The Mothers(32)

Chile, she says, this world ain’t got nothin’ good for me. Nothin’ that I want, that’s for sure.

We tried to love the world. We cleaned after this world, scrubbed its hospital floors and ironed its shirts, sweated in its kitchens and spooned school lunches, cared for its sick and nursed its babies. But the world didn’t want us, so we left and gave our love to Upper Room. Now we’re afraid of this world. A boy snatched Hattie’s purse one night and now none of us go out after dark. We hardly go anywhere at all, besides Upper Room. We’ve seen what this world has to offer. We’re scared of what it wants.

—

IN MICHIGAN, Nadia Turner learned how to be cold.

To wear gloves, even though she couldn’t text with them on. To never text and walk because you might slip on a patch of ice. She learned to wear a scarf, to always wear a scarf, they weren’t just decorative like the ones she wore in California with her tank tops. To always get her free flu shot at the student health clinic. She started taking cod-liver oil pills that her boyfriend Shadi swore by, or at least his Sudanese mother did, sending them to him by the boxful. He’d grown up in Minneapolis, so he knew how to be cold. He told her about stuffing heat warming packs in her pockets, how it was better to melt ice with sand instead of salt, how she should start taking a vitamin D supplement because she was black.

“You think I’m joking,” he said. “But it’s unnatural, being colored in all this cold. We need more sunlight than these white people.”

She looked it up on her phone. He was right, people with darker skin did need more vitamin D, but he was also right about feeling unnatural in Ann Arbor. She had never lived in a place so white. She had been the only black girl before—in restaurants, in advanced-placement classes—but even then, she was surrounded by Filipinos and Samoans and Mexicans. Now she looked out into lecture halls filled with white kids from rural Michigan towns; in discussion sections, she listened to white classmates champion the diversity of their school, how progressive and accepting it was, and maybe if you had come from some farm town, it seemed that way. She felt the sly type of racism here, longer waits for tables, white girls who expected her to walk on the slushy part of the sidewalk, a drunk boy outside a salsa club yelling that she was pretty for a black girl. In a way, subtle racism was worse because it made you feel crazy. You were always left wondering, was that actually racist? Had you just imagined it?

She’d met Shadi at a Black Student Union meeting her friend Ekua dragged her to in the fall of her freshman year. Barack Obama had just been elected president and the BSU and Gay-Straight Alliance were cohosting a forum to discuss whether high black voter turnout also caused the gay marriage ban to pass in California. By then, Nadia had already grown tired of town hall meetings, but she’d gone because she was homesick. She stood in the back, piling her plate with free Boston Market, when she noticed Shadi on the panel. He had deep brown skin and a smile that broke his face in half, turning his already slanted eyes into crescents. He was nerdy in black horn-rimmed glasses, but his body seemed lean and athletic even under his sweater. He had boxed growing up, she would later learn, which seemed so unlike him, so needlessly dangerous for a man who still swallowed cod-liver oil pills because his mother told him to. He was nothing like the boys she usually liked—brash and showy boys who didn’t even carry book bags to school, only tucking the thinnest binder under an arm as if to advertise how little they cared. Shadi was, she could already tell, About Something. He out-debated everyone on the panel, even though he raced through so many different points, she often couldn’t tell which side he was on. He challenged the idea of there even being sides.

“What’s with this black versus gay bullshit?” he asked at one point, leaning into the table. “There are black gay people, you know.”

For a second, her heart sank. Was he talking about himself? But after the meeting ended, he wandered over to the back and asked what she thought. He stuck his hands in his pockets, head bowed as she spoke, and she realized that he had noticed her in the back the whole evening, that he had been showing off for her. Maybe he was like the boys she normally liked, at least a little.

Shadi was passionate about human rights, and their sophomore year he started a campus newspaper dedicated to reporting news about political movements in Palestine and Sudan and North Korea. She found herself reading about places that had always seemed vague and distant to her. When she told him she’d received an e-mail about studying abroad, he urged her to apply, and the winter of their sophomore year, he went to Beijing and she went to Oxford.

“Is it safe?” her father said, when she’d called to tell him she’d been accepted.

“It’s England, not Afghanistan.”

“How much does it cost?”

“My scholarship covers it,” she said, not mentioning that she’d picked up a job at Noodles & Co. in addition to her work-study to pay for it.

“And you have all your documents?” he said. “Your passport and stuff?”

Shadi had driven her to the passport office to get her picture taken. He already had stamps in his from visits to France, South Africa, and Kenya, and she realized, waiting in the tiny office, that her mother had never even left the country. This would be her life, accomplishing the things her mother had never done. She never celebrated this, unlike her friends who were proud to be the first in their family to go to college or the first to earn a prestigious internship. How could she be proud of lapping her mother, when she had been the one to slow her down in the first place?