a teddy bear hanging from a string of lights — Photo by Andrey Khoviakov on Unsplash

ROLA

November 1998

The church held a dinner for all the immigrant families.

I had never heard of Thanksgiving before coming to America. The concept seemed strange to me—a whole day devoted to eating too much food and saying thank you for things. In Nigeria, we said thank you before every meal. We said it when someone gave us something, when someone did something kind, when God answered our prayers. We didn’t need a special day for it.

But Mummy said this was important. “It’s an American tradition,” she explained while braiding my hair that morning—it made me homesick for Lagos even though she was right there. “We are Americans now. We should learn their traditions.”

So she dressed us in our best clothes—the ones from the church donation box—and walked us to the community center attached to the church. It is a building made of cinderblocks painted yellow, trying very hard to be cheerful.

The room was full of people I half-recognized from Sunday services. Other Nigerian families, mostly, but also people from Ghana and Senegal and places with names I couldn’t pronounce. All of us immigrants. All of us far from home. All of us gathered around long tables covered in food that looked nothing like anything I was used to.

“What’s that?” I whispered to Toba, pointing at a brown, glistening thing at the center of the biggest table. It looked like a chicken had been blown up to the size of a small dog and then shellacked with all the oil in the world.

“Turkey, I think.”

“It looks scary.”

“It tastes like chicken. But different. Drier.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “A kid at school told me. His family has it every year.”

I studied the turkey suspiciously. Next to it were bowls and platters of other strange things—orange mush that I later learned was mashed sweet potatoes, something lumpy and brown called “stuffing” (though I couldn’t figure out what it was stuffed into), a dish of green beans drowning in what looked like mushroom soup, and a bowl of cranberry sauce that was so red it seemed almost angry.

We found seats at one of the long tables, squeezing in between the Johnson family—whose daughter Abigail had become my closest friend in school—and the Isholas, who had just arrived from Nigeria last month. They kept looking around with the same bewildered expression I remembered from our first weeks here.

“Rola!” Abigail scooted over to make room for me. “I saved you a seat. Did you see all this food? The Americans make so much food. My mother says it’s wasteful, but I don’t care. I’m going to eat until I burst.” She chuckled, her face filled with mischief.

“Is it good?”

“Some of it. The turkey is boring but the pie is amaziiiiing. Wait until you try the pumpkin pie. It’s like nothing you’ve ever had.”

Pastor Ifeanyi stood at the front of the room and raised his hands for silence. He was a small man with a big voice, and when he spoke, everyone listened.

“Let us say grace,” he announced. “On this day of Thanksgiving, we have much to be grateful for. We thank God for bringing us safely to this country. We thank Him for the opportunities He has given us. We thank Him for this community, for each other, for the food on this table and the roof over our heads…”

He went on for a while. Next to me, Abigail’s stomach growled so loudly that she clapped her hand over it, embarrassed. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.

Finally, finally o, the prayer ended and we were allowed to eat.

I tried everything, just like Mummy told me to. The turkey, which was indeed dry and needed more salt, maggi and pepper than was available. The mashed potatoes, which were creamy and strange. The cranberry sauce, which was so sweet it made my teeth ache. The stuffing, which had an interesting texture, like bread but not bread. And the pie—the pumpkin pie that Abigail had promised me—which was unlike anything I had ever tasted, creamy like custard and spicy with puff-puff’s nutmeg.

“Do you like it?” Mummy asked, leaning over to wipe a smear of orange from my chin.

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Good.” She smiled. “This is our first Thanksgiving. We have many things to be thankful for.”

“Like what?”

“Like you.” She touched my cheek gently. “And your brother. And God’s grace that brought us here safely.”

I looked across the table at Toba. He was eating mechanically, silently, his eyes fixed on his plate. He had been quiet all day, quieter than usual, and I knew something was bothering him. But when he felt me watching, he looked up and his face changed. He smiled at me and mouthed: Are you okay?

I nodded.

He nodded back.

And for one moment, in the middle of all these strangers eating strange food and giving thanks for things I wasn’t sure I was thankful for, hope sparked in my chest. Maybe, despite everything—the small room with the brick wall view and cold that never seemed to stop—living in America would be okay. Maybe we could build something here. Maybe the three of us, together, could survive this.

Maybe, I thought with a smile, watching Mummy laugh at something Mrs. Johnson said, while Toba snuck an extra piece of pie onto my plate after mummy said I’d had enough.

Maybe this place could become home.

* * *

After the dinner, Abigail and I snuck outside to get away from the adults. The evening was chilly but not unbearable. We sat on the steps of the community center, looking up at the sky that had few stars out.

“Do you like it here?” Abigail asked. “In America?”

I pretended to think about it.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes I hate it and I want to go back to Nigeria more than anything. But sometimes... sometimes it’s okay. Like today. Today was nice.”

“Yeah.” Abigail pulled her jacket tighter around her. “Today was nice.”

“Do you ever miss home?”

“All the time. I miss my grandmother. And my friends from school. And the way the rain sounded on our roof during rainy season.” She was quiet for a moment. “But I can’t go back to Jamaica. My family can’t go back. So I try to find things to like about here instead.”

“Like what?”

“Like pizza. And the library—did you know you can borrow books for free? As many as you want? And...” She glanced at me sideways, a small smile on her face. “And friends. Like you.”

I smiled back. “Like you too.”

We sat there for a while longer, two immigrant girls on the steps of a church in Brooklyn, learning how to be grateful for small things in a big, strange country. Learning how to survive. Learning, slowly, how to belong.

When Mummy called for me, I went inside feeling lighter than I had in month even though tomorrow I would wake up in that small room with its brick wall view and feel sad again. Cold would seep into my bones and I would cry for home the way I sometimes did, late at night when I thought no one could hear.

But tonight, I had pie in my belly, a friend who understood and a brother who loved me.

Tonight, was perfect.

* * *

The days after Thanksgiving felt different.

It was as though we got together to remind ourselves to stay thankful through the cold, gray December weather that made you want to stay in bed forever.

I started paying attention to things I hadn’t noticed before. The way the light hit our window in the morning, turning the brick wall golden for a few minutes before the sun moved on. The sound of Mrs. Garcia singing in the apartment above us. She sang in Spanish—I didn’t understand it—and it was beautiful. The smell of bread from the bakery two blocks over, drifting through the streets on cold mornings.

“You seem happier,” Mummy said one evening, looking at me with curiosity. “What changed?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Everything.”

She didn’t push. She rarely did anymore—too tired from work, too worn down by the constant struggle of keeping us alive. But I caught her smiling to herself as she went back to folding laundry, making me wonder if she was remembering something from her own childhood.

Abigail and I became real friends that winter. Not just school friends who sat together at lunch, but friends who told each other secrets. She taught me about American things I didn’t understand—why everyone cared so much about Christmas shopping, what a snow day was, how to make hot chocolate from a packet. I taught her Yoruba words, the ones Mummy still used when she was too tired to speak English, and she taught me patois phrases from her Jamaican grandmother.

“You’re lucky,” Abigail said one afternoon, as we walked home from school together. The first real snow of the winter was falling, soft flakes that melted on our cheeks. “You have your brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not alone. You have someone who’s always on your side. My older brother moved out when I was six. I barely remember him.”

I thought about Toba. About waiting for him every day after school. How he made sure I ate dinner before he did. Thought about him holding me at night when the nightmares came. His presence made everything bearable.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m lucky.”

“Do you guys fight?”

“Sometimes. Not really. Not like other siblings.”

“That’s weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean all the siblings I know fight all the time. Like, they can’t be in the same room without arguing. But you and Toba...” She trailed off, searching for the right words. “You’re like best friends instead of brother and sister.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because she was right, and I hadn’t thought about it that way before. Toba and I didn’t fight. Not really. We disagreed sometimes, had small arguments about stupid things, but the whole sibling warfare I saw in movies and heard about from other kids—the hair-pulling, name-calling, room-invading chaos—that wasn’t us.

“We’ve been through a lot together,” I said finally. “Coming to America. Leaving everything behind. It’s just us and Mummy now. I think that makes us... different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know how to explain it.” I shoved my hands deeper into my coat pockets. “We need each other. Not just the way families do. More than that. Like… if something happened to him, I don’t know who I would be anymore.”

Abigail was quiet for a moment.

“That sounds intense,” she said carefully.

“It is.” I glanced at her, worried I had said too much. “Is that weird?”

“A little.” She smiled so I knew she wasn’t making fun of me. “But not bad weird. I think it’s kind of beautiful, actually. Having someone who knows you that well. Someone you can count on no matter what.”

“Yeah.” I returned her smile, relieved. “It is beautiful.”

“Lucky you.”

We walked the rest of the way in silence, snow drifting around us in soft spirals, the city muffled and hushed under winter.

I didn’t know then how complicated that luck would become. How the closeness I treasured would twist into something else, something that would either save us or destroy us.

I only knew that loving him felt as natural as breathing.

We turned onto Story Avenue, and that’s when I saw her.

Deidra was on her stoop with two of the older girls, their breath rising in small clouds, a jump rope coiled between them. Her parka swallowed her whole, and her knit cap sat crooked over her ears.

She saw me too. Lifted her chin in acknowledgment.

I did the same.

“Who’s that?” Abigail asked.

“A girl from the corner. She taught me double-dutch in summer.”

“I didn’t know you knew people around here.”

I kept walking. “She’s just a girl from the corner.”

But even then, I turned back before the corner disappeared, just to see if she was still watching me.

* * *

ROLA

November 1998

PS: This is not a love story… this is what love did to them.

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