The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by Clemantine Wamariya

  We walked for miles. Claire carried Mariette in front. I missed the weight of Mariette’s body. When we finally arrived at an electric fence, a section near the bottom had been cut out and we crawled under.

  A truck waited for us a few miles away. I sat in a seat now, holding Mariette. We drove and drove, toward the lights, the little yellow lights from the streetlamps and the houses.

  I had not seen faraway twinkling lights in so long. Everywhere we’d lived had been dark and torn by war. The lights made me think about bread and jam, bread and butter, french fries. I asked Claire when we were going back home. She gave me a hard look and didn’t answer.

  I knew she didn’t like me. I was a burden. I was terrified she’d leave me behind.

  * * *

  South Africa looked so beautiful. We spent the night in an abandoned office building taken over by those who’d fled the conflict in Zaire.

  Down a long hallway we met a woman who cooked us ugali and lent us a blanket. She made chicken but gave us only a few bites of the wings. The rest of the meat and the gizzards were reserved for the men.

  The next day, Claire set out to find Rob. South Africa was jubilant and tense, filled with pride. Mandela was president. Claire found Rob living in a township in Mayville, sharing one room with four families. He had a job cutting hair. It was a life.

  As refugees, we could go to the Department of Home Affairs and get six-month visas. You could do this multiple times. We didn’t have to fear arrest. But Claire wanted to move on. She thought we’d have more opportunities in the coastal city of Durban, which was gleaming and lined with beaches and piers.

  Claire always taught me: Everything is yours, everything is not yours. The world owes you nothing; nobody deserves more or less than the next person.

  Even as a refugee she always kept one dignified outfit—early on, a crisp white blouse, well-fitting flared jeans, short black boots; later, a brown suit—so she could present herself to anybody, anywhere, as a smart, enterprising young woman, period. She asked for no pity, no permission. She was a fact of life, an equal. Nobody needed to know more.

  She had a routine by now. You go. You find someone who speaks the language. You put on your best outfit and you knock on doors asking for opportunity, never for money. You get a job. You work hard. You don’t steal.

  In Durban, Claire found a Tanzanian who knew Zulu and she persuaded him to act as her interpreter. She put on her white blouse. She entered a wealthy neighborhood. She knocked on a door. When a man answered, Claire instructed her Tanzanian interpreter, “Tell him that I would like a job.”

  The man who answered the door said to come back in the morning.

  So Claire did. She arrived the next morning, again in her white blouse and good jeans; the man’s wife gave her a basket of clothes to wash, by hand. Claire was now the house girl, like the girls my mother had employed in Kigali.

  The family could easily have afforded a washing machine, but that wasn’t the custom here, so Claire handwashed clothes for five hours—five children lived in the house—regretting that she had never allowed my mother to teach her these mundane skills. Claire, after all, was not going to need them. She was going to McGill. Now, this. But the woman returned from work and paid Claire well, and told her to come back in three days.

  Meanwhile, I hung out with Mariette. We lived in a room in an apartment building, not a camp, but I was an outcast. One day the kids in the neighborhood took pee and froze it and told me it was a popsicle and said that I needed to eat it.

  I threw it down and ran away.

  * * *

  Claire pretended to read Zulu newspapers on a bus so nobody would think she was a foreigner and harass her. We attended a Baptist church. Claire didn’t really understand English, but she cried a lot in church. She loved the singing and the hymns. One Sunday, as we walked out of church, we saw a white Afrikaans woman looking at us. She was big, beautiful, strong, and heavy, and she wore a long dress like a priest’s robe.

  She came up to Claire and said, “Refugee?”

  Claire said, “Refugee.”

  The woman said, “Yes.”

  Claire said, “Yes.” Claire’s English was limited to yes, no, good morning, and good afternoon. She often just repeated whatever the other person said. I don’t know why this woman singled Claire out, but as soon as Claire said yes she motioned for us to follow her.

  Her house was about three blocks away, lined with floral wallpaper, filled with floral couches and curtains. She walked in, opened her refrigerator, and started pulling out fish, beef, chicken, and pork. She set the food on the table, along with plates and fancy napkins, and then she scooped vanilla ice cream into a bowl and watched me eat it. She saw the child in me that no one else seemed to see.

  The next week Claire, Rob, Mariette, and I returned to church and followed the Afrikaans woman, Linda, home again. This time her house smelled like curry. She sat down with all of us to eat. Linda was big and Claire was small, and Linda gave Claire an armful of clothes that were all far too large, but it didn’t matter. It was such a relief to be cared for.

  The third time we visited, Linda motioned to her breast. She’d had cancer and a mastectomy. She showed us her scar. It looked like a map.

  After that, the church collected a monthly allotment of food for us. Linda helped us find our own tiny apartment and gave us pots and pans. The day we moved in, she came over with a giant bologna and we made bologna sandwiches with tomato and mayonnaise.

  The apartment was on the third floor, across the street from a brothel, and I learned about sex by watching the women who worked there. An older girl who lived in the building explained to me what was going on. One day, in our apartment, she said to me, “You’ve never been kissed. I’ll kiss you.”

  I said, “I’m never going to kiss anyone.”

  * * *

  No walking, no camps, no murder. Life felt easy for a time. Rob had stopped cutting hair and now worked making textiles in a factory outside of town, meaning, much to my relief, that he was gone nearly a week at a stretch. Claire got a security job watching guests’ cars at a fancy hotel. The older girls in our building taught me the Zulu words for get away, don’t look at me, step off.

  One day Claire came home and said, “Put down the mattress! Put down the mattress!” I put down on the floor the mattress we propped against the wall during the day. Claire started pulling money out of her pockets and throwing it on the bed. “We are rich! We are so rich!” she said. “Pick whatever you want! I will buy you whatever you want.”

  For months, while Claire kept that job watching cars, I told everybody how rich we were. She bought me a new shirt and shoes. She bought us a whole roast chicken. She bought a bag of chicken gizzards. In Africa, the gizzards are reserved for men. If a wife cooks a chicken and she serves it without saving the gizzard for her man, her husband might leave her. But Claire wanted to taste gizzards.

  She brought them home and I fried them. They looked like testicles. But to Claire they tasted like victory. She was eating power.

  * * *

  Mariette was my world, my every day, my beautiful, animated doll. I fussed over her outfits, so people would see how cute she was and want to pick her up. I hovered and overprotected. One day I left a hot plate on the floor, and Mariette thought it was a tiny chair and burned herself through her diaper. I felt such shame.

  I wanted a mother, preferably Linda. One day she took me to register at a school. She promised she’d find someone to look after Mariette so I’d be free during the day. While filling out papers, Linda was informed by the principal that I needed to get a tuberculosis test. I’d been coughing a lot. Linda brought me to the hospital. I was infected and needed to be quarantined.

  The hospital scared me but made me feel important and pampered. I had my own bed. Linda brought me flowers. One day a nurse woke me up and wheeled m
e to a room with giant windows through which I could see the whole ocean. The hospital fed us custard. They fed us rice pudding. At lunch the nurse asked, “Do you want Jell-O? Do you want green beans?”

  Linda came in one day with a little backpack and a pencil case with my name embroidered on it. She said, “You can start school here. You can learn to write in here.”

  * * *

  After I got out of the hospital, we moved again, to be closer to the textile factory where Rob worked, this time up in the townships, a few miles out of Durban, among rows and rows of small houses that all looked alike. Mandela had been elected just three years before and he gave the country such exuberant pride. Music blasted through the township at all hours: hip-hop, Biggie, Papa Wemba, Tupac, Brenda Fassie. I worked so hard to learn all the Zulu words to the Brenda Fassie songs. Open the gates, Miss Gossip. My baby boy is getting married today.

  The plan for me to attend school fell away. In this neighborhood I needed to look after Mariette. In the morning, I’d tie Mariette to my back and watch all the other children go off to school. In the evening, I watched the men come home from work. The bus picked up and dropped off passengers a little way down the hill. There was one man who was tall and stocky, just like my father, and he wore the same cap. I watched him every day.

  Zulu was such a hard language. It included clicks and other sounds I’d never made before, and it required using parts of my mouth that I’d never used. I barely spoke a word aloud for months. Then one day I approached a girl I knew to be the daughter of the tall, stocky man I watched every day as he came home from work. I was so eager to have a friend here, to be integrated into the normal world. I dropped my survivor-girl act just long enough to say to her, in my tentative Zulu, “Your father looks just like my father.” She threw a fit. I didn’t understand why.

  Only later did I realize I’d said, “Your father is my father.” I tried to explain to the girl but it was too late.

  Claire lost her job watching cars, but she started buying clothes wholesale, purchasing soccer jerseys for twenty-five rand and reselling them in barber shops for fifty. She did the same with jeans.

  She still worked as a house girl too. Some days I went with her. We did the laundry first, then we swept, then we ironed, Mariette tied to one of our backs. We never worked outside. Black South Africans didn’t want jobs as house girls and boys anymore, and they didn’t want black immigrants performing those jobs either. We would have been heckled on the bus and in the township if we’d been seen.

  Every day, we cleaned the living room just as Oprah came on TV. Oprah was a goddess to me. She had so many different couches. She wore different clothes every time she appeared. I didn’t understand what she said, but I loved the way she walked out into the audience, and I loved the way she held herself when she sat—with enthusiasm, concern, joy, anger, solidarity, skepticism, whatever she needed to evoke. I didn’t know that anyone could sit that well.

  Claire studied Oprah but did not revere her. She swore that she would meet her someday. “Oprah eats, Oprah sleeps,” Claire said. “Me too.”

  I didn’t understand Claire’s confidence. My sense of self-worth was so relational. My job, while we watched Oprah, was to polish the cocktail table, and I wanted to get an A. I wanted the owner of the house to walk in, notice the table’s gleam, and say, “Zikomo! Zikomo!” Thank you so much!

  I felt so adrift in the world, so much of the time, so outside any category I knew or wanted to grab hold of to define myself. Claire, Rob, Mariette, and I were nobody’s vision of a family. Not even mine.

  * * *

  Then Claire got pregnant again and Rob’s reaction to this news was to persuade her to go back to Rwanda with me, but not him, to find our parents.

  I detested the idea. We were safe here. We could keep renewing our visas. We didn’t have papers to travel abroad. Why would we start moving again, by choice, not just to Rwanda but through one wrecked country after another? Plus, our parents were dead. We hadn’t heard anything from them for so long. In my head, they were gone.

  “Don’t worry, Claire. Rwanda is fine,” Rob tried to convince us. “They’re not going to hurt a pregnant woman.”

  Claire didn’t want to go either. We had a stable life here, at times even rich! But Claire, however resourceful, was only seventeen. She never let outsiders reduce her to nothing, yet she thought she had to do what her husband wanted her to do. That was how we were raised. Rob was a tyrant, Claire did know that. But she thought she had to obey him all the same.

  I wanted to stay with Linda, preferably as her adopted child, but Claire needed me to take care of Mariette.

  I was ten. I knew too much, and that knowledge was heavy, a blanket soaked in muddy water. Before, I didn’t know what killing entailed—I didn’t even know what it meant. Now I’d seen it, I’d felt it. And it was so much worse than the Rambo graffiti of violence that Pudi had painted in my brain all those years ago.

  Claire, Mariette, and I rode a bus back north to the forest, back toward hell, and climbed through the electric border fence.

  12

  One Sunday, while I was in Chicago, in Claire’s apartment, I occupied myself with Mariette’s hair.

  My mother was cooking—garlic, onions, meat, and rice—and trying to hum along to a song on the radio that she didn’t know. The windows fogged up from the steam trapped below the low ceiling.

  “Ouch! Aunt, you’re hurting me!” Mariette said, but all I could think was: You don’t know what pain is.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I promised not to hurt her again. My mind drifted off to college, scholarships, money—trying to get to a place in life that felt comfortable. My mother continued humming. Her voice sounded unfamiliar.

  I felt cold, despite the steam and heat of the stove, so I asked Michele, Claire’s youngest, “Milu, could you please get me your soft Miley Cyrus blanket?”

  Michele looked at me with disdain. She was comfortable, just then, watching Eloise. I found her attachment to comfort garish.

  When she finally got up, she said, “I want to be like Eloise, trick people and speak to my mom in French.”

  I laughed—how cute. Then Mariette, five years older than Michele, crushed her dream. “I am very sorry to tell you,” Mariette said to her little sister, “but you’re stuck here with us and it will never happen.”

  Michele began to cry. I patted her head and whispered in her ear, “Don’t listen to Mariette. You can live like Eloise if you want.”

  * * *

  Some of the hardest lines to navigate were between the African and African American communities. Of course I was African, dark-skinned, and I lived in America—specifically in Illinois, in the heartland. Yet I didn’t have any personal history with white Americans. No one had enslaved me or my family. No white banker had kept me or my family from buying a house. My community in a white suburb was exceedingly generous to me.

  Meanwhile, Mariette, Freddy, and Michele lived in a different universe. They were growing up in Edgewater, in public housing. They picked up the slang and style of their black friends at school and they blended it with the Swahili or Kinyarwanda they learned at home. Even Claire had an intimacy and a fluidity with African American culture that I lacked. Sometimes she would wear a Missy Elliott sweatshirt; other times a gorgeous wild kitenge, complete with head wrap. She understood well the lives of her neighbors whose families had lived for generations in a system that dehumanized and stole from them. I lived Monday to Friday in a house with a well-groomed lawn and a detached garage. I wore polo shirts and J.Crew. My classmates asked me about my weekends in the exotic “inner city.” They always called it that—the inner city. Nobody I knew lived in the inner city. They lived on the city’s edge.

  Toni Morrison wrote about blacks in America with the same question that defined my whole life: How do I survive? Every person I met, every paragraph I read,
that’s what I wanted to know: How are you surviving? She described the strength I was looking for; she called it the strength in the blood. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is not my favorite of her books—The Bluest Eye is. But it helped me understand how white American stories depend on certain assumptions about black characters. Most of the black people we studied in school were dead. They had fought a war that was not my war. One day I brought home from school The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Mrs. Thomas was in the kitchen, cooking black beans. She looked up with a smile and said, “Blackness is beautiful.” The pieces of my identity rattled in my head like loose change.

  * * *

  I knew I was now privileged. I had started to forget what it was like to suffer, to worry about basic needs. I had time to think, time to create. I worked hard on bleaching and distressing my jeans, to make them look like Britney Spears’s. I bought vintage jackets and sewed pieces of various garments together. I signed up for a John Robert Powers modeling class.

  Mrs. Thomas was unhappy that I had enrolled in the course. The classes were out by the airport. I took three trains to get there. For the bargain price of two free classes and then a ridiculous fee, John Robert Powers taught susceptible immigrant girls like me how to put on makeup, how to smile with your eyes, how to walk to sell a pair of pants, how to walk to sell a dress, what to have on your résumé when you sit down for an interview, the importance of wearing nude underwear to photo shoots.

  This was during the Abercrombie & Fitch era. All the girls at school wore Abercrombie & Fitch. I did too, and I wanted to see somebody who looked like me in their catalogs. I didn’t see me anywhere.