Six
knocked on the door, calling out, “Housekeeping!”
The family in the suite asked her to come in and clean, they were just leaving, the mother gathering her shopping bags.
They were Nigerians, could tell, from their glaze of self-assurance, and the mother’s expensive wig, the kind she saw only on Nigerian women, just silky enough to look like the real hair of foreigners.
Africans who could afford to stay in this hotel made her proud, and they were nearly always Nigerians.
This family was probably Igbo; the mother and daughter had the same yellowish skin tone as the Igbo traders she knew in Conakry.
They were so beautiful, they could have been Fula women, with their finely boned faces.
“What’s your name?”
the daughter asked, smiling, surprising ; she must have lived a long time in America, rich Africans never asked the names of servants.
“I’m Bah,” she said.
“Oh, you’re African!”
the daughter said.
“I wasn’t sure.
I thought you might be from Haiti.
Are you Senegalese?”
“I come from Guinea Conakry.”
“Long live Sékou Touré!”
the father said, and smiled.
His daughter shared his smile, open, warm, a smile that invited you in.
The mother was too preoccupied with herself to smile.
She said, “Oh, Francophone,”
sounding disappointed, her attention on her shopping bags.
“Your hair is so neat, where did you braid it?”
the daughter asked, as if to make up for her mother’s hauteur.
said she braided it herself, and then followed more admiration from the daughter, and numbers exchanged.
The daughter’s name was Chiamaka and she said her parents were staying in the suite because she had started remodeling the kitchen in their house and hadn’t finished.
It seemed to too much information, but Americans did that all the time, they gave details that nobody had asked them for, and Chiamaka must have lived a long time in America.
Chiamaka said she had just been in Senegal, and actually she had a book in her bag that she’d bought there, which might like.
had never felt so flattered, to be thought of as a person who could read.
—
Later, they would joke about this.
“You gave the best present I never use,”
would say, and Chia would cover her face in her hands.
From braiding Chia’s hair, she began cleaning Chia’s house.
Chia paid her well and marveled at ordinary things she did.
How did you manage to remove that carpet stain, Kadi? You changed the window screen already? Rich people, the good ones, could be so impressed by the normal things they never did, and it made them overpay for those things.
When the hotel closed for refurbishing and the manager said he wasn’t sure she would be rehired, Chia said Zikora knew somebody who could help, and soon was hired at George Plaza, a better job, with better pay.
Beautiful Chia, always trying to make people happy, cosigning for ’s apartment, teaching Binta to play the piano.
The first time they stayed the night at Chia’s house it was because Chia said Binta needed to practice the piano, and it became the first of many nights, until was the caretaker, with her own key, coming and going, even when Chia was away.
Chia’s cousin, Omelogor, was visiting then, on that first night, and she sat at the dining table while Chia and Binta were at the piano.
She was watching them; her watching made uncomfortable.
Omelogor was strange, difficult to read; she looked at you stonily, only to say something nice, and then she smiled before she called you a fool.
Was she thinking that Chia was wasting time teaching the servant’s child how to play an instrument she would never own? But all Omelogor said was “Chia, stop hovering, let Binta trust herself.”
always felt a sense of precaution flood through her body whenever Omelogor was there.
To be careful, but for what exactly she was not sure.
Omelogor lived in Nigeria and she didn’t affect a blindness to life’s pecking order; she sent on errands without apology.
Kadi, can you boil some water for tea.
Kadi, can you clean these shoes for me.
Chia would never ask her like that, nor would Zikora.
America had infiltrated them both and taught them to sprinkle life’s realities with the seeds of apology, as if to say, “I am sorry I have to ask you but I will ask you still.”
Sorry, Kadi, please wash this, Chia would say.
It was the same with some White people who looked with pity at her as she arrived to clean their rooms, thanking her too profusely, and they made her feel sorry for being the cause of their pity, a pity that was not in any way useful to her.
Her coworkers, Chinese, Caribbeans, other Africans, joked with one another about this, sharing snacks, trading stories.
Lin had the best stories; she was the most animated, tiny Lin, a Chinese woman.
It was Lin whom had shadowed when she was training, and she was startled at how strong Lin was, how quickly she moved furniture, flipped a mattress, vacuumed long hallways.
Lin said the manager always escorted guests to her floor—the twenty-eighth floor, the special floor, the floor with suites—as if they could not go up in an elevator on their own.
One night a guest on Lin’s floor trashed his room, ripping up the sheets, smashing the mirrors, puncturing the walls.
It was like a war zone, Lin said.
was mystified.
Why would a guest just destroy a hotel room? “White people are strange,”
Lin said.
“The Black rich ones don’t do it, the Asian rich ones don’t do it, the Hispanic rich ones don’t do it; only the White rich ones.
They’re bored, so they destroy.”
Lin’s favorite story was about a guest who called Lin into the room to say that the complimentary flowers were not fresh.
“And she shows me one stem of the flower! One stem! They are crazy,”
Lin would say, laughing.
laughed, too, a slight laugh; she was uncomfortable mocking guests, and always cast a surreptitious glance around, to see if any managers were nearby, worried that her laughter might somehow jeopardize her job.
When the others asked if any guest in her room had done a crazy thing, she demurred, saying no, nothing.
Which was true.
But she could not see herself telling stories about crazy guests.
“You never complain,”
the manager told her once, his tone admiring, but his words did not please her.
He made her behavior seem like a repudiation of her coworkers.
Lin whispered to her, weeks in advance, that she would win Best Employee at the Christmas party, and did not believe it until her floor manager, Shaquana, called her into the manager’s office to tell her, and they gave her the certificate.
Each time she looked at the gleaming seal below “George Plaza,”
she felt like an educated person with a certificate, her name written in gold.
—
Her phone rang, and a voice asked if she was willing to take the call and accept the charges from Arizona.
Yes, she was.
Arizona made her think of a desert because it was what Elhadji Ibrahima said when he first told her where Amadou was being sent to prison.
I hoped it would be somewhere close but they’re taking him to Arizona and that place is a desert .
It stuck in her mind— that place is a desert— and each time they talked she imagined Amadou thirsty in an unforgiving landscape, until his voice and his laughter dispelled the image.
His upbeat tone, laughing off his stories of life inside, how they were made to wear pink underwear and how his lunch packet always had a rotten apple.
He spoke of the other inmates as if he just harmlessly happened to be living alongside them: they were good guys and he had made many new friends.
The food was terrible, he said, one hot meal a day, a slop whose ingredients were impossible to tell.
“I dream of your fouti and latchiri every day, Kadi.
No, I dream of you but also of fouti and latchiri!”
he said.
After he got privileges for being consistently disciplined, she paid credits into his prison account and he told her what he bought at the commissary, chicken tenders cooked in bad oil, Philly cheesesteaks in overbaked buns.
“They should give you the contract to supply prison food, my love.
Nobody will want to be released!”
When he wasn’t laughing, he was apologizing, saying he hadn’t told her about selling marijuana because he wanted to keep her clean.
He slid the English word “clean”
into his Pular, as if its meaning were different from the Pular word.
She said it was okay, because it was.
She had come to understand that dishonesty had its shades, its layers, its twists and knots.
Sometimes we lie because we love, and sometimes we lie to serve or save those we love.
She could not shake off her guilt, the ever-present drip of blame, because as soon as she left New York, he seemed to fall apart, first losing his apartment and then being arrested.
If she had stayed, she might have kept him whole.
And he had stolen nothing; he had merely sold something that was given to him.
There was no true dishonor there.
She began saving for a plane ticket just weeks into his confinement, but it was more than a year before she flew to Arizona.
She felt fluttery, like a bride allowed to choose her own husband, as Chia did the paperwork, filling out forms and ordering a background check, and Binta read the visitation guidelines on the prison website.
She was not to wear anything that was see-through or above the knee, no cleavage, no spandex, no camouflage, no orange-colored clothes. She thought it strange, all the specific details of this rule, as if people visiting their loved ones in prison would be so preoccupied by clothes.
Chia paid for a motel room, not far from the prison, and for a rented car, a small sedan with clean shiny wheels.
drove carefully, unused to the landscape; even the sun was different, sparkling off the windshield.
As she approached the sprawl of prison buildings, she felt the ebbing of her excitement and the first pulse of shame.
It was not shame for what Amadou had done, but a more intimate shame that crawled under her skin as she stood in line, a metal detector grazing her caftan, a brisk guard patting her down.
Two brown dogs came sniffing at her and disgust welled up in her throat.
Dogs, unclean dogs.
She came from an upright and honest people, even if they had little.
They were not thieves.
And Amadou had stolen nothing.
Yet here she was being sniffed by dogs, unclean creatures judging how clean she was. A woman in the next line, wearing a long red dress, began to shout at the guards, “What the fuck do you mean by inappropriate?”
while her two little girls, their braids clinking with bright beads, asked, “So we don’t get to see Dad? So we don’t get to see Dad?”
The stone-faced guards were telling the woman she should have read the visitation dress code.
watched them, stunned.
These people really enforced their clothing rule; they were controlling not only the men locked inside but the women left outside, too.
What harm could a dress do inside a prison? The red material sat on the woman’s skin, clinging all over, to her belly, her breasts, her behind, the kind of dress Americans wore all the time.
The woman turned to leave, and called to the children, who hesitated before following her, glancing back as they did.
Those innocent children, denied of their father because of a skintight dress.
But why did the mother wear it anyway? ’s cup of shame was full, now spilling over, to include this woman she did not know, and her two little girls.
She sat in a cubicle, feeling trapped by the plexiglass walls around her.
The black two-way phone in front of her looked ancient and clunky, a thin grimy line of dirt below the mouthpiece.
A forlorn roll of toilet paper sat on the ledge, perhaps for visitors who might need to wipe their tears.
Amadou was brought in by a guard, confident, bouncing Amadou, wearing what looked like an orange sack.
He flashed the guard a meek smile before he sat down.
Even though he had lost no weight, he looked reduced to her.
The hollow at his collarbone had deepened.
She understood then the true debasement of prison, that you no longer owned yourself.
Suddenly she didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to see this Amadou, who was beaming at her through the plexiglass and talking fast into the phone.
held her receiver limply to her ear.
He said, “You look beautiful, my love.”
He said, “Seeing you is like daybreak.”
In the face of her silence, he finally asked, “Kadi, what is it?”
“I want to go,”
said.
And then she dropped the phone and stood up and Amadou looked dumbfounded.
If he called out to her, she didn’t hear it, because by putting the phone back on its cradle, she had given up her desire to hear him.
She should not have come here just to look at him, like an animal in a cage.
Seated separated from him by hard glass, so far from him that he could not even smell her jasmine scent.
When she returned from Arizona, Chia said, “Oh, Kadi.
I love your love,”
wistfully, like a child longing for a make-believe sweet.
Chia loved the idea of love, so eagerly, so unwisely.
“I love that you’re waiting for Amadou.
They better release him early so he can hurry up and bring kola nuts already!”
Chia said.
They were in the kitchen with Omelogor, and did not want to talk about Amadou at all.
She was making fouti; Omelogor had just arrived from Nigeria, and had brought her mother with her, for a medical checkup, and Chia thought her aunt would like the sauce.
The vegetables were boiling in a small pot.
Now Chia was brightly telling Omelogor about Amadou, details of ’s life revealed, as though unclothing her: he was her childhood love, he brought her to America, he was now in prison for marijuana possession.
“The judge that sentenced him probably went home and had a joint to relax,”
Omelogor said.
did not understand and she wanted to understand.
She poured the vegetables into a colander, eggplants and okra and peppers, all soft from boiling.
But she delayed blending them, to better hear Omelogor.
“He shouldn’t be in prison this long, just for selling marijuana,”
Omelogor said.
“I was reading about incarceration the other day.
Black and White Americans use marijuana at the same rates but Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for it.”
“I didn’t know that!”
Chia said.
“I mean, I know about how they treat crack and cocaine differently.”
“It’s pure madness.
America has the most people in prison in the world.
Many of them have no business being there.”
paused, to digest the words, before turning the blender on.
She should not have left Amadou like that; suddenly she felt weak and disloyal, and ashamed for succumbing to her shame.
He didn’t truly deserve to be there, he hadn’t stolen and he hadn’t killed, and she should not have felt any shame.
A new resolve grew inside her, to do better by Amadou, to rinse herself clean of emotions that did not benefit them.
She would save up for a ticket and go back to Arizona and this time they would smile and smile at each other through the plexiglass wall.
“Kadi, Amadou doesn’t even deserve all the years he got.
You have to hold on to him, it won’t be easy but hold on to your love,”
Chia said, as if reading her mind.
For the first time, appreciated Chia’s dreamy grasp of love.
She had sensed a welling up of dissatisfaction in Chia for a while, about her boyfriend, Mr.
Luuk, the tall White man who seemed unable to sit still.
Chia would leave him soon, she had not found what she was looking for, and she didn’t know she never would, because it simply did not exist.
wished Chia would descend from her cloud and get married; a baby would ground her, calm her restlessness.
wondered whether to tell Chia that it would be a mistake to leave Mr.
Luuk, but she never volunteered her opinion, she waited always to be asked.
The weekend he visited from Mexico, he kept coming into the kitchen to talk to while she wished he would let her cook in peace.
But she liked him because he loved Chia; he was nothing like that professor, Darnell. Darnell, who made the effort, took the time, to rudely ignore her greeting—she, , a mere housekeeper. Such unnecessary contempt she had never seen before. She had prayed so much for Chia then, for Chia’s blindness to come to an end.
turned off the blender, pleased with the mix; its watery texture was just right.
She felt Omelogor’s intense eyes, as she spread the fouti over some rice, and drizzled warm palm oil on top.
“Jesus Christ, that is disgusting,”
Omelogor said.
“Omelogor!”
Chia said, but Chia was laughing and could not help but smile.
It amused her, how sure Nigerians were that their narrow-minded food was superior.
Just like Madame, Chia’s imperial and imperious mother.
“Kola nuts for marriage ceremonies,”
Omelogor said suddenly.
“We’re all related, we Black Africans, we really are, the fundamental cultural ideas are the same.
It’s beautiful, it’s just so beautiful.”
Her eyes were flashing with passion, a passion out of proportion, too large for its cause.
And the conversation had long moved on from kola nuts anyway.
There was a hint of instability in Omelogor, as if she might think herself to madness one day.
—
loved the brisk walk to the hotel after she exited the metro, then going down in the back elevator to the staff area to change into her uniform.
She was accustomed to wearing stockings now; they had been itchy at first, clinging to her legs, and she would pinch and lift and tug at them, unused to something so close to her skin.
Her uniform made her feel like a professional: a smart button-down dress, and an apron tied over it.
In it, she became a person with a purpose, ready to go.
Sometimes she hummed as she worked, hanging the cleaning sign, stripping the bed, restoring a lost order to the world.
The loud buzz-hum of the vacuum soothed her.
Once a White businessman came in to collect his bag while she was in the room.
“Thanks for cleaning,”
he said, and he pushed his hand into his pockets and offered her a crush of dollar bills.
Guests rarely tipped, and when they did, she felt the stirrings first of embarrassment, before gratitude.
Wasn’t it gluttony to be tipped when she got twenty-five dollars an hour plus health insurance for her and Binta? Recently she had gotten even more benefits, sick days fully paid, and it felt like a miracle, to have a union that battled for the rights of workers.
She always wished God’s special blessing on them.
She paused often, while cooking for Chia, or cleaning a hotel room, or talking to Binta, to think this was her life, it really was her life, a life of stable things, trimmed with small pleasures.
She sent money to her mother and paid school fees for her siblings now in Conakry.
She paid rent on her two-bedroom apartment.
She had a car.
Binta was taking AP classes—her American accent faultless, and Binta herself sometimes bewildering in her mix of familiarity and foreignness.
Her childish superiority had emerged; she now refused to eat bread and mayonnaise.
“Mayonnaise is a condiment in a sandwich; it’s butter you should eat on bread,”
she said.
Each time Binta slipped more English into her Pular, mourned a small loss, and yet she wanted nothing more for Binta than this ability to own two worlds.
In the mornings prayed, the airing of worries that she hoped to numb.
Relax, she told herself, but always something lingered.
Clouds gathering, or already gathered.
The cruel promise of loss always there.