Behold the Dreamers(71)
He slammed the door behind him and left her whimpering in the bedroom.
Alone in the darkness she cried herself to sleep, Timba on her bosom, Liomi in the cot beside the bed. When she woke up early the next morning, Jende was in the living room, sleeping on the sofa.
Thirty-six
CHRISTMAS WAS THREE DAYS AWAY AND THE DARKNESS THAT HAD FALLEN upon the city appeared to be on hiatus, outshone by the radiance of lighted trees at Rockefeller and Lincoln centers and the mesmerizing displays in shops along Fifth Avenue. Throughout the boroughs, there were steady, if faint, glimmers of hope shining through the windows of apartments where people lived with the belief that the good times would soon return. Even the despondent willed themselves to the streets, to hear something or see someone or go someplace that would remind them that Christmastime was here, springtime was ahead, and in no time it would be summer in New York City again.
“Welcome and a very merry Christmas to you,” the pastor Natasha wrote in an email to Neni. “I’m so glad you were able to stop by at Judson, and I’d so love to get a chance to know you more. Please schedule a time to come to the office for a little chat.”
Neni scheduled the meeting for the next day and told Jende nothing of it.
In the church office, she met the assistant pastor, a redheaded and bearded young man from New Hampshire named Amos. He told Neni he used to be a Buddhist monk before deciding that progressive liberal Christianity was more aligned with his beliefs than Buddhism. Neni was curious about the difference between the two but thought it wise not to ask—asking might lay bare her ignorance about religion and spiritual matters and expose her true motive for coming to the church.
In private, the pastor Natasha was a more subdued woman than the fiery preacher who had stood at the pulpit and spoken about the need for a revolution that would shake the country to its core. Her mid-back-length gray hair was straight and side-parted, and Neni couldn’t help admiring her courage in growing her gray hair long, and for leaving it gray in a city where there was no shortage of salons eager to rescue middle-aged women from grayness. There were framed pictures of happy families on the bookshelves in her office, families of all kinds: two fathers and a baby; two mothers and a toddler; an old man and an old woman and a dog; a young man and a young woman and a newborn. Natasha told Neni they were all congregants in the church. She asked Neni about her family and what brought her to Judson. I think I want to become a Christian, Neni responded, to which Natasha replied that she did not need to become a Christian to join the Judson family. Neni was relieved, though she still wanted to become a baptized Christian—what if the people at the Full Gospel Church near her house in Limbe were right about heaven and hell? She wanted to be on the safe side so she could get into heaven if it ended up being real. Her family didn’t go to church (except for a brief period after her father lost his seaport job), but she believed there was a God with a son named Jesus, though she had a hard time believing that people speaking in tongues were truly possessed by some Spirit. You can believe whatever you want, and we’ll accept you here, Natasha told her. We take everyone. From anywhere. We don’t care if you believe in heaven and hell and pearly gates. We don’t even care if you believe that the best way to get to heaven is by subway or Metro-North or LIRR, she added, which made Neni laugh.
Over tea, they spoke about motherhood and marriage. So open was their conversation about the sacrifice of dreams in parenthood and the loss of self in marriage that Neni went further than she thought she would and told Natasha about Jende’s deportation case. She told her about their argument on Sunday and the shame she would experience if she had to return to Limbe; the sense of failure she might never escape for not having given her children a good life, a life full of opportunities, the kind of life that would be all but impossible for them to have in Cameroon. Natasha listened and nodded, allowing the stricken woman to release months’ worth of tears. She offered Neni a tissue and took Timba when—perhaps sensing her mother’s distress—the baby began to cry, too.
“The American immigration system can be cruel,” she told Neni, rubbing her knee, “but Judson will stand and fight with you. We will stand with you till the end.”
Neni Jonga walked out of Judson and into Washington Square Park that afternoon with the lightness of a beautifully crafted kite. There was a man playing a flute on a bench, and a young woman in a black down jacket playing a violin. She smiled as she walked through the park listening to them—she hadn’t realized until then how divine classical music was. On the other side of the park, beneath the arch, a group of young people held placards, chanting and protesting the bailout. Bail us out, not our oppressors! Why are you using our taxes to destroy us? Death to Wall Street! Paulson the Antichrist!
Neni stood by the empty fountain and watched them, admiring their passion for their country. One of them in particular was a pleasure to watch, a dreadlocked young white man who was prancing and shaking his fist at their absent foes. Someday, Neni thought, if Judson could help them stay in America, she would be an American citizen and she would be able to protest like that, too. She’d say whatever she wanted to say about powerful people and have no fear of being thrown into prison the way dissidents were being thrown into prisons in some African countries for speaking out against abominable authoritarian regimes. She wanted to skip around the park, rejuvenated by the hope that had been handed to her by a compassionate woman of the cloth, but she couldn’t—Timba was waking up from the cold, and she had to pick up Liomi from his last day of school and cook dinner.