* * *
Within a month, I had built a shellacked veneer, tough and thin. Each morning I walked two or three hours to fetch water. Then I waited in line at the pump, a plastic gallon jug in each hand, for an hour more. The other women, who were probably only seventeen, tried to bully me out of my spot.
“Are you going to be able to carry that jug? It’s bigger than your head. It’s bigger than your whole body.”
I gave them my newly mastered do-not-fuck-with-me stare. I’d developed it by telling myself that I was twice as old and five times stronger than these pitiful women, who could only cope with their lives by making a six-year-old feel small. My act was not often well-received, nor was it always deployed well.
I took it upon myself to look after the other children at the camp, and they provoked in me contempt and rage. Many walked around naked. I considered them pathetic and weak. I had grown expert in one thing in my short life: I knew what it meant to be taken care of. Their treatment was not it.
One day UNHCR workers set out bags of clothes: old T-shirts, sweaters, underwear, pants. I grabbed an armful, took it back to my tent, and rounded up all the naked young children I could to give them something to wear. When I had run out of clothes I just yelled: “Where is your mother? Get out of here and go tell your mother to put clothes on you.”
Parents complained to Claire: Your younger sister is terrorizing our kids. I could not help myself. I couldn’t stand the naked two- and three-year-olds. They looked to me like strays—filthy, unloved, drooling, bugs crawling on their faces, flies around their eyes that nobody bothered to swat.
One day I tried to bathe a little boy on our rock. He lunged away, as if to flee, and I grabbed his wrist and yelled: “Sit down.” Soon after, I started admonishing parents: “Put your kids on a leash!” Not long after that, I was forbidden to enter certain areas of camp.
I made a point of visiting the bathroom as seldom as possible. The biggest of my fears was falling into the disgusting pit latrine. One morning a child did. A man with a bucket had to fish him out.
* * *
When we heard the World Food Program trucks rumbling, all the kids would run, barefoot and shirtless, pushing and tripping each other on the uneven trails. The grown-ups didn’t hurry. They dragged themselves, in their own time, over the hill with their torn plastic sacks. When asked, they flashed their red cards indicating their allotted portion of maize.
After a while we could barely eat it. The maize made people constipated for days. At night a young man from our unit snuck out of the camp and found a miller in town who could grind the maize into flour.
Flour! This made my life so much easier. I could now cook by stirring the flour in boiling water and letting that steep for fifteen minutes. Or I could add just enough water to make a thick paste, wrap the paste in banana leaves, and put the leaves over boiling water to steam. I could knead the flour and water into a dough and then cook that over dry heat, setting our pot on hot stones.
Someone, somewhere inside UNHCR cared just enough, or so it seemed to me, to realize that maize alone could not possibly sustain a growing body. So once a month aid workers called all the kids over to the Center for Children, which was really just a large tarp strung up to provide shade, with a dirt floor and no sides. We children were each given half of a red vitamin—half, not even a whole one.
Also once a month, on a different day, each child received a biscuit. The biscuits were made with soy and protein powder and they tasted like cardboard soaked in sugar.
Once a month: half a vitamin. Once a month: a biscuit. It was such horrible teasing.
* * *
I tried to stay vigilant about the bugs. I tried to stay clean. I tried to remember who I was before. I tried not to cry. But there were always bugs in my feet, and in my clothes, and in my bed. I worked at pretending that this was tolerable, that this did not make me feel repulsive, that this did not turn my world into a noxious yellow-green, that this did not make me feel buried, that this did not make me feel that I was worthless except as food. I succeeded in projecting this fantasy to others. When I polished up my armor I could project: I am Clemantine. I am valuable. I am a fighter. I am human.
But I could not fool myself.
The one tenderness I allowed myself was singing before I went to sleep. My mother taught me a song:
Scooch closer to God and tell him
Everything that is painful to your heart
Everything that makes you sad
Everything that makes you lonely…
Whisper to God
God has not forsaken you or abandoned you.
My mother taught me the song so I could cheer myself up when I felt wronged or was in a bad mood—say, if Pudi didn’t want to play with me or I broke a favorite toy. I sang the song for ten minutes a night. I felt hurt all the time.
4
The night before I started school I lay awake rehearsing: “Good morning. It’s fine to meet you. My name is Clemantine. Thank you.”
We’d moved into a rented apartment on North Winthrop Avenue, on the north side of Chicago, near the Thorndale stop on the Red Line. One bedroom, on the fourth floor. It felt luxurious. The church had pooled money to buy us furnishings, so I now had a daybed in the living room, covered in a white spread and lots of pillows. Every time I walked into the apartment I thought, This is my bed, my bed.
I shared it with Mariette but I considered it mine.
My alarm went off at 5:00 a.m. I ironed my nice new American middle-school outfit, the jeans and sweater I’d picked out from Old Navy, and put on the choker Julia Becker had given to me as a parting gift. By 6:00 a.m. I’d done my hair and brushed my teeth, and at 7:00 a.m. Claire walked me down the block to the Swift School. The George B. Swift Specialty School was three stories tall, with long banks of windows high above the street, and a square yard with a jungle gym. I noticed kids walking into the cafeteria to eat a free breakfast, so, good former refugee that I was, I walked into the cafeteria and ate the free breakfast too.
I was too old for any grade lower than sixth, so I was put in sixth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Garcia, wore lipstick and black square glasses and looked very fit. She kept mints on her desk. When she introduced me to the class, she pronounced my name exactly right.
I sat in the third row, near the windows. I spent the days drawing with paper and crayons. I had no idea what was going on.
* * *
On Sundays Mary Anne, from the Church of the Redeemer, came to Claire’s apartment to tutor me in English. She tucked her brown hair behind her ears. She looked as if she’d never been scared in her entire life.
Each week she brought a stack of notecards. On one side was a picture of a shoe or a car or a nose or whatever, and on the other side was the word SHOE or CAR. My job was to color the pictures. I found this very childish and soothing.
People asked me if I was happy. I was still unclear on what happy was. I drank chocolate milk at school at lunch each Friday. People from church threw a baby shower for Claire and lavished her with onesies, a giant box of diapers, and a double stroller.
I was trying hard in my new role: to be grateful, to be teenager-ish. Yet I often felt overwhelmed and miserable and dreamed of jumping off the roof of the Swift School and floating away. The Beckers invited us for Thanksgiving and we were the most ridiculously stereotypical refugees. Claire whispered to me that she wanted to take all the extra food from the buffet and bring it home to sell it.
Christmas was the same: overload. A turkey and a ham. All the colors, all the smells, all the sounds made me dizzy. I’d grown alarmingly thin. I refused to eat and drink.
I could not believe any of it but I made myself believe it. I needed to see the world in front of me clearly to perform my part well. I needed to crack the code. So many times, in our former life, I’d had to become someone else in orde
r to stay out of a refugee camp or out of jail, to stay alive. I had played a mother. I had played a yes-ma’am younger sister. I had made myself a nobody, invisible. Now I had become this strange creature: an American teenager.
Yet I wasn’t like the teenagers at my school. My mother and father were…who? Nobody in my life attended parent-teacher conferences. Nobody made doctor’s appointments for me. Nobody checked to see if I did my homework.
Eventually Mrs. Becker stepped in. Near the end of the year she talked to my teacher. I needed more—more resources, more guidance, a more stable home environment, one in which I could really be a kid. I needed to go to a better school.
* * *
The woman I came to call my American mother was petite and blond, Southern and proper, and the only other thing I knew about her before she drove to my house to pick me up in her tan Mercedes was that she wore red turtlenecks and jewelry to church.
Mrs. Becker had spoken with Mrs. Beasley, the pastor’s wife, who taught at a school called Christian Heritage Academy. Mrs. Beasley, in turn, convinced the school to admit me to repeat sixth grade. Christian Heritage Academy was in Northfield, the suburb next to Glenview, twenty miles north of the city and too far from our apartment in Edgewater for me to commute every day. To go to this school I needed a place to live, Monday to Friday.
That’s where my new American mother, Mrs. Thomas, came in. Mrs. Thomas’s older sons had left for college. She had empty rooms in her house in nearby Kenilworth. It was now late June. I was thirteen. I’d been in the United States a year.
Rob came outside and spoke with Mrs. Thomas, to make a show of confirming that the Thomases weren’t inviting me to live at their house so that I could be a servant. I placed my navy backpack and small red tote bag in Mrs. Thomas’s trunk. I brought with me only a few changes of clothes.
The air-conditioning was on. I felt so cold. Caulay, the Thomases’ sixteen-year-old daughter, sat in the front passenger seat. No one had ever asked me if I wanted to move. I had never moved alone. In her lilting Southern drawl, Mrs. Thomas oriented me in my new landscape: This is Lake Michigan. This is Northwestern. This is the beach where we swim.
We pulled up at a green-shingled house with a green lawn, a large porch in the front, and a detached garage in the back. Inside were green chairs and green carpets. Caulay took me up two flights of stairs to a large bedroom with two twin beds, a desk, several bookshelves, a radio, a box of cassette tapes, its own bathroom, and a peaked roof.
The Thomases had two dogs, Cotton and Ginger. They treated the dogs like people. This was a new experience for me. Dogs in Rwanda became a nightmare during the war. They started eating the dead.
I remember wanting to ask: Is this all mine? That first night I did not turn out the lights. I switched from one bed to the other and then remade the first. I looked through the cassettes and books.
This was a trial, for the summer. I would live with the Thomases and attend an art class at Christian Heritage Academy, and if that worked—which is to say, if I passed my test as a tolerable boarder—I would live with the Thomases and attend Christian Heritage Academy for the school year.
I didn’t want to mess anything up. In the morning I made the second bed, replaced all the books and cassettes, dressed, and walked downstairs when I heard Caulay’s footsteps. I ate cereal for breakfast because Caulay ate cereal for breakfast. Mrs. Thomas made me a peanut butter sandwich to take with me to art camp for lunch, and I told her I loved peanut butter and sandwiches even though I disliked them both.
My refugee skills were kicking in. I wanted to be who I needed to be and get what there was to get. There was a feedback loop that I could now see. If I performed well in my role as a student, people responded with happiness and pride and wanted to pour more resources into me. Fill me up again and again.
* * *
For my first day at my new school, Sarah Beasley taped to my locker a big construction-paper star that said TINA. Mrs. Beasley had noticed that people often pronounced my name incorrectly—it’s Cleman-teen, not Cleman-tyne, though everybody said the latter. So she decided that for school my name should be Tina. Tina would not be mispronounced. Tina would be much less cumbersome than Clemantine to shout if I played sports.
Afternoons, after I finished track practice or dance rehearsal, Mrs. Thomas picked me up, always in the same spot. She understood my fear of being lost or left behind. At home, I climbed the stairs and did my homework in my bedroom. I loved my space—the peace, the order. Everything was under my control.
Every weekend I returned from Kenilworth to Edgewater. Each time Mrs. Thomas dropped me off, I gave her a big smile, said, “Thank you!” and hurried out of the car before she reached over to hug me. Affection still made me flinch.
Claire’s life was the opposite of mine: so many people, so much chaos. She now worked two hotel jobs, her marriage was unraveling, and she was raising three kids as a single mother. Her third child, Michele, was born American. That still sounds strange to me.
Friday to Sunday I cooked, cleaned, and took care of the kids. I didn’t talk about my life in Kenilworth, and Claire didn’t ask. She didn’t know that my bedroom had two beds, or that under the stairs on the first floor of the Thomases’ house was a bathroom with the most glorious red walls and a dish of soaps that looked like robin’s eggs. She didn’t know that I beamed with pride when Caulay introduced me as her sister.
* * *
We said the Pledge of Allegiance. Then I went to first period in a classroom with large glass windows overlooking the playground. Soon after, everyone started panicking. The principal dismissed school for the day. Mrs. Thomas picked me up.
At home, on the TV, we watched the World Trade Center towers fall, again and again. Every five minutes Mrs. Thomas tried to call Brad, her older son, who lived in New York, and Mr. Thomas, who wasn’t picking up his phone at his law office. She couldn’t breathe. I felt nothing.
“This happens to people everywhere,” I said to Mrs. Thomas many hours into her vigil. Horror flashed across her face. These were not the words of the nice poor African refugee girl she’d invited to live in her home.
I was awful: jaded and scornful. Why shut down the school? My nightmares returned. Every night I now dreamed of falling down the Thomases’ laundry chute and landing in their basement, where I found myself trapped in a maze full of people with those faces I’d seen in Rwanda. I heard the noises of lives destroyed.
I could not comprehend why people were wearing American flag pins instead of packing their bags. I filled my backpack with extra shoes, a sweater, my Bible, a pencil case, and snack bars.
I clipped obituaries out of the Chicago Tribune and kept a list of the names of the dead. I resented and envied the acknowledgment. These dead were lucky enough to be memorialized and mourned. Here they were, named individually in the paper, each with a specific job, family, and hometown.
* * *
Around Kenilworth, people wanted to treat me like an egg, the poor fragile refugee girl. They said, with the best of intentions, “Let’s do something special for you. Let’s buy you something nice.”
I was contemptuous and cold. My attitude was, Okay, if that makes you feel better. If that’s your way of giving, if it makes you sleep at night—yes, let’s do something nice for me, fine.
I was one of only three black students at my school. The lone black adult was the Eritrean janitor. When neighbors stared at me, Mrs. Thomas said, “Honey, just smile. You’re beautiful.”
People wanted to help in the ways they knew how to help. One day one of Mrs. Thomas’s friends picked me up at school in her convertible, handed me a pair of sunglasses, and said, “We’re going shopping today. Call me Auntie Wilma.” Wilma Kline became my godmother of shopping. We drove to Marshall Field’s. She’d clearly been there at least two hundred times.
“Clemantine, we need good boots for winte
r,” she said, and then she walked me to the shoe department where several salesgirls knew her name. “Do you have those on sale? Do you know when they’ll go on sale? Do you have the Ralph Lauren collection?”
She knew every inch of every floor of that department store. She was a superhero of sorts to me. I recognized in her the ability to navigate an overwhelming space with complete mastery and confidence. For years, both Claire’s life and mine had depended on just that skill: reading a complicated, unfamiliar space; judging who would be your friends, who would be your enemies, how do you navigate with ease, how do you survive, how do you escape?
I still ask myself those questions all the time. If something happens, where would I go? Who is strong in this situation? That person is trying way too hard—why? This person is extremely friendly—does he want something? Money? Favors?
“Okay, here’s how it works,” Mrs. Kline said. “You buy things you can mix with things you already have. It’s not only about trend but what will last longer.”
After the boots we tried on clothes, outfits that would work for school and outfits for the weekends.
Mrs. Kline wanted to teach me about my body, help me find comfort in it. Maintaining my body had been so much work, so costly. Protecting it had been a never-ending battle. It was not a source of joy. I had been dragging it around for thirteen years, trying to keep it from harm. I felt like it stood in my way.
At Marshall Field’s, Mrs. Kline pulled a red polka-dot dress off the rack and said, “This is an investment piece.” Then she collected an armful of white blouses, tank tops, shorts, jackets, jeans—everything—and took me back into the hushed private dressing rooms to try them on. Mrs. Kline had opinions. She instructed me to try on the jeans first with one blouse, then another. Then try the jacket with the boots. Some looks she liked, others not.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 5