wetting the bed. Nur didn’t know how to retaliate. Everything inside of her, words, rage, humiliation, even joy would try to find a way out, but it all got stuck. In her throat, her belly, behind her eyes. Nothing made its way out. Clots of unuttered words and uncried tears formed and took root, spawning a silence that spread to all her parts, such that everything about her seemed quiet. She breathed and ate quietly. Her eyes were remote, without language. That’s how she was the first day she arrived at Mills Home. Mrs. Whitter, her new housemother, a desiccated white woman with exceptionally thin lips, was delighted, “Praise Jesus!” that the “first Muslim child on campus” had been delivered to them. “We love and accept everybody here,” she said.
Nur didn’t react. She plopped her sights on something insignificant and waited for the greetings, the introductions, the rule readings, the importance of God and Jesus in each cottage, the formalities of yet another “family,” to be over. And when Nzinga left, Nur didn’t say good-bye.
The Blue Between Sky and Water Page 9