ROLA
January 1998 — Brooklyn
The room was small.
I stood in the doorway, still wearing my jacket because it was cold even inside, and looked at the space that was supposed to be our new home. I had expected something from the movies — big windows and tall ceilings and furniture that matched. Mummy had said America would be better. She had said we would have a good life.
This did not look like a good life.
One room. Maybe three meters by four meters, though I wasn’t good at measurements yet. A window on the far wall that looked out at something — I couldn’t see what from the doorway. Two beds pushed against opposite walls, their frames metal, their mattresses thin and covered in faded floral sheets that didn’t match. A mattress on the floor between them, no frame, just a mattress lying there like someone had forgotten to finish setting up.
The kitchen was a corner. Not a separate room, not even a separate area — just a corner with a hot plate and a small refrigerator that hummed too loud, like it was working very hard to do very little. There was a counter the size of a school desk, and above it, three cabinets with doors that didn’t close all the way.
The bathroom, Uncle Chidi explained, was down the hall. Shared with the other families on this floor.
“How many other families?” Mummy asked.
“Four. Maybe five. It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
Uncle Chidi just shrugged.
I walked slowly into the room, looking at everything, trying to understand. The walls were painted a color that might have been white once but was now something yellower, sadder. There were marks on the walls — scuff marks and stains and, in one corner, what looked like words written in pencil that someone had tried to erase but hadn’t fully succeeded. The ceiling had a brown stain in the shape of Africa, and I wondered if that was a sign, if the building itself was trying to tell us something.
“It’s temporary,” Mummy said. She was still standing in the doorway, as if crossing the threshold would make this real in a way she wasn’t ready for. “When I find a good job, we will move somewhere better.”
“When is that?” Toba asked.
“Soon.”
That word again. Soon. It meant nothing and everything. It meant Mummy didn’t know but didn’t want to admit it. It meant we were supposed to be patient and grateful and not ask too many questions.
I walked to the window and looked out.
The view was not a street, the sky, or even a small patch of grass. It was a brick wall. The side of the building next door, so close I could count the individual bricks if I wanted to, so close that if I opened the window and stretched out my arm, I might be able to touch them.
In Lagos, our compound had a courtyard. It wasn’t fancy — just a patch of dirt with a few struggling plants and a coconut tree that produced fruit every few years when it felt like it — but it was open. I could see the sky from anywhere in the compound. I could watch clouds move overhead and guess what shapes they were making. I could feel the sun on my face and know, at least, that I was not trapped.
Here, I would have to press my face to the glass and look straight up to see even a slice of sky. And what I would see would be gray. Gray like the airport. Gray like the buildings. Gray like everything in this country.
“Rola.” Mummy’s voice was tired.
“Yes, Mummy.”
“Come help me unpack.”
I turned from the window. Toba was already opening one of the bags, the small suitcase with the broken wheel, pulling out clothes and trying to find places to put them. There was a closet — I could see a door in the wall that must be a closet — but when Toba opened it, it was barely big enough to stand in. Maybe four or five hangers could fit. Maybe.
There was a chest of drawers against one wall. I went to open it and found that one of the three drawers was broken — the bottom had fallen out, leaving a wooden frame with nothing inside. The other two worked, sort of, though they stuck when you tried to pull them and made a scraping sound that hurt my ears.
We unpacked in silence.
There wasn’t much to unpack. The Ghana-Must-Go bag was gone, so we had only what fit in the suitcase and the duffel and the cardboard box. Clothes. A few books. Mummy’s Bible and the small statue of the Virgin Mary that she placed on a shelf above the hot plate, the only decoration in the whole room.
When the bags were empty, Mummy sat down on one of the beds. Not slowly, like you sit when you’re choosing to rest, but dramaticaly, like her legs just gave out. She looked older than she had in Lagos. Smaller. Like the journey had compressed her, squeezed out essence from her and left behind this tired, frightened woman I’m struggling to recognize.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “I will go out and look for work. Toba, you will stay with your sister. You will not leave this room. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“Rola, you will be good for your brother. You will not make trouble.”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“Good.” Mummy closed her eyes. “Now let me rest. We will eat later.”
But later didn’t come. At least, dinner didn’t.
Mummy fell asleep in her clothes, curled on her side on the bed she had claimed, still wearing the shoes she had worn on the airplane. Her breathing deepened, and I watched her for a while, this woman who had brought us all this way, who had risked everything on the promise of something better.
Was she dreaming? Are her dreams in English or Yoruba?
Toba sat down on the other bed — our bed, I realized, the one we would share — and patted the space beside him.
“Come.”
I went. Sat next to him. Close, because the room was cold despite being indoors, and because I didn’t want to be far from him, and because there was nowhere else to go.
Outside the window, sounds I didn’t recognize drifted in. Sirens — we had sirens in Lagos too, but these were different, a different pitch, a different urgency. Voices mumming in rapid languages I couldn’t identify. Thumping bass music that made the window vibrate slightly.
The walls were thin. I could hear the people next door — or above us, or below us, it was hard to tell — talking, laughing, a television playing, a baby crying. The building was full of lives pressed close together, and none of them knew we existed.
“Toba?”
“What?”
“I don’t like it here.”
He didn’t answer right away. I thought maybe he would tell me I was wrong, that it would get better, that I should be grateful we were here at all. That’s what adults always said. Be grateful. Be patient. Be good.
But Toba wasn’t an adult. He was thirteen, which sometimes felt very old and sometimes felt like nothing at all.
“I know,” he said finally. His arm came around my shoulders, pulling me close. “I don’t like it either.”
“So why did we come?”
“Because staying was worse.”
I thought about that. About Lagos. About our compound and our school and the way life was there — familiar, known, even when it was hard. About Daddy, who was never really ours, who looked at us like mistakes he wished he could undo. About his other wives and their children. About Mummy’s tears at night when she thought we were sleeping.
“Is this better?” I asked.
Toba was quiet for a long moment.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it’s different. And sometimes different is the first step to better.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe that this gray room with its thin walls and its broken drawer and its view of bricks was the first step toward something good. That Mummy’s promises would come true. That we would be happy here.
But looking around at our new home, I couldn’t see how.
So I just pressed closer to my brother and let him hold me, and eventually I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder, dreaming of coconuts, sunlight and a sky so blue, that it went on forever.
* * *