Once the headmaster went on his way, I turned to Gogo, hopeful I’d find a way to talk openly with her. I felt I owed her an explanation for what happened to me at the cemetery, the place where Ngoni was meant to finally, formally mourn his father, and instead it had been me who wept. But I didn’t know how to tell Gogo about my dad, about how he died. I didn’t even know how to explain that he’d been an unobservant Jew. It somehow made more sense to start with my grandmother Rose, how she’d forced me to decide between her and Ngoni.
“Listen to me, my daughter,” Gogo said when I’d finished, taking me by the crook of my arm as we walked toward her house. “When you married Ngoni, you became one of us, you became a Munemo.” She emphasized the surname, made it sound royal. “And from now on, when I need something, I will come to you.”
I smiled, but I didn’t know what she meant.
“In our culture, when the mother—or in this case, the grandmother—needs something from her son, she cannot go to the son. Once he is married, she must go to the muroora.”
I tried to imagine what sorts of things she might need from me, from Ngoni, and it took me a moment to realize this wasn’t about things—or it wasn’t only about things. So I said, “I will be here,” and squeezed her arm with mine.
“This is one of the ways that we tie a family together,” Gogo said, her eyes steady on the road ahead of us. “This is how we create bonds. When I need something from Tendai, I go to her husband. He speaks to her, and in this way we become more closely tied together. It will be the same with us.”
I didn’t know why this was her response to my admission about my own grandmother and how she’d hurt me, but I’d been learning in Zimbabwe that here it made sense to stay quiet, to wait for the connections to come clear.
Gogo paused for several beats, for several steps. We were almost home now—I could see the gray Durawall and the black metal gate just around the bend in the road—and Gogo stopped walking and turned to me. “People will study your heart.” She put the fingers of her right hand on her own. “They will study it, and they will know who you are. This grandmother of yours, she knows she has hurt you. And now anytime you want to speak to her, you will worry she will hurt you again. She has broken that bond. She is your only connection to your father, and just like that, she cut it.” Now Gogo pointed up to the sky and her face broke into a wide smile. She laughed as she said, “Maybe she doesn’t know that there is no racism in heaven.”
I bristled at this, though I tried to hide it from her. I’ve never been comfortable talking about God, and I can’t pretend to believe in a race-free afterlife—or in any afterlife, really. “But we are one,” Gogo said, and I smiled at her. I wanted it to be true. “Racism will really break your heart, but she has made her decision, and you can move on confidently now, knowing that we are tied together.” With this she hooked her arm back in mine and we walked toward the house. “It does no one any good to come between two people who love each other,” she said as we waited at the gate for someone to come unlock it and let us in. “That is why I welcome you, my daughter, that is why we are tied together.”
As we walked through the gate and into the house where she raised my husband, I felt a warmth I hadn’t at our wedding. I thought maybe this conversation was a threshold, one I needed to cross to really become married to Ngoni, to join his family.
11
“IF WE NAME him Augustine,” I said one snowy night in early December 2002, nine months after returning from Zimbabwe, “we could call him ‘Gus!’” I hoped this would be what convinced Ngoni. Gus! What a great name. “Sekuru is Julius Augustine, after all.”
“I hate ‘Gus.’”
“Okay,” I said. We sat on the worn red couch my mother gave us in our small New York City apartment. The red couch from the living room on State Street. It was so old by then that it had shrunk—or maybe they made couches lower to the ground in the seventies—and when friends came to visit they’d fall the last few inches, expecting the cushion to meet them earlier. We were huddled there with plates of chicken curry and brown rice and salads on our laps. Well, my plate was on my knees because I didn’t have a lap by then. NY1 told us what happened that day in the city outside our windows, but I wasn’t watching. I was worried about naming our baby after someone still alive and if that would doom Sekuru to an untimely death. I was worried about giving our baby a name that would make the school bully think he was named after his mother. I was worried about what it means to become parents and if we were capable. I was worried about whether our boy would inherit his grandfathers’ mental illnesses. I was worried what it would look like, how we’d know.
“We could name him Julius, but give him a different middle name and call him by that one,” I said after a while.
There was a patient pause before Ngoni spoke, and for a moment I thought I’d convinced him. “Since I was a little boy and Sekuru took me in, I have wanted to name a son after him,” Ngoni said, enunciating every syllable. “It’s the best way I know to honor him for taking care of me when no one else would.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d said this to me, but I finally saw how much more it mattered to Ngoni than Jewish traditions I wasn’t raised with and didn’t understand mattered to me. It was the first time I saw that my worries about potential playground taunts years away were manifestations of my anxiety about becoming a mother. It wasn’t the first time I surrendered to a plan of Ngoni’s before it had become my own, but it was the first time I felt my body shift into it. He’d thought about this more than I had, with a clarity I lacked. He could see the potential positives and the potential negatives and had weighed them. His vision was crisp, and I glanced out the window and watched the snow collecting on the fire escape for a moment before deciding to trust him.
You’re Julius, I said silently in my head to my baby. I’m sorry if kids think you’re named after me.
“Let’s go get a Christmas tree,” Ngoni said as he gathered our plates and headed into the kitchen. I stood up with a grunt and pulled on the thick wool sweater that was the only thing that fit around me by then. Ngoni put on the gray peacoat Sekuru had given him when he moved here and we walked hand in hand to the corner of 113th Street and Broadway to find a tree. We passed the aging white man with greasy gray hair, packing up his table of used books before the snow got too heavy. He glanced from side to side as he did so, expecting someone to run up and grab something from him. I smiled and waved as I always did when I passed. His eyes twitched nervously behind thick glasses, and he almost smiled back. I stopped at his table most nights on my way home from work, looked through his offerings, picked up a title I didn’t have. He seemed to always be taking the temperature of our block, and I thought I recognized something in the way he wrung his hands, in the speed and cadence of his voice. As we passed him that night I realized my dad would be about his age and it occurred to me I might have tethered myself to his book table not because I loved to read but because he connected me to a past I didn’t understand.
The tree salesman, a tall black man with a Jamaican accent, was set up a few feet beyond the book table. He stopped talking to the other customer at his kiosk when he saw my belly. It’d been big enough since August to attract attention.
“Oh, let’s get you a tree quick before the baby comes!” he laughed. When we chose one and paid for it, he asked if we needed help getting it home.
“Nope,” Ngoni and I said at the same moment, and he took the thick end and I took the tip and we walked back home with our tree, a little slower than we had the year before, but with a sweet snow dusting our shoulders and heads.
That night I had a dream I used to have when I was little. There was a pen filled with alligators in the front yard of our house on State Street. Usually in this dream the dark green animals slithered in