T
HEY
NAMED
HER
A
MATIMBA
M
UNYENGE,
HOPING
IT
WAS
THEIR
DEAD
daughter who had returned to bring them happiness: Amatimba for “she has returned” and Munyenge for “happiness,” both in their native Bakweri. They would call her Timba, for short.
She was born on the tenth of December at Harlem Hospital, two blocks from their apartment. On the twelfth of December they walked home from the hospital, father cradling newborn daughter in a carrier, mother holding firstborn son by the hand. In their apartment were their friends, who had come to celebrate with them. Winston was in Houston for the holidays, to continue wooing Maami back, but nine friends were packed in the boiling living room to eat and rejoice and welcome Timba to earth.
“Take as much time off as you need,” Clark said when Jende called to share the news. “Mighty's going to be on his winter break soon, Cindy is taking some time off work. We'll be fine.”
“Thank you so much, sir,” Jende replied, unsurprised at his employer's generosity. “Merry Christmas to you and to Mrs. Edwards.”
Jende called Cindy, too, to personally tell her the news. She did not return his voice message, but Anna stopped by with a box of size-two diapers a couple of days later, which he and Neni assumed was from the Edwardses.
“How can we ever thank Mr. and Mrs. Edwards?” Neni asked him after Anna had cooed to Timba and hurriedly left to avoid missing her train home to Peekskill.
“We can't ever,” he said. “Let's just remember to always thank God for them and for everything we have.”
“Truly, we have to,” she said.
The next day a letter from Immigration arrived for him.
On the basis of being admitted to the United States in August of 2004 with authorization to remain for a period not to exceed three months and staying beyond November 2004 without further authorization, it has been charged that he is subject to removal from the United States, the letter said. He was to appear before an immigration judge to show why he should not be removed from the country.
The date was set for the second week of February.
“There's nothing to worry about, my brother,” Bubakar assured him again when Jende called that evening to discuss the letter. “I have handled cases like this before. I know what to do.”
“What are you going to do?” Jende asked.
“There's not much to do during this first hearingâit's only a master calendar hearing. The judge just wants to verify your name, your address, ask us to admit or deny the charge against you; different kinds of protocol things like that. Then he's going to schedule another date to see you again for who knows when. Like I told you before, my brother, between the backlog in the court and me filing one appeal after another if we need to, we're going to buy you a whole lot of time in this country.”
How much was all this going to cost? Jende wanted to know. If they had to file appeals, one after another to buy time, how much would they each be?
“It's going to cost good money, my brother. Immigration is not cheap. You just have to do what you gotta do and pay it. I know my fee is not as cheap as some of those nincompoops who go out there and stammer in front of the judge, but you stick with me and I'll help you through this, that's my promise. We are in this together, my brother. Step by step, together, eh?”
Jende called Winston after getting off the phone with Bubakar. He did not know what to do, he told his cousin, whether to continue believing in Bubakar or change course.
“I don't know, Bo,” Winston said. “I think this man is taking you down a bad road.”
“But he says he has handled many cases like mine. And they all got approved in the end.”
Winston was incredulous. Bubakar, he had decided, was a useless loudmouthed buffoon. A former colleague of his who had left Dustin, Connors, and Solomon to start an immigration law practice had recently told him that asylum applications could not be won with preposterous tales like that of a man running to America because he was afraid his father-in-law was going to kill him.
Who does he think sits in Immigration offices? the former colleague had asked after Winston told him all the pertinent details about Jende's case. Sure, those folks aren't the smartest cookies in the can of federal employees, but they're very intelligent and they've heard enough false stories of persecution and seen enough beautiful young women proclaim endless love to ninety-year-old men for the sake of green cards that they can tell a contrived story from one that resembles the truth. And sure, the former colleague had added, asylum has been granted to applicants running away from nothing, but for heaven's sake, a made-up story should be much better than the laughable crap Bubakar had given Jende. What was also unfathomable about the case, the man went on, was why it took Jende almost three years to get an interview at the asylum office and another eight months to get a decision. He'd heard of immigration cases disappearing into black holes and applicants waiting months and years for interviews and decisions, but Jende's was quite extreme, which means either he was one unlucky guy or he had a ridiculously lazy lawyer. Could this former colleague take him on as a client? Jende asked when Winston told him all this. No, was the former colleague's reply. His specialty was investor visasâhelping foreign billionaires and multimillionaires obtain entrance and legal status in America through investment, business development, and trade; more lucrative stuff, you know? Jende's case, the former colleague had said, was for a much smarter storefront lawyer than Bubakar.
“Why didn't he use a political asylum story?” Winston asked Jende, a question that would have been more useful at their first meeting with Bubakar. “Isn't that what most people seeking asylum use? Langaman's younger brother, the one in Montana, he's claiming he left
pays
because Biya was going to put him in Kondengui for challenging him. That
paysan
never went near a voting booth in
pays
but he's now saying he was a member of SDF and submitting evidence of how his friends were beaten and locked up for months and how he, too, could be if he returns to Cameroon. Anyone entering this country can make up any story about what their life was like back in their country. You can say you were a prince, or someone who ran an orphanage, or a political activist, and the average American will say, oh, wow! Heck, I tell
ngahs
all the time that I was a political activist in Cameroon, when they start asking me things like âSo, how's the political situation in Cameroon?' Instead of thinking up something like that for you, that useless idiot told you to stick to a story about running away from your father-in-law.”
“Winston may be right,” Neni said after Jende told her about their conversation, “but if a river has carried a load halfway downstream, why not let it take it all the way to the ocean?”
Jende agreed. Their fate was in the hands of othersâwhat use would it be to get another opinion and find themselves weighing bleak option against bleak option? They would stay with Bubakar; it was all going to work out. They encouraged each other to be hopeful, to believe that they would one day realize the dream of becoming Americans. But that night they each had nightmares that they told the other nothing of the next morning. Jende dreamed of knocks on the doors and strange men in uniform taking him away from his fainting wife and crying children. Neni dreamed of returning to a largely deserted Limbe, a town devoid of the young and ambitious, scantily populated with those too old, too young, and too feeble to flee to distant lands for the riches that could not be gotten in Limbe. In one dream, she saw herself at the annual canoe race at Down Beach, dancing alone as empty canoes approached the shore. When she woke up, she pulled her sleeping daughter closer to her bosom and kissed her. Timba was going to enter Limbe one day as a proud Cameroonian-American returning to see the land of her ancestors, she told herself. Not as the child of failed asylees tossed out of the country like food that had turned sour.
And Liomi was going to become a real American one day, she whispered in the darkness. He had taken so well to America, hardly missing anyone or anything in Limbe. He was happy to be in New York, excited to walk on overcrowded streets and be bombarded by endless noise. He spoke like an American and was so knowledgeable in baseball and all the state capitals that no one who came across him would believe he was not an American but a barely legal immigrant child, a mostly illegal one, in fact, whose future in the country rested on a judge believing his father's incredible story of fleeing persecution. They could never take him back to Limbe. If they took him back he might no longer be the happy child he is and was before coming to America. He might become angry, disappointed and hostile, forever resentful toward his parents.
On the second night after they received the letter, Neni spent most of the hours staring into the darkness, unable to stop thinking these things. The next morning, as she ironed her children's clothes, she sang the hymns the churchgoing people of Limbe sang when life gave them no answers to their questions. She sang a song about having a very big God who was always by her side and another about Jesus never failing even though the man of the world would let her down. Singing the songs reminded her of the times she had visited a church in Limbe and left feeling better, happy and unburdened, because for two hours she had been surrounded by joyful people who believed their circumstances were about to change because an omnipotent Being was in control. During Timba's naps, she searched the Internet for a nearby church to visit. There were many to pick from, most professing acceptance of anyone with any kind of belief, all seemingly just eager to fill up their pews. She decided to go downtown to a church in Greenwich Village called Judson Memorial Church, a brown building facing Washington Square Park, because she enjoyed the street music in the Village and loved the fountain at the center of the park, where she'd taken Liomi to play the past June.
The Sunday before Christmas, while Jende was working, she and the children went to the church. Her mother had warned her not to take the baby too far out of the house before she was three months old, but Neni ignored the advice. She bundled Timba in her carrier and took Liomi by the hand, from the 3 subway to the A. When she got to the West Fourth station, she got out and trudged through Greenwich Village. She walked rapidly, breathing out light clouds in the chilly December morning, eager to get to this place of prayer where she could find respite.
When she got there, she was disappointed in what she saw. Instead of a house of worship filled with a youthful diverse crowd of New Yorkers rocking and jiving and saying “Amen!,” the vast pewless room was full of middle-aged white people, not rocking and not jiving but rather singing hymns without the slightest attempt to shake their bodies and cast off their cares and sorrows the way the churchgoers of Limbe did every Sunday morning. Avoiding stares, Neni settled in a seat at the back, the baby still in the carrier, Liomi quiet by her side. The pastor was a woman with long gray hair and red-framed glasses who preached about some kind of coming revolution, a message Neni neither understood nor found applicable to her current situation.
After the service, the pastor came to her and introduced herself as Natasha. Other congregants came over, too, to greet her and to admire Timba sleeping in the carrier. One man said he had worked in Cameroon many years before as a Peace Corps volunteer, far up in the northern region of Adamawa. Neni raised her eyebrows and smiled, surprised and excited to meet someone who had been to her country in a place like that. Though she'd never been to the Adamawa Region, she felt as if she'd just reconnected with a long-lost childhood friend.
“I can't believe you have been to my country,” she said to the man as she handed her completed visitor information card to an usher. “Some people I meet in America don't even know there is a country called Cameroon.”
The man laughed. Yeah, he said, Americans were not renowned for their knowledge of African geography. He even knew of Limbe, he added, though he'd never been there. He wished he'd gone there to sit on its black sand beaches.
“Everyone was so happy to welcome us,” Neni told Jende that night.
“Maybe because they don't have black people there, and they want to have a black family,” Jende retorted. “Those kind of white people are always trying to prove to their friends how much they like black people.”
“I don't care,” Neni said. “I like the place. I'm going to go back.”
“What for? You didn't even go to church in Limbe. You're not baptized in any church.”
“So what if I'm not baptized? Didn't I use to come with you to Mizpah for Christmas and Easter? And didn't I sometimes go to the Full Gospel near our house?”
“That doesn't mean you were a church kind of person.”
“Then I'm going to become a church kind of person now. I think it's good for us to start going to church at a time like this. I was watching on the news the other day about this family that was supposed to be deported and they ran to a church. The church people let them stay in the churchâthe government could not touch them there.”
Jende shook his head and let out a short derisive laugh. “So you think that's what we're going to do, eh?” he asked. “What kind of stupid idea is that? I'm not going to hide in any church. How long did the people stay in the church?”
“I don't know. How am I supposed to know?”
“You're the one who thinks it's a good idea. Why would I do such a thing? A grown man like me, hiding in a church? For what?”
“For what?” she said. “You want to know for what, Jende? For your children! That's what for. So your children can continue living in America!”