Behold the Dreamers

by Mbue, Imbolo

  Neni shrugged.

  “You’ll regret it if you go back home, I’m telling you right now,” Betty said. “Why are you guys acting like little children? Life is hard everywhere. You know that maybe it will get better one day. Maybe it will not get better. Nobody knows tomorrow. But we keep on trying.”

  “You know how hard things have been. Ever since he lost his—”

  “What about the money you got from Mrs. Edwards?”

  “Ssshh,” Neni said. She looked out of the kitchen to make sure Liomi wasn’t nearby. “Jende says we cannot use the money,” she whispered. “He’s hidden it in a separate bank account and says we’ll only touch it when worse comes to worst.”

  “Why does he get to decide how to spend the money?”

  “Ah, Betty, there’s no need for you to put it like that.”

  With her mouth half open and her nose flared, Betty looked at Neni, moving her eyes slowly up Neni’s face, from chin to forehead and back down, twice.

  “Neni?” she said, cocking her head.

  “Eh?”

  “Did you march to that woman’s house that day and earn that money for yourself?”

  Neni nodded.

  “Is that money Jende’s money or both of your money?”

  “It’s both—”

  “Then tell your husband it’s your money, too, and you want to use it to stay!”

  “What kind of talk is that?” Neni said. “You think I’m an American woman? I cannot just tell my husband how I want something to be.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know what kind of man Jende is. He’s a good man, but he’s still a man.”

  “So you’re going to go back to Cameroon?”

  “I don’t want to go!”

  “Then don’t go! Tell him you want to stay in America and keep trying. There are one million things you have to do before you start thinking about packing your things—you get your papers first and you go from there. I’ve told you if you need to borrow money for your tuition I know people who can help you out. I’ll make some calls tomorrow, maybe even tonight I’ll start calling people. Just … don’t even think about this going home nonsense anymore. Tell Jende you’re not going anywhere. That you want to stay here and keep trying!”

  Neni looked at Betty and her gap tooth that divided her mouth into two equally beautiful halves. The woman knew all about trying. Thirty-one years in this country and Betty was still trying, and Neni couldn’t understand why. Betty had come here as a child with her parents and gotten her papers through them. She had been a citizen for over a decade, and yet here she was, in her early forties, working two jobs as a certified nursing assistant at nursing homes, stuck in nursing school. Neni couldn’t understand how that was possible. If she were a citizen, she would be a pharmacist in no more than five years. A pharmacist with a nice SUV and a home in Yonkers or Mount Vernon or maybe even New Rochelle.

  That evening she sat at the desktop for almost two hours, searching for advice on Google. “How to convince husband.” “How to get what you want.” “Husband wants to move back home.” She found no advice remotely relevant to her situation.

  Later, as she stood in front of the mirror staring at her face before applying her exfoliating mask, she promised herself she would fight Jende till the end. She had to.

  It wasn’t only that she loved New York City and the times it had given her and the times it held in store for her. It wasn’t just because she was hopeful that she would one day become a pharmacist, and a successful one at that. It was hardly only about what she would leave behind, things she could never find in her hometown, things like horse-drawn carriages on city streets, and gigantic lighted Christmas trees in squares and plazas, and pretty parks where musicians played for free beside polychromatic foliage. It wasn’t merely for what she was leaving behind. No. It was mostly for what her children would be deprived of, and for where they would all be returning to: Limbe. It was for the boundless opportunities they would be denied, the kind of future she was almost denied in her father’s house. She was going to fight for her children, and for herself, because no one journeyed far away from home to return without a fortune amassed or dream achieved. She needed to fight so she and her children would never become objects of ridicule the way she’d been when she’d gotten pregnant and dropped out of school.

  “How are all those people in town going to look at us?” she said to Jende a few days later, before he left for work. “Look at them, they will say. America don pass them.”

  “So that’s what’s bothering you, eh?” was his response. “You want to spend the rest of your life living like this because you’re afraid people will laugh at you?”

  “No!” she replied, pointing in his face as he put on his jacket. “That’s not what’s bothering me. You’re what’s bothering me!”

  Betty called minutes after he left. “Now I understand why some women choose to marry other women,” she said before Neni had a chance to talk about her own morning.

  “What happened?” Neni asked disinterestedly, wishing she hadn’t picked up the phone.

  “I go to Macy’s and buy one dress on sale, and Alphonse acts as if all I do is shop.”

  “What has that got to do with marrying a woman?”

  “What woman is going to make another woman feel bad for buying a dress that makes her feel good? I’m not going to wear an old dress to go to a wedding where people are going to take my picture and put it on Facebook. Next thing you know people will be commenting on my picture ‘Betty looks so old, she looks so fat.’ These days you have to be careful about—”

  “Betty, please, I have to go to the store—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  Neni ignored the question.

  “Is it Jende?”

  “Who else?” Neni said. “I don’t know what else I can say to him.”

  Betty grunted disapprovingly once, then twice. “You know,” she said, “I’ve heard a lot of crazy things in my life, but I’ve never heard of anyone leaving America to go back to their poor country.”

  “He thinks he knows something the rest of us don’t know.”

  “What did he say when you mentioned the divorce?”

  “I haven’t spoken to him about it.”

  “You still haven’t said anything! This whole time—”

  “Please, I don’t need you to make me feel bad, too, okay? I’m begging you. I’ve been thinking about it …”

  “You cannot just sit there thinking about it.”

  “I’m not just sitting there thinking about it! I’ll talk to him about it; not today—he’s coming back home from work too late.”

  “When are you going to ask him then? You know the longer you wait—”

  “Nothing is going to change in a few days.”

  “So you’re going to wait till next year?”

  “I said I’ll talk to him.”

  Fifty-one

  A TOPIC LIKE THIS HAD TO BE APPROACHED WITH UTMOST CARE. NOT TOO seriously. Not too lightly. It had to be brought up with just enough finesse so it wouldn’t become a fight. Which was why she waited until he was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. She entered while he was lining his toothbrush with Colgate, from one end of the bristles to the other, the way he always did it, even back in Limbe where a tube of toothpaste sometimes cost as much as a pile of cocoyams.

  She sat on the toilet seat and watched him turn on the faucet and wet the toothbrush. “I was thinking,” she began, looking at his face in the mirror.

  He put the toothbrush in his mouth and began brushing, intensely scrubbing his molars.

  “It’s just that, I was … Betty, she has a cousin … she says he can … he has citizenship.”

  He spat out the white foam. “So?” he said, not bothering to turn around.

  “He can help us, bébé. With papier.”

  He put the toothbrush back in his mouth and con
tinued brushing: up, left, right, down. His eyes in the mirror were the reddest she’d ever seen them. “If you’re trying to say what I think you’re about to say,” he said, his mouth half full of foam, “shut up right now.”

  “But … please hear me out, bébé. Please. Betty asked him and he said he can do it for us.”

  With his mouth half-open, a thin trail of foam pouring out, he turned around to look at her. She turned her face away.

  “The money from Mrs. Edwards,” she said, “we should use it to pay him.”

  He lifted the faucet handle, scooped water into his mouth and swished, then spat out the foamy water and began washing his face, splashing as far as the mirror above and the trash can below. When he was done, he pulled the towel hanging on the shower door and covered his face, breathing in and out through it.

  “We divorce, I marry him. I get papier through him, then me and him divorce and me and you marry back, but the whole time we continue living …”

  As if he’d heard something unbelievably stunning, he abruptly pulled the towel off his face, which seemed to have grown blacker than his hair. He turned around to face her. “Those screws in your head holding your brain together,” he said, poking his temple with his index finger, “they’ve gotten loose, right?”

  “We don’t have to go back to Cameroon, Jends,” she said, her voice so laden with despair it sank with every word.

  He dropped the towel on the floor and opened the door. “If you ever open your mouth and suggest this kind of nonsense to me again—”

  “But bébé—”

  “I said, if you ever say this kind of foolish talk to me again, Neni, I swear to God—”

  “The money from Mrs. Edwards, it’s my money, too!”

  He stood at the door, looking down at her looking up at him. “If you dare open your mouth and say one more thing, Neni!”

  “You’ll do what?”

  He slammed the door in her face and left her frozen on the toilet seat.

  Fifty-two

  BUBAKAR AGREED TO DO AS JENDE WANTED. HE WOULD PETITION THE judge to close the deportation case in exchange for Jende leaving the country on his own.

  “Voluntary departure is what they call it,” Bubakar said. “You leave quietly within ninety days. The government will be happy. They don’t have to pay for your airfare back to Cameroon.”

  “And I can come back to America?” Jende asked.

  “Of course,” the lawyer said. “If the embassy gives you a visa again. But will they? I cannot tell you the answer. You will not be banned from returning to the country like you would be if you had just overstayed your visa and left. You can still come back, but will you be able to get another visa after what you did with the last one? Only the embassy in Cameroon can decide that.”

  What about his wife and children? Jende wanted to know. Would they be able to come back? The baby could always come back because she was American, Bubakar told him. As for Neni, she should be fine if she formally withdrew from BMCC and left by a certain date after the international students office terminated her record in SEVIS. The embassy would probably give her another visa in the future because they wouldn’t hold it against her that she once came in on a student visa and was unable to finish her studies because she had a baby.

  “But your son, Liomi,” Bubakar said. “He will be in the same hot soup as you.”

  “Why? He is only a child. They cannot punish him if his parents brought him here. I am the one who made him overstay his visa. It’s my fault, Mr. Bubakar. It’s not his fault.”

  “Eh? Na so you think, abi?” The lawyer laughed his usual two-note laugh. “Let me tell you something, my brother,” he said. “American government does not care whether you are a one-day-old baby who was brought here and ended up illegal or whether you were blindfolded and tossed into a shipping container and woke up to find yourself in Kansas City. You hear me? American government doesn’t give the tiniest piece of shit whose fault it is. Once you are here illegally, you are here illegally. You will pay the price.”

  “But—”

  “That’s why you have to think very carefully about this decision to take your family back home,” he said. “You say this country don pass you, eh? I believe you. Sometimes this country pass me, too. America can be hell, I know. Man nova see suffer until the day ei enter America, make I tell you.”

  He laughed again, the kind of laughter released only at the remembrance of awful things past. “I mean,” he went on, “I’ve been here for twenty-nine years. For the first three years, I spent hours every month searching for a one-way ticket back to Nigeria. But you know what, my brother? Patience. Perseverance. That is the key. Persevere it like a man. Look at me today, eh? I have a house in Canarsie. My one daughter is in medical school. My son is a civil engineer in New Jersey. Another daughter is in Brooklyn College. Hopefully, she’ll get into Fordham Law and become a lawyer like me. I’m very proud of them. When I look at them, I do not one bit regret all my suffering. I can say without feeling any shame that life is good for me. I persevered, and look at me now. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you that life is going to get easy for you next month or next year, because it might not. It’s a long, hard journey from struggling immigrant to successful American. But you know what, my brother? Anyone can do it. I am an example that with hard work and perseverance, anyone can do it.”

  “Rubbish,” Winston said when Jende told him what Bubakar had said. Of course he did not want Jende to return home. Cameroon did not have opportunities like America, but that did not mean one should stay in America if doing so no longer made sense. “Why does everyone make it sound as if being in America is everything?” he said.

  “All this stress,” Jende said. “For what?”

  “For you to die and leave bills for your children to pay,” Winston replied.

  Even if Jende got papers, Winston went on, without a good education, and being a black African immigrant male, he might never be able to make enough money to afford to live the way he’d like to live, never mind having enough to own a home or pay for his wife and children to go to college. He might never be able to have a really good sleep at night.

  “Whenever I talk to someone in pays who is trying to leave their good job and run to America, I tell them, ‘Look out, oh. Look out. Make man no say I no be warn ei say America no easy.’”

  “But you didn’t warn me seriously enough,” Jende said, laughing.

  “No,” Winston said, laughing back. “I didn’t warn you. I just bought you a ticket so you could come see it for yourself.”

  “That is not a lie.”

  “But if someone asks me right now if they should leave their job at home and come to America, I swear, Bo, I will beg them to forget about America for now.”

  “Maybe wait until after this recession thing finishes.”

  “What finish? Is it ever going to finish?”

  “One day, surely, the country is going to get better.”

  “I don’t know about that, Bo. I just don’t know. In short, even some people who went to law school like me cannot expect a good life in this country anymore. I read stories about Mexicans who crossed the border to enter America, and now they’re trying to cross the border to go back to their country. Why? Because there’s nothing left here for them to come and get.”

  “It’s people like you who are lucky,” Jende said. “To have a good job and money.”

  “You think I’m lucky?”

  “Are you not luckier than the rest of us? If you don’t think you’re lucky, you can come live in this Harlem dumpster and I’ll live near Columbus Circle.”

  “I guess I’m lucky,” Winston said after a chuckle. “I work like a donkey from morning to night for the people who are taking everything and leaving only a little for everyone else. But at the end of the day, I go home with piles of their dirty money, so—”

  “But how man go do?”

  “How man go do? I cannot do anything. And even if I could I probably w
ouldn’t, because I like the money, even if I hate how I make it.”

  “As the Americans would say, ‘Gotta do wha ya gotta do.’”

  “I’m just sorry for people like you, Bo,” Winston went on. “This country—” He sighed. “One day, I’m telling you, there will be no more Mexicans crossing the border to come to America. Just wait and see.”

  “Maybe it will be Americans running to Mexico,” Jende said.

  “I won’t be surprised if that happens one day,” Winston agreed, and they both burst into laughter at the image of a multitude of Americans surging across the Rio Grande.

  Jende got off the phone thankful that Winston had supported his decision. He needed the validation—he’d found it nowhere else, not even from his mother. When he had told her of his plan to return home, she had wondered why he was coming back when others were running out of Limbe, when many in his age group were fleeing to Bahrain and Qatar, or trekking and taking a succession of crowded buses to get from Cameroon to Libya so they could cross to Italy on leaky boats and arrive there with dreams of a happier life if the Mediterranean didn’t swallow them alive.

  Fifty-three

  THE DAY LIOMI WAS BORN SHE HELD HIM AND CRIED FOR OVER AN HOUR. It had been a long pregnancy, almost forty-two weeks of nearly every awful pregnancy symptom imaginable: ghastly morning sickness and vomiting for four months; virtually nonstop headaches for the next two months; back pain that had her unable to roll over in bed and stand up without groaning; swollen feet that couldn’t fit in the size ten shoes Jende had bought for her; a brutal thirty-hour labor. During the last month, she had used a cane to run errands and get around town, not wanting to spend all day in bed and have her siblings and friends laugh at her for acting as if pregnancy were an illness. Stop behaving like an old woman, they surely would have said, lovingly poking fun at her awkward gait and large belly. What would you do if you were pregnant and had five other children to look after? her father had said to her, angrily, when she said she wouldn’t be carrying bags of groceries on her head anymore since pregnant women shouldn’t carry anything too heavy. She hated his snide comments but, without a husband to protect her, she had to remain in his house and be subdued by them. When Liomi finally came out—after two midwives had maneuvered and pressed on her belly for over an hour while her mother and aunt held her legs up and shouted, push, push, if you know how to enjoy the sweet part then you must know how to suffer the bitter part, too—she hugged his bloodied and puffy body and cried so hard she feared she would use up all the water and strength in her body. It’s over, the women in the room said to her, what are you still crying for? But she knew it wasn’t over, and the women knew that, too. It was only the beginning of far more pains, but it would all be worth it as long as at the end of the day her baby was alive and well and she could look into his eyes and see what a wonderful, wonderful gift she’d been given.