Dream Country

by Shannon Gibney

  Lovie looked at Kollie for a second, like she was going to ask if he was okay again, and he wished more than anything he could put his headphones back on. But then she smiled and dug something out of her backpack. “Lowell said this top-of-the-line-oh.” It was a Bose Bluetooth speaker. Her older brother worked at Best Buy, and often got special deals on merchandise. Lovie had a small gap between her front teeth that he had always found endearing, especially when she smiled shyly like she was doing now. “I got it cheap-cheap,” she said. “I knew when I saw it, it was perfect for your room-oh.”

  His other speakers had busted last week, probably from too much use. He had to have his music pumping whenever he was home, no matter what he was doing. It was just that simple.

  “You my black diamond-oh,” he said, and he almost meant it. He had had two other girlfriends before Lovie, and none of them did half the stuff for him that she did. She cooked him both burgers and bean soup with fish and cow, helped him with his homework on occasion, and had even cleaned his room once. Lovie didn’t freak out about sex, either, and was pretty much down for whatever. She was a good church girl, showed up every Sunday with her family, and memorized line and verse, but the meaning—especially the dire warnings about the effects of fornication on the soul—seemed to go in one ear and out the other. Which Kollie knew he ought to appreciate.

  Lovie leaned over to give him a quick kiss on the lips, and he let her.

  Angel snickered beside them. Kollie knew she thought all of this was nonsense, that Lovie was wasting her time and energy on him. Angel called herself a feminist, which as far as Kollie could tell meant that she hated men but wanted a penis. She certainly hated their father enough.

  The bus rumbled in the distance. Kollie sighed at the thought of another day at school. Lovie was texting, so he put in his headphones and started pumping the P-Square. The bus stopped, Angel got on, then Lovie, then him. Lovie expected him to sit by her during the ten-minute ride to school.

  “Hey, bro, wassup?” Saah said as he walked by the first front seats. He held out his hand, and Kollie slapped it.

  “Yo, wassup, Comrade?” Kollie said back, dropping his headphones to his neck but leaving the P-Square playing.

  “How everything, Comrade?” Mardia asked, seated next to Saah.

  “Yeah, fine,” Kollie answered, taking a seat behind them, next to Lovie. Mardia and Saah lived a few blocks west of him, and played with him on the soccer team. Their mothers also frequently cooked large platters of Liberian food together for community gatherings, either at their houses or at church.

  “The weekend good-oh,” Mardia said as the bus pulled away from the curb. “I don’t know why it need to end with this school shit.”

  Kollie smiled wryly.

  Saah smacked his friend lightly on the arm. “Man, the weekend been done for a whole day now. Today Tuesday, Mardia.”

  Mardia hit back. “I know that. I just talking about how there never enough time in this country to relax-oh. No wonder the people so wack.”

  Kollie shook his head. Mardia was right, of course. Everyone here worked all the time and went to school when they weren’t working. All the adults, anyway. The Liberians threw their own parties on the weekends, which started at ten and lasted until three or four in the morning, but then they had to get up a few hours later for church or work wiping old white people’s butts at the nursing home.

  Up ahead, the gray institutional face of Brooklyn Center High School got larger and larger in the front windshield. It looked like a prison, with its blank concrete walls and tiny windows.

  “Yo, Comrade, how you doing-oh?” A teasing voice boomed from behind them.

  Kollie felt his fist tighten.

  “Yes, very well, Comrade. ’Cept the shit I got for lunch came out of my mother’s asshole-oh before she put it in my lunchbox,” the voice continued.

  Someone snickered.

  This was how it was most mornings, riding in with the black kids who sat in the very back of the bus, smacking their gum and talking shit about everyone, like they owned the whole fucking vehicle. The guys had do-rags covering their heads, and the sickest Nikes on their feet—Kollie had even seen a few of them with the new LeBron Soldier Xs. Don’t concern yourself with them, his mother had told him since the very first day they had seen the black Americans in the neighborhood. They are not serious, and they don’t have culture. That is why they act that way.

  “Seriously, did y’all smell that rank green shit Saah brought out at lunch yesterday? I swear I saw a fish head in it. A fucking fish head, y’all! Isn’t that, like, a violation of state health laws or something?”

  More laughing. One of them was almost on the floor, he was laughing so hard. The old white dude who drove the bus was watching them in his mirror, smiling.

  “Nigga, you wrong for that. You just wrong.”

  Saah looked from Kollie to Mardia and shook his head. It’s not worth it, is what that meant.

  The bus pulled into the school parking lot, behind a row of others. Kollie felt sick. He couldn’t wait to get off.

  “I’m serious, man. That shit was disgusting. Take that African shit back, ’cause we eat real food that ain’t been taken from the dumpster here. For real.”

  The bus driver pulled the brakes and then opened the doors. Everyone stood up and started filing out.

  Kollie closed his eyes. They have no culture-oh, he could hear his mom saying again.

  Clark slapped Kollie lightly on the back of his head as he walked past him. Kollie jumped.

  “Seriously, though. What the fuck is wrong with y’all? How can you eat that greasy, stank soup every day? Don’t it make you wanna vomit?” he said, turning to look straight at Kollie.

  Beside him, Lovie grabbed his arm. Kollie looked back at her, and she gave him a muted smile. He knew what she was trying to do. Even though he resented it, he relaxed his fist, which had been steadily rising to his chest.

  “Pussy,” Clark said as he walked away.

  * * *

  —

  Kollie’s backpack slammed against the back of his locker so hard that the rattle reverberated down the hall. People turned around to look at him, which pleased him. The hall monitors were not really awake and moving in full force yet, so he was still relatively safe from what he and his friends referred to as the Agents of Discipline. He looked sideways and saw Sonja walking down the hall with her girl Aisha. Aisha was Sonja’s best friend, and she was Kenyan, although she had lived in America since fourth grade. Sonja was wearing a thin purple dress, which somehow managed to look fly and casual at the same time. The dress wasn’t tight or so short that she’d get a dress-code referral, but somehow still she made Kollie’s testicles ache. Sonja was like that, though—a chameleon who didn’t seem to be governed by the same laws as everyone else.

  He caught her eye and nodded at her as she passed. He tried to look as nonchalant as possible. She nodded back, training her gold-flecked, dark brown eyes on him. He thought he also detected a small smile, but he could have imagined it. Then the moment was gone, and he was staring at the back of her legs, listening to the faint swish of her skirt as she passed. He felt his penis harden and turned back into his locker as calmly as he could, so as not to draw any attention. The dead bird by the side of the road this morning. The growing crack in the sidewalk outside the house. The dirty dishes Ma was too tired to wash last night. Thinking of these things, which were the dullest he could conjure, always seemed to bring his body down a notch and back to normal. Today was no different, and after a moment, he slammed his locker door shut and began walking to room 237. He held the tilapia and red sauce with rice his mother had packed for him in his right hand, and at the garbage can in front of room 235, he threw it in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I DON’T KNOW WHY they think this is some MLK Day march-oh,” Haji said as he prepared to enter the room for h
is midday prayers. He was looking at a group of black kids putting up posters on the column the administration had set aside for student organizations. Kollie saw one of them advertised an upcoming die-in to protest a police shooting. “What they need to do is clear out and get over it. Allah got no time for such lazy men-oh. No wonder they can’t graduate, and white man got no job for them.” Kollie and Tetee cracked up and patted Haji on the back. Although he was Liberian, he was also Muslim and floated between the Somalis and Liberians, no problem.

  The prayer room itself, however, was a problem.

  It was a makeshift space, set up on the second floor beside the school’s new atrium. The principal had brought in movable walls to be placed around a small set of prayer rugs, at the request of Somali students, so that they could complete their salat during the school day. There had, of course, been “concerns from the community” about the partitions spoiling the new atrium, and certain parents grumbled about “special treatment.” A white father even spent a morning in the atrium to “see for himself” what was going on. And one afternoon, everyone found an “Ugly Truths about Sharia” flyer on the windshield of their car. But none of it had escalated. And this was before some Somali parents made contact with the ACLU, just in case.

  The real tension was with the black kids, anyway. They had previously used the space now occupied by the prayer room as an informal lounge. “It was our place. Our one space where we could chill and be us in this whole raggedy school,” the black student union president said in an editorial in the school paper. “So, of course, you had to take it away from us.” Some of them would still loiter around the prayer room, trading the dozens, laughing loudly, or even talking about how the space was really theirs. The Somali students mostly ignored them, although lately, nerves had been frayed on both sides.

  Haji saluted good-bye to his friends and then walked toward the prayer room. He smiled easily at the black guys in front of him and nodded. They did not respond, except to grimace. Kollie watched, his stomach beginning to churn, as they crossed their arms and blocked Haji’s way. Their faces were covered in disgust, and when they pushed Haji, Kollie couldn’t say he was surprised. He felt a scalding fury bubble up, and before he knew it, he was rushing toward them. It was Abraham who came out of nowhere and saved him, who grabbed his shoulders and turned him around. “It’s not worth it,” he hissed in Kollie’s ear. “They’re not worth our futures-oh.” Kollie could not stop himself from lunging in their direction again, but this time, Haji lodged his small frame between them.

  “Eh-menh,” he said, so that only the three of them could hear, “listen to your brother, Kollie. Don’t let this be the thing that ruins your life in America.”

  The black guys were looking at them perplexed, wondering what was going on. Abraham had caught Kollie before he could make his move, so it just looked like he had stumbled toward them, his true intent still unknown.

  Kollie would still have grabbed for them, but Abraham, Tetee, and Haji were holding him back.

  The bubble of fury found a way to burst. “Motherfuckers! Don’t think this is over! You goddamn motherfuckers!” Kollie shrieked. “Motherfuckers!” echoed through the atrium silencing all other conversations in the adjacent hallways.

  “We’re counting on it, jungle nigger,” a black guy threw back at him. “Best watch your back.”

  Before he even had time to think, Abraham, Tetee, and Haji moved him around the corner, out of their sight line. “Get off me, man,” Kollie told his friends, and shrugged off their hands.

  Tetee held up his palms. “Easy. Easy, Comrade.”

  Kollie scowled. Then he put his hands on his head and kicked the nearest wall.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “WHO CAN TELL ME about the Great Migration north?” said Yasmine Jackson—Ms. Jackson to her students. Ms. Jackson taught American History and was the only black teacher in the whole school, and as a result, her classes tended to be filled with black and African students. The white kids had plenty of other choices.

  Tetee groaned. “What the fuck,” he said to their entire table. “Again?”

  Kollie laughed openly.

  Ms. Jackson whipped around and eyed him icily. She crossed her arms and kept on staring. Her bright brown eyes seemed to see everything in the room, but there was a familiar weariness in them too. Kollie had begun to notice it more often, not just in Ms. Jackson or his mother, but in the other black and Liberian women he knew.

  Kollie sat up in his seat, a bit chagrined despite himself. He had spent his first nine years in Liberia, and it was drilled into his very marrow that teachers were not to be disrespected—at least not outwardly. That reverence was a liability in this new context, in which it was clear to all of Kollie’s friends that American teachers were out to destroy them, rather than raise them up. It was far easier to ignore them, like they did Mrs. Walker, and pretend that they were not even there. But Ms. Jackson had a hardness in her, like so many of these black women, and wouldn’t allow that.

  “Sorry,” he said softly.

  Apparently satisfied, Ms. Jackson finally broke from his glance and addressed the entire class. “Now then, let’s begin, people. I want to start with what might sound like an obvious question to guide our discussion: Why would anyone ever want to leave their home?”

  Because they have to, Kollie said in his mind, before he could stop himself. Because there is no food, no work, no school, and they have no choice. Or because General Butt Naked or Colonel Do-or-Die will make their Small Boys kill you for a cassava leaf—or for no reason at all.

  As the Second Liberian Civil War geared up, Kollie and his family had fled such rebels and ended up stranded in Ghana in the Gomoa Buduburam refugee camp outside of Accra. They waited three years for whatever papers the people in charge said were needed in order to come to the West. If he tried hard enough, he could still see a dusty orange road in his memory, the compound in the village in Lofa County where he was born and lived the first five years of his life. The goats who lay lazily in the road and would not get up, the mist that covered the tips of Mount Wuteve at dawn. The sound of an AK-47. His mother carrying water on her head and baby Angel, ever-present and watchful, on her back. But these memories were all a patchwork of faded images now; there was no narrative to hold them together and give them meaning.

  “Like, war?” a white kid said.

  “People leave their homes when they’re being treated like second-class citizens,” said a black girl.

  “Because the white man is a crafty devil and drives them to it,” said Henry, a black kid. Henry was Clark’s best friend, and his father was an assistant principal. Some people said he got special treatment because of it.

  An audible cackle passed through the room, as the black kids reacted to his comment.

  “That’s racist,” said the same white kid. “And stupid.”

  “Is that right?” Henry said, and began to stand up. “You got anything else you wanna say, you ignorant—”

  “Enough!” Ms. Jackson exclaimed. She walked over to Henry. “Sit down.”

  Henry looked back at the white kid, who was cowering in his seat.

  “Sit. Down,” Ms. Jackson said again, this time getting up in his face.

  Tetee looked from Kollie to Abraham, his eyebrows raised. Things at Brooklyn Center High School had never seemed calm, but lately, it was like something was rising to the surface. And there only seemed to be a few adults in the building—Ms. Jackson among them—who actually wanted to deal with it.

  She gestured back at Henry’s chair, demanding that he take it, and he finally did grudgingly. Then she slowly walked back to the front of the room.

  “We talk about these things because we have to,” she said, “not because we want to.”

  Kollie sucked his teeth. How many things a day did he have to do, anyway? Was this the way to spend the precious few years of youth?

/>   “You all think you hate one another precisely because we don’t talk about this stuff.” She sighed. “You don’t realize it yet, but that is the real tragedy. Not a name somebody got called.”

  It was strange, almost like she had forgotten that they were there, and was talking to herself, rather than the class.

  Ms. Jackson shook her head, as if waking herself up from a dream. “But we will have these discussions in my class, and when we do, we will conduct them respectfully.” She looked meaningfully at Henry, who was still defiant, and then at the white kid, who was still shrinking. “Understood?”

  They both nodded. Henry rolled his eyes.

  “Good,” she said, her voice returning to its normal, conversational tone. “Now then. Back to the topic of leaving home. During the Great Migration, African Americans relocated at a rate and number so high that it changed the entire face of the country. To them, Jim Crow was something no one should suffer through if they had the choice, so they made the decision to leave for what they hoped would be better, more welcoming communities up north. Unfortunately that wasn’t always—or even often—the case.”

  Kollie let her voice become background noise, as he worked out the beats to a new track he was putting together. He closed his eyes and wondered what it would feel like to have his own music blasting through the speakers of his own club, while he and Sonja danced, their hips grinding together.

  * * *

  —

  “I heard you flunked the test in geometry. Again.”

  No matter how high he turned up his music, it was never enough to drown out Angel. Especially not when it was just the two of them at their mom’s house.

  She leaned into him, pulled one of his headphones, and whispered in his ear. “Mom said this was your last chance, and you messed it up. So that’s it—you’re going back to Liberia.”

  Kollie snickered and turned up the Kanye.