Five
An ambulance noisily racing through crowded streets to save a single life.
Just one life.
What a country.
If something happened to her, an ambulance would come racing to save her, too, and nobody would ask her to pay in advance.
For this reason alone, if for nothing else, she wanted to stay forever in America.
A heady miracle, to think that this was Binta’s inheritance, this land of ease.
The asylum process was too easy, and she felt a lingering discomfort still, a sense of the unfinished, at how easy it had been.
The visa interviewer at the embassy, pleasant and patient as spoke, then nodding at the translator’s words, as if she cared about the wedding said she was attending in New York.
The person at the airport, another pleasant White woman, wincing when said her aunt had cut her with a razor blade, offering Binta a lollipop, telling “Good luck.”
had paused.
The story of her cutting was easy to tell, words rolling out, the memory so far away as to have happened to someone else.
But she had paused, before starting the other story.
To gather herself, to rouse the spirits she needed, because to echo the voice on that tape was to poke at her own bound and banished ghosts.
She was telling another woman’s story, a woman she did not know, but of a pain she did.
And so she had paused.
With a heave to her shoulders, she began.
She was about to say “there were four soldiers”
when the pleasant White woman said “Good luck”
and pushed a piece of paper across to her.
She looked at the woman and then at the translator.
It’s finished, the translator said in French.
You’re approved.
breathed deeply to shield her astonishment.
Was this a ruse? How could it be over already? Amadou said it would be very difficult, he said she should talk first about her cutting only as an opening before repeating the story of the voice on the tape.
He said the story on the tape would sway them, make her case stronger.
But the pleasant White woman was smiling an encouraging smile, the slight movement of her head saying “You can go.”
It really was over and she had not told her practiced story.
She had not wanted to tell it and yet she felt deflated, now that she would not tell it after all.
All that memorizing, staining herself with words, coming to nothing.
Was there another part of this process? Maybe they would call her again to ask her questions.
But Amadou said there was no other process.
“See, you didn’t lie! You didn’t want to lie and God helped you and you didn’t lie! You are in America, my love! All we have to do now is wait for your papers to come in the mail!”
She spent her early months in a language haze, floating in and out of comprehension.
American English was spoken at a higher pitch than normal, and she wondered if she would ever perfect that pitch, even if she managed to get the words right.
She felt unsteady on her feet, walking the crowded streets of Queens, as if the secret of truly belonging here was yet to be revealed to her.
She was disoriented by the closeness of strangers, the graffiti scrawled on buildings, the long lurching buses.
The subway scared her, at first, to be descending deep into the earth, but when they climbed up the stairs and emerged again into the light, a giddiness overcame her, as if she had reached an unexpected peak.
“I want you and Binta to stay with my uncle, I don’t want to dishonor your family,”
Amadou said.
“Amadou, as far as I am concerned, I am your wife.”
“Give me time, my love.
To do things properly.
You can be with me all day but I want you to sleep at my uncle’s house, until we’re properly married.”
“And when will that be?”
She wanted to ask but did not.
In Conakry he said he would send kola nuts back home as soon as they arrived in America, so they could begin as a married couple, but now he was asking for time.
She moved with Binta into his uncle’s house, in a basement room that was dark even in the afternoon.
His uncle, Elhadji Ibrahima, was warm and wise, and her spirit felt at peace with him.
He told her often how he had been one of the workers on the Monument du 22 Novembre 1970, alongside Chinese and other foreigners, all of them proud that Guinea had quashed that terrible Portuguese coup.
didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she understood his nostalgia, his need to talk about home with a person recently from home.
He stayed in the kitchen while she cooked, asking how he could help, while she tried to hide her awkwardness from having a man in the kitchen.
“They say we Fula can’t rule and we should stick to trading.
We produced a man like Diallo Telli and they say we cannot rule? They killed him in Camp Boiro and chased so many of us out of Guinea, to Senegal and Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.
Okay, now what has happened? The country is even more divided today.
But I still believe we can be united.
This government must acknowledge the injustice done to us Fula, and we, too, have to identify first as Guinean before Fula, otherwise they will be right to call us outsiders.
They say we are not citizens like them, because they are the true inheritors of the Manding empire, but that is not what citizenship is about.
Sékou Touré was a great liberator but also a great dictator and we can teach a history that tells the full story.”
“Yes,” said.
When she was with knowledgeable people like him, she always thought, with a stab of wistfulness, that Binta would have known what to say.
Most evenings Elhadji talked and talked, and she felt slightly appalled by his emotional manner, so lacking in the stoic reserve of a proper Fula man.
But he was kind, endlessly kind, explaining America to her, taking her to the public school to enroll Binta, teaching her to drive, showing her which TV shows to watch, to learn English.
—
Amadou bought her a pair of denim shorts and asked her to wear them to a summer cookout and she balked; it felt like being naked.
She couldn’t wear them out, she was horrified by women on the streets who bared so much skin in shorts and tiny tops.
But she wore them for him, in his apartment, and he asked her to walk around so he could look at her and she did, shyly, laughing girlishly, and then flopping down on the sofa next to him.
She was unused to looking at her own body and her exposed thighs felt unfamiliar, the skin much lighter, a thin crisscross of veins underneath.
When his friends came by, she ran into his bedroom to hide, so they wouldn’t see her so uncovered, and Amadou laughed.
“You have to loosen up a little, Kadi.
Just a little,”
he said.
She didn’t wear the shorts to the summer cookout in the park, but she ate some of the food in large pans covered in foil, because she knew he wanted her to, as her newly loosening-up self.
Potato salad, pasta salad, macaroni and cheese, all of them as tasteless as chalk.
Binta was running around, shrieking happily, while Amadou chased after her.
He had painted her face blue and red, and a blob of vanilla ice cream, fallen from her cone, had left a patch on the front of her dress.
watched them with a tug in her chest of pure joy.
She hoped to always remember this moment, the sky a boundless clear blue, their life beginning in Binta’s new world.
—
But Amadou was different in America, not as light on his feet, nor in his spirit, as he had been back home.
He wasn’t answering her questions fully, his eyes always darting to distractions.
“I want to take Binta to Coney Island,”
he said.
“I want to take her to the Bronx Zoo; it’s the biggest in the world.”
Anxiety spread over his face whenever his phone rang, and he would glance at the screen, and then turn back to her with a fake forced cheer.
Sometimes he sat despondent on the edge of the bed, looking into the distance, and he would say a business deal fell through, something to do with a supplier from China.
She sensed he wasn’t yet where he wanted to be, and his unfulfilled dreams, his failures, ground him.
With her here now, he could no longer hide.
“Amadou, tell me how things really are, please,” she said.
“My love, it’s okay.
No problem,” he said.
“I want to get a job.
We will do it together.”
She decided she would no longer wait until she could speak English well before looking for work.
She started at a braiding salon owned by a querulous Ivorian woman, and got a cash commission at the end of each day, a few folded dollar notes.
The salon was alive with chatter, French spoken in Ivorian and Guinean and Malian accents, and from the women she learned useful nuggets of information, the best Greek yogurt for kossan, the African store where she could buy sour leaves and even, occasionally, fresh garden eggs.
But the salon pay was poor, and Elhadji Ibrahima said she could do much better; after all she had her papers, while many of the other braiders didn’t.
He found a home health aide job, caring for an elderly American man, but after she spoke to somebody on the phone, they turned her down, saying they couldn’t understand her English.
He told her there was an opening for a good hotel job, as a housekeeper, but it was in Washington, D.C.
didn’t want to leave New York without Amadou.
The weather was cooling, summer becoming fall.
Amadou was often away.
Sometimes he told her he would be gone a few days; he was “hustling,”
he said, and it was all to give her and Binta the best life.
He took her to the bank to open an account, and then said he needed to keep some money aside, in her account, explaining something about taxes that she didn’t understand and didn’t need to understand.
She wanted only to have their plans made molten, blending each in the other.
—
His Guinean friends were Fula and Malinke and Susu, and even some Christians from the forest region.
They were moths drawn to Amadou’s flame of rebellious charm.
In his apartment, they lounged barefoot, English and French mashed up in fierce arguments about Guinean politics, about football, about random useless things.
Amadou always started the intensity, then he ended in play and laughter.
One day, overheard them joking about pork, his friend Joseph was stuttering, and she did not fully get the joke.
She hoped she had not heard what she heard.
They were all excitable that day, checking their phones, following the protest in the stadium in Conakry.
“I would have been in front!”
Amadou said.
And one of the friends said, “The government cannot ignore this, this is big!”
She called him into the bedroom to whisper, unable to wait until his friends left.
“Did you eat pork in Joseph’s house?”
Even the question from her own mouth horrified her, to think that Amadou might have pushed open the door to another curse, now that she and Binta seemed finally free.
“Did Joseph say you ate pork in his house?”
she asked again, wanting him to be offended that she would even ask.
His eyebrows furrowed, and she saw his mental shift from Conakry protest to pork.
“What? Oh, don’t mind Joseph.”
“Did you?” asked.
“Did I what, my love?”
“Eat pork.”
“What if pork was the only food left in the world?”
From his tone he was laughing at her without laughing at her.
One of his friends called out from the living room to say there was trouble in Conakry, and she watched him go back to become reabsorbed by them.
She could not imagine Tantie Fanta joining a mass protest, but still she went out to buy a phone card to call and check on her.
Later, she told Amadou, “Tantie Fanta said soldiers killed Fula people in the protest.”
“It was not just Fula people.
We have to stop playing victim all the time.
Those soldiers shot at all the protesters.”
“Bhoye told her.
He said he had to lie down next to dead bodies and pretend to be dead.”
“Bhoye is always lying!”
Amadou said.
was taken aback, his dislike of Bhoye more blistering than she knew, his voice sharper than it needed to be.
It felt as if he found her wanting or had chosen something else over her.
She went silent and moved away from him.
“Sorry, my love,”
he said.
“All I am saying is that we are all Guinean and this thing that happened in Conakry is terrible.”
The sanctimony shining from his face upset her.
“Did you eat pork in your friend’s house, Amadou?”
she asked quietly.
“What is all this, Kadi?”
“If you did, you have brought a curse down on us,” she said.
He laughed, he actually now laughed, a short and brutish laugh.
With all his knowledge, he lacked the wisdom of knowing that curses were real.
“No, Kadi, I did not eat pork in anybody’s house,” he said.
She had thought that he did eat pork, that she heard Joseph say so, but Amadou would never lie to her.
Her relief lifted the dark clouds.
—
On weekends when Amadou wasn’t there, she went over and cleaned his apartment while Binta watched television.
One day she found two photos in Amadou’s drawer of a child, maybe two years old, smiling in a stroller in a woolen hat.
He was Amadou’s son, you only had to look at his face.
That exuberant smile.
A face so like that black-and-white baby picture of Amadou that she now carried in her purse.
She screamed and shouted at Amadou.
It was unusual for her because she existed best in a low key, but she shouted to show him the roaring nature of her hurt.
Amadou said it was a fling, long over, and the child was in Texas with the mother, a woman from Mali who cashed the checks he sent but refused to let him see his son.
Even the Malian woman knew about , he said, knew she was his only love, his destined wife.
As he spoke, there was, in ’s mind, the loud creaking of doubt.
“A child.
A whole precious child, and you did not tell me,” she said.
“I was going to tell you at the right time.”
“I thought you told me everything,”
she said.
She felt betrayed, not because he had a child but because he hadn’t told her.
If she was indeed his true love, he should have told her.
She felt the ground shifting beneath her, suddenly certain there were other things she should know but did not.
That evening she told Elhadji Ibrahima that, yes, she would go to Washington, D.C., for the hotel job, if it was still open.
Elhadji Ibrahima looked surprised.
“You have discussed with Amadou?”
“Yes.”
“Good.
They pay well.
I know a Fula woman you can stay with until you get your own place.”
“Thank you,”
said.
She tried not to show how much her own decision frightened her.
The galloping heartbeat flooding through her.
Find her own place on her own.
Alone with Binta.
“Washington, D.C., is not too far away,”
Elhadji said, kindly, as though to soothe her.
“Yes,”
said.
She looked into the future and saw herself empty without Amadou and Binta crying for Amadou and the painful gash of distance between them.
But she saw, too, slowly unfolding, the first slender shoots of her own autonomy.