Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

Neni scoffed. Fatou couldn’t stop herself from making up a new proverb on the spot; she could never prevent herself from being a one-woman book of odd opinions.

“No matter what woman in this country do,” she went on, “we African woman musto stand behind the husband and be following them and say yes, yes. That what we African woman musto do. We no gonno say to husband, no, I no gonno do it.”

“So you do everything Ousmane asks you to do, eh?”

“Yes. I do. Everything he want, I do. Why you think we got seven childrens?”

“Because Ousmane said so?”

“What you think? What woman no crazy wanno suffer like that seven time in one life?”

Neni laughed, but the afternoon would be one of the few times she would laugh about her plight with a friend. Most times she would shake her head in bewilderment, which was what she did two days later, when Betty stopped by to drop off her children before heading to her second job at a Lower East Side nursing home.

“Tell him you’re not going,” Betty said in the kitchen while the children fought over the remote control in the living room. “What does he mean life is too hard here? If life was not hard for us back home why did we leave our countries and come here?”

“He thinks it’s better for a person to suffer in their own country than to suffer somewhere else.”

“Ha! Please, don’t make me laugh. He really thinks suffering in Cameroon is better than suffering in America?”

Neni shrugged.

“You’ll regret it if you go back home, I’m telling you right now,” Betty said. “Why are you guys acting like little children? Life is hard everywhere. You know that maybe it will get better one day. Maybe it will not get better. Nobody knows tomorrow. But we keep on trying.”

“You know how hard things have been. Ever since he lost his—”

“What about the money you got from Mrs. Edwards?”

“Ssshh,” Neni said. She looked out of the kitchen to make sure Liomi wasn’t nearby. “Jende says we cannot use the money,” she whispered. “He’s hidden it in a separate bank account and says we’ll only touch it when worse comes to worst.”

“Why does he get to decide how to spend the money?”

“Ah, Betty, there’s no need for you to put it like that.”

With her mouth half open and her nose flared, Betty looked at Neni, moving her eyes slowly up Neni’s face, from chin to forehead and back down, twice.

“Neni?” she said, cocking her head.

“Eh?”

“Did you march to that woman’s house that day and earn that money for yourself?”

Neni nodded.

“Is that money Jende’s money or both of your money?”

“It’s both—”

“Then tell your husband it’s your money, too, and you want to use it to stay!”

“What kind of talk is that?” Neni said. “You think I’m an American woman? I cannot just tell my husband how I want something to be.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know what kind of man Jende is. He’s a good man, but he’s still a man.”

“So you’re going to go back to Cameroon?”

“I don’t want to go!”

“Then don’t go! Tell him you want to stay in America and keep trying. There are one million things you have to do before you start thinking about packing your things — you get your papers first and you go from there. I’ve told you if you need to borrow money for your tuition I know people who can help you out. I’ll make some calls tomorrow, maybe even tonight I’ll start calling people. Just … don’t even think about this going home nonsense anymore. Tell Jende you’re not going anywhere. That you want to stay here and keep trying!”

Neni looked at Betty and her gap tooth that divided her mouth into two equally beautiful halves. The woman knew all about trying. Thirty-one years in this country and Betty was still trying, and Neni couldn’t understand why. Betty had come here as a child with her parents and gotten her papers through them. She had been a citizen for over a decade, and yet here she was, in her early forties, working two jobs as a certified nursing assistant at nursing homes, stuck in nursing school. Neni couldn’t understand how that was possible. If she were a citizen, she would be a pharmacist in no more than five years. A pharmacist with a nice SUV and a home in Yonkers or Mount Vernon or maybe even New Rochelle.

That evening she sat at the desktop for almost two hours, searching for advice on Google. “How to convince husband.” “How to get what you want.” “Husband wants to move back home.” She found no advice remotely relevant to her situation.

Later, as she stood in front of the mirror staring at her face before applying her exfoliating mask, she promised herself she would fight Jende till the end. She had to.

It wasn’t only that she loved New York City and the times it had given her and the times it held in store for her. It wasn’t just because she was hopeful that she would one day become a pharmacist, and a successful one at that. It was hardly only about what she would leave behind, things she could never find in her hometown, things like horse-drawn carriages on city streets, and gigantic lighted Christmas trees in squares and plazas, and pretty parks where musicians played for free beside polychromatic foliage. It wasn’t merely for what she was leaving behind. No. It was mostly for what her children would be deprived of, and for where they would all be returning to: Limbe. It was for the boundless opportunities they would be denied, the kind of future she was almost denied in her father’s house. She was going to fight for her children, and for herself, because no one journeyed far away from home to return without a fortune amassed or dream achieved. She needed to fight so she and her children would never become objects of ridicule the way she’d been when she’d gotten pregnant and dropped out of school.

“How are all those people in town going to look at us?” she said to Jende a few days later, before he left for work. “Look at them, they will say. America don pass them.”

“So that’s what’s bothering you, eh?” was his response. “You want to spend the rest of your life living like this because you’re afraid people will laugh at you?”

“No!” she replied, pointing in his face as he put on his jacket. “That’s not what’s bothering me. You’re what’s bothering me!”

Betty called minutes after he left. “Now I understand why some women choose to marry other women,” she said before Neni had a chance to talk about her own morning.

“What happened?” Neni asked disinterestedly, wishing she hadn’t picked up the phone.

“I go to Macy’s and buy one dress on sale, and Alphonse acts as if all I do is shop.”

“What has that got to do with marrying a woman?”

“What woman is going to make another woman feel bad for buying a dress that makes her feel good? I’m not going to wear an old dress to go to a wedding where people are going to take my picture and put it on Facebook. Next thing you know people will be commenting on my picture ‘Betty looks so old, she looks so fat.’ These days you have to be careful about—”

“Betty, please, I have to go to the store—”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

Neni ignored the question.

“Is it Jende?”

“Who else?” Neni said. “I don’t know what else I can say to him.”

Betty grunted disapprovingly once, then twice. “You know,” she said, “I’ve heard a lot of crazy things in my life, but I’ve never heard of anyone leaving America to go back to their poor country.”

“He thinks he knows something the rest of us don’t know.”

“What did he say when you mentioned the divorce?”