TOBA
March 1998 — Public School 147
The boys were waiting for me by the fence.
I saw them as soon as I came out of the building—three of them, all bigger than me, all wearing clothes that marked them as belonging here in ways I never would. Baggy jeans that sagged low on their hips, held up by belts they didn’t actually use for holding anything up. Puffy jackets in bright colors—red, blue, black—with logos I didn’t recognize but understood meant something. Clean, white, expensive-looking sneakers probably worth more than everything in my closet combined.
Darnell Thompson was in front, as always. He was the leader of this particular group of boys who had decided, for reasons I still didn’t understand, that I was their favorite target. Maybe because I was new. Maybe because I was African, which apparently was something to be ashamed of in this country. Maybe just because I was there and they were bored and cruelty was a form of entertainment.
I could run back inside. Find a teacher. Report what was about to happen. The school had rules about bullying—I had seen the posters in the hallways, bright colored with encouraging slogans about respect and kindness and telling an adult if someone bothered you.
But I didn’t.
In two months at this school, I had learned that rules were just words. They existed on paper and on posters and in the mouths of teachers who said all the right things but couldn’t actually protect anyone. The boys who ruled these halls knew this. They knew exactly how much they could get away with and how to do it without getting caught.
And I had learned something else too: showing weakness made everything worse. If I ran to a teacher, they would find me later. If I hid in the bathroom, they would wait. If I showed fear, they would feed on it like dogs on meat.
So I kept walking. Head up. Eyes forward. Pretending I didn’t see them, even though every cell in my body was screaming at me to run.
“Yo, African!” Darnell stepped into my path, forcing me to stop. “Where you going, African?”
“Home.”
“Home?” He looked at his friends, grinning. “You hear that? He said home. What, you got a hut back in Brooklyn? You got a little mud hut with a grass roof?”
His friends laughed. One of them—a smaller kid whose name I didn’t know, who followed Darnell around like a shadow hoping to absorb some of his power — started making sounds. “Ooh ooh ooh, ahh ahh ahh.” Acting like a monkey from a movie about jungles and savages. He looked like a fool.
My hands curled into fists at my sides. Heat rose in my chest—same heat that got me in trouble three times already at this school. Same heat that led to Mummy being called to the principal’s office, that made her cry when she got home because she couldn’t afford to lose work over “your nonsense, Toba, why can’t you just keep your head down?”
“I don’t live in a hut,” I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me. “We have buildings in Nigeria. We have cities. Lagos is bigger than New York.”
“Lay-gus?” Darnell stepped closer. “The fuck is Lay-gus? Sounds like a disease. You got Lay-gus? That shit contagious?”
More laughter. The circle was tightening around me now. I could feel them pressing in, cutting off my escape routes, herding me like prey.
“Let me go,” I said, trying to move past Darnell.
He shoved me. Not hard enough to knock me down, but hard enough to make a point. His hand flat against my chest, pushing me back.
“Nah, nah. You don’t get to just walk away, African. Not until you pay the tax.”
“What tax?”
“The tax for walking on our sidewalk. The tax for breathing our air. The tax for coming to our country and taking our shit.” His face was close to mine now. I could smell his breath—minty, like chewing gum. I doubt he has ever experienced hunger, to go to bed with an empty stomach because there simply wasn’t enough food. “Give me your lunch money.”
“I don’t have lunch money.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t. I bring food from home.” This was true. Every morning, Mummy woke up early to pack my lunch—concoction rice in a plastic container, or bread with sardines, or sometimes just bread with nothing, depending on how much money we had that week. She couldn’t afford to give me money for the cafeteria. The cafeteria food cost more than we spent on dinner for all three of us.
“Then give me the food.”
“I already ate it.”
Darnell’s eyes narrowed. His expression hardened.
“You lying to me, African?”
“No.”
“I think you lying.” He looked at his friends for confirmation. “Y’all think he lying?”
“He lying,” they chorused in unison.
Darnell stepped even closer. Close enough that I could see the individual pores on his nose, the slight asymmetry of his eyes, the scar on his chin that someone had probably given him the same way he was about to give one to me.
“Empty your pockets.”
I didn’t move.
“I said empty your fucking pockets.”
My heart was pounding. My palms were sweating. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to do what he said, to give him whatever he wanted, to make this stop.
But something else was rising in me too. Something that had been building for two months of this—two months of being called African like it was a slur, of being mocked for my accent, of watching my mother cry and my sister shrink and our whole family become smaller and smaller in this country that didn’t want us.
“No.”
The word came out before I could stop it.
No. I balled my fist standing my ground.
Darnell blinked. Surprised, maybe, that the African boy with the strange accent and the strange clothes had something like defiance in him.
Then he hit me.
His fist connected with my stomach first, driving the air out of my lungs, folding me in half. I tried to stay up, tried to keep my feet, but someone kicked my legs out from under me. I fell had on the cold pavement, and they were all on me at once. Kicks to my sides. To my back. A sneaker glanced off my head. I curled into a ball, arms wrapped around my face, trying to protect the important parts while they took what they wanted from the rest.
It lasted maybe thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. Time stretches when you’re on the ground getting kicked by boys who hate you for reasons you don’t understand.
Then a sharp, shrill whistle and suddenly they were gone. Running. Scattering. Leaving me on the pavement with my jacket torn and my lip bleeding. Something broke inside me that had nothing to do with my ribs.
A teacher appeared. Ms. Rodriguez. She taught social studies and always wore sweaters with cats on them. She was saying something, asking something, but the words weren’t reaching me. I just lay there, looking up at the gray sky, tasting blood in my mouth, thinking;
This is America... This is supposed to be better.
* * *
The walk home took twice as long as usual.
Every step hurt. My ribs ached. My head throbbed. My lip was swelling, pulsing with my heartbeat. The backpack on my shoulders felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, the straps digging into bruises I couldn’t see.
I stopped at the corner of our block, leaning against a building to catch my breath. The afternoon was fading, the gray sky darkening toward evening. Soon Mummy would be getting ready for her night shift, if she wasn’t already gone. Soon Rola would be alone in that room, waiting for me.
I couldn’t let them see me like this. Couldn’t let her see me like this. How do I encourage her that this place has nice people?
I sat down on someone’s front steps and tried to fix myself. Used the back of my hand to wipe the blood from my lip, but it just kept coming. Tried to straighten my jacket, but the tear in the sleeve was too obvious. Tried to arrange my face into something that wouldn’t scare her.
Twenty minutes I sat there. Maybe thirty. Waiting for my body to stop shaking. For my eyes to stop stinging. For the rage and the shame and the helplessness to settle into something I could carry without breaking.
Then I got up and walked the rest of the way home.
The stairs to our building were the hardest part. Three flights. Each step a reminder of what had been done to me. By the time I reached our floor, I was breathing hard, sweating despite the cold.
I unlocked the door. Stepped inside. Tried to smile.
Rola was sitting on our bed, cross-legged, drawing in a notebook with the crayons Mummy found at the church donation box last week. She looked up when I came in, and her whole face changed.
“Toba!” The joy of seeing me. Then: “What happened to your face?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? Ahn ahn, see blood.”
“It’s nothing. I fell. At school. On the playground.” The lies came easily. “It’s not a big deal.”
She didn’t believe me. I could see it in her eyes. But she didn’t push.
Instead, she got up and went to the bathroom down the hall, returning a minute later with a wet paper towel that she pressed gently to my lip.
“Hold still,” she said.
“It’s fine—”
“I say hold still.”
I held still.
She dabbed at the blood, her touch careful, tender. Her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth in concentration. Nine years old, playing nurse, taking care of her older brother like it was the most natural thing in the world.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“A little.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I know.” She dabbed some more. “But I’m still sorry.”
I watched her face as she worked. So serious. So careful. So much older than she should have to be. Nine years old and already learning that the world was hard and that the people you loved couldn’t always protect you from it.
“Don’t,” I said, “don’t tell mommy about this. Okay?”
“Why not?”
“Because she has enough to worry about. She works all day and all night and she still can’t—” I stopped.
Rola didn’t need to know about our money problems. About the bills that piled up faster than Mommy could pay them. About mommy crying last week after counting coins and one dollar papers on her bed, trying to figure out how to make the numbers work.
“She still can’t what?” Rola asked.
“She just… she has a lot on her mind. This is small. I can handle it.”
Rola looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded.
“Okay,” she said. Then smiled, bright and beautiful. “Our secret.”
“Our secret.”
She finished cleaning my lip, then stepped back to examine her work. Apparently satisfied, she went to throw away the paper towel. When she came back, she sat next to me on the bed—close, her body touching mine.
“Toba?”
“Yeah?”
“I hate this place.”
I put my arm around her. Pulled her close. Let her press her face against my shoulder the way she’d done at the airport, on the airplane, every time she was scared.
“I know,” I said. “Me too.”
We sat like that for a long time, two children in a room that was too small, in a building that was too cold, in a country that didn’t want them. Holding onto each other because there was nothing else to hold.
* * *