Behold the Dreamers (6 page)

H
E
KNEW
BAD
NEWS
COULD
COME
EVEN
ON
THE
HAPPIEST
OF
DAYS.
H
E
knew it could arrive even when sadness was as far from the heart as Ras ben Sakka is from Cape Agulhas.

He knew any given day could be like the day his brother sent a text message asking him to call back as soon as possible. That had been a good day, a warm sunny Saturday. He was at the Red Lobster in Times Square with Neni and Liomi, eating with his favorite people at his favorite restaurant. He had immediately called his brother back and listened to him say, in a panicked voice, that their father had come down with an ugly case of malaria and could barely talk. Pa Jonga's eyes had rolled to the back of his head, Jende learned, and he was now in a conversation with his long-dead father. He needed to be rushed to a private hospital in Douala; money for the hospital could be borrowed from a businessman in Sokolo if Jende could talk to the lender and promise to send the funds for repayment as soon as possible. I beg you, Jende, his brother had said, you get for promise for send the money now-now-so, or Papa go die by daybreak.

Jende had not been able to finish his food after that call. Neni had asked the waiter to wrap up the sautéed shrimp while Jende ran, first to an ATM, to withdraw money from his savings account, and then to a bodega bearing a Western Union logo on its window, to transfer the funds to Cameroon. He ran along Eighth Avenue like a deranged man, pushing aside bedazzled tourists so he could send the money as soon as he could even though the time would make no difference since his brother would not be able to retrieve the money till Monday.

His father had survived, and Jende had been reminded that, indeed, bad news has a way of slithering into good days and making a mockery of complacent joys. But the day Bubakar called, that Tuesday in April 2008, was not a special day. Jende was at work, the weather was cold, the streets of Manhattan as brutal to drive on as any other day.

He was parked on a street corner, reading Clark's discarded
Wall Street Journal,
when he saw Bubakar's name flashing on his phone. He picked up the phone warily, knowing it had to be big news, good or bad: Immigration lawyers, like doctors, did not call to say hello.

Bubakar said hello, asked about his day. His voice was somber and serious, lacking the
eh
s and
abi
s he often added at the end of sentences, and from that Jende could tell something was amiss. Even when Bubakar asked about Neni and Liomi and tried to make small talk about life as a chauffeur, Jende could tell the man was merely sterilizing a spot on his heart so he could inject painful words.

“I finally received the letter,” Bubakar said.

“What did they say?”

The asylum application was not approved, the lawyer told him. The case was being referred to an immigration judge. Jende was going to have to go to court because the government was going to begin removal proceedings against him. “I tried my very best, my brother,” he said. “I truly did. I'm sorry.”

Jende said nothing—his heart was pounding too fast for his mouth to open.

“I know it's not good news, my brother, but don't worry,” he went on. “We'll keep fighting. There is a lot we can do to keep you in the country.”

Still, Jende could muster no words.

“It's very hard, I know, but we must try to be strong, okay?”

The silence remained.

“Stay strong, my brother. You've got to stay very strong. I know it's a mighty shock. Really, the decision is shocking me, too, very much right now. But what can we do? The only thing we can do right now is to keep fighting.”

Finally, Jende muttered a barely audible something.

“Huh?”

“I say, this means I have to leave America?”

“They say that, yes. They don't believe your story that you'll be killed by Neni's family if you go back to Cameroon.”

“I thought you said it was a good story, Mr. Bubakar. In fact, you yourself told me that they would believe me. We left the interview happy. You told me I had answered the questions very well and that the Immigration woman looked like she believed me!”

“Yes, but like I told you the last time we spoke, I didn't think it was a good sign when she told us to go home and wait for the decision in the mail instead of asking us to come back to the asylum office in a couple of weeks to pick it up. I didn't want to read too much into it—”

“You told me not to worry too much about the fact that it was taking them too much time to mail us the decision, because Immigration is very slow. That's what you said!”

“They don't even have the decency to apologize and explain why it took them a whole eternity to make one decision—”

“You didn't make it sound that bad, Mr. Bubakar! You told me that the woman was very satisfied with my answers!”

“I thought so, my brother. I thought she was. But who knows how those bastards at Immigration really think? We give them a story and hope they believe it. But some of them are wicked people, very wicked. Some people in this country don't want people like me and you here.”

“What is going to happen to me now? Are they going to arrest me and force me inside a plane? Will I get a chance to say goodbye …”

“Oh, no, God forbid! Inshallah, it'll never get to that. No, for now you're going to get a date when you have to stand in front of an Immigration judge. ICE lawyer will be there, pushing for the judge to throw you out of the country. I will be there, standing next to you, pushing for you to remain. I'm going to do everything I can to convince the judge that the people at USCIS are wrong and that you belong in America.”

“So you are saying it's going to be you versus the lawyer from the government?”

“That's correct. Me versus their lawyer. Better man go win all.”

“Oh, Papa God!”

“I know, my brother, I know, believe me. But you have to put your faith in me. You must, okay? We're going to do this together. Have we not made it this far together?”

Jende took in a deep breath. The car seat had turned into a bed of needles.

“Did I not help you make it this far?” Bubakar said. “Did I not petition USCIS to give you a work permit when they were taking too long to get to your case? Eh? Is it not because of that work permit that you were able to get a driver's license and now have a better job?”

“What am I going to do?”

“You've got to trust me.”

“It's not that I don't trust—”

“Did I not help you apply for a student visa for your wife to come here and go to school? I got your whole family together in New York, my brother. Got you this close. The least you can do is trust me that, Inshallah, we will win this case and you'll get a green card.”

Jende's mouth dried up.

Bubakar asked if he had any other question.

“When do I have to be in court?” he asked softly, dreading the response.

Bubakar said he didn't know—he'd received only a letter of explanation today but Jende should be getting the Notice to Appear, with a court date, soon enough.

“You have any more questions, my brother?”

Jende said no; he could think of nothing more to say or ask.

“Call me anytime with any questions, okay? Even if you just want to talk.”

Without a word, Jende hung up.

He dropped his phone on his lap.

He did not move.

He could not move.

Not even his mind could move; the ability to create thoughts deserted him.

What he'd lived in fear of the past three years had happened, and the powerlessness was worse than he'd imagined. If not for his pride, he would have cried, but tears, of course, would have been useless. His days in America were numbered, and there was nothing salty water running out of his eyes could do.

Upper West Siders strolled by. MTA buses stopped by. A chaos of kids on scooters rushed by, followed by three women—their mommies or grandmas or aunties or nannies—cautioning them to slow down, please be careful. Mighty would soon be done with his piano lesson. The nanny would be calling in about twelve minutes to ask Jende to bring the car to the front of the teacher's building. What should he do in those twelve minutes? Call Neni? No. She was probably on her way to pick Liomi up from his after-school program. Call Winston? No. He was working. It wouldn't be right to call him with bad news at work; besides, there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do. No one could save him from American Immigration. He would have to go back home. He would have to return to a country where visions of a better life were the birthright of a blessed few, to a town from which dreamers like him were fleeing daily. He and his family would have to return to New Town empty-handed, with nothing but tales about what they'd seen and done in America, and when people asked why they'd returned and moved back into his parents' crumbling
caraboat
house, they would have to tell a lie, a very good lie, because that would be the only way to escape the shame and the indignity. The shame he could live with, but his failings as a husband and father …

He looked out the window at the people walking on Amsterdam Avenue. None of them seemed concerned that the day might be one of his last in America. Some of them were laughing.

That night, after he'd told Neni, he watched her cry the first tears of sadness she'd ever cried in America.

“What are we going to do?” she asked him. “What do we have to do?”

“I don't know,” he replied. “Please dry your eyes, Neni. Tears are not going to help us right now.”

“Oh, Papa God, what are we going to do now?” she cried, ignoring his plea. “How can we keep on fighting? How much more money do we need to spend now that it's going to be a court case?”

“I don't know,” he said again. “I'm going to call Bubakar soon to discuss more. The news hit me so bad … it was as if someone was pressing a pillow against my face.”

They would have to use the money they had saved, they agreed. All of it: the couple thousand dollars they had put away by sticking to a monthly budget and which they hoped to one day put toward a renovation of his parents' house, a down payment on a condo in Westchester County, and Liomi's college education. If they had to get rid of their cable and Internet and take second jobs, they'd do that. If they had to go to bed hungry, they'd do that, too. They would do everything they could to remain in America. To give Liomi a chance to grow up in America.

“Should we tell Liomi now, so he can be prepared if we have to leave?” Neni asked.

Jende shook his head and said, “No, let him stay happy.”

S
HE
DRAGGED
HERSELF
THROUGH
THE
CITY,
FROM
WORK
TO
SCHOOL
TO
home, because she needed to carry on as if nothing had changed, as if their lives hadn't just been opened up to unravelment. She couldn't summon a smile, sing a song, or string together two thoughts without the word “deportation” finding its way in there, and yet she propelled herself forward the morning after the news, dressed in pink scrubs and white sneakers for a long day of work, an overloaded backpack strapped on her shoulders so she could study at work while the client slept. Fatigued but unbowed, she traveled every day that week from Harlem to Park Slope to Chambers Street, even though she had a headache so vicious she groaned on subway platforms whenever trains screeched toward her. Once, on her way to work, she considered getting off the train to run into a Starbucks bathroom and have a good cry but she resisted the urge, because what good had all the tears done? What she needed to do was start sleeping better, stop staying up all night dreading the most horrid things that had not yet happened. We'll take it as it comes, Jende said to her every day, but she didn't want to take it as it came. She wanted to be in control of her own life, and now, clearly, she wasn't, and simply thinking about the fact that someone else was going to decide the direction of her future was enough to intensify her headache, leave her feeling as if a thousand hammers were banging on her skull. This helplessness crushed her, the fact that she had traveled to America only to be reminded of how powerless she was, how unfair life could be.

Six days after the news, her headache abated—not because her fears had diminished but because time has a way of abating these things—but new symptoms cropped up: loss of appetite; frequent urination; nausea. The symptoms could mean only one thing, she knew, and it wasn't something to cry over. And yet when she told Jende about them, she burst into tears, her joy and despair so mingled she seemed to be crying tears of joy out of one eye and tears of despair out of the other. She couldn't join him in laughing in amazement at the fact that it had finally happened, just when they had stopped worrying about whether it was ever going to happen after almost two years of trying. She couldn't marvel at how wonderful it was to get good news at a time like this, but she hoped she would be happy soon, as soon as she could eat without throwing up and get through a day without feeling like a movable lump of hormones.

“Mama,” Liomi said to her one morning as she packed his lunch, “please don't forget we have the parent-teacher conference today.”

Tell your teacher I cannot come, she wanted to say, but she looked at him sitting at the dinette eating his breakfast cereal, peaceful in his ignorance in the way only a child could be, and she knew she had to go to the meeting, because Jende was right—they had to keep him happy.

“Liomi's a good student,” the teacher said to her by way of opening the conference, after she arrived fifteen minutes late from work. Neni nodded absentmindedly. Liomi was a good student, yes, she knew—she sat with him most evenings to do his homework. She didn't need to attend a meeting to hear this, not after having spent ten hours attending to a bedridden man while her stomach churned from not having eaten lunch because of a lack of appetite. It had been about as awful a day as any other to be a home health aide: Every time the man had coughed and asked for his spit cup to deposit yellow globs of phlegm, her nausea had returned and she had rushed into the bathroom to throw up the water and crackers she'd had for breakfast.

“The only thing that concerns me about him,” the teacher went on, “is that—”

“What concerns you about him?” Neni interjected, suddenly alert.

“Oh, nothing too bad,” the teacher said with a short laugh, a faint accent (Hispanic? Italian?) seeping through her warm voice and causing Neni to wonder if she was an immigrant or a child of immigrants. If she was an immigrant, she didn't appear to be a poor one, not with the dazzling diamond ring on her finger and the Coach bag on the table. She was new to the school and seemed no older than twenty-four, probably only a year or two into teaching, and it was clear to Neni, from the young woman's cheerful demeanor and easy smile, that she was enjoying her job, and that regardless of why she initially took the job, she believed in what she was doing, in the difference she was making in the lives of her students. It was evident she was nowhere close to being as disillusioned as Liomi's teacher from the previous year, who repeatedly shook her head and sighed at least ten times during parent-teacher conferences.

“Liomi's a good student, Mrs. Jonga,” she said, “but he could be more attentive in class.”

“Attentive, eh?”

The teacher nodded. “Just a little bit more, yes. It could make a world of difference.”

“And by not attentive, what do you mean? Is he sleeping when you are talking?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” the teacher said, smiling again, apparently to put Neni at ease. Her makeup and pink lipstick were fresh, as if she had applied them between the end of classes and the start of her meetings with the parents; every strand of her hair was pulled into a neat bun at the back of her head. As far as Neni was concerned, she looked as if she was all set to go out to dinner with her fiancé, or to one of those lounges where young women without family responsibilities went to drink and laugh after work.

“I didn't say he's not attentive,” she said. “He is. He's a good listener. But every so often, he lets himself get distracted in class. He and his friend Billy—”

“They do what?” Neni asked. She was aware of the anger in her voice but didn't care to tell the teacher that the anger wasn't directed at her.

“Billy's the clown, but Liomi can't stop himself from laughing at every silly thing Billy says or does. Liomi's a great kid, Mrs. Jonga. He's obedient, he's sharp, he's just an all-around good boy. I'm sure I don't need to tell you this—I can tell from his performance how involved you are in his schooling.”

“But he makes noise in class?”

“He loves to laugh. Which is fine, of course. It's a good thing to be happy, don't get me wrong, but when he's in class, it would help for him to be less … giggly?”

“And you spoke to him? He does not listen to you?”

“He listens sometimes. I've moved him and Billy to extreme ends of the classroom. It's not just Liomi. Other kids get a kick out of Billy and his little brand of comedy—we're working on him. But in the meantime, it'll be good if we can help Liomi so he doesn't continue to—”

“Oh, don't worry about anything continuing,” Neni said, widening her eyes as she stood up to button her jacket. “None of this nonsense will continue after today.”

The teacher nodded and was about to add something, but Neni was already out the door. She ordered Liomi to stand up and he complied, jumping up from a bench in the hallway and strapping on his backpack. She said nothing more to him until they got home, though she held his hand firmly as they walked down Frederick Douglass Boulevard, tightening her grip as they hurried past a housing project where two young men had been gunned down the week before.

At home, she gave him crackers and orange juice. She could see his fear as he gingerly moved the crackers into his mouth.

“Lio,” she said to him softly, after he had finished his snack and she had asked him to sit next to her on the sofa. She hadn't envisioned herself speaking to him this gently when she'd walked out of the parent-teacher conference, but something about walking past a place where young men had died, then watching him eat his crackers so sadly, had softened her heart.

“Lio, do you know why we send you to school?” she said.

He nodded, looking down to avoid her eyes.

“Do we send you to school to play, Liomi?”

He shook his head.

“Tell me why we send you to school.”

“So I can learn,” he said slowly, almost shamefully.

“To learn and do what else?”

“You send me to … nothing, Mama. Just to learn.”

“Then why do you play in class? Eh? Why do you not listen to your teacher?”

He looked at her, then the floor, then the wall, but said nothing.

“Answer me!” she said. “Who is Billy?”

“He is my friend.”

“Your friend, eh?”

He nodded, still looking away.

“Because he's your friend, you have to let him distract you? Have I not told you that when it comes to school, you cannot let yourself be distracted?”

“But Mama, I did not do anything—”

“Listen to me, Liomi! Open your ears and listen to me, because I will say this once and then I'll
never
say it again. You do not go to school to play. You do not go to school to make friends. You go to school to sit quietly in class and open your ears like
gongo leaf
and listen to your teacher. Are you hearing me?”

The child nodded.

“Open your mouth and say ‘Yes, Mama'!”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Do you think Papa goes to work every day so you can play in school? Without school, you will be nothing. You will never be anybody. Me and Papa, we wake up every day and do everything we can so you can have a good life and become somebody one day, and you repay us by going to school and playing in class? You know what's going to happen if I tell Papa what the teacher told me? Do you think he'll be happy to hear that you think school is a place to play?”

“Mama, please …”

“Why should I not tell him?'

“I won't do it—”

“Wipe your eyes,” she said. “I won't tell him. But if I hear that you did one stupid thing in class again …”

He nodded, drying his eyes with the backs of his hands.

“I hope so, because you don't know how it hurt me today, what the teacher said.”

His lips started trembling, and with one look at them, and his tear-stained face, her heart softened again. She moved closer to him, wiped his cheeks with her palm.

“You're going to do well in school, Liomi,” she said, drying her palm on her scrubs. “You're going to graduate high school with A grades and go to a good college and become a doctor or a lawyer. You want to become a lawyer like Uncle Winston or a doctor like Dr. Tobias, don't you?”

The child shook his head.

“What are you shaking your head for? Don't you want to be a lawyer or a doctor?”

“I want to be a chauffeur.”

“A chauffeur!” Neni exclaimed. “You want to be a chauffeur?”

Liomi nodded, looking at her confusedly, his lips partially parted.

“Oh, Lio,” she said, laughing, enjoying the first light moment of her day. “Nobody chooses to be a chauffeur. You think Papa would choose to be a chauffeur if he could choose to be anything in the world? Papa is a chauffeur not because it is the best thing he can be. Papa's a chauffeur because he didn't finish school. And he'll never be able to finish school now, because he has to work so me and you can finish school. A chauffeur job is a good job for Papa, but it won't be for you.”

Liomi forced a smile.

“I've told you this, and I'll keep on telling you: School is everything for people like us. We don't do well in school, we don't have any chance in this world. You know that, right?”

He nodded.

“Me and Papa, we don't want you to ever be a chauffeur. Never. We want you to have a chauffeur. Maybe you'll become a big man on Wall Street like Mr. Edwards, eh? That'll make us so happy. But first you must do well in school, okay?”

Liomi nodded again and she smiled at him, then rubbed his head. For the first time since Bubakar told Jende about the possible deportation, she was hopeful. Until the day she left the country, she was going to keep believing that she and her family had a chance.

When Jende returned home from work around six o'clock (thanks to Mr. Edwards being out of the country for work and Mrs. Edwards canceling her evening plans because of a cold), she served him his dinner and left for her eight o'clock precalculus class without telling him what Liomi's teacher had said. In class she sat in the front row, as she did in every class, believing physical proximity to the teacher was directly related to class grades. Except that night, her theory was once more proven wrong: When the instructor returned the previous week's test, she had a B-minus.

“I just … I don't understand this grade, Professor,” she said to the instructor after she'd lingered around him long enough for all the other students to leave.

“Do you disagree with the grade?” the instructor asked as he moved a folder into his burgundy man bag.

“No, I don't think I disagree,” she said. “It's just that I stayed up all night the night before this test to study. I did many practice problems, Professor.”

“I'm not sure what you're asking me to do.”

“All this studying and I end up … I hate it when I work so hard for something and I get a result like this. I just hate it! No matter what I do, I just cannot do well in precalculus, and now my whole GPA is going to go down …”

“I'm sorry,” the instructor said as she began walking toward the door.

“It's okay, Professor,” she said, turning around. “I'm not angry at you.”

“Why don't you email me? I'll be glad to meet to see what you're struggling with.”

She sighed and nodded, fatigue blended with frustration making it hard for her to utter words.

“And cheer up,” the instructor said. “Lots of students would be happy with a B-minus.”