Since Umma was asleep alone in the hotel, I made sure I was back in Manhattan by the time she opened her eyes and in time for prayer.
Dialing the combination that unlocked the hotel safe, I took Umma’s jewels, the few we managed to bring from back home, and wrapped them in one of her colorful silk scarves. I carried them on my back secured in my backpack. She folded the remaining cloths, which had now dried, and packed our few pieces of luggage. We checked out of the hotel once and for all, paying a large amount of American dollars.
Inside of seven days Umma transformed our small Brooklyn apartment into a very modest Sudanese home. The first thing she did was fill each room with the powerful scent of sandalwood from back home. From the ceiling to the floor she hung newly purchased lavender curtains to cover the living room windows and even the clean but bland off-white walls. She handmade huge, colorful, bejeweled suede purple pillows and placed them onto the sparkling floors. Aside from a beautiful dark-brown walnut table that we purchased from an antique shop on the other end of Brooklyn, we had only a few selected pieces of furniture. I admit that when we would return from the outdoor coldness, Umma’s fragrances and the color scheme she selected would warm us right up.
Buying a music system for the living room, a special grill and hot plate for Umma to cook breads and Sudanese food the way she wanted to, plus a serving tray and coffee and tea sets, as well as ten-pound bags of long-grain rice and an array of beans, olives, grains and vegetables, honey, yogurt, fruits, fresh-cut flowers, and Halal meats brought the cost of moving in way beyond what we had projected.
We also ended up having to hire movers to pick up our furniture and bed sets because most of the stores wouldn’t deliver to our neighborhood. “We don’t go over there,” various store owners insisted. It was our first hint that something wasn’t right.
Even though our new surroundings inside our apartment looked great and were soothing, an unspoken sadness weighed heavy on our hearts. More than anything, we knew not to speak on any of it. It was as if just a simple mention of what was actually happening in our lives would bring the ceiling crashing down onto our heads.
After our telephone was installed, I would see Umma pick up the receiver and, one by one, dial several long-distance phone numbers. The only thing was, there would never be a conversation, only her gripping the telephone and sitting silently and waiting and eventually hanging up and saying nothing to me of what was going on. In her room she would be writing furiously. She would stop the instant I appeared. She would put her papers to the side or in a drawer and not speak on it. I was not concerned about the content of her writings. It was only her I was concerned about, her feelings and exactly how to make a true smile spread across her face again as it always had back home.
Very soon Umma confided to me that she would have to find a job. At the same time, she wanted to sign me up to start in an American school. But she also realized that she could not do both. She needed me to help her search for a job. She needed me to speak English to them and translate their English back to her.
I was against the idea of her working while carrying my sister. I felt my father would not like it either. But if she was going to be traveling outside to meet potential employers, I was definitely going along with her. So when she was six and a half months pregnant, I found a job for Umma working at a fabric factory, a building located inside a group of warehouses where women, most of them foreign, worked on industrial machines lined up in rows.
I spoke to the manager there who offered Umma parttime work due to her pregnancy, at three dollars per hour. He said if Umma was good, she could be bumped up to full time after she gave birth. I liked that there were mostly women working there on the floor where all the sewing was being done. I did not like that all the bosses were men. Back home, Umma’s clothing business was run, from top to bottom, exclusively by African women.
The best part about the Russian-born Israelis who ran the factory was that they didn’t make a big deal about Umma’s Islamic attire. And when I explained that Umma couldn’t speak English, one of the bosses asked, “Does this look like a talking place to you?” “Show up on time, work fast and work hard, that’s it,” the second boss chimed in.
So I escorted Umma to the factory each time she went, and picked her up at the end of every workday. We rode the trains together. At work and in public, she remained covered from head to toe, beneath a hijab and behind a niqab veil. No one could see her, except me. Her modest clothing gave me a chance to grow up without having to fight grown men all day, every day. Her modest clothing kept me from having to hurt anybody, especially on my Brooklyn block.
My sister Naja was born in a Brooklyn hospital that some fool had the good mind to name The Kings County Hospital, a place where no one was treated royal. Umma was left alone in a room lying down with impatient and unprofessional health-care workers, angry that she could not speak English and bent on keeping me, her translator, in a separate area. As I pressed them at the front desk to call the doctor, one nasty lady in a colorful medical jacket pointed her fat crooked finger at me and said, “Do you see all these people out here?” I did see them, tens of them lying on tables, some in rooms, others pushed against the walls and lined up in the hallways.
“Some of these people have been shot. Has your mother been shot?” she asked me with a monster mug face.
“No, alhamdulillah,” I answered, meaning, “No, Umma has not been shot, thank Allah.” Living in Brooklyn I had seen guns being aimed and triggers being pulled, and shots being fired, and gangsters and thieves and pimps and shootouts, but nothing was scarier than this woman’s hatred and disregard for human life. Why couldn’t she understand what Umma was going through? She was a woman too. Then I decided that she was really nothing but an empty shell with a booming voice and hole where the heart is supposed to be. I could not imagine that she had ever been anybody’s mother or friend.
“So she has to wait, then! The doctor will see the most important cases first.”
My sister didn’t wait. Umma was drenched in sweat when she burst out. Umma jumped off the table and caught her before her eight-pound body could hit the floor.
Later I found out that the monster lady was not even a nurse. Somehow someone in America had given out colorful medical jackets to the most uneducated, untrained people in the world and left them there to care for the sick and newborn.
A real nurse showed up eventually and said that Umma should have been under a doctor’s care throughout her entire pregnancy. She blamed Umma and covered for the crazy lady who yelled at us, explaining that we showed up at the wrong door of the hospital.
Umma said we would have to take good care of ourselves and my newly born sister Naja, to make sure that we all remained healthy. Otherwise, Umma explained, we would fall victim to “the American hospital, which should be called ‘the American morgue.’ ”
The first day we carried Naja to the apartment was the first day we received a real visit from a neighbor. She was named Ms. Marcy. We already knew her because she was an elderly lady who I once helped to carry her groceries inside the building.
Umma said that old people are always attracted to babies. Through me, Ms. Marcy asked about Naja often. Sometimes she invited Umma over for small talks and hot drinks. Since Umma could not really communicate with Ms. Marcy, we knew she really wanted to spend time with the baby. Umma accepted Ms. Marcy as her only neighborhood acquaintance. She said she missed the wisdom, warmth, and love of the elders that she once had back home. Eventually, Ms. Marcy became the only person in our hood allowed to see, touch, and care for my infant sister Naja.
At home I assisted in every way possible. I thought it was amazing, this newborn life. Since all we had was each other, I learned more about infants than I ever would have back home. In the Sudan, our newborns are surrounded by aunties and a host of women of every age who handle everything. Where I am from, a male would usually never interfere in the areas that the women control and are better suited for.
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When Umma was breast-feeding Naja once, I asked her what was she thinking when she was in the hospital lying on her back and felt Naja come flying out?
She said “I didn’t think at all. It was a mother’s instinct and catching Naja was the same as catching myself.”
Umma and I grew closer every day and depended on each other and no one else. We made up certain rules between us and even had an emergency plan if anything seemed to have happened to one of us. In our rooms, both of us always kept one piece of packed luggage in case we suddenly had to make a move. We weren’t expecting anything bad to happen, but we both learned that things do happen even when you don’t expect it.
When Umma, Naja, and I were inside our Brooklyn apartment, we were inside our own little Sudanese world. We adjusted and trusted and believed only in us three. There was only love in there. What went on outside our door we tolerated, dealt with, and handled. I kept my fury for the streets. Inside we were determined to maintain our traditions, ways of being and doing. And we were steadfast in our Islam.
7
QUIET MONEY
Getting money and getting killed seemed like one and the same around my way. Every male I saw getting money ran the risk of losing his life and freedom, and many of them did.
The way I saw it, if you lost your freedom, you lost your life anyhow, ’cause then you really can’t get no money. In two years’ time I counted twenty male teens dead. Twelve had actually lost their lives. The remaining eight were hauled off in police cars, heads pushed down by the palm of some questionable cop’s hand, cuffed and carted away for a long, long time. And this was only in my building. I didn’t count the dead from the other side of my block.
It was crazy how they left the yellow tape on the walkway, tracing out the body of DeQuan’s dead little brother DeLeon, the asthmatic one. He got popped on the block at age fifteen. Somebody spray painted the outline of his corpse and drew a mural on the ground in his name that read: ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE.
I looked down at it one day as I walked by and figured his brothers blamed him for not being gangster enough to stay alive.
Another time, two teens had lost their lives throwing a party around our way in the tiny rec center. They was tryna make some money. One was an emcee. The other was his deejay. Now they just dead. They brought my building body count to twenty-two in two years. In four years the count exploded to forty-six. Getting money was usually the reason, or somebody jealous that somebody was getting money, or somebody stealing money. Or the cops shutting people down ’cause they don’t want nobody around here making money or just ’cause they felt like it.
We made quiet money, Umma and me.
It was strange to us how an American salary was so much more than a Sudanese salary, yet American workers remained poor. It was strange remembering how Umma’s employees back home earned so much less money but had so much more. Swiftly we realized that a salary here meant next to nothing. We needed to have a business of our own.
Together we decided to build the business most familiar to Umma, modeled on the one she built and operated back home, but on a much smaller, start-up level. I had faith it would work. I knew that there are very few people who can do what Umma does the way she does it. Once people found out about her products, there would be a demand, I thought.
Every day after work, Umma would be telling me her ideas for improving her workplace, including introducing new methods and products. She pointed out that the factory had more advanced machinery and a larger operating budget than she ever had back home, but they worked with a simple and lower-quality fabric and cranked out garments with limited, unexciting patterns and designs.
On the flip side, Umma was an expert in textiles and designs, and could make everything beautiful. She knew all that a person could know about fabrics—cotton, linens, silk, wool, seersucker, jute, leather, suede; their grain, grade, and quality. She also knew about coloring, blends, and dyes. She was so nice with her fingers that she could stitch elegant patterns and pictures on brocades and do embroidery of intricate original designs on cloth, clothing, and upholstery. When she was bored she crocheted and knitted beautiful blankets, sweaters, scarves, gloves, hats, and clothing. All of our beds at home were draped in her work. She told me she began sewing and stitching at age five. She loved creating designs and clothing but said that her greatest accomplishment was a Sudanese carpet she made from an elaborate design she saw in her mind. It was the only carpet she had ever designed and woven in her lifetime.
I recommended that instead of her trying to get me to translate her suggestions to management in an effort to move up in their company, she should keep her ideas to herself and we should start our own hustle on American soil.
At first Umma was skeptical. To earn her factory pennies, she already worked long, hard hours, sometimes randomly being required to do double shifts. She knew the possibility existed of making money in a private business. Yet after she received the huge hospital bills for the birth of Naja, which she had to pay on her own, she really valued the limited health insurance we were now receiving from what became her full-time factory job. It offered a financial cushion and she was afraid to lose it. Also, back home she had a huge family and friends and community to draw her customers and contacts from. In the U.S. she felt anonymous and isolated. But I was confident and certain about Umma. Besides, I was right there to help out in every way.
To encourage her, I had one hundred Umma Designs business cards printed up at a local print shop. After dinner one night when I pushed the cardboard box over to her side of the table, she opened it up and read the card, smiled, then cried.
“Umma Makes Everything Beautiful,” was the slogan I had embossed in gold script beneath the company name. She could not even read the English words printed on the cards. But she saw and recognized her name on the card and understood my intent, which meant even more.
We learned fast that just having the business cards did not guarantee us any business.
Our breakthrough happened when one of Umma’s coworkers, a pregnant Black woman with a British accent, approached me as I waited one day outside of the factory for Umma to come out.
“Your Sana’s son, isn’t it?” she asked. “It’s great how I see you waiting here for her each day. I wish my son were so good. Anyhow, I’d like to invite your mum to my baby shower. Here’s the invite. You make sure she understands. Good enough?” She looked tired but she was smiling.
“What is a baby shower?” I asked, unfamiliar with this kind of event. She laughed and answered, “It’s for the ladies to get together and celebrate the baby that’s coming.” She rubbed her belly. “Your mum doesn’t have to, but most gals bring gifts for the baby. Okay, thanks,” she said, waddling off.
I’m sure I seemed calm and cool to the woman but really I was excited. I convinced Umma to attend the shower even though there was a language barrier. I explained to her that this was her perfect chance to show her work. She should look her best and design and sew the most beautiful gifts for the unborn baby. Maybe even for the baby’s mother. It was a women’s event, so she could get comfortable, unveil, and display everything.
I was positive the women would all admire Umma and everything she wore and made. Meanwhile, as the women exited the shower, I would be seated right outside with the business cards, pen and paper in hand, ready to catch our first customers’ orders.
On the way to the shower, packed tightly in the backseat of the Brooklyn taxi cab, I pulled out seven of my mother’s gold bangles, her exquisite jewelry that we usually kept stored away. I placed each one on her right wrist as she caressed Naja with her free hand. The driver jammed on both the gas pedal and then his brakes, dodging traffic.
Instead of Umma speaking to me, she was thinking to herself. I knew an emotion stirred in her because she had not worn jewelry since we lived in America. She no longer saw the need to decorate herself since she was out of the presence of my father.
Today, however, underneath the be
autiful cloth of her thobe, she wore a handmade dress with amazing embroidery stitched from the neckline to the hemline. She carried Naja in a handmade satchel with embroidery that complemented her dress. Before stepping out of the cab, I helped her slip out of her flat walking shoes into a pair of gold leather heels. She had not worn these either while living in America, but I selected them especially for this day.
I carried the gifts in one shopping bag, and her samples in the other. We ended up walking up eight flights of stairs because the elevator in the woman’s building was broken. I got worried that maybe these women wouldn’t have the money to order anything. Then I pushed the thought out of my head because in my building all the broke people dress the best.
I handed the woman the shopping bag stuffed with gifts. She screamed in delight, “Bloody God! You shouldn’t have!” I didn’t understand her comment. I handed Umma the other shopping bag and said in Arabic, “I’ll be waiting outside here until you’re finished.” The woman invited me to stay as she saw me leaving. I thanked her and left anyway.
Four or five hours later, the women one by one slowly exited the shower. They were all smiling and upbeat. I handed each of them our business card, explaining that Umma made everything by hand and if they wanted to place an order, they could call the telephone number on the card. About eight of the women must have been the British lady’s friends and relatives because I did not recognize them from the factory. Meanwhile I told Umma’s coworkers they could also speak their order to me any weekday after work when I came to meet Umma.
When Umma finally came out, the British hostess and a small group of ladies were each thanking and hugging her and showering Naja with compliments and attention. It was the first time there wasn’t the formalities and distance between them that there was at the factory, where Umma stayed covered and veiled and unusual because of the male presence. Now they had all seen Umma the elegant woman, her face kissed by Allah, her beautiful hands that made beautiful clothing, her authentic jewels, and her very calm and lovable baby girl.