Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

The Sunday before Christmas, while Jende was working, she and the children went to the church. Her mother had warned her not to take the baby too far out of the house before she was three months old, but Neni ignored the advice. She bundled Timba in her carrier and took Liomi by the hand, from the 3 subway to the A. When she got to the West Fourth station, she got out and trudged through Greenwich Village. She walked rapidly, breathing out light clouds in the chilly December morning, eager to get to this place of prayer where she could find respite.

When she got there, she was disappointed in what she saw. Instead of a house of worship filled with a youthful diverse crowd of New Yorkers rocking and jiving and saying “Amen!” the vast pewless room was full of middle-aged white people, not rocking and not jiving but rather singing hymns without the slightest attempt to shake their bodies and cast off their cares and sorrows the way the churchgoers of Limbe did every Sunday morning. Avoiding stares, Neni settled in a seat at the back, the baby still in the carrier, Liomi quiet by her side. The pastor was a woman with long gray hair and red-framed glasses who preached about some kind of coming revolution, a message Neni neither understood nor found applicable to her current situation.

After the service, the pastor came to her and introduced herself as Natasha. Other congregants came over, too, to greet her and to admire Timba sleeping in the carrier. One man said he had worked in Cameroon many years before as a Peace Corps volunteer, far up in the northern region of Adamawa. Neni raised her eyebrows and smiled, surprised and excited to meet someone who had been to her country in a place like that. Though she’d never been to the Adamawa region, she felt as if she’d just reconnected with a long-lost childhood friend.

“I can’t believe you have been to my country,” she said to the man as she handed her completed visitor information card to an usher. “Some people I meet in America don’t even know there is a country called Cameroon.”

The man laughed. Yeah, he said, Americans were not renowned for their knowledge of African geography. He even knew of Limbe, he added, though he’d never been there. He wished he’d gone there to sit on its black sand beaches.

“Everyone was so happy to welcome us,” Neni told Jende that night.

“Maybe because they don’t have black people there, and they want to have a black family,” Jende retorted. “Those kind of white people are always trying to prove to their friends how much they like black people.”

“I don’t care,” Neni said. “I like the place. I’m going to go back.”

“What for? You didn’t even go to church in Limbe. You’re not baptized in any church.”

“So what if I’m not baptized? Didn’t I use to come with you to Mizpah for Christmas and Easter? And didn’t I sometimes go to the Full Gospel near our house?”

“That doesn’t mean you were a church kind of person.”

“Then I’m going to become a church kind of person now. I think it’s good for us to start going to church at a time like this. I was watching on the news the other day about this family that was supposed to be deported and they ran to a church. The church people let them stay in the church — the government could not touch them there.”

Jende shook his head and let out a short derisive laugh. “So you think that’s what we’re going to do, eh?” he asked. “What kind of stupid idea is that? I’m not going to hide in any church. How long did the people stay in the church?”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”

“You’re the one who thinks it’s a good idea. Why would I do such a thing? A grown man like me, hiding in a church? For what?”

“For what?” she said. “You want to know for what, Jende? For your children! That’s what for. So your children can continue living in America!”

She stood up from the sofa as she spoke and took a seat at the dinette, irritated by his declaration and not wanting to sit next to him anymore. He seemed taken aback by her sudden anger, infuriated that she dare challenge him on the matter.

“You think I don’t care about my children?” he asked her. “You think I won’t do anything for us to stay in America?”

“No!” she said, jumping up from the chair and pointing her index finger directly at him. “I don’t think you will fight till the end for us to remain here. I think when the time comes, you’ll give up, because you care too much about your pride. But I’ll do whatever I need to do for us to stay in America! I’ll go sleep on a church floor, no matter if I have …” She ran to the bedroom and sat on the bed, next to her sleeping daughter.

“What are you crying for?” he said, having followed her and looking angrily at her from the bedroom doorway. “What are those stupid tears for, Neni?”

She ignored him.

“You think I don’t want to remain in America, too? You think I came to America so that I can leave? I work as a servant to people, driving them all over, the whole day, sometimes the whole week, answering yes sir, yes madam, bowing down even to a little child. For what, Neni? What pride are you talking about? I lower myself more than many men would ever lower themselves. What do you think I do it for? For you, for me. Because I want us to stay in America! But if America says they don’t want us in their country, you think I’m going to keep on begging them for the rest of my life? You think I’m going to sleep in a church? Never. Not for one day. You can go and sleep on the church floor all you want. The day you get tired, you can come and meet me and the children in Limbe. Nonsense!”

He slammed the door behind him and left her whimpering in the bedroom.

Alone in the darkness she cried herself to sleep, Timba on her bosom, Liomi in the cot beside the bed. When she woke up early the next morning, Jende was in the living room, sleeping on the sofa.

CHRISTMAS WAS THREE DAYS AWAY AND THE DARKNESS THAT HAD FALLEN upon the city appeared to be on hiatus, outshone by the radiance of lighted trees at Rockefeller and Lincoln centers and the mesmerizing displays in shops along Fifth Avenue. Throughout the boroughs, there were steady, if faint, glimmers of hope shining through the windows of apartments where people lived with the belief that the good times would soon return. Even the despondent willed themselves to the streets, to hear something or see someone or go someplace that would remind them that Christmastime was here, springtime was ahead, and in no time it would be summer in New York City again.

“Welcome and a very merry Christmas to you,” the pastor Natasha wrote in an email to Neni. “I’m so glad you were able to stop by at Judson, and I’d so love to get a chance to know you more. Please schedule a time to come to the office for a little chat.”

Neni scheduled the meeting for the next day and told Jende nothing of it.

In the church office, she met the assistant pastor, a redheaded and bearded young man from New Hampshire named Amos. He told Neni he used to be a Buddhist monk before deciding that progressive liberal Christianity was more aligned with his beliefs than Buddhism. Neni was curious about the difference between the two but thought it wise not to ask — asking might lay bare her ignorance about religion and spiritual matters and expose her true motive for coming to the church.

In private, the pastor Natasha was a more subdued woman than the fiery preacher who had stood at the pulpit and spoken about the need for a revolution that would shake the country to its core. Her mid-back-length gray hair was straight and side-parted, and Neni couldn’t help admiring her courage in growing her gray hair long, and for leaving it gray in a city where there was no shortage of salons eager to rescue middle-aged women from grayness. There were framed pictures of happy families on the bookshelves in her office, families of all kinds: two fathers and a baby; two mothers and a toddler; an old man and an old woman and a dog; a young man and a young woman and a newborn. Natasha told Neni they were all congregants in the church. She asked Neni about her family and what brought her to Judson. I think I want to become a Christian, Neni responded, to which Natasha replied that she did not need to become a Christian to join the Judson family. Neni was relieved, though she still wanted to become a baptized Christian — what if the people at the Full Gospel Church near her house in Limbe were right about heaven and hell? She wanted to be on the safe side so she could get into heaven if it ended up being real. Her family didn’t go to church (except for a brief period after her father lost his seaport job), but she believed there was a God with a son named Jesus, though she had a hard time believing that people speaking in tongues were truly possessed by some Spirit. You can believe whatever you want, and we’ll accept you here, Natasha told her. We take everyone. From anywhere. We don’t care if you believe in heaven and hell and pearly gates. We don’t even care if you believe that the best way to get to heaven is by subway or Metro-North or LIRR, she added, which made Neni laugh.