Voice of America (15 page)

“You slapped me, now you have to kill me—you must kill me today and take my dead body back to my parents,” Mother said, and began to wail aloud. But the slap soon began to take effect like a slow-acting drug, and she seemed to wilt and began to quake with heavy sobs.

“Get me the phone,” she said to me.

As I walked toward the phone, Father’s voice cut through to me. “Leave that phone alone.”

“I said bring me the phone, or are you deaf?” Mother screamed at me.

I hated to be caught in the middle this way; I hesitated and began to walk toward the phone.

“If you invite the cops and for any reason I am deported from this country, you will spend the remaining part of your stupid life in misery—in short, that is when you will really regret ever meeting me,” Father said.

Mother went into the bathroom, lay down in the bathtub, and curled up like an infant in the womb.

Silence descended upon the days that followed, as it usually did. I became the go-between.

“Go and ask your father if he wants dinner,” Mother would say to me, even though they were within hearing distance of each other.

“Tell your father that I need quarters to do the laundry.”

“Tell your father that he has a phone call.”

Father’s response to these was never more than a grunt, and if the message involved money, with which to do the laundry for instance, he never gave any but cursed and asked aloud if Mother no longer had hands with which to wash the clothes. I went to school and came back each day hoping I would see them talking to each other, but this did not happen. This was unusual, because before now they usually made up within a few days.

One Friday evening, Uncle Boateng came to visit. Father fondly called him Boat and looked up to him in many ways. He was not really an uncle—he was Ghanaian, and we were Nigerian—but father insisted I call him Uncle. Though he had lived in America for over ten years, Uncle Boateng still spoke with a strong Ghanaian accent and wore kente-cloth shirts and
a traditional woven African cap. He was a graduate student of physics and had been for ten years; he worked illegally as a distributor of the
Post-Standard
newspaper. He told stories about his job that made it sound like some glamorous occupation.

“The dogs in DeWitt and Fayetteville are the most wicked dogs in this country,” he would say, laughing uproariously. “Ah, those dogs, they hide on the porch and the moment you come out of the car to drop off the paper in the box, they have reached you in one bound, and you know the worst part, they go straight for either your prick or your jugular, and the owners are right there behind the blinds, watching and smiling. As an illegal worker you are not covered by insurance, and if anything happens to you, you are on your own.” He would then take Father to his old beat-up maroon Ford Taurus and show him the scratch marks made by dogs on the car’s fading paintwork. Father took every word that came out of Uncle Boateng’s mouth as the word of life.

“American boy,” he called me as he entered the house with a bottle of vodka wrapped in a brown paper bag. He smiled at me, showing an expanse of pinkish red gums. It was a Sunday, and I was watching football on ABC; the picture quality was poor and the rabbit ears atop the television hung at a precarious angle.

“You should be watching real football, soccer as they call it here—you know, real African football, I mean by African superstars like Roger Milla of the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon, Jay Jay Okocha of the Nigerian Green Eagles, and Abedi Pele of the Black Stars of Ghana. And look, let me tell you something, the Americans are soon going to discover soccer, and then it will become big, and even now if you play well you can win a scholarship to Le Moyne.”

Father came out of the study and greeted him. He stepped
back and looked at Father, gave him a once-over, and bellowed with laughter.

“You this man, look at how much weight you have lost because you had a minor quarrel with your wife, oh, so if you don’t eat that
thing
for one month, you will die.” He laughed again.

“And where is your wife? The woman that has made you lose all this weight, where is she, or can she tell me she did not hear my voice?” Mother came out of the room and genuflected in greeting. They all went into Father’s study, and I returned to my football game. I could not concentrate on my game and soon went to take my accustomed position by the door. Uncle Boateng was talking to Mother.

“I know that it is tough for you, our women in this country. Staying at home all day, not working because of immigration rules, doing all the chores alone while the man is off to school, this useless school that we are attending at our old age. I know back home you’ll have lots of people to help you with chores, but still you have to suffer now so that you can enjoy tomorrow.”

“That is what I have been telling her all these years, but she would not listen,” Father interjected.

“You, don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking, I will soon get to you—or do you think you can bribe me not to speak the truth?” Uncle Boateng said to Father.

“Now, listen to me, woman, it is not for nothing that in Africa where we come from, the wife refers to her husband as ‘the owner of my head.’ We are in America, but still we are Africans, and you should not talk back to your husband, even more so in the presence of his first son.”

“And as for you,” he said, turning to my father, “you have to start changing; you cannot go through America without
America going through you. Even me, I’m changing; last Valentine’s Day I took my wife out to a restaurant to eat just like Americans, I even bought her roses on her birthday. The rhythm of the drum has changed, and we the dancers have to change our dance steps. Now apologize to your husband. I do not want to come here to settle quarrels, I want to come here to celebrate the birth of a new baby.”

I heard both Mother and Father laughing, and the sound of Mother’s knees hitting the floorboards as she knelt down in apology. The door opened, Mother came out, and I ran back to my football game on television. I had missed a touchdown, and the commentators were still talking about it. The Orange men were getting back in the game.

Father came out to get the wine opener and saw Mother cutting up chicken to prepare pepper soup. Father looked at her and teasingly called her “stubborn woman.”

“Ah, if I wasn’t stubborn, you would have killed me, you
wicked
man,” she said and they both laughed.

Soon the aroma of boiling chicken seasoned with garlic, basil, thyme, and curry and some African herbs that Mother usually bought from the African store on South Salina Street filled the apartment. I knew that the next day all the clothes in my closet would smell like curried chicken.

Highlife music was coming out of Father’s study, and Uncle Boateng’s laughter was booming. He and Father were talking and drinking and agreeing with everything the other said.

“Where is your son? He is almost a man now, and should be sitting here with us, drinking and picking up wisdom from sitting near his elders.”

“Ah, do you want me to end up in jail, or don’t you know that this is America?” Father said, and Uncle Boateng laughed again.

“Anyway, he can sit with us, can’t he, there is no harm in that. At least there is no law yet saying he cannot sit with elders while they are drinking, or is there such a thing as secondhand drink, like you have secondhand smoke?” Uncle Boateng said, and they both laughed again.

I came and sat with them and pretended to be enjoying it while thinking of the football game on television.

“You are already a man, and according to the customs of our people back in Africa, you should by now be preparing to go into the bush and catch an animal with your bare hands and return with it to show the entire clan that you have become a man. But we are in America, and killing a squirrel here is an offense. So your father and I have been putting our heads together, and we have come up with an equivalent test of manhood for you,” Uncle Boateng said.

Mother brought in the steaming bowls of pepper soup, and Uncle Boateng began to lick his lips. He grabbed a bowl from the tray, took a spoon, and began to drink the soup. I was worried the hot soup was going to scald his throat.

“Ah, you are looking at me with wonder—don’t you know I have an air-conditioning unit inside my throat?” he asked, laughing. “Back home, when I was about your age, my parents sent me to a boarding school. That was where I learned to bolt down hot food. If you did not bolt down your food as soon as it was served, the senior prefects would start their endless announcements, and you could not eat while a prefect was
speaking. By the time the prefect finished speaking, lunchtime was over and the food had to be poured away.”

I too began to drink my bowl of soup, which had cooled somewhat since Uncle Boateng began telling his story.

W
E ENTERED
G
ALDI’S,
the discount grocery store where Father preferred to do our grocery shopping. Buying groceries was a woman’s chore back in Nigeria, but it was one duty Father did not find demeaning or complain about. When Mother used to shop for groceries, it was a source of endless quarrels between them. He would ask her for the receipt from her purchases and, his glasses perched precariously on his nose, hold a pencil in one hand while going through the receipts like homework. He would ask Mother lots of questions on a voided purchase, his eyebrows raised as he posed the question. He would rise from the dining table, still holding the receipt. Finally one day, Mother had blurted out that it was about time he started doing the grocery shopping himself, and Father had jumped at the offer as if it were a long-awaited opportunity.

Father inserted a quarter into the shopping cart and gestured for me to push the cart into the store.

“Pick whatever you like,” he said to me. I could not believe my luck. Usually Father would frown when I asked if we could buy chocolates, yogurt, or breakfast cereals. His only concession was buying ninety-nine-cent bagels, nodding in my direction and saying, “I know you like bagels.”

Galdi’s was full today, and for some reason Father seemed to find this fact exciting. It was the typical Galdi’s crowd of Sudanese and Croatian immigrants and poor old people who
rode the Centro bus and closely examined every item they picked up from the shelf, put the same item back on the shelf, and then picked the same item up again and dropped it on another shelf.

I picked up a tub of ice cream, a few bars of chocolate, some cookies, and a giant pack of Mike and Ike. Father looked at me and asked if that was all I wanted. I began to pick up items at random, a six-pack of fruit jugs and about half a dozen different kinds of candy, but Father did not even stare at me. He bought the usual items that we needed—jumbo chicken thighs, tomato puree, pasta, vegetable oil, rice, and trash bags. Our shopping cart was overflowing at this point, but Father urged me to add a pack of Twinkies to my haul just before checkout.

There were four checkout lines, but Father picked carefully before we joined a line. He was sweating slightly, like someone at the verge of something, but I could not quite place whatever it was he had in mind. We began to off-load all our stuff onto the conveyor belt, with father smiling apologetically at a matronly white woman behind us. The cashier flashed us a false smile and began to tally our purchases. It came to a little over a hundred dollars. Father seemed genuinely surprised and pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill and ten-dollar bill from his back pocket, all the while smiling at the woman behind us.

“I did not realize things have become this expensive, eh, I thought it was only the price of gas that has gone up,” he said out loud and smiled at the cashier, but she did not return his smile.

“We have no choice, we cannot pay for your items, you have to return them.” He began returning the items I had picked to the cashier, who asked, “You don’t want these?” And without waiting for a response, she began to return the items to a cart
near her. But the lady behind us on the line pulled Father aside and began to talk to him. I could hear her.

“I noticed you had to drop off a lot of stuff. See, I can help, and you don’t have to pay me. I’m sure you would do it for someone else. I will pay the difference.” She handed her debit card to the cashier and asked her to add the charge to her bill. Father seemed genuinely surprised and kept saying, “Thank you, thank you,” in a voice that seemed not to be coming from him.

“It’s not a problem at all, I’m sure you’ll do it for somebody else, I used to have kids myself,” the lady said and smiled, showing only her teeth.

We walked out of Galdi’s loaded down like hunters with their kill. The traffic on Erie Boulevard pounded like African talking drums, and Father kept smiling and patting me on the back.

Y
our case is simple, you will soon be released,” the sergeant said to Paiko. Paiko had been arrested earlier that evening during a police raid on Jolly Hotel, a brothel that harbored more than thirty female prostitutes.

In the late evening, Paiko was still sitting on a worn brown wooden seat behind the counter. He was beginning to get worried. His arrest was likely to stop him from going to his stall at the Alade Market, where he sold “Okrika Wake Up,” imported secondhand clothes and bags. Since after his arrest, his girlfriend, Sweet, for whom he had been waiting to finish having sex with her last client so that they could go home together, had not yet come to visit him at the police station. He recalled a conversation he had had with Sweet a long time ago, when he first told her he wanted her to become his “special woman.” She had smiled and told him that any man who wanted to keep an
ashewo,
a prostitute, as his woman must be prepared to catch the clap and should be ready to spend some time at the police station. He had been lucky until last night. Usually he would bribe the police
whenever they came on a raid of the Jolly Hotel, but last night was different. The people who had arrested him were members of the newly formed SARS, Special Anti-Robbery Squad.