She has thought of everything else. She has given herself every reason why her mother should come to the States, why she needs to return to New York for her writers, for Bess Milford in particular, but until her mother says, You, me, and your father in your apartment in New York, she has not thought of them together. Now a cold liquid collects at the base of her stomach and makes its way up her throat. She swallows and the liquid spreads down her arms and thighs.
Her parents have been to New York on many occasions, each time staying at a hotel in Manhattan, never crossing the bridge to Brooklyn where Anna lives in Fort Greene, on the cusp of gentrification. Always there have been excuses. On both sides. Her mother never finding the time between the plays she wants to see on Broadway and the meetings her husband has come to attend, Anna conveniently not protesting. She works in Manhattan; it would be easier to meet in the hotel where her parents are staying. No one objects.
If this arrangement has raised suspicions, neither Anna nor her parents have voiced them. But now, after twenty years, her mother will see where her daughter lives; more than that, she will see how she lives. In all the permutations of her plans to convince her mother to have surgery in the States, why has she not thought of this? Why hasn’t she factored in the practical reality that her mother will need a place to stay before and after her surgery, and that this place will be her apartment?
There is tacit agreement between the immigrant and those who do not emigrate. Only good news is to be sent back home. The immigrant has a duty to spare her family and friends news of failure. The immigrant must not disappoint. This is the bargain the immigrant makes for the freedom of anonymity, for the chance to remake herself, to wipe the slate clean, to begin anew and write new history in the fantasy land that is America.
Television promises there are fortunes to be made. Even in America’s congested cities, the poor drive their own cars. The family and friends of the immigrant do not want this dream shattered. Their hopes, the hopes of the community, rest on the immigrant’s success. Like children believing in Santa Claus, they do not want to be told the dream is a lie.
They will not pry. No one will ask the question that could lead to the answer that the price may be too high for this exchange of the familiar for life in a strange land among people whose culture the immigrant does not understand. All want to believe in the lie beamed through the television into their living rooms: in America the streets are paved with gold. Suffering and deprivation happen in other lands, in drought-stricken Ethiopia, in war-ravaged Bosnia. Not in America.
They are enablers, all of them, the immigrant and the ones who remain at home. In Brooklyn, Anna passes stores that cater to them, shops that advertise barrels the immigrant will fill with goods and food she will ship back home, proof of her success, proof to family and friends that the fantasy exists. The immigrant holds her tongue. She does not tell of the long hours she must work. She does not say that night falls before she returns to her oneroom apartment where for months the view outside her window is desolate, a concrete jungle sprouting leafless trees in patches of dirt carved out on pavements. She does not admit to loneliness. She does not say no singing birds wake her in the morning; she does not hear the soft patter of rain on a galvanized roof in the early dawn. She does not say she cannot afford to buy for herself many of the things she puts in the barrel. The illusion is to be maintained. There were celebrations back home when the U.S. embassy granted her a visa. How can you be unhappy when you have won the lottery? Impossible! they say.
Anna’s situation is not as dire. She does not have to fill barrels with food and goods for her parents back home. Her parents do not need her money, her financial support. But for Anna the early days were not easy. Alice, her friend in high school who had immigrated to New York years before, invited Anna to share her apartment. She should have paid more attention to the advice Machiavelli gave to would-be princes on the loyalty of friends! So long as you benefit them they are all yours; … they offer you their blood, their property, their lives, their children, when the need for such things is remote. But when need comes upon you, they turn around. So if a prince has relied wholly on their words … In less than two months, Alice made it clear that Anna had worn out her welcome.
Why had she left her grassy island? There was a time she had staked her hopes in the promises of independence, the end of colonial rule, but she returned home from college in the Midwest to find nothing substantial had changed. The island was still in thrall to British dominance, though the skin color of the rulers was not the same. No longer were white men visibly in charge. The prime minister was a man of color and so were the ministers in his cabinet. Within a mere few years, funded in part by scholarships the British gave to locals to study at the extension of the University of London that the British had established in Jamaica, there were many more dark-skinned doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, journalists, entrepreneurs than there had been when she was in high school. Yet attitudes remained the same. And why not? They had been groomed to serve the Mother Country; they had been taught to venerate her history, her accomplishments, her beauty, her art. They judged each other by the way they spoke. The more British the accent, the more polished the person was assumed to be. At tea parties and cocktail parties they served bland hors d’oeuvres, careful not to contaminate them with spicy seasonings. The music was muted, the help required to wear the white uniforms that in colonial times had humiliated the parents of the nouveau riche. One was judged by the yardstick of British approval, every accomplishment requiring validation from the Mother Country or else deemed inferior. High school students still had to pass exams approved by the British, conflicts in law adjudicated by British courts; medical procedures needed British consultation. For Anna, the last straw was the difficulty she had finding employment.
She had received an honors degree from an established university in the Midwest and assumed she was qualified to teach high school literature and composition. Arrogantly, or so it seemed in hindsight one year later, she refused her father’s offer of help. Now she knows that business gets done through an old boys’ network. Her father was an important man with many influential friends. He had only to speak to one of them. But Anna had returned from a country where water jetting out firemen’s hoses blasted the skin of young men and women; where snarling dogs, straining against leashes held by officers sworn to uphold the law, fangs bared and dripping with phlegm, were set loose on children. She had come back from a country where thousands marched, risking life and imprisonment for civil rights for those long denied them. She would not take advantage of the privileges of her parents’ social class. She went to the Ministry of Education without references, without the list of connections that would pave her way.
“The university of where-did-you-say?” The man who interviewed her was patient. He explained that except for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which they knew something about, the ministry had no way of evaluating whether degrees from American universities measure up to the quality of a British education. She asked him about Howard. The prime minister of the island had graduated from that university in Washington, D.C.
“Howard is an exception,” he said. He was aware of the history of segregation in America. “You can’t blame black students if they won’t let them into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Howard is the Harvard for black Americans.” He handed back her diploma.
For seven months, Anna searched in vain for a job. The response of the headmasters and headmistresses from the schools was the same. An American degree, if it was not from one of the universities that belonged to the Ivy League, was not acceptable to them. In despair, Anna turned to her father for help. In two days, he arranged an offer for her from the headmaster of a junior secondary school, the third tier of an educational system that determined the fate of children by age twelve. There would be those who would make their living with their brains and those with their brawn. The children in the school where Anna was assigned were the latter. They were to be prepared for occupations in trades. For the boys: construction, cabinetry, plumbing, electrical repair. For the girls: sewing, cooking, domestic affairs that would make them good housewives and mothers. For girls unlikely to marry: secretarial education, typing, and filing. But everyone had to learn to read and write English (England was the Mother Country, after all), and so there was a place in the school for Anna. Her salary could not be the same as that of someone with a degree from a British university. If Anna wanted the job, she had to accept less money.
When by chance Anna bumped into Alice, who was on holiday on the island, she was ready to leave. She had a vague plan of going to graduate school, nothing more than that, when she applied for a green card for permanent residence in the U.S. What she felt then was an emptiness, a sense of her life going nowhere, of being stuck in a rut, teaching children who had already accepted the fate decreed to them when they failed to make the passing grade on the eleven-plus exam. Already marked, they saw no purpose in reading books or learning to write beyond what was necessary to be a good cook, a good seamstress, a cabinetmaker, a construction worker. Anna wanted more for them and for herself, but there wasn’t more for any of them in a system that was confident it had found the answer to the problem of children who threw spitballs in class.
Finding it difficult, if not impossible, to feel at home in America, Anna tried one more time after graduate school, baffling her mother who could not understand why she would want to come back now that she had a green card, the passport to the country where the streets were paved with gold. So seductive was the myth that many middleclass women on the island willingly humbled themselves to work in the kitchens of rich white Americans in the hopes of being sponsored. It took Anna just weeks to realize there was no place for her on the island. Her father cringed when she quoted Frantz Fanon to him, when she said that colonialism worked because the British had succeeded in colonizing minds—but the truth was, there were teaching jobs for expatriates from England and Canada, very few for local black women, and none again for her.
The standard explanation was that the island was in a transitional phase and needed foreign professionals to replace the British officials who had left. But the University College of the West Indies, an arm of the University of London, had long been established in Jamaica. By the time it gained independent status in 1962 as the University of the West Indies, not the “College of,” there were many qualified locals able and ready to replace the British. But the British and Canadian expatriates had grown accustomed to spending lazy afternoons at the beach in the warmth of the tropical sun. They did not want to return to dark winter days and frigid nights.
On TV, Anna once caught a glimpse of a grim-faced brown-skinned woman in her late seventies standing quietly on the sidelines of an anti-immigration rally in England. She was holding a sign that read: We are here because you were there.
Anna chose America, land of immigrants, those willing and those ripped from their homeland in chains, a country where every living person, with few exceptions, can draw a straight line through ancestors not born here. Now, twenty years later, her mother will see where she lives in America. How she lives. And Anna panics.