THE PLACE WE were going that Friday in late June, 1995 was York County Prison in rural York, Pennsylvania. I don’t think Hudson ever housed INS detainees before we were sent there because of the riot, and I don’t think it ever has since. York, however, is one of the prisons the INS routinely uses to hold its detainees.
The INS pays York something like $50 a day for each detainee, even though the cost of housing a detainee is only about $24 a day. Housing INS detainees is such good business for York that there were plans to expand the prison so it could hold five hundred more detainees. It was like Esmor all over again. All that money. And the prison didn’t treat refugees any better than it treated convicts. If anything, it treated us worse.
A large bus drove us through the predawn darkness to York, several hours away. Once there, we were taken into another drab processing room where our chains were removed. Next we were herded into the medical room where we were strip-searched, right in front of the American inmates who worked there, then ordered into showers that had no curtains or doors, while a guard stood watching us. When we came out of the shower, she sprayed our hair, underarms, and private parts with some type of disinfectant that stung. ‘To kill bugs,’ she said matter-of-factly. After our shower, we were given uniforms to wear – blue again, like Esmor’s – and issued the usual supplies. This was my third prison. I was getting to know the drill.
Our dinner was given to us in a gym. As I sat there with yet another inedible prison meal in front of me, I glanced out the gym window into the hallway and saw several refugees from Esmor walking past. There was Sylvie! And Esther! I hurried over to one of the guards who was supervising us.
‘Excuse me, can you tell me where those women are going?’ I asked, pointing to the window.
‘Back to their dorms,’ he said.
Their dorms! Allah had answered one part of my prayers. We were in a prison that had dormitories. That wouldn’t help me, however, because it turned out that the dorms were only in minimum security. For some reason – or more likely no reason – the group I arrived with that day was sent to maximum security. We were split up and assigned to one of four cell pods, A, B, C, and D, where female inmates were housed in two-person cells, not dorms. Unfortunately, Oche was sent to B pod, while I was sent to C with three other detainees.
The guard delivered us to the door of the C pod, and left us there. I wasn’t really sure where I should go, so I walked into the dayroom and stood for a few minutes, looking around. The air in the C-pod dayroom was thick with smoke – Oh God, no, not again – and the room was only slightly less noisy than the dayroom at Hudson. But nobody was fighting. I thanked God for that.
The dayroom had a wall of windows facing out into the hallway, and windows on either side facing into neighboring cell pods. A metal stairwell on the far left side of the room led to a deck that ran along the rear wall. There were eight cells upstairs, eight downstairs. Each cell door had a narrow vertical opening cut into it. The walls and cell doors were painted off-white, the floor was gray concrete. There were telephones against one wall.
Some thirty or so women in blue prison uniforms were sitting at metal tables in the dayroom, talking, shouting, playing cards, or watching the TV, which was mounted high up on one of the walls. I saw one woman braiding another woman’s hair. Refugees! They had to be. When I looked closer, I saw they were women I knew from Esmor. There was Dulcie, who was Ghanaian, Wang, my Esmor dorm mate and co-worker on the laundry crew, a Haitian girl whose name I can’t remember now, one woman from India, and another from Cuba. I thanked Allah for that. What a terrible thing, to be grateful to see other refugees thrown into this terrible place with me, but grateful I was. I was glad not to be the only refugee among all these convicts – women who were considered dangerous enough to be held in maximum security.
As I stood taking it all in, Dulcie and the other detainees from Esmor noticed me and came over to greet me. We all hugged each other. Dulcie checked my bracelet for my cell number.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘You have the worst roommate in the pod.’
She pointed to my cell, which was in the corner. I went to check it out. It was about twice the size of the cell at Hudson, with the same kind of furnishings – metal toilet-and-sink unit, metal table and stool, metal bunk bed. The window, opposite the cell door, was also bigger than the cell window in Hudson and gave onto the outside, but all I could see through it was another part of the prison. The lower bunk was already made, so I proceeded to make the upper bunk. The cigarette smoke was even thicker in the cell than in the dayroom. An ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts was on the table. Oh God. A smoker!
‘Hi.’
I turned around. A tall, skinny black woman was standing slouched against the doorway. She was missing one of her front teeth, her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, her features were hard, and her face was bony. She looked like she was maybe in her thirties. She was smoking a cigarette and looked really scary. I couldn’t stay here with a convict. What if she was like the inmates in Hudson – always fighting, always shouting? They had to move me!
She came into the cell and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘Fauziya.’
‘Fauziya, I’m Bernice. Don’t worry, we’re gonna get along fine, long as you don’t touch my stuff. That’s the only rule. No touchin’ my stuff, OK?’
I looked around the cell. She had a newspaper spread neatly underneath the window, with food, toothpaste, and other things one could get from the commissary neatly arranged on it.
I nodded and quickly left the cell. I had to get out of here! Out of this cell! Out of this pod! I headed to the phone to call Bowman. It was the usual prison phone: Listen for the beeps, press the buttons, hope your call will go through, pray the person you’re trying to reach is there because nobody can call you back. This time the call did go through, and Bowman was there.
‘Fauziya! Oh, thank God. We’ve been trying to find you! Where are you! Are you OK?’
I started to sob hysterically. ‘You have to get me out of here! You have to!’
‘Fauziya, try to calm down. You have to pull yourself together and tell me where you are.’
‘I don’t know!’
‘Fauziya, take a deep breath,’ Bowman said, very slowly and quietly. ‘Calm down.’
I took a deep breath, let it out.
‘OK, now try to listen to me, OK? You’ve got to find out where you are. Is there someone there you can ask who knows?’
An American inmate was standing a few paces off with her back to me. I called to her. ‘Excuse me?’ She turned. ‘Can you tell me where this prison is?’
‘York County Prison, in York, Pennsylvania.’
I repeated what she said to Bowman. And then I started crying again. ‘You have to get me out of here! They have me in with smokers!’ I didn’t say anything about my asthma. I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to be that specific.
‘I’m working on it, Fauziya,’ Bowman said. ‘I’m still trying to get your case transferred.’
‘Does that mean I’ll get out of prison?’ I asked him.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise, Fauziya, but I’m hoping.’
‘What about my hearing? I missed my hearing!’
‘I know, Fauziya. I’m sorry. But the hearing was canceled. They were all canceled after the riot.’
‘I still get one, don’t I?’
‘Yes, you still get one.’
‘When?’ Soon. It had to be soon. I’d already waited six months!
‘I don’t know, Fauziya.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Didn’t they give us a new date?’
‘No. All the hearings were canceled until further notice.’
‘You mean I have to wait here?’
‘Yes, Fauziya. I’m sorry. But we’re going to do everything we can for you.’
When I hung up the phone, I couldn’t stop crying. For six months I’d been waiting to get out of prison, only to find myself in an even worse prison – two worse prisons, so far. Now I was in a real prison where I had to share a cell with a convict instead of being in a detention center where there were only refugees. And I didn’t have a hearing date anymore. The light at the end of the long tunnel was extinguished. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again.
As far as Bowman and Layli were concerned, the phone call that plunged me back into despair was cause for rejoicing. Layli told me later that Bowman came rushing into her office as soon as he hung up the phone. ‘Fauziya just called!’ I was alive. I was OK. I was at York. And now that the hearing had been postponed, and they’d found me, they’d be able to do a much better job of preparing me for it when it was eventually rescheduled. That was their view. Not mine.
After I hung up from my conversation with Bowman, my head in a fog of misery, I was heading back to my cell when I heard a familiar voice.
‘Fonsinya!’
Wang! Wang, seeing that I was in tears, had come over to comfort me. I was glad to see her, but too caught up in my own problems to notice that she was wearing a gauze bandage on her leg. Later I would learn that she had been hurt during the rioting. She’d been taken directly from Esmor to a hospital and then directly from the hospital here to York. But now she was ‘OK-la,’ as she would say. Wang started following me back to my cell but kept looking over her shoulder, saying ‘Officer. Officer.’ Oh. Finally I got it. We weren’t allowed to go to anyone else’s cell. Was that it? Yes. So I went with Wang to the dayroom instead, where we joined the group of detainees from Esmor. We sat together taking what comfort we could from the feeling of safety we had in one another’s company. And we had a lot to talk about. Everyone had their own horror story about the riot. Everyone wanted to compare notes about where they had been taken afterward. I told them that the five days I’d spent in Hudson felt like five years. Dulcie told me that she’d been transported to the same place as Sylvie and Esther when everybody was shipped out of Esmor – a place called Varick in New York City, which she said was much better than York. She said in Varick they were treated like people instead of criminals. But they’d been transferred here on Tuesday. At first they’d all been put in maximum, but Sylvie, Esther, and most of the others in their group had been moved to minimum earlier that day. Dulcie and the two Haitian women had been left back here.
I thought to myself, Sylvie and Esther were moved! That meant I could get moved too! No, wait. Maybe it didn’t. Dulcie hadn’t been moved. The Haitian women hadn’t been moved. But they had to move me! I couldn’t stay here! The smoke would kill me! And I had to be with Sylvie and Esther!
Was there any way of getting moved to minimum? I wanted to know. Dulcie said the American inmates had told her it was up to the counselor, so she’d talked to the counselor. The counselor had told her she wasn’t ready to move anybody yet, but she would put Dulcie’s name on the list. And how do you get to talk to the counselor? Knock on the window, Dulcie said. Ask the guard for a request form, fill it out, and the guard will put it in the counselor’s box.
Please, I wrote, once I got the form. I need to be moved. I have asthma. I can’t be around smoke. It makes me sick.
I asked Dulcie if there was any way I could see Sylvie and Esther while I was still in maximum. She explained that the prison didn’t allow women in maximum and minimum to visit each other. ‘But you can see them tomorrow,’ she said. The women in maximum were allowed outside into a fenced-in enclosure for about an hour in the morning if the weather was good, and if a guard agreed to take them out. The women in minimum were allowed out into a larger enclosure anytime at all between eight in the morning and eight at night. ‘If you want to see them, go outside tomorrow morning,’ Dulcie said. ‘If they’re not out there, tell someone to go in and get them. You can see them that way.’ Our conversation was interrupted by the crackling of the loudspeaker.
‘Count time!’
Oh God, no! At Hudson, you had to be locked in your cell with your cellmate during count. I didn’t want to be locked in with Bernice. But I walked back to my cell, trying to steel myself for lockdown. Bernice was standing outside the cell. She stopped me as I was about to enter. ‘You don’t have to go in,’ she said. ‘We just have to stand by the door.’ Oh thank God. We stood on either side of the door, while a guard walked through the pod with a clipboard in hand, checking off each inmate. Another guard stood at the door to the pod, keeping an eye on everything. During count, when the guards were in the pod, the entire place was silent. The guards wouldn’t allow any talking and even the television was turned off. As soon as they left, the place exploded in noise again.
I asked Bernice how often we got locked in. ‘Just at night,’ she said. Lockdown for the night was at eleven P.M., and the doors were unlocked at seven A.M. Once they opened, they stayed open all day. So I’d be locked in with her only at night. I didn’t know how I was going to bear that, but at least I wouldn’t be locked in with her for hours every day. That was something to be grateful for.
My first night at York I learned that Bernice snored. When she was asleep, her snoring kept me awake. When she was awake, the smoke from her cigarettes made me wheeze, cough, and gag. I lay in my bunk as she smoked, watching the smoke curl upward in the light coming in from the dayroom. Every half hour, a guard came by and shone a flashlight in the bunk, doing count. The cell was cold, my blanket was thin, my mattress and pillow were hard and crackly. The lights in the dayroom were kept on at night, which meant that light came streaming into the cell through the window in the door. What with the light, Bernice’s snoring and smoking, and all the terrible thoughts running through my head, it was impossible to sleep.
By the time the doors unlocked again the next morning, I had a raging headache and my mouth tasted like cigarette smoke. I had to speak to Bernice. I screwed up my courage, then got the first words out.
‘Please, Bernice. Can you do me a favor?’
She didn’t look at me. She just sat perfectly still.
I forced myself to go on. ‘I have asthma, and cigarette smoke really, really makes me sick. Can you try not to smoke in the cell at night?’
She frowned, pursed her lips, lifted her eyes and glowered at me. I didn’t know what to expect. She was a convict, after all, and I assumed that she was in maximum security for something serious. So, asking her to give up the one thing that gave her pleasure and satisfaction in prison was very bold of me. How would she react? Would she explode in anger and shove me? I’d seen a lot of that kind of behavior at Hudson. That and worse. She could hurt me if she wanted to, because the guards were out in the hall. I stood still, waiting.
She sighed. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll try.’
‘Thank you, Bernice.’ Thank you, God. But I had one more issue to discuss with Bernice. I needed to pray, and I needed a clean place to pray. I couldn’t pray in the dayroom because it wasn’t private enough. And it was filthy. I had to pray in the cell, so I offered her a trade. If she would let me set aside a space for praying, I would clean the cell.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ she said. ‘No touching my stuff. You can clean your part. But don’t touch my part.’
We worked out which part of the small space was hers and which was mine, which I could clean, which not to touch. I got my bunk, part of the table, and a small section of floor space along the right wall to use for praying. I asked her not to walk in shoes on the place I had designated for prayer, and she agreed.
‘Prepare for breakfast! Prepare for breakfast!’ I heard the call for breakfast come crackling over the loudspeaker, and went into the dayroom to join my friends. I didn’t feel much like eating, but Dulcie told me I had better eat then, because it was usually the best meal of the day.
It wasn’t great but it was edible – waffles, syrup, fruit, milk. Lunch and dinner, there was no telling – no telling whether you could stand to eat it, no telling what it was even when you were looking right at it. Muslims don’t eat pork, and since I had no way of knowing what a lot of the meat-based dishes were made of, I usually left them alone. I’d eat the chicken if it wasn’t too awful, fruit if we got it. But mainly I’d been living on starch – cereals, waffles, pancakes, bread, potatoes, rice. I would do the same at York, even though all the starch made me feel soft and fat and pasty.
After breakfast I waited to see if we would be allowed into the yard. According to Dulcie, the guards would let us out if it was good weather. I’d looked out the window in the cell first thing that morning and seen that it was a nice day. I was desperate to go. Outside, where I could breathe fresh air, outside where I could see Sylvie and Esther.
I sat with Dulcie and Wang in the dayroom, waiting, praying. Please, God, let the guard take us outside. At around nine-thirty she led us out of our pod, down the hall to a door at the far end, then waved us through.
Oh God, I was outside. Out in the fresh air and sunshine. Outside, standing on the earth. On real grass. It reminded me of Kpalimé, my lush, green, beautiful, lost home. I got down on my hands and knees and put my nose to the ground, inhaling, filling my lungs, my heart, my spirit with the sweet smell of earth. Wang laughed. ‘Fonsinya! You clasy!’ Dulcie tapped her arm. ‘Let her be,’ she said. She understood. I got up off my knees, ripped a handful of grass from the earth, crushed the blades between my fingers and smelled them. Home. It smelled like home.
Oche was there too. She’d come out with some of the other women from B pod. We walked over to the fence to look for Sylvie and Esther. I had imagined a single fence separating us from Sylvie and Esther, a fence we could put our fingers through to touch each other. But I was wrong. We were in one fenced-in enclosure, separated by several feet from the larger fenced-in enclosure for the women in minimum. We wouldn’t be able to touch. We’d have to call out to each other.
A few women were out in the minimum enclosure, but not Sylvie and Esther. A couple of the women were dressed in regular clothes, the others were wearing uniforms. Later I found out that convicts in minimum could wear their own clothes, even though the refugees couldn’t – one of many ways in which convicts got better treatment than we did at York. I shouted and waved to one of the women in a prison uniform whom I recognized from Esmor. ‘Helloo! Helloo!’ She looked up, came to the fence. ‘Get Sylvie! Go get Sylvie! Tell her Fauziya is here!’ She nodded, waved, went inside. I waited. And then there she was, my mom. Sylvie. Sylvie was running toward me, crying and running toward the fence. ‘Oh my baby! My sweetheart!’
And then there was Esther, sauntering across the yard behind her, smiling and waving, looking beautiful, even in another ugly prison uniform. Looking like the beautiful princess she was.
We stood at our fences – Wang, Dulcie, Oche, and me at our fence, Sylvie and Esther at theirs – crying, laughing, shouting back and forth to each other. Sylvie and I did most of the shouting, as we caught up on what had happened to each of us after the riot, and what was going on with us now. When I told Sylvie that I was in a smoking pod, she said she’d speak to the counselor about getting me out.
‘I’ll tell her you’re my daughter! You have to be with me!’
I laughed. ‘OK, Mom! Tell her!’
She would too. I knew it. She’d fight to have me with her.
‘Hey, Fauziya!’ Esther shouted. ‘I talked to Frank!’
Oh God, how I missed Frank. ‘Is he OK? I tried to call from Hudson, but the call wouldn’t go through!’
‘Call him! He’s worried about you!’ She gave me his telephone number. It turned out that the number I’d been dialing for Frank was wrong. Somehow my memory had failed me and I’d reversed two of the digits.
‘Who’s there with you?’ I wanted to know.
Sylvie shouted out names. So many of my friends from Esmor. They were all together in minimum! I wanted to be in minimum too! I wanted to be with my friends!
The male guard who was stationed in a box outside the fence blew a shrill whistle. ‘Away from the fence. You can’t touch the fence.’ And soon a female guard came outside and ordered everyone from maximum back inside.
No! Not already! It felt as though we’d just come out.
‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’
I turned away from the fence, walked back across the soft earth and green grass, lifted my face to the sun, took a few last breaths of fresh clean air, and went back inside.
As soon as I was back in the dayroom, I went to the phone and dialed Frank’s number.
‘Hey Fauz!’ he said as soon as he heard my voice. Oh, I was so happy to be talking to Frank again. He told me his mother had called him the Sunday morning after the riot to tell him what had happened. He’d rushed right over, but he’d missed us. He’d been sick with worry when he hadn’t heard from me for so long. He said the guards and officers had been allowed back in after the riot, before the cleanup crews went in. ‘My God, Fauz. The place was destroyed.’
‘I know.’
‘They didn’t touch the laundry though. Isn’t that something?’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No. I couldn’t believe it. The whole place is trashed and then I walk into the laundry room and it’s like nothing happened. I couldn’t figure it out.’
‘It’s because you’re such a good man, Frank, and everybody knew that. The men weren’t angry at you, so they left the laundry alone.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. But that wasn’t important. He had something else to tell me. He and Miss Jones had gone to K dorm when they’d been allowed back in. They’d looked around for things they thought maybe they should save for us before the cleanup crews came in. They’d found my Qur’an and my tasbih. ‘I’ve got them, Fauz. I thought you’d want to know.’
My tasbih! My mother’s beautiful tasbih! I put my face against the wall, held the receiver to my heart, and cried for joy. I cried in gratitude, to God, to Miss Jones, to Frank.
‘You want me to mail them to you?’
‘No!’ What if they were lost again, or taken from me? They were safer there with him than in prison with me. ‘No. Can you keep them for me? Until I’m out?’
‘Sure, Fauz. I’ll keep them until I can give them to you in person. How’s that?’
Oh, please God, let that be soon! ‘Thank you, Frank. God bless you.’
‘You too, Fauz.’
‘Thank Miss Jones for me?’
‘I will. She’s been worrying about you too, you know.’
Miss Jones. Oh God, how I missed her.
Our time was almost up.
‘Call whenever you want to, don’t disappear on me again, OK?’
‘OK.’
Next I tried Rahuf.
‘Fauziya! Are you all right?’
‘I’m OK.’ He said Bowman had called him on Friday to tell him he’d heard from me. He’d been so relieved. He’d been waiting to hear from me, worried about me. And now he had a surprise for me.
‘A surprise? What?’ I couldn’t imagine.
‘Fauziya, I’m coming to visit you soon.’
That should have been wonderful news. But I didn’t hear it that way at first. All I could think of was that at York, the women in maximum weren’t allowed what are called contact visits, where you can actually sit in the same room with your visitor. We had to sit in booths, and talk to visitors on phones. It didn’t matter that we were detainees and not convicts. York made no special allowances for us. I wasn’t sure I could stand to have Rahuf visit me that way – it seemed too humiliating – and I tried to talk him out of coming. It was too long a trip for him to make just to sit and talk to me over a phone, I said.
‘No, I’ve made up my mind, Fauziya,’ Rahuf said. ‘I want to see you and I’m coming as soon as I can. After all, I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl.’
‘That’s true,’ I said, forcing a laugh. He was trying to cheer me up, I knew. It was only polite to try to respond. Besides, I didn’t have the strength to argue anymore.
‘I remember the last time I saw you at the house in Kpalimé.’
‘Yeah, so do I.’ It was a sweet memory. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old at the time. My father had just bought a beautiful brown car and Rahuf had come to see it. I’d stood beside my father in the courtyard as he showed it off. Rahuf had walked all around it, admiring it, looking at everything. ‘It’s a beauty, all right,’ he’d said. My father had smiled and winked at me. ‘Fauziya helped me pick it,’ he’d said. ‘Didn’t you, Fauziya?’ Oh, I’d felt so proud! So special, so loved, so happy. It seemed like a dream to me now. Had I ever really been that happy? Had I ever really been that happy, bright, loved, pampered little girl?
Our time was almost up. The phones cut off after ten minutes.
‘Take care of yourself,’ Rahuf said. ‘Call me next week, OK?’
‘OK.’
I hung up the phone and returned to my cell pod. The rest of the day was a noisy, smoky blur. I watched television. I lined up for meals. I lined up for count. I watched more television. I made it through the day. I made it through the night. I had learned how to survive.
We couldn’t close the cell door ourselves because the doors were controlled from the guard’s booth. So if I wanted privacy to use the toilet in my cell, I had to go down to the dayroom, knock on the window, and ask the guard on duty in the booth to close my cell door. Then when I was finished I had to holler through the door to get somebody to go tell the guard to open the cell door. Announcing my toilet needs to a guard, knowing the guard would then be waiting in her booth to hear when I was finished, was humiliating. But it was better than using the toilet with the door open, which is what a lot of the other women did.
I also had to tell the guard if I wanted to take a shower, because the shower stalls were visible from the hallway. If a man was walking through while you were taking a shower, the guard would make you get out, even if you were all covered with soap. It was bad enough that there were only two showers for thirty-two women in our pod – the one that was next to our cell, and one directly upstairs on the next landing – but we couldn’t even count on being able to finish a shower when we finally got a chance to take one.
On Monday, after my first weekend at York, the prison loud-speaker blared my name. ‘Kasinga. Report to Medical!’ I walked across the hall for my health evaluation. I’d been through one at Esmor, but they’d skipped it at Hudson.
The doctor was a middle-aged white man. He took my blood, gave me a TB test, asked me a few questions.
‘Are you taking any medications?’
‘No.’
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘No!’
‘Have you ever tried to kill yourself?’
‘No!’ I’d come here to try to save my life, not end it.
He checked off some boxes on a form.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I need to be moved. I’m in a smoking pod and I can’t be around smoke. I have asthma. It makes me sick.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, checking off some more boxes on the form. ‘This is a smoking facility.’
‘The whole prison?’ I asked him.
He hadn’t answered my question.
‘The whole prison?’ I asked again. ‘The whole prison is smoking?’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘OK, that’s it. You can go.’
I returned to my pod, my stinky, smoke-filled pod. I was in total despair. Dulcie saw me come in. She was sitting at one of the tables watching TV. York, Hudson, Esmor. It was the same everywhere. Nothing to do but watch TV. Nothing to do but sit, think, worry, cry, and watch TV.
‘Fauziya!’ She waved me over, then saw the look on my face. ‘What is it? What happened?’
I sat down next to her. ‘Oh, God, Dulcie, what am I going to do? The doctor says the whole place is a smoking facility and I’ll die if I have to live with smokers. I have to get out of here.’
‘Don’t listen to that doctor. It is not all a smoking facility. A pod is nonsmoking and I think the dorms are nonsmoking, one of them at least. You already put in a request to talk to the counselor, right? Well, when you see her, tell her the problem. She seems pretty nice. Tell her they at least have to move you into A pod. They can’t keep you in a smoking pod if it’s going to make you sick. They have to move you right away.’
That’s what she thought. That’s what I thought. We were wrong.
One good thing at York was the gym. We were allowed to go there for thirty minutes every morning. I was grateful for that, grateful for any chance to get out of that smoky dayroom. My first time there (except for the day of my arrival, when we’d all been fed dinner there) I went with Dulcie. Guards escorted us out the door and past the guard’s booth, which looked out over all four of the adjoining cell pods, A, B, C, and D. When we got to our destination, I saw that the gym was a regular indoor space, somewhat larger than Esmor’s open-roofed enclosure, with a basketball hoop, a volleyball net, some exercise equipment. I just sat, watching the other women run around, content to be breathing the smoke-free air. Dulcie joined me for a while.
‘What are the guards like here?’ I asked as we sat together. We spoke in Twi so nobody would understand us.
‘Some are OK, some you have to watch out for. Like Jean Brown.’
‘Which one is Brown?’
‘She’s big, white, and mean-looking. You know the one I mean? She’s the worst.’
‘Are there any nice ones here?’ I asked Dulcie.
‘Arlene,’ she said. ‘She’s the nicest. Short white woman with short dark hair? She treats everybody like a human being. Some of the others . . .’ She curled her lip.
‘Who’s the one who strip-searched us when we came in? Kind of skinny.’
‘Oh, that’s Geena. She’s OK, but she talks too much. She’s into everybody’s business.’
I soon learned that this was true. Geena loved to gossip. But sometimes she had interesting information. One day she told me that there were at least one hundred of us detainees in York.
At least a hundred! ‘All from Esmor?’ I asked her.
‘No, there’s a whole bunch of Chinese guys here from somewhere,’ she said. From the Golden Venture, I learned later, the freighter that had run aground on a sandbar just off a beach in Queens, New York, the night of June 6, 1993, with a smuggled cargo of 286 Chinese men and women and children, many of whom were fleeing China’s practice of controlling population growth through forced sterilization and forced abortion. Some had since been sent back to China, some had been sent to other countries, and some had been released. But a lot were still in prison, some forty of the men right here at York. They’d been in prison two years by the time I arrived.
One day that first week I was called to the counselor’s office. She was a short, heavyset white woman named Amy Jefferson.
‘What can I do for you?’ she said brightly.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’m in a smoking pod. I have asthma. The smoke is making me sick. Please, can you move me? Can I go to minimum? I have friends in minimum. Please. I’d like to be with my friends.’
She was nice, friendly, cheerful. She told me the same thing she’d told Dulcie. ‘I’m not ready to move anybody yet, but I’ll put your name on the list.’
‘But I have asthma,’ I said, struggling not to cry. ‘I can’t breathe in there. Please. Can you at least move me to a nonsmoking pod?’
‘I’m not ready to move anybody right now, but keep your fingers crossed. I’ll put your name on the list.’
I waited all day. Nothing happened. She didn’t move me. I waited all the next day and the next day and the next day. I went out in the mornings and cried to Sylvie, who was campaigning hard to get me transferred. So hard, in fact, that the counselor finally got annoyed and told her to stop bugging her about me.
They didn’t move me. I stayed where I was. For the entire week.
Layli told me later that Bowman spent that week calling here, there, everywhere, trying to find out if hearings were being rescheduled yet, trying to get me a date. By the end of the week, around the same time it was becoming clear to me that I wasn’t going to be moved anywhere anytime soon, it was becoming clear to Bowman that my hearing wasn’t going to be happening anytime soon either. That was bad for me but good for Bowman and Layli. It gave them all the more time to prepare my case. Layli’s focus now was on the ‘exhibits’ to be submitted in support of the brief she’d turned in earlier. Exhibits are the studies, articles, letters, affidavits, and other documents that a lawyer attaches to the brief as evidence that the refugee is telling the truth, that his or her request for asylum is based on valid grounds, and that the request should be granted. In the rush to get the brief written and submitted in time to meet the original deadline, Layli hadn’t been able to pull together much in the way of exhibits. She and Bowman had attached the two letters from my mother, the marriage certificate plus English translation, and the untranslated police report my uncle had filled out when he and my aunt had discovered I was missing. That was it. That’s all there had been time for. Now that she had so much more time, she could make use of some of the information she’d been able to get at the Immigration Lawyers conference she’d gone to in Atlanta a week earlier.
Thank goodness she’d made that trip, she thought. Several of the people she’d met there had been extremely helpful, and very interested in my case. Layli started working the phones, calling everyone she thought might be able to give her new ideas, new information. Soon fat packets of material concerning gender-based claims began arriving daily at Bowman’s office, all of them addressed to Layli. Roshan helped her locate articles on FGM in medical journals, including one in the September 15, 1994, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr Nahid Toubia of Columbia University’s School of Public Health, which contained a full-color, detailed photograph of what remained of a seven-year-old Sudanese girl’s genitals after she’d been infibulated. Layli wanted to reproduce the photograph in color. She wanted to make a strong statement. No more of this ‘circumcision’ nonsense, which made it sound so harmless, even healthy. She wanted the judge and the INS trial attorney to see what FGM really is. The color-copying would cost a lot of money because the exhibits apparently had to be submitted to a lot of different people. Layli talked to Bowman. He recognized Layli’s passion and enthusiasm for my case, and didn’t want to squelch it. He agreed that the photo made a powerful statement, and since he knew Rahuf couldn’t afford the copying expense, he agreed to pay it himself.
Layli began searching for statistics on FGM in Togo. There weren’t any statistics on FGM in Togo, really. There were estimates, guesses, but no surveys or studies of the kind that had been conducted in other countries.
She called universities, trying to find an expert who could testify in writing that what I was saying about the way things worked in my tribes and culture was true. My country is small. My tribes are small. It wasn’t easy to find anyone who knew anything about them. But the phone trail finally led to an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke University named Charles Piot, who’d spent three years in northern Togo doing research on the Kabye tribe. Piot hadn’t really studied FGM, or kakia, as we call it. He knew it was practiced, but he couldn’t say how extensively. Based on his familiarity with the anthropological literature on the cultures of northern Togo, he was able to confirm that the Tchamba do expect their women to be circumcised and he thought it likely that a man would want his wife to be cut before marriage, but that was about as far as he could go in support of my story.
All Layli’s hard work culminated in a thick packet of new exhibits, all organized in five categories: general information on FGM; INS response to FGM; United Nations response to FGM; U.S. Congress response to FGM; and medical community’s response to FGM. She included Dr Toubia’s New England Journal of Medicine article, a copy of a really thorough report on FGM called ‘Female Genital Mutilation: A Call for Global Action,’ also by Dr Toubia; a copy of the new INS guidelines on gender persecution; a copy of the INS’s report on FGM that Bo Cooper had given her; a copy of a December 7, 1994, article reporting that the American Medical Association had come out in favor of legislation banning FGM. Layli also included the text of the bill that Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was still trying to get passed prohibiting FGM. Shroeder had introduced it again, for the third year in a row, on February 14, 1995.
Bowman watched as packages piled into the office for Layli. One day, as Layli was showing him all of the information she had put together so far, he said, ‘How’d you like to argue the case?’
Layli didn’t have to think twice. Although the huge responsibility was a bit daunting, she knew her answer. She felt so passionately about my case. The issues involved in it were ones that had concerned her for a long time. It was as though she was destined to be my advocate. Now she would be, and she looked forward to the challenge.
While Layli continued working on my case, I was spending my days in a smoking pod. During my second miserable week there, I started coughing. A persistent cough that was making my chest and throat sore. I again asked the counselor to please move me. Again she was friendly, cheerful. But this time she told me that she couldn’t move anybody because the INS didn’t allow the prison to move refugees without its consent. What? What was she saying? They moved people! I knew they moved people! Why was she telling me this? Why?
I saw a doctor again that week too – a different doctor from the one who’d done my initial health evaluation. I had developed another boil, which had gotten bigger and bigger, more and more painful, until finally it came to a head and started draining. It needed treatment. The doctor cleaned it, applied ointment and bandages, prescribed antibiotics. I asked that doctor, too, to please move me. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I have asthma.’ Nothing happened. I saw a doctor or nurse almost every day that week to have the bandages changed. ‘Please move me.’ Nothing happened. Now when I coughed, there was blood in my mouth. I was coughing up blood.
I called Bowman again in desperation. ‘You have to get me out of here!’ I said, crying. ‘I can’t be with smokers!’
‘I wish I could, Fauziya,’ he said. ‘But there isn’t anything I can do.’ We just had to hope my hearing wouldn’t be too far off.
‘Do we have a date yet?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘When will they give us one?’
‘I don’t know, Fauziya. They’re not rescheduling hearings yet.’
Oh God! ‘What about the transfer?’
He had news about that. He tried to make it sound good. My case had been transferred, but not to Baltimore. It had been transferred to Philadelphia. That’s where my hearing would be.
Philadelphia! I didn’t know anything about Philadelphia but I’d heard things that frightened me about one of the judges who used to come to Esmor to do hearings. His name was Ferlise. He hadn’t granted asylum to any of the refugees I knew. A number of the women who’d gotten him as their judge had come back from court in tears.
‘Do we know who the judge will be?’
‘No, Fauziya. We don’t even have a court date. Stay in touch with Rahuf. I’ll call him as soon as I know anything.’
I hung up the phone, shaking, crying, more frightened than I’d ever been before. I still didn’t know when my hearing would be. And now, for the first time, I had reason to fear it. What if I got Ferlise? I went back to my pod, walked across the dayroom, went to my cell, climbed into my bunk, and got under my blanket. I curled up on my side, shivering, gripped by a coldness that seemed to be inside me, somewhere in the pit of my stomach. I prayed to God. ‘Please God, make this feeling go away. Make it wrong. Don’t let it be telling me what it seems to be telling me. Not Ferlise. Please God. Don’t let me get him.’
As Layli got further into her work on my case, she continued to consult with Bowman. One thing she wanted from him was the opportunity to accompany him to an asylum hearing before arguing my case. He agreed that it would be a good idea for her at least to see one before she had to participate in one, and promised to let her know when his next case went to court.
Oh, and there was something else she needed to talk to him about. When Layli had first started working for Bowman, she sat in while Cindy Lewis interviewed a client at length, going over and over the facts of his story. Cindy had then worked that information into an affidavit that presented the facts and chronology of his story in clear written form. After having the client review it to make sure it was accurate, she had him sign it, and then submitted it along with the legal papers filed on his case. Should Layli try to do one for me too? Bowman didn’t think an affidavit was necessary, since Layli had already explained the facts of my case in the brief and since I was going to testify in court. Well, Layli thought to herself, one less thing I’ll have to worry about. She could concentrate on everything else she had to do. She was just starting out. She didn’t know. Bowman didn’t know either. He didn’t know who my judge would be. He was trusting in the way hearings generally work. He thought I would have ample opportunity to tell my story in court. He was giving advice based on past experience. Layli was trusting his advice.
When Layli went to Bowman’s next asylum hearing, which was in Arlington, Virginia, she thought it seemed like very valuable preparation for what was to come. It was the first asylum hearing she had ever attended, so she took careful notes on everything. The judge was cordial, respectful, attentive. He gave Bowman all the time he needed to question his client thoroughly, gave the man all the time he needed to tell his story fully and make as strong a case for asylum as he could. The judge listened carefully, asked questions politely. He even put the INS trial attorney in his place for trying to intimidate the man. ‘That’s really not necessary,’ the judge said calmly, in response to the attorney’s aggressive tactics. Layli was impressed. Oh, so this is the way it works, she kept thinking. The judge then retired to his chambers to consider his decision. Bowman had done what he could with what he had to work with, but the man’s case was thin. When the judge returned to the courtroom, he explained in detail how he’d reached his decision, and then issued his ruling: asylum denied. Layli felt bad for the man, but she felt that the decision was fair. The fairness of the decison made her feel encouraged about arguing my case, which she thought was much stronger than that of Bowman’s client. With a judge as thoughtful and attentive as the one she’d just seen, she felt confident that she could convince him of the validity of my request for asylum. And there was no reason for her to expect that my judge would be any different.
All this work she was able to do without me. But she wished she could have easier access to me for the part of her job that required my participation. It’s standard procedure for lawyers to prepare clients for hearings by reviewing the series of questions they’ll be asking them in court as often as possible ahead of time, so that the clients will feel comfortable speaking up during the actual hearing. The answers to the questions tell the clients’ story. Since I was in prison I wouldn’t be able to come into the office for my run-through. She would prepare me by phone and hope for the best.
Layli kept talking to everybody she could think of about my case, anybody she thought might think of something she had overlooked or forgotten. One person she consulted with was a close friend named Denise Wolf, who was the editor-in-chief of the Law Review, the most prestigious of the law school’s journals. ‘Media attention,’ Denise suggested to Layli. ‘Newspaper coverage.’ She should try to get a reporter interested in writing about my case. People needed to know about me, Denise said. Media attention could arouse public sympathy. Public sympathy could work in my favor. Denise told Layli to contact a friend of hers who was a reporter at a Philadelphia newspaper. ‘She writes about women’s issues,’ Denise said. ‘She might be able to help you. Tell her I told you to call.’
Should she? Layli discussed it with Bowman. Absolutely, he said. He agreed that media coverage might help.
Layli called the number Denise had given her and left a message on the woman’s answering machine, but when the woman didn’t call back, Layli decided to call a couple of other local newspaper reporters. Nobody returned those calls, either. Her first attempts at dealing with the media had failed. Well, I’ll just have to keep trying, she decided.
Layli was doing all that work, for me. And I didn’t even know it. While she was working on my case, doing everything she could to prepare for my hearing, I sat in prison, growing more and more depressed every day, feeling completely hopeless and alone. How could everybody just keep ignoring the fact that I had asthma? I felt the whole world had forgotten about me.
Why was God doing this to me? I asked God that question every time I prayed, every day, five times a day. I never stopped praying. I was in hell, but I still prayed to God. I prayed in my cell, standing barefoot on a towel on the little patch of floor Bernice had allotted me, my head and hair wrapped in a piece of bedsheet I’d talked one of the laundry workers into giving me. ‘Please, God. Deliver me from my suffering.’
But God wasn’t listening. God didn’t hear my cries.
Then one Sunday morning, I was in the yard waiting to see Oche. I asked another refugee from Oche’s pod to ask her to come outside.
‘Oh, she was transferred,’ the woman told me. ‘This morning.’
Oh God! Oche! ‘Where? Where’d she go?’
‘To her hearing, but I don’t know where.’
Oche was the first of my friends to be shipped out of York without warning. Afterward it seemed like two or three people disappeared every other day or so. We assumed they were all going to their hearings, but nobody told us anything and we were never really sure. I knew my hearing was coming up, but when? I didn’t want to be taken by surprise that way. I wanted some warning. ‘Any word on my court date yet?’ I kept asking Rahuf. No, he said. No word. He’d checked in with Bowman, but there was no date yet.
I lived for the mornings, for the thirty minutes I could spend outside breathing clean air and holding shouted conversations with Sylvie, Esther, and my other friends in minimum. I lived for phone calls, counting the days until I could call Frank or Rahuf. ‘Call anytime,’ they both told me, those two good, kind, generous men. But they couldn’t afford that, I knew. So I was careful not to call them too frequently.
That was my life, day after day. Day after endless, identical, unendurable day. One week. Two weeks. Three weeks. Four weeks . . .
‘Prepare for breakfast!’
It was Wednesday morning, July 26, 1995, the fourth day of my fifth week in a maximum-security smoking pod. I got my cup and got in line. The line shuffled forward. One of the food servers, an American inmate, handed me a tray, and delivered a message.
‘Your mom is in the hallway. She’s leaving. She said to tell you to go to the window and watch for her. She wants to say goodbye.’
Sylvie! My heart stopped. Sylvie was leaving. I dropped my tray on the nearest table, ran to the window and looked down the hall in the direction of the waiting room, or holding room, where inmates are held on their way into or out of the prison.
And there she was. A female officer was escorting her out of the holding room.
‘Mom, where are you going?’ I shouted as loudly as I could.
She heard me, turned, smiled, shouted back to me. ‘I don’t know. Bye, baby! I love you, baby! I love you, sweetheart! I’ll write.’ And with that the guards led her away.
Later that morning I went outside, walked numbly to the fence, and shouted across to someone in minimum to get Esther. She came out and shouted across to me that Sylvie had been taken to her hearing, too, but she didn’t know where. That’s how they did things at York – in all the prisons I’d been in, in fact. The guards had come for her that morning and told her to pack her things. That was the first time she knew she was going. Would I ever see Sylvie again? I had no idea.
‘Kasinga! Kasinga!’
It was around four-thirty that same afternoon.
‘Kasinga! Kasinga!’
Oh, God, what now? I climbed out of my bunk and walked out into the dayroom. A guard was standing in the hallway. She motioned me to the door, opened it.
‘Pack your stuff,’ she said. ‘You’re moving.’
God had finally taken mercy on me. At around four-thirty on Wednesday afternoon, the day Sylvie left, I was told I was being transferred to minimum. Dulcie was going too.
Oh God, Thank you! Thank you! I ran to my cell, grabbed my cup, toothbrush, and spare uniform. Then I ran back out to the dayroom, shouting and laughing. ‘I’m going to minimum! I’m going to minimum!’ Wang was sitting at a table. She jumped up and hugged me. ‘Oh, Fonsinya! Gooda!’ Wang. I wanted to take her with me. But I couldn’t. I hugged her back quickly and ran to the door, where the guard was waiting to lead me to my new home.
It was a large dormitory, one of York’s two minimum security dorms. The room had eight long rows of brown metal bunk beds, and behind the last of the rows, several decent-size windows giving on the outside. There were some two dozen or so women in the room, sitting and lying on beds, talking, reading, or just looking out the windows. Such a small thing. Such an incredible thing. To be able to sit on a bed and gaze out a real window. The women were another mix of convicts and refugees, mostly convicts. But since these convicts were in minimum, I wouldn’t have to fear them as much, I hoped. One of the first refugees I recognized was Khadija. She was Muslim, from Somalia. We used to pray together in Esmor.
As soon as Khadija spotted me, she jumped up from the bunk where she’d been lying, ran over to me and hugged me. Then she took me on a tour of my new home. It was heaven, by prison standards. Absolute heaven. There were two tall rows of lockers on both sides of the room, one per person, where we could each store our things. We were even allowed to keep money in our locker if we had any. My money from Esmor had been transferred while I was in maximum. Now that I was in minimum, I would be able to keep it with me.
There was a separate bathroom, which connected the two minimum security dorms. The bathroom had four toilets, four sinks, and four showers. The showers had curtains and the toilets had doors. I’d been in prison more than six months, always in dorms or cells with a toilet right there in the same room. A separate bathroom seemed like an amazing luxury.
Women could go in and out of the dorm at will. The door was open. Khadija said it was closed and locked only at night. When we walked out the door and nobody stopped us, I just couldn’t get over it. For the first time since I’d arrived in America, I had the freedom to walk through a door. The door led to a large common living area, shared by both dorms, which contained regular tables and chairs, two small sofas, a television, vending machines. Vending machines! My head spun. There were two telephones on one wall of the common area. You had to sign up for one ten-minute interval at a time, but if no-one else was waiting to use the phone, you were allowed to make extra calls. It was still a prison phone, though, and you would be interrupted three times in a ten-minute phone conversation with an announcement that the call was coming from the York Correctional. On one side of the common room was a kitchen area with a sink as well as a refrigerator. Women in maximum weren’t allowed to save food, although many did anyway, but women in minimum were – fruit, milk, hot chocolate packets. Khadija said women could get second helpings on the food. You could save the extra helping in the refrigerator, heat it up on the stove range, and eat it whenever you wanted. Whenever you wanted!
Connected to the big common area there was another smaller room, with a Ping-Pong table, television, and several books. This was where I was going to spend most of my time, when I wasn’t in the dorm, because that’s where the other detainees usually hung out and it was a no-smoking area. The dorm was a no-smoking area too. People could smoke only in the big common room.
I couldn’t get over the freedoms! You could get packages from outside if you had anyone to send things to you – books, magazines, all kinds of stuff. There was a small separate laundry room with washers and dryers where you could do your own laundry! You could go outside whenever you wanted to, for as long as you wanted, anytime between eight in the morning and eight at night. You had to come in for meals and count and lockdown, but otherwise you had free access to the yard. All you had to do was sign out at the security desk. I could go outside! Anytime I wanted! Oh, God, I could just walk outside!
‘And we’re allowed contact visits too,’ Khadija said. Unlike the women in maximum, the ones in minimum didn’t have to sit in a booth talking by phone to friends or family members who were on the other side of a glass barrier. They could sit with their guests in the common area. They could touch, hug, kiss. My God, that would be the most freedom I’d experienced since arriving in America. I couldn’t believe my luck, that I’d be in minimum when Rahuf came.
There was a big clock on the wall in the common area. Nine P.M. Rahuf would be home from work now. I went to the phone, waited my turn, and called Rahuf. I was so excited that I was hyperventilating when he came on the line.
‘Fauziya, what happened?’ Poor Rahuf. He thought something terrible had happened. Again.
But this time something wonderful had happened. ‘I’m in minimum! They finally moved me! Today!’
‘Oh, Fauziya! That’s great!’
‘I’m in a nonsmoking dorm! I can go outside! And guess what? If you come visit me now, we won’t have to talk on the phone!’
‘Really?’
‘Really! We’ll be able to sit in a room and talk like regular people!’
He laughed. ‘Well, guess what?’
‘What?’
‘I’m coming this Saturday. It’s all arranged. A friend of mine has a car. He and another friend are driving me. I was waiting for you to call so I could tell you. I’ll see you in three days.’
Saturday! This Saturday! Oh God, it was too much. Too incredibly, unbelievably wonderful! I was finally in minimum. And Rahuf was coming on Saturday!
I spent the next three days enjoying my new freedoms. I took showers without worrying about being called out of them. I played Ping-Pong. I visited Esther in her dorm, even though I wasn’t supposed to. The women in the two dorms were allowed to socialize in the common area, but they weren’t allowed to go to each other’s dorm. I sat with other detainees, talking, gazing out the window. I made new friends. I braided women’s hair. I asked the detainee I’d seen knitting to teach me how to make a belt and sweater. She gave me needles and yarn and began teaching me. I saved fruit and milk in the refrigerator and ate when I wanted to eat, not when the prison said I had to eat. I went outside when I wanted to. I came back in when I wanted to. It was almost like being in boarding school back home.
Back home. Rahuf was from home, and I was going to see him soon. Women in minimum had daily visiting hours. They were officially allowed a maximum of three half-hour visits a day, which was pretty liberal for a prison. But only thirty minutes per visit! Thirty minutes, no matter who the visitor was, no matter how far the visitor had traveled, no matter how long it had been since you’d last seen the visitor or how long it would be until you saw each other again. But the guards sometimes bent that rule and let visitors stay through two and sometimes all three thirty-minute time slots. I was hoping the guards would be in a rule-bending mood on Saturday. Rahuf was taking time off from work, from earning the money he so desperately needed to earn, to make the two-hour trip from Washington, D.C. to York, Pennsylvania, just to see me. My good, kind, wonderful cousin was going to spend four hours in a car to spend possibly no more than thirty minutes with me. Please, God, let the guards let him stay longer. Please.
‘Kasinga! Visitation!’
Rahuf arrived around three in the afternoon on Saturday, July 29. I hurried to the common room. I was so excited! So nervous! I hadn’t seen him in something like ten years. Had he changed? Would I recognize him? Would he recognize me?
I was standing against the wall with a couple of my refugee friends when he walked into the common area with his two friends. Rahuf. I recognized him immediately. He’d gained a little weight. And he seemed shorter, which he wasn’t, of course. I was just taller. But otherwise he looked exactly the same. I watched him scan the room, waited to see if he’d recognize me. He didn’t. He looked right past me. I started to wave at him. Rahuf turned to his friend and said, ‘Who is that girl? She thinks she knows me.’ Then I started walking toward him.
His eyes came back to me, this stranger who was walking toward him. I was a lot taller than when he’d seen me last, and a lot heavier-looking too. I was wearing an ugly blue prison uniform, and my face was broken out in pimples. My months in prison had changed me. He stared at me for a moment, looking for the pretty, happy child he remembered in the female inmate who’d waved to him. He didn’t find her. That happy child was gone.
‘Fauziya?’ he asked. ‘Is that you?’ I saw confusion, shock, and sadness in his eyes. I looked down at the floor, shy and ashamed.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘Fauziya. Oh, Fauziya.’ He took my hand and his eyes filled with tears. Rahuf. My cousin. My blood. All my grief, all my loss, all my heartache, all the pain and fear I’d been holding inside me for so long, broke loose and came rushing up and out. I broke down completely.
When I finally stopped crying, he led me to a table where we sat down together, still holding hands. I couldn’t let go of his hand. He was my cousin, my family, my only living connection to everything I’d lost. He introduced me to both of his friends, one from Togo, the other from Ghana. We sat and talked, four people from Africa. Rahuf and I talked in Koussountu. Our language. What joy, what a relief, to sit in a room with a member of my own family, speaking my own language. We talked, and I began remembering. Everything started coming back to me. My memories. They weren’t just dreams. They were real! This man was my cousin. He knew. He remembered too. He knew who I was. I was Fauziya Kassindja. I was the youngest daughter of Alhaji Muhammad and Hajia Zuwera Kassindja. I was my father’s beloved. I was Yaya’s girl. I’d had a life, a family, a culture, a country, an identity before coming to America. Rahuf gave them back to me. Rahuf gave me back myself.
We talked and talked, with me never letting go of Rahuf’s hand. What did we talk about? I don’t remember. It didn’t matter. Rahuf was there. That’s all that mattered. Rahuf was there, my blood cousin, holding my hand.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’ I did tell Rahuf a little bit about the prison conditions I’d lived through, but when his eyes started to fill with tears, I stopped.
I gave Rahuf all the money that had finally been transferred from Esmor, around $450, to help him with the legal fees. He didn’t want to take it, but he didn’t have much money himself.
‘Fauziya, you have to keep something for yourself.’
Rahuf fished in his pockets and pulled out a few crumpled dollar bills and a handful of coins – for the vending machines – and handed them to me.
I took it. ‘Thanks, Rahuf.’
And then, suddenly, our time was up. Visiting hours were over. We stood together, awkwardly, neither of us knowing quite what to say. Rahuf looked at me tenderly. We were still holding hands.
‘I’ll try to come visit you again, Fauziya,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know when it’ll be. You know, with work and everything.’
‘I know, Rahuf. It’s OK. Really. You came today. That’s all that matters. I can’t tell you what it means to me. I don’t know how to thank you. God bless you.’
‘You, too, Fauziya. I’ll pray for you. Are you going to be all right here?’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine now. Seeing you . . .’ There were no words. I couldn’t tell him. But he knew. I saw it in his eyes. I smiled. ‘I’ll be fine.’
He pulled me toward him and we hugged. And then he was gone.
I walked back to my dorm and lay down on my bed, happy. Everything was going to be all right, just like Yaya promised. I was feeling hopeful again, confident again. I was in minimum. Rahuf had come to visit me. My fortunes were changing. Allah had finally heard my prayers. He’d shown mercy. The worst was behind me now. I was sure of it.
So sure, so sure. . .