“Jackie said you’re from Africa?” a boy in a baseball cap asked her.
“Yes.”
“That’s really cool!” he said, and Ifemelu imagined telling Obinze about this, the way she would mimic the boy. Obinze pulled every strand of story from her, going over details, asking questions, and sometimes he would laugh, the sound echoing down the line. She had told him how Allison had said, “Hey, we’re getting a bite to eat. Come with us!” and she thought it was an invitation and that, as with invitations back home, Allison or one of the others would buy her meal. But when the waitress brought the bill, Allison carefully began to untangle how many drinks each person had ordered and who had the calamari appetizer, to make sure nobody paid for anybody else. Obinze had found this very funny, finally saying, “That’s America for you!”
It was, to her, funny only in retrospect. She had struggled to hide her bafflement at the boundaries of hospitality, and also at this business of tipping—paying an extra fifteen or twenty percent of your bill to the waitress—which was suspiciously like bribing, a forced and efficient bribing system.
CHAPTER 13
At first, Ifemelu forgot that she was someone else. In an apartment in South Philadelphia, a tired-faced woman opened the door and led her into a strong stench of urine. The living room was dark, unaired, and she imagined the whole building steeped in months, even years, of accumulated urine, and herself working every day in this urine cloud. From inside the apartment, a man was groaning, deep and eerie sounds; they were the groans of a person for whom groaning was the only choice left, and they frightened her.
“That’s my dad,” the woman said, looking at her with keen assessing eyes. “Are you strong?”
The advertisement in the City Paper had stressed strong. Strong Home Health Aide. Pays cash.
“I’m strong enough to do the job,” Ifemelu said, and fought the urge to back out of the apartment and run and run.
“That’s a pretty accent. Where are you from?”
“Nigeria.”
“Nigeria. Isn’t there a war going on there?”
“No.”
“Can I see your ID?” the woman asked, and then, glancing at the license, added, “How do you pronounce your name again?”
“Ifemelu.”
“What?”
Ifemelu almost choked. “Ngozi. You hum the N.”
“Really.” The woman, with her air of unending exhaustion, seemed too tired to question the two different pronunciations. “Can you live in?”
“Live in?”
“Yes. Live here with my dad. There’s a spare bedroom. You would do three nights a week. You’d need to clean him up in the morning.” The woman paused. “You are pretty slight. Look, I’ve two more people to interview and I’ll get back to you.”
“Okay. Thank you.” Ifemelu knew she would not get the job and for this she was grateful.
She repeated “I’m Ngozi Okonkwo” in front of the mirror before her next interview, at the Seaview restaurant. “Can I call you Goz?” the manager asked after they shook hands, and she said yes, but before she said yes, she paused, the slightest and shortest of pauses, but still a pause. And she wondered if that was why she did not get the job.
Later Ginika said, “You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.”
Ginika laughed, a sure throaty laugh. Ifemelu laughed, too, although she did not fully understand the joke. And she had the sudden sensation of fogginess, of a milky web through which she tried to claw. Her autumn of half blindness had begun, the autumn of puzzlements, of experiences she had knowing there were slippery layers of meaning that eluded her.
THE WORLD WAS WRAPPED in gauze; she could see the shapes of things but not clearly enough, never enough. She told Obinze that there were things she should know how to do, but didn’t, details she should have corralled into her space but hadn’t. And he reminded her of how quickly she was adapting, his tone always calm, always consoling. She applied to be a waitress, hostess, bartender, cashier, and then waited for job offers that never came, and for this she blamed herself. It had to be that she was not doing something right; and yet she did not know what it might be. Autumn had come, wet and gray-skied. Her meager bank account was leaking money. The cheapest sweaters from Ross still startled with their high cost, bus and train tickets added up, and groceries punctured holes in her bank balance, even though she stood guard at the checkout, watching the electronic display and saying, “Please stop. I won’t be taking the rest,” when it got to thirty dollars. Each day, there seemed to be a letter for her on the kitchen table, and inside the envelope was a tuition bill, and words printed in capital letters: YOUR RECORDS WILL BE FROZEN UNLESS PAYMENT IS RECEIVED BY THE DATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS NOTICE.
It was the boldness of the capital letters more than the words that frightened her. She worried about the possible consequences, a vague but constant worry. She did not imagine a police arrest for not paying her school fees, but what did happen if you did not pay your school fees in America? Obinze told her nothing would happen, suggested she speak to the bursar about getting on a payment plan so that she would at least have taken some action. She called him often, with cheap phone cards she bought from the crowded store of a gas station on Lancaster Avenue, and just scratching off the metallic dust, to reveal the numbers printed beneath, flooded her with anticipation: to hear Obinze’s voice again. He calmed her. With him, she could feel whatever she felt, and she did not have to force some cheer into her voice, as she did with her parents, telling them she was very fine, very hopeful to get a waitress job, settling down very well with her classes.
The highlight of her days was talking to Dike. His voice, higher-pitched on the phone, warmed her as he told her what had happened on his TV show, how he had just beat a new level on Game Boy. “When are you coming to visit, Coz?” he asked often. “I wish you were taking care of me. I don’t like going to Miss Brown’s. Her bathroom is stinky.”
She missed him. Sometimes she told him things she knew he would not understand, but she told him anyway. She told him about her professor who sat on the grass at lunch to eat a sandwich, the one who asked her to call him by his first name, Al, the one who wore a studded leather jacket and had a motorcycle. On the day she got her first piece of junk mail, she told him, “Guess what? I got a letter today.” That credit card preapproval, with her name correctly spelled and elegantly italicized, had roused her spirits, made her a little less invisible, a little more present. Somebody knew her.
CHAPTER 14
And then there was Cristina Tomas. Cristina Tomas with her rinsed-out look, her washy blue eyes, faded hair, and pallid skin, Cristina Tomas seated at the front desk with a smile, Cristina Tomas wearing whitish tights that made her legs look like death. It was a warm day, Ifemelu had walked past students sprawled on green lawns; cheery balloons were clustered below a welcome FRESHMEN sign.
“Good afternoon. Is this the right place for registration?” Ifemelu asked Cristina Tomas, whose name she did not then know.
“Yes. Now. Are. You. An. International. Student?”
“Yes.”
“You. Will. First. Need. To. Get. A. Letter. From. The. International. Students. Office.”
Ifemelu half smiled in sympathy, because Cristina Tomas had to have some sort of illness that made her speak so slowly, lips scrunching and puckering, as she gave directions to the international students office. But when Ifemelu returned with the letter, Cristina Tomas said, “I. Need. You. To. Fill. Out. A. Couple. Of. Forms. Do. You. Understand. How. To. Fill. These. Out?” and she realized that Cristina Tomas was speaking like that because of her, her foreign accent, and she felt for a moment like a small child, lazy-limbed and drooling.
“I speak English,” she said.
“I bet you do,” Cristina Tomas said. “I just don’t know how well.”
Ifemelu shrank. In that
strained, still second when her eyes met Cristina Tomas’s before she took the forms, she shrank. She shrank like a dried leaf. She had spoken English all her life, led the debating society in secondary school, and always thought the American twang inchoate; she should not have cowered and shrunk, but she did. And in the following weeks, as autumn’s coolness descended, she began to practice an American accent.
SCHOOL IN AMERICA was easy, assignments sent in by e-mail, classrooms air-conditioned, professors willing to give makeup tests. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called “participation,” and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. And so she sat stiff-tongued, surrounded by students who were all folded easily on their seats, all flush with knowledge, not of the subject of the classes, but of how to be in the classes. They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge. And they ambled, these Americans, they walked without rhythm. They avoided giving direct instructions: they did not say “Ask somebody upstairs”; they said “You might want to ask somebody upstairs.” When you tripped and fell, when you choked, when misfortune befell you, they did not say “Sorry.” They said “Are you okay?” when it was obvious that you were not. And when you said “Sorry” to them when they choked or tripped or encountered misfortune, they replied, eyes wide with surprise, “Oh, it’s not your fault.” And they overused the word “excited,” a professor excited about a new book, a student excited about a class, a politician on TV excited about a law; it was altogether too much excitement. Some of the expressions she heard every day astonished her, jarred her, and she wondered what Obinze’s mother would make of them. You shouldn’t of done that. There is three things. I had a apple. A couple days. I want to lay down. “These Americans cannot speak English o,” she told Obinze. On her first day at school, she had visited the health center, and had stared a little too long at the bin filled with free condoms in the corner. After her physical, the receptionist told her, “You’re all set!” and she, blank, wondered what “You’re all set” meant until she assumed it had to mean that she had done all she needed to.
She woke up every day worrying about money. If she bought all the textbooks she needed, she would not have enough to pay her rent, and so she borrowed textbooks during class and made feverish notes which, reading them later, sometimes confused her. Her new class friend, Samantha, a thin woman who avoided the sun, often saying “I burn easily,” would, from time to time, let her take a textbook home. “Keep it until tomorrow and make notes if you need to,” she would say. “I know how tough things can be, that’s why I dropped out of college years ago to work.” Samantha was older, and a relief to befriend, because she was not a slack-jawed eighteen-year-old as so many others in her communications major were. Still, Ifemelu never kept the books for more than a day, and sometimes refused to take them home. It stung her, to have to beg. Sometimes after classes, she would sit on a bench in the quad and watch the students walking past the large gray sculpture in the middle; they all seemed to have their lives in the shape that they wanted, they could have jobs if they wanted to have jobs, and above them, small flags fluttered serenely from lampposts.
SHE HUNGERED to understand everything about America, to wear a new, knowing skin right away: to support a team at the Super Bowl, understand what a Twinkie was and what sports “lockouts” meant, measure in ounces and square feet, order a “muffin” without thinking that it really was a cake, and say “I ‘scored’ a deal” without feeling silly.
Obinze suggested she read American books, novels and histories and biographies. In his first e-mail to her—a cybercafé had just opened in Nsukka—he gave her a list of books. The Fire Next Time was the first. She stood by the library shelf and skimmed the opening chapter, braced for boredom, but slowly she moved to a couch and sat down and kept reading until three-quarters of the book was gone, then she stopped and took down every James Baldwin title on the shelf. She spent her free hours in the library, so wondrously well lit; the sweep of computers, the large, clean, airy reading spaces, the welcoming brightness of it all, seemed like a sinful decadence. She was used, after all, to reading books with pages missing, fallen off while passing through too many hands. And now to be in a cavalcade of books with healthy spines. She wrote to Obinze about the books she read, careful, sumptuous letters that opened, between them, a new intimacy; she had begun, finally, to grasp the power books had over him. His longing for Ibadan because of “Ibadan” had puzzled her; how could a string of words make a person ache for a place he did not know? But in those weeks when she discovered the rows and rows of books with their leathery smell and their promise of pleasures unknown, when she sat, knees tucked underneath her, on an armchair in the lower level or at a table upstairs with the fluorescent light reflecting off the book’s pages, she finally understood. She read the books on Obinze’s list but also, randomly, pulled out book after book, reading a chapter before deciding which she would speed-read in the library and which she would check out. And as she read, America’s mythologies began to take on meaning, America’s tribalisms—race, ideology, and region—became clear. And she was consoled by her new knowledge.
“YOU KNOW you said ‘excited’?” Obinze asked her one day, his voice amused. “You said you were excited about your media class.”
“I did?”
New words were falling out of her mouth. Columns of mist were dispersing. Back home, she would wash her underwear every night and hang it in a discreet corner of the bathroom. Now that she piled them up in a basket and threw them into the washing machine on Friday evenings, she had come to see this, the heaping of dirty underwear, as normal. She spoke up in class, buoyed by the books she read, thrilled that she could disagree with professors, and get, in return, not a scolding about being disrespectful but an encouraging nod.
“We watch films in class,” she told Obinze. “They talk about films here as if films are as important as books. So we watch films and then we write a response paper and almost everybody gets an A. Can you imagine? These Americans are not serious o.”
In her honors history seminar, Professor Moore, a tiny, tentative woman with the emotionally malnourished look of someone who did not have friends, showed some scenes from Roots, the images bright on the board of the darkened classroom. When she turned off the projector, a ghostly white patch hovered on the wall for a moment before disappearing. Ifemelu had first watched Roots on video with Obinze and his mother, sunk into sofas in their living room in Nsukka. As Kunta Kinte was being flogged into accepting his slave name, Obinze’s mother got up abruptly, so abruptly she almost tripped on a leather pouf, and left the room, but not before Ifemelu saw her reddened eyes. It startled her, that Obinze’s mother, fully hemmed into her self-containment, her intense privacy, could cry watching a film. Now, as the window blinds were raised and the classroom once again plunged into light, Ifemelu remembered that Saturday afternoon, and how she had felt lacking, watching Obinze’s mother, and wishing that she, too, could cry.
“Let’s talk about historical representation in film,” Professor Moore said.
A firm, female voice from the back of the class, with a non-American accent, asked, “Why was ‘nigger’ bleeped out?”
And a collective sigh, like a small wind, swept through the class.
“Well, this was a recording from network television and one of the things I wanted us to talk about is how we represent history in popular culture and the use of the N-word is certainly an important part of that,” Professor Moore said.
“It makes no sense to me,” the firm voice said. Ifemelu turned. The speaker’s natural hair was cut as low as a boy’s and her pretty face, wide-foreheaded and fleshless, reminded Ifemelu of the East Africans who a
lways won long-distance races on television.
“I mean, ‘nigger’ is a word that exists. People use it. It is part of America. It has caused a lot of pain to people and I think it is insulting to bleep it out.”
“Well,” Professor Moore said, looking around, as though for help.
It came from a gravelly voice in the middle of the class. “Well, it’s because of the pain that word has caused that you shouldn’t use it!” Shouldn’t sailed astringently into the air, the speaker an African-American girl wearing bamboo hoop earrings.
“Thing is, each time you say it, the word hurts African Americans,” a pale, shaggy-haired boy in front said.
Ifemelu raised her hand; Faulkner’s Light in August, which she had just read, was on her mind. “I don’t think it’s always hurtful. I think it depends on the intent and also on who is using it.”
A girl next to her, face flushing bright red, burst out, “No! The word is the same for whoever says it.”
“That is nonsense.” The firm voice again. A voice unafraid. “If my mother hits me with a stick and a stranger hits me with a stick, it’s not the same thing.”
Ifemelu looked at Professor Moore to see how the word “nonsense” had been received. She did not seem to have noticed; instead, a vague terror was freezing her features into a smirk-smile.
“I agree it’s different when African Americans say it, but I don’t think it should be used in films because that way people who shouldn’t use it can use it and hurt other people’s feelings,” a light-skinned African-American girl said, the last of the four black people in class, her sweater an unsettling shade of fuchsia.
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