Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [104]
They had a visitor from Sudan: James, a Nuer man who had ridges of scars on his forehead from manhood ceremonies. In Africa the Nuer and the Dinka might have been enemies, but here in Lincoln the many different tribes mix. The Sudanese are a sociable, fun-loving people. When they are not working or sleeping, they visit each other. They share food, clothes, bicycles, cars, and money with their countrymen.
The Kakuma refugees didn't look like African Americans. They looked like handsome Dinka warriors in sweatpants. Joseph was clearly the leader. He was tall and slender, with a broad smile and a handshake and greeting for everyone. I wondered where he had acquired such good manners.
Abraham was even taller and thinner than Joseph. He looked very much like his older brother, but more winsome and tentative. Martha was pretty and quiet. Unlike her brothers, she hadn't been allowed to go to school, and she spoke almost no English. Paul had an open trusting face and seemed heartbreakingly eager to please. He closely watched his older brothers and did exactly what they did.
Over time I got to know the family very well. Joseph was a wise leader, a workhorse, strong and proud, so proud it hurt him to make a mistake. He had sacrificed his own desires for so many years that he did that now automatically. Margaret Mead wrote that "Responsibility tends to ennoble and absolute responsibility ennobles absolutely." She could have been writing about Joseph. He had kept his family well-behaved and together through a holocaust. And he had done this as a twelve-year-old boy. In America, at age twenty-two, faced with a very different set of problems, Joseph would take the same heroic approach. He did what he had to do so his family could survive.
Abraham was spiritual, moody, and intense. Like most Dinka men, he spoke little, but he was tormented by all he had missed. Sometimes he was angry or heartbreakingly sad; other times his face broke into a sunshiny grin. He was charismatic and could light up or chill a room with a glance. Had he grown up in America, he would have been a poet or jazz musician, someone who made a living being sensitive. But because of his life, he would have a rough time finding a spot in Nebraska.
Paul was a fifteen-year-old hormone-filled adolescent who could really look like a sad sack when he didn't get his way. He was very tall with big hands and feet. He'd been well protected by his siblings, especially Martha, and he was clearly the petted baby of the family. But because of his age, he had to obey everyone in what turned out to be a very hierarchical family.
Martha was six feet tall and looked like a supermodel in her Goodwill clothes. She Wore her hair in cornrows or other stylish African ways. She cooked and cleaned for the family. She was proud and slow to trust. At first, she had the mandatory silence of the non-English speaking, but as soon as she started school, her English improved rapidly.
On our first visit, the family was polite to us in the African way of being polite to elders, which meant they spoke softly and didn't look at us. They answered our questions and nodded as we talked, but they didn't initiate conversation. We Americans think it is polite to make eye contact, and it took us a while to get used to the downcast eyes and short answers to our questions.
That first day we all felt a little strange and awkward. The only whites this family had known were government workers or anthropologists. I pondered the irony that as a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, I had read about the Nuer and Dinka tribes and now I was meeting them in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Martha showed me their apartment. All the beds, the chairs, and the couches were covered with doilies she had sewn over the years so that when they finally had a home they would have beautiful things.
Jim and I showed them picture books of Africa and America that we'd checked out of the library. Later I would bring them a map and we would trace their travels