Chapter 13 2004
I woke the morning after I’d arrived home to discover two shimmering elephant coins beneath my pillow in place of the two teeth I’d lost. Holding one tight to my chest, I closed my eyes and wished with all my might for my voice to return.
It did not work.
I decided to hold on to the second wish, unsure if I was doing something wrong and not wanting to waste it.
When another day passed and I still hadn’t managed to utter a word, Profe and Boodo grew concerned.
They didn’t want to bother Mother, but they had tried everything to cure me—lozenges, herbal teas, hot compresses, cold compresses, vapor rubs, chants, and several prayers to Allah.
Nothing had worked. Finally, Profe called Mother at the tune-up place, and Mother told him to take me to the doctor.
The next day, Profe and I drove into the city to see the ancient man I went to once a year for my checkups.
It took him five minutes to declare me “fit as a fiddle.” He suggested Profe take me to a psychologist because he believed I was suffering from something called “selective mutism.” Which, quite frankly, was a very stupid name, suggesting I was choosing not to talk, which wasn’t the case at all.
I found it extremely upsetting not having a voice.
After all, I was finally home, with my two favorite people, and I couldn’t say all the things I’d been wanting to say since I’d been gone.
“My best guess is that it was brought on by the stress of going to school,” the doctor said, which embarrassed me because it made it seem as if I couldn’t deal with something every other kid dealt with just fine.
When Profe told Boodo what the doctor had said, she put her hands on her hips and said, “We tried it your way. Now it’s time to call the chief.”
My pulse quickened. The great Somali chief was the only dhaqtar dhaqameed, traditional healer, in Minnesota, possibly in the whole United States.
Everyone at Blue House knew about him. He lived on the top floor of Cedar High Apartments with three of his six wives.
His other wives, along with countless of his children and grandchildren, remained in Somalia.
He’d ended up in Minnesota because he was unable to save the brother of a general who had been shot and brought to the chief to cure.
The chief, knowing he couldn’t help the dying man and realizing that his failure would likely result in his execution, sneaked from his house with the wives who were with him at the time and fled.
Somalis traveled from all over seeking his help.
His second wife, a woman tall and rigid as a door according to No Fingers, determined who he would see.
No Fingers had been one of the lucky ones.
He went to the chief seeking relief from the pain in his missing fingers, and the second wife let him in.
The visit was a miracle. No Fingers’s face no longer contorted every other minute as if he was being stabbed with a fork, and finally he could sleep. He started dating. He took up skateboarding. He went back to school.
After that, Boodo sent Tiny to see the chief, hoping he might help her with her nightmares. But Tiny, who was not a lucky person, was turned away.
Boodo spent a long time writing the note that explained my situation. The note said the great chief’s help was urgently needed in the matter of a white child whose voice had been terrified from her body. She sent Happy to deliver it along with a container of kaakac.
I did not think of myself as lucky, so I did not expect the chief to agree to see me. But much to my surprise, the next day, Happy received an email saying the chief would visit Kendall House that evening.
The news sent Boodo and her daughters into a frenzy. The four of them, along with Astur, rushed to Kendall House with cleaning supplies, groceries, and Boodo’s sacred incense burner. The four women set to work scrubbing the house top to bottom and preparing a feast for the chief’s arrival.
It was Astur’s and my job to make the bakhoor for the incense burner.
We sat on the back porch, tearing herbs and flowers and mixing them with myrrh and syrup.
Since I couldn’t talk, Astur did the talking for the both of us.
Which was not unusual. Even when I had my voice, she talked a lot more than me.
She had started playing soccer and, according to her, was quite good.
I wanted to tell her about running, and that I was quite good as well.
It felt like the only thing I had to be proud of since I’d gone away.
We finished making the bakhoor, and Tiny took me to have a bath and to “scrub me until I glowed.”
As she washed my neck, she said, “The great chief will return your voice with the flick of a wrist.” She flicked the washcloth in her hand.
It was clear how much she believed in the great chief, and it made me terribly sad that he hadn’t agreed to help her. I pointed to my nevus, wondering if he might fix that as well.
“Oh, child,” she said with a smile only Tiny could give, both happy and sad at once. “The great chief will not fix a thing that does not need fixing.”
It was easy for her to say. She didn’t have to live with people calling her Poopface and thinking she was contagious.
Before I went to Gaines, I didn’t mind the nevus.
I understood it made me different, and that sometimes it frightened people who didn’t know me.
But the people I loved didn’t care about it at all, and each time Mother took me to another specialist, I felt relieved when they told her removing it was too dangerous.
The blood vessels were too deep and close to the eye, and the safest course was to leave it.
But in the tub, at that moment, as Tiny continued to scrub me clean, I prayed she was wrong and that the great chief might fix me.
The chief arrived as the sun was going down.
We heard the car, and the seven of us—Boodo, Tiny, Diamond, Happy, Astur, Profe, and I—hurried out to the porch.
A powder-blue convertible the size of a boat drove slowly up the drive.
Despite the frigid evening, the top was down.
A very small, very dark Black man was in the driver’s seat, and the chief sat in the back.
I knew he was the chief because of the large black-and-white checked turban he wore.
Profe stepped from the porch to greet him, and the two men shook hands.
With the chief’s turban they were about the same height.
But that was where the likeness ended. Profe’s thick silver hair was neatly trimmed and combed back from his clean-shaven face.
The chief’s bristly hair, whiter than cotton, stuck out wildly from the turban, and tufts of snowy beard sprouted from his chin and cheeks haphazardly.
Profe was dressed in his double-breasted tweed wool coat over a white collared shirt and pressed black pants.
The chief wore an ornately gold-and-maroon stitched tunic that nearly reached the ground.
His posture was bent, and he leaned on a black staff inlaid with colorful beads.
The only uninteresting part of his outfit was his shoes, a pair of blue Nike sneakers, the kind a lot of Somali men wore.
Profe pulled an envelope from his pocket, and the chief’s driver stepped forward and took it, while the chief did not move.
In fact, he held himself so still it made me think of a stone gargoyle perched below a bell tower of a medieval church—a cold, powerful creature, unmoving during the day but that came to life to wield its magic at night.
I tucked myself tighter against Boodo.
As if sensing my thoughts, he turned his head, and my pulse quickened as his black marble eyes found mine, then it ticked up again when he crooked a bony finger, gesturing for me to come forward.
Boodo forced me out from behind her skirts, and heart knocking around in my chest, I walked down the steps.
I stopped a foot in front of him, and he bent at the waist, then tilted his head one way, then the other to examine my nevus. Up close, I could see the deep crevices in his face and the blue tinge at the edges of his eyes, and I was certain I had never seen a man so old.
He straightened, then crooked his finger again, this time signaling for me to follow him as he turned toward the lake.
I looked back at Boodo, and she jutted her chin for me to go. Profe offered a smile of encouragement. And Astur mouthed, “Go!” and shooed me with the backs of her hands.
Mostly because I didn’t want to look like a coward in front of her, I hurried after the shuffling bent figure.
The chief reached the boat dock and, with surprising grace, lowered himself to the planks. He sat cross-legged, and I did the same across from him. Icy wind gusted over the water, and I shivered beneath my coat. His tunic did not look all that warm, but he did not seem affected.
For a long time, he simply looked at me, regarding me as if sorting through my thoughts.
The wind shifted, and I picked up his scent—tobacco, sweat, and old age.
Oddly comforting, it made me think of the old man who lived in the house beside Blue House.
He was always on his porch smoking and doing the crossword puzzle in the paper.
I realized as we sat there that, since his arrival, the chief hadn’t said a word—not to Profe and not to me—and I wondered if it was intentional, if mimicking the person he was going to cure was part of his magic.
The familiar evening sounds of the lake surrounded us—the whisper of wind through the trees, the lapping of the water against the dock, crickets and frogs chirping, the occasional cry of a bird.
We sat so long my heart stopped pounding, and instead of worrying about the chief, I began instead thinking about how cold I was and how much I was looking forward to the grand dinner Boodo, Tiny, Diamond, and Happy were preparing of lamb shank, rice, and caramelized carrots.
My stomach rumbled and my mouth watered thinking about it.