The bottom line was the coworkers were all used to seeing one another. Seeing Umma, really seeing her today for the first time, was a highlight. I could tell that they had all been affected, especially by her genuine, warm, pretty smile.
I carried Umma’s first American Singer sewing machine to our apartment from a used appliance shop. I took her shopping in Manhattan’s garment district, and carried her newly purchased supplies.
I received our first customer orders that same week. There were women who ordered, “That exact same blanket that your mother crocheted for the baby . . .” “The same beautiful dress your mother wore to the shower, but in my size . . .” “Ten of those baby satchels but in a variety of solid colors so I can sell them to my friends . . .” “Something unique for my niece. I liked the way your mother designed the clothes for the baby. It was so personal.”
Now Umma realized that most of her coworkers could work the machinery at the factory, but really did not have magical fingers like she did. If they did, would they get so pumped up on the items she made that they were willing to part with their hard-earned bucks?
Everyone communicated their orders to me. I established the rates, and requested and collected the deposits. I even hooked some ladies up once they explained their concept of “layaway.” When their items were completed, I delivered them and collected the balance. I became known for my good manners, nice way of talking, for being on time, honest, and reliable. All of the customers were women, although some were ordering items for men. They expressed their gratitude to me by offering tips. Tips were small but they added up. On the American holidays, my tips doubled because customers tended to spend like crazy.
Eventually, customers began phoning who were friends of friends of coworkers. I brought an answering machine to keep all the orders organized. I put my voice on the greeting and sometimes bugged out on the various accents, requests, and types of messages when I played them back at night in my room. I also ordered a second phone line to be installed for Umma’s personal use.
We never told anyone our home address. It was not on the business card. If special measurements had to be taken, which was unusual, we would make an appointment and show up to the customer’s place.
We purposely never advertised or solicited any customers in our own neighborhood or building. We kept our money quiet. Nobody knew we got it or how we got it.
My part in the business may sound easy. Yet there were risks involved. I delivered anywhere that a customer lived. I never said no to any address or location. Some of the places were dangerous and fucked up. America, or at least the state of New York, was divided into separate areas. A lot of people were tribal and territorial. Some fools seemed to believe that if you weren’t from a certain area, you couldn’t enter or walk through that area. Some people thought their buildings were off limits. Some people believed that kids were easy targets, like the two guys who hid in the corners down in the subway then came at me from two sides, surprising me then jamming me in the turnstile. They didn’t get nothing. I dropped down and rolled out.
In just the borough of Brooklyn you could get hemmed up by Black American youth or angry mobs of young whites and sometimes even their parents! You could get chased out by territorial and suspicious Jews, who sometimes had their own private patrols and community rules. Even some of the real religious ones considered their neighborhoods exclusive. I handled all of that and the other boroughs as well.
I had to keep the product nice, neat, and in the same condition that Umma packaged it in. I purchased a high-end North Face backpack from Paragon, a sporting goods and mountain gear boutique in Manhattan. I also brought garment bags in bulk from the Garment District to use when the orders were large. I made sure I expressed our appreciation to each customer and even provided handwritten receipts.
I kept my twenty-two on me to defend our profits. Umma sewed deep pockets into my jeans and khakis, jackets, and coats. She did it because I asked her to. I asked her to so I could carefully conceal my joint plus my knives.
She knew I had weapons. Where we are from, a man is supposed to be armed to defend his family.
She never tried to be an obstacle to my manhood. Even when I showed up with wounds, cuts, or bruises, she just cleaned them up and asked no questions, the same way she related to my father.
Umma opened her first bank account with my translation assistance. We placed half of her cash in the bank. We hid one fourth of the cash in a secret location just in case. I kept one fourth of the cash in my room for business operating costs, like extra supplies and transportation fees or the phone bill and such.
My tips were a separate matter. I started storing them in tin cans that used to hold tea leaves. After filling eight of them, I had to upgrade to huge coin jars, which I filled and placed in the back of my clothing closet—pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, all in their own jars. I marked each jar as it filled up, to keep the count. Small tips were adding up. Inside of each of my volumes of The Amazing Adventures of Akbar, I kept my clean double digit paper dollars neatly arranged and pressed.
As time pushed on, Umma upgraded our business in several ways. We developed a much bigger client list of paying customers who had nothing to do with the factory where she worked. Through word of mouth, or should I say the precision of her skills in making women dress and feel better, she received a big order from one woman who wanted Umma to design everything she wore. The woman had deep pockets and never haggled about our mushrooming prices. She attracted a few wealthy friends of hers to our business but never allowed us to meet them. She made their orders run through her.
With more money to invest back into the business, I improved our packaging to make the products more appealing. Umma introduced colorful tissue papers for wrapping each item, some solids, some fluorescent, some paisley, all interesting and different. She added a line of “scented clothing,” using a tradition from back home in the Sudan where women draped their cloths in a closed-in room where homemade incense was burning, making everything they wore smell delicious and leaving an alluring trail wherever they went.
Slowly and carefully, Umma began making her secret homemade perfume potions and placing them in small crystal bottles for sale to exclusive customers and as a gift to returning customers who spent more than three hundred dollars with each order.
I was impressed with her and completely dedicated. Everything that she did naturally as a woman was saving our family. She was my father’s private treasure and wife and people were willing to pay to get even a small item that she touched up, or an ounce of her everyday aroma, or a duplicate of her personal style, or anything that resembled her elegance.
8
UPSTATE NEW YORK
Funny thing is, when people support you in business, even though you have given them a great product in exchange for their money, they want you and your business to support them in other ways too.
So, when one of my mother’s clients organized a bus trip to an upstate New York farm for apple picking and purchasing fresh plucked vegetables and fresh squeezed juices, Umma decided that our family would attend.
It was the fall season. Although we had come to the United States years before, it was our first trip outside of our hood and our five-borough business area.
Two and a half hours into the trip we exited the highways and the rural countryside appeared on the other side of our bus window, presenting me with a picture completely different than my Brooklyn urban view. There were enormous trees with multicolored leaves that were part green, red, orange, and yellow. They floated down from the tree branches and danced to the ground where they formed waist-high piles on some narrow roads. We were surrounded by the colors of autumn.
There were houses, none of them masterpieces of architecture, but sitting on land with large spaces between them. There were broken-down barns and cows and sheep and goats and horses.
Four-year-old Naja was fascinated with these animals, which she was seeing for the first time in her life. Her
little face and hands were pressed against the glass. Umma was excited and relaxed, speaking softly and explaining everything to Naja in Arabic. Naja would speak Arabic to Umma and then turn to ask questions in English to me.
As the bus bumped up a long rocky dirt road and onto the farm, the women put away their snacks and sandwiches, cleaned their children’s hands and faces, and walked off the bus and onto the farm together. I told Umma I would meet them back on the farm in an hour. One of the few males on the trip, I preferred to take a look around this completely new area.
On a paved black road with no sidewalks or curbs, I kicked through a pile of leaves. Walking alone on the road, seeing no one nowhere, I stopped, then stood still. I wasn’t losing my mind. On my Brooklyn block standing still was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
I looked up through the trees and into the skies. The sun was beaming through the colored leaves and small open spaces, creating a kaleidoscope. I listened to the sounds of nature, the way we used to back home in my grandfather’s village. I could hear the subtle sounds of the mosquitoes, knowing they were dying out for the season. I could hear the music of the birds flying south. I could hear the wind breezing through the grass. I could hear the deep moan of the cows and stutter of the goats.
A mile down the road I came upon a horse farm. About eight of them were grazing on some grass behind a rusted barbed-wire fence. I stopped to take a good look at one of them that stood about fifteen feet from me. Horses are big and imposing creatures. I couldn’t even imagine what Allah was thinking when He created them. Allah is the ultimate designer, I thought. How amazing to think up and then bring into existence thousands of different kinds of creatures, each one unique and awesome on its own. Look at the difference between a horse and a camel, I thought to myself. The horse’s skin was more smooth and tight, its body more streamlined. Allah filled the horse’s eyes with mystery. It seemed like they knew something that humans did not know. Yet there was no real way for a human to decipher what a horse was thinking and feeling.
I laughed at myself. Ten minutes in the countryside, and my thoughts were filled with Allah. Back home in my building, I can only feel Allah in my prayers, but not in my surroundings and never outside of our apartment.
When I looked down at the plants, I thought of my father, a scientist. He would know something about each of these plants, not just about their beauty but their use.
He could also look at a field that others would describe as being empty, and create a vision in his mind of what it could be, then make it happen. I saw him do that before, back home. He brought me with him to areas that his business developed.
Soon I arrived at a plot of land that had a house for sale. There were no curtains, shades, or blinds in any of the windows. From where I was it appeared to be empty. I wondered if I could stand to live out here. I had spent summers in my grandfather’s village. But it was not only the nature that made it great. It was the people, the brothers and sisters, the cousins, friends, relatives that made it incredible. It was the music, the gatherings, the talks, the sports, and even the work that made it a life.
I pulled my pen and pad out from my army-green jacket and jotted down the telephone number of the realtor. If anything, I just wanted to call and find out how much a piece of property out here would actually cost.
Umma and I already knew that we had to move off our Brooklyn block. We talked about it often and had a plan. We were saving up to buy a house with our cash. We agreed that until we had enough money to pay for the house in full we would remain on our Brooklyn block working hard and saving our profit. No tricky realtor with tricky fees. No mortgage bankers or bloodsuckers who a person had to pay for thirty years of their life. No astronomical interest rates and shit that switched up in the blink of an eye and after the shake of two hands. No more monkeys in the middle, loans, leases, or debts.
To the right, I came upon a pebbled path. I could hear some people talking for the first time in four miles. They were inside a graying building with a weathered sign the read “Blacks.” Somehow that meant me so I walked up the path and pushed through the antique door with the we’re open sign hanging from one rusty tack. It had been cool outside but was mad hot in here. It was a blacksmith shop with one big older white man covered in black grease, banging what looked like a heavy all-metal hammer on a piece of iron, then poking the iron into an open oven shimmering with intense heat and orange flames.
“You need horse shoes?” the teenage boy who emerged from the corner asked me.
“Nah,” I answered.
“Then what’d ya come here fer?” he asked me in an unfamiliar accent.
“Just looking,” I told him, my eyes taking in all of the iron and steel, the intense fire and heavy tools.
I wondered to myself, why horse shoes? This place seemed like it had the right equipment and tools and was the perfect place to make weapons.
“Where you from?” the youth asked me. His father or boss kept working.
“Just visiting the apple farm four miles down,” I answered without giving up no real info.
“Yeah, I know the place,” he said casually.
“Let me show you something,” I said as I reached into my left pocket and pulled out a small book I had been reading. He stepped up closer to take a look. I went to page sixty-six, which had an illustration of a Japanese shuriken, a wicked-ass knife that I wanted.
“Do you think you could make one of these?” I asked him. He took my book into his hands and got a spot of black grease on the page and answered, “Yep, we could. What you want it for?”
I ignored his question.
“If I ordered a set, how much would it cost me?” He looked back at the older man, who aside from a quick glance didn’t seem interested at all.
“I could do it for you, a set of four for a hundred.” But I knew that the older guy would be a better craftsman. I was concerned about the quality and the dynamics of the knives. I wanted them to be exact.
“Nah. I’d rather him do it.” I nodded to point out the older guy. The boy laughed, a little insulted.
“He’ll double the price,” he warned. I creased the page and tore it from my book. I handed him the page, with a one-hundred-dollar bill as a fifty-percent deposit on “double the price.”
“How long before he can have it ready?” I asked.
“A couple of days,” he answered.
“I’ll be back to pick them up. Hold ’em for me,” I told him firmly.
“You better come back. Once my father works the iron you gotta pay up in full. You can’t get no deposit money back if you change your mind,” he threatened.
I seen he needed to feel like a boss over me, the customer. I wanted the product so I played along with it.
“Here’s fifty more. Just let him do a good job on it,” I said calmly. Now that more money was changing hands, I saw the youth’s father paying attention.
Umma, Naja, and I made the Zuhr prayer on the farm right before sunset with the violet sky as our ceiling and the trees as our walls. It felt completely peaceful. The passengers on the bus waited eight extra minutes for us. When we raised from our prayers we could see them watching us through their windows. When we boarded, they all had odd looking expressions on their faces as we walked down the aisle. Maybe they had never seen a family pray before. I don’t know. Thirty minutes into the ride, they loosened up and were back to acting normal, eating apples, playing cards, kids clapping, and an older lady passing around a hat to take up a collection to tip the bus driver. I thought to myself, maybe these people thought that we were strange. It didn’t matter though, because after the prayer, they definitely showed us respect.
What started out as a bother and an obligation turned out to be a great trip. At first Umma and I worried about losing an entire Saturday, which was the biggest workday for her side business. Now we not only got some fresh vegetables and fruits that grew up from the ground and hung down from the trees and were picked by Umma’s hand the way she liked it,
I also had a lead on a house for sale.
When I gave the realtor a call that same week, at first he didn’t want to talk to “a kid,” on the telephone. I was twelve. I told him my parents didn’t speak English and that I was translating for them. He switched from being angered to only being a bit impatient. He priced the house at sixty-two thousand dollars. He also offered to sell us the empty plot of land beside it for twenty thousand.
Through Umma Designs, in two years we’d banked twenty-four thousand dollars. We agreed that when we had enough money to walk in and buy a whole house and the land it sat on, we would disappear from our Brooklyn block quietly. No one would know where we had gone, why, or most important, how.
The shuriken turned out sweet. They were curved knives with a fist grip. One graceful swipe at a neck at the right angle and the head comes off.
9
GOLD
A problem did come like I knew it would. I didn’t know what it would be or who it would be, but based on my father’s words and lessons, it would happen. His name was Gold Star Tafari. He showed up in the parking lot outside the factory where Umma worked.
A dark cat like me, he seemed about twenty-nine, thirty years old. He had a rough face that you could tell was etched by experience. A medium build, he was about two inches taller than me at thirteen. He had two cuts on his left cheek that looked mean. I always liked scars. They belong on men as a reminder. If you ask a male about his wounds, usually he’ll tell a good, crazy, original, and action-packed story. Once a youth starts collecting scars, it makes him a better fighter, smarter with his moves in his next encounter.