Dear God,
Buzz is going to prom and he has a suit on! It’s navy blue with a pink tie and a pink pocket square. TBM had to order the suit special cuz Buzz’s so tall that they didn’t have anything for him in the store. We spent all afternoon taking pictures of him, and we were all laughing and hugging and TBM was crying and saying, “You’re so beautiful,” over and over. And the limo came to pick Buzz up so he could pick his date up and he stuck his head out of the sunroof and waved at us. He looked normal. Please, God, let him stay like this forever.
My brother died of a heroin overdose three months later.
7
By the time I wanted to hear the complete story of why my parents immigrated to America, it was no longer a story my mother wanted to tell. The version I got—that my mother had wanted to give Nana the world, that the Chin Chin Man had reluctantly agreed—never felt sufficient to me. Like many Americans, I knew very little about the rest of the world. I had spent years spinning elaborate lies to classmates about how my grandfather was a warrior, a lion tamer, a high chief.
“I’m actually a princess,” I said to Geoffrey, a fellow student in my kindergarten class whose nose was always running. Geoffrey and I sat at a table by ourselves in the very back of the classroom. I always suspected that my teacher had put me there as some kind of punishment, like she had seated me there so that I would have to look at the slug of snot on Geoffrey’s philtrum and feel even more acutely that I didn’t belong. I resented all of this, and I did my best to torture Geoffrey.
“No, you’re not,” Geoffrey said. “Black people can’t be princesses.”
I went home and asked my mother if this was true, and she told me to keep quiet and stop bothering her with questions. It’s what she said anytime I asked her for stories, and, back then, all I ever did was ask her for stories. I wanted her stories about her life in Ghana with my father to be filled with all the kings and queens and curses that might explain why my father wasn’t around in terms far grander and more elegant than the simple story I knew. And if our story couldn’t be a fairy tale, then I was willing to accept a tale like the kind I saw on television, back when the only images I ever saw of Africa were those of people stricken by warfare and famine. But there was no war in my mother’s stories, and if there was hunger, it was of a different kind, the simple hunger of those who had been fed one thing but wanted another. A simple hunger, impossible to satisfy. I had a hunger, too, and the stories my mother filled me with were never exotic enough, never desperate enough, never enough to provide me with the ammunition I felt I needed in order to battle Geoffrey, his slug of snot, my kindergarten teacher, and that seat in the very back.
My mother told me that the Chin Chin Man joined her and Nana in America a few months after they moved to Alabama. It was his first time on an airplane. He’d taken a tro-tro to Accra, carrying only one suitcase and a baggie of my grandmother’s achomo. As he felt the bodies of the hundreds of other bus passengers press up against him, his legs tired and achy from standing for nearly three hours, he was thankful for his height, for the deep breaths of fresh air that floated above everyone else’s heads.
At Kotoka, the gate agents had cheered him on and wished him well when they saw where he was headed. “Send for me next, chale,” they said. At JFK, Customs and Immigration took his baggie of chin chin away.
At the time, my mother was making ten thousand dollars a year, working as a home health aide for a man called Mr. Thomas.
“I can’t believe my shithead kids stuck me with a nigger,” he would often say. Mr. Thomas was an octogenarian with early-stage Parkinson’s disease whose tremors had not deterred his foul mouth. My mother wiped his ass, fed him, watched Jeopardy! with him, smirking as he got nearly every answer wrong. Mr. Thomas’s shithead kids had hired five other home health aides before my mother. They’d all quit.
“DO. YOU. SPEAK. ENGLISH?” Mr. Thomas yelled every time my mother brought him the heart-healthy meals his children paid for instead of the bacon he’d asked for. The home health service had been the only place to hire my mother. She left Nana with her cousin, or brought him to work with her, until Mr. Thomas started calling him “the little monkey.” After that, more often than not, she left Nana alone while she worked her twelve-hour night shift, praying he’d sleep until morning.
The Chin Chin Man had a harder time finding a job. The home health service had hired him, but too many people complained once they saw him walk in the door.
“I think people were afraid of him,” my mother once told me, but she wouldn’t tell me why she’d come to that conclusion. She almost never admitted to racism. Even Mr. Thomas, who had never called my mother anything other than “that nigger,” was, to her, just a confused old man. But walking around with my father, she’d seen how America changed around big black men. She saw him try to shrink to size, his long, proud back hunched as he walked with my mother through the Walmart, where he was accused of stealing three times in four months. Each time, they took him to a little room off the exit of the store. They leaned him against the wall and patted him down, their hands drifting up one pant leg and down the other. Homesick, humiliated, he stopped leaving the house.
This is when my mother found the First Assemblies of God Church on Bridge Avenue. Since her arrival in America, she had stopped going to church, opting instead to work every Sunday because Sunday was the day of the week most Alabamians wanted off for the two holy acts—going to church and watching football. American football meant nothing to my mother, but she missed having a place to worship. My father reminded her of all that she owed God, reminded her of the power held in her prayer. She wanted to summon him out of his funk, and to do so, she knew she needed to swim out of her own.
The First Assemblies of God Church was a little brick building, no bigger than a three-bedroom house. It had a large marquee out front that displayed cutesy messages meant to lure people in. Sometimes the messages were questions. Have you met Him yet? or Got God? or Do you feel lost? Sometimes, they were answers. Jesus is the reason for the season! I don’t know if the marquee messages were what drew my mother in, but I do know that the church became her second home, her most intimate place of worship.
The day she walked in, music played over the loudspeakers in the sanctuary. As the singer’s voice beckoned, my mother inched toward the altar. My mother obeyed. She knelt down before the Lord and prayed and prayed and prayed. When she lifted her head, her face wet with tears, she thought she might get used to living in America.
8
When I was a child I thought I would be a dancer or a worship leader at a Pentecostal church, a preacher’s wife or a glamorous actress. In high school my grades were so good that the world seemed to whittle this decision down for me: doctor. An immigrant cliché, except I lacked the overbearing parents. My mother didn’t care what I did and wouldn’t have forced me into anything. I suspect she would be prouder today if I’d ended up behind the pulpit of the First Assemblies of God, meekly singing number 162 out of the hymnal while the congregation stuttered along. Everyone at that church had a horrible voice. When I was old enough to go to “big church,” as the kids in the children’s service called it, I dreaded hearing the worship leader’s warbling soprano every Sunday morning. It scared me in a familiar way. Like when I was five and Nana was eleven, and we found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. Nana scooped it into his big palms, and the two of us ran home. The house was empty. The house was always empty, but we knew we needed to act fast, because if our mother came home to find the bird, she’d kill it outright or take it away and drop it in some small stretch of wilderness, leaving it to die. She’d tell us exactly what she’d done too. She was never the kind of parent who lied to make her children feel better. I’d spent my whole childhood slipping teeth under my pillow at night and finding teeth there in the morning. Nana left the bird with me while he poured a bowl of milk for it. When I held it in my hands, I felt its fear, the unending shiver of its little round body, and I started crying. Nana put its beak to the bowl and tried to urge it to drink, but it wouldn’t, and the shiver that was in the bird moved in me. That’s what the worship leader’s voice sounded like to me—the shaky body of a bird in distress, a child who’d grown suddenly afraid. I checked that career off my list right away.