4. TRUCE

FOR A WHILE, things got better between Sadia and her mother: Sadia passed all her classes. Both were relieved that a crisis had passed. On a sunny afternoon in January, they bantered, as Rahama—full cheeked and breathing softly—slept on the couch:

“I have a secret boyfriend,” Sadia said.

“Shame on you!” Zahara said.

In many Somali Bantu families, dating is not allowed unless a girl is engaged. And though Zahara felt free to break rules, she was strict with her daughters. “Here, girls can have a boyfriend. But we don’t do boyfriend.”

Later, it was Zahara’s turn to tease: “Sadia’s fat,” she said, pinching her daughter’s arm.

“I’m not,” Sadia said, brushing away her mother’s hand.

“Here—and here!” Zahara said, touching Sadia’s butt and belly. “No good for a young girl.”

Zahara was worried about the weight she had gained during pregnancy—and had started drinking a “weight-loss tea.”

Sadia was the rare teenage girl, confident about her looks. She did not compare herself to the thin girls in American magazines. She knew she was as pretty as the models in the Somali Bantu fashion catalogs she and her sisters pored over.

She fantasized about being a model. Recently, without telling her mother, she had a friend take some headshots. Then she sent them to a man she had connected with online, who said he ran a Somali Bantu modeling agency. But when he talked about meeting her, she got scared.

“When I was young, I was skinny,” Zahara told her.

“That’s because you were starving in Africa!”

Sadia picked up Rahama, who had just awakened. “Did you think I’d forgotten about you?” she asked the baby.

Sadia and her sisters were proud of their mother. Before giving birth to Rahama, she worked at the Chobani yogurt factory in New Berlin, rising at 4 a.m. and returning home at 3 p.m. Zahara’s mother, Halima, took care of the younger kids when she was gone.

Zahara relished the work, the paycheck—and the camaraderie. “We had our Chobani family,” she said. “And our home family.”

At lunch, coworkers—from Nepal, Burma, Cambodia—shared home-cooked meals. “Tomorrow, can you bring me food?” Zahara would ask if she saw something good. And she would bring in spicy beans and rice for them.

She appreciated the small prayer room set up for Muslim employees. And she liked the managers: “When we feel bored, they say, ‘Are you OK?’ ”

“We felt rich,” Sadia said about her mother’s year at Chobani. “We had everything we needed.” For six years before that, Zahara worked as a caregiver at a nursing home.

Sadia admired her mother’s independence. “She was the one who divorced her husbands,” Sadia said. Some irritated Zahara. Some did not want to be around so many kids. She would say, “If you can’t handle us, you don’t have to be here.”

Zahara is proud to have 11 kids. “The ideal is to have about a dozen,” said Dr. Kathryn Stam, a professor of anthropology at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and codirector of the Midtown Utica Community Center, where she works with young refugees. “For Somali Bantu parents, children are a family’s legacy, their silver and gold—and their honor in the community.”

In the past, there were practical reasons for having many children, Dr. Stam added: Mothers lost a third of their children to malnutrition and disease. Parents needed extra hands for farming and tending animals. And having lots of kids ensured that a mother would be taken care of in her old age.

Sadia was surprised by how happy she felt to be back at Proctor. It was as if the school had suddenly opened its doors to her.

“I love running,” she said. She had just started running track at school. “I’m African—track is life.”

In Global Studies, she was absorbed by stories about Greece and Rome, the Middle East and Islam. She was touched that her teacher had given her a book by Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer. And she was excited about next year’s courses: “I want to take Photography!”

The outside world beckoned: “I want to get used to some other cultures,” she told her mother. She had never traveled, except to family weddings.

“I want to go to California. If we lived in a big city, there’d be a lot of stores.” All the women in their family loved fashion.

“I don’t like a big city,” Zahara said. Utica’s quiet streets felt like a haven to her. She belongs to the Mudey clan, and over a hundred extended family members live within blocks of one another.

Zahara did not like St. Louis, where she and her kids were first resettled. She was relieved when she joined her mother in Utica.

“Don’t you want to settle down and have kids?” she asked Sadia.

“No.”

Sadia was hungry to travel, but the logistics seemed overwhelming: “You have to get your plane tickets, your hotel reservation, your food,” she told her mother.

Zahara did not say anything. She peeled an apple and let the long peel fall in her lap.

At 14, Zahara had been fleeing civil war, running toward the Kenyan border. She was two months pregnant with Mana.

Sadia and her younger sisters only knew bits about their life in the refugee camp: “We slept on the floor,” Zahara told them. Ten people, including her parents and siblings, lived in a one-room mud hut. They cooked outdoors in an oven built of mud and stones. They had three kerosene lamps.

Rations were meager: “Dried corn, beans—no rice—and a little oil,” Zahara said. Armed members of the Turkana, a seminomadic Kenyan tribe, often stole their food and clothing at night. Women going into the forest alone for firewood risked being raped.

Zahara’s mother, Halima, graceful in a head scarf and long skirt, crossed the living room and headed toward the kitchen. She did not look at Zahara or Sadia.

“I don’t talk to her,” Sadia said, glancing at her grandmother. “She’s ignorant! I have a problem with Somalis. You’re killing your people for no reason! You can’t kill a girl for losing her virginity or getting raped.”

“You can’t bury girls alive.”

In the kitchen, Halima started cutting vegetables for a stew.

“What my grandmother has gone through,” Sadia said, slowly, “is way harder than what I’ve gone through.”