Sometimes It Snows In America Read online

  MARISA LABOZZETTA

  SOMETIMES IT SNOWS IN AMERICA

  ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 96

  GUERNICA

  Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.) 2012

  For

  Michael, Ariana, Carina, and Mark

  Why must so many men be what they consistently are – condoners of injustice or victims of it, doomed to soured souls, never-ending rancor, and the needless bitterness and sickening burdens of an unintelligible world?

  Kenneth Roberts

  Lydia Bailey

  *

  “I’m scared of him,” said Piggy. “And that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him.”

  William Golding

  Lord of the Flies

  CONTENTS

  I

  Shelby House of Correction 1995

  Island Girl 1966

  Betrothed

  Katundu

  II

  Carlington

  Mombasa Eye

  The Penny House

  More Promises

  Hostess with the Mostess

  III

  Iblis

  Lady Liberty

  Columbus Day

  The Feast

  At the Top of the Hub

  In Muslim Law

  The House of the Five-Headed Monster

  IV

  Daughters of Muhammad

  A Higher Power

  The Closet

  A New Identity

  V

  Shangazi

  Lamu

  Imani

  Willowsville 2001

  I

  Shelby House of Correction 1995

  The taxi and the ambulance showed up at the same time on the afternoon Fatma shot her husband. She had phoned for the taxi. He had summoned the ambulance that came accompanied by a squad car. If the taxi had arrived first, she might have got away.

  Shelby County Jail and House of Correction was color coordinated, with uniforms that matched the cinder-block walls of the cellblocks: a sea of greens and corals and purples and blues to tell the women that they’d become a category – newcomer, pretrial, troublemaker, or psycho. If they enlisted in the culinary school, they got to wear white.

  She arrived at the orientation cellblock on a Thursday, wearing tropical orange. The day hadn’t mattered to her then, but she would come to hate Thursday. It was inspection day, the day that would remind her of Auntie’s house, in which she had grown up and where the maids constantly scrubbed and polished.

  While Fatma sponged down the metal toilet and sink in her cell during the weeks and months that followed, she would close her eyes and wander back to that colonial mansion Uncle Oliver had built. She could get away from herself that way. Then she’d open her eyes and catch her distorted image in the wavy slab of shiny metal that hung above the sink. (No glass was allowed at Shelby, nothing that might be used as a weapon or for self-destruction.) And she’d remember that she and her life had become warped beyond recognition. That they had become uglier than she had ever imagined they could be. That she had stumbled so far away from home, so far from Mombasa.

  Island Girl 1966

  She was born in Somalia, to a Somali father and a Saudi mother. Many Saudis lived in Somalia in those days; Arabs had been planting themselves along the Somali coast for centuries. Her mother ’s father owned three movie theaters, six gas stations, the entire bus system, the largest clothing stores, and a canner y that shipped lobster and other fish to Italy, along with bananas from his farm. There were plenty of Italians in Somalia too from their years of colonization: her father always said two out of three Somalis had Italian blood; the other third had Arabic. This, and the fact that the original Somali people migrated from Yemen, made Somali people different from other Africans – more like Egyptians, with lighter skin, longer noses, and straight hair. Other Africans didn’t like them.

  Fatma’s parents had been neighbors in Mogadishu. When her mother was thirteen and her father seventeen, they ran away from school and got married. Fatma’s grandfather never accepted his daughter’s marriage to a Somali, whom he considered beneath his Arab lineage, despite the fact that Fatma’s father had once been the son of a king. Her grandfather paid government officials to imprison his new son-in-law. It was an Italian-run prison, however, where spouses were allowed to bring in food and spend Friday nights, and Fatma’s mother bore her father five children in five years. Acknowledging the futility of the situation, Fatma’s grandfather eventually had her father released.

  Her father entered the militar y, became a general, and traveled for long periods of time. He married other women in other cities and countries, but he never left her mother. He just loved women: young, old, rich, or sick. If he came upon a woman begging in the street, he would crouch down beside her and pet her, and if he fell in love with a woman in his hometown of Mogadishu, he would sleep with her but still come home to Fatma’s mother’s house to eat. According to Muslim law, the second wife must approve of the third wife, the third of the fourth, and so on, but the first wife must approve of all other wives. Fatma’s mother never approved of any of them. In time her father divorced the other women, but he never divorced her mother. Perhaps it was her mother’s Arab dignity that set her apart from the others. Perhaps she believed in the superiority of her race, despite the fact that she was married to a Somali, because she was beauty and brains and ner ves of steel encased in cr ystal. Her elusiveness only made her children work harder to capture her love; it kept her husband tied to her. She, on the other hand, could have existed without any of them.

  Fatma was her mother’s fourteenth child. Her mother wanted to name her Fatimah, her father Fatma. They settled on Fatma; it was one of the few times her mother ever compromised. When she was three days old, her mother gave her away to her infertile sister and English brother-in-law, who lived in Mombasa, Kenya’s prized island-city in the Indian Ocean. Some might have regarded this as a magnanimous gesture, but Fatma always felt that she was as expendable to her mother as an article of damaged clothing in her crowded armoire.

  *

  While Fatma’s mother was a shrewd businesswoman, Auntie, her shangazi, was content to keep house in Mombasa for Uncle Oliver, who operated a cargo ship laden with coffee, tea, cotton, and animal hides from Kenya to Italy and on to his native Liverpool. Auntie was a kinder-hearted woman than her younger sister, and while she was not as pretty, with duller eyes and softer, unremarkable features, she loved Fatma more.

  Fatma lived with her aunt and uncle in a big two-story brick house in Mombasa. It was several miles from bustling Biashara Street, with its modern kiosks and storefronts, but not too far from the narrow cobblestone alleys of Old Town, lined with stalls offering everything from colorful bolts of fabric to giant sacks of flour, and near the cannons and crumbling mud arches of what remained of Fort Jesus. She awoke each morning to the smell of brewing tea. Auntie knew how Fatma liked hers and put just the right amount of tea, milk, and sugar in the pot. Often there were eggs and fresh liver from a goat Auntie had killed, stuffing its stomach with broccoli, corn, and potatoes, sewing it up, and skewering the whole animal with a stick. She would cook it for hours in a red mud-clay oven as big as some people’s houses that Uncle Oliver had made for her. From time to time she removed the lid and basted the meat with a garlic and oil marinade, turning the meat with the stick that protruded from holes on each side of the oven, roasting it until the flesh was so tender it fell off the bone. With the leftovers, she made cementlike potato patties studded with stew meat and vegetables. She poured black beans over them to make them more appealing to Fatma who hated vegetables, but this only made them less ap
petizing.

  Fatma’s pink-plaster-walled bedroom, with its gauze curtains that came alive in the evening breeze, faced the sea. On the beach tourists from Switzerland, Germany, and Holland shielded the fair skin of their scantily clad bodies with glistening concoctions and blended into the fine white sand. When Fatma went bathing, she wore a costume with three-quarter sleeves and a below-the-knee skirt that Auntie had made and that was typical beach attire for Kenyan women. Fatma not only believed that the tourists baked their bodies because they were envious of what little skin of hers they could see, but was foolish enough to think that, when they left for their cold gray lands, these foreigners would take with them as a souvenir their envy of the young girl who had been born just right, with honey tones and brown freckles that dotted her button nose and high cheekbones.

  The tourism industr y fed on the natural beauty of Mombasa, and Mombasa’s economy feasted on tourism. Yet culture was never sacrificed for business, a notion that only added to Mombasa’s mystique. Outsiders tried to capture it with a camera, but it was a world that opened and closed faster than a lens shutter. Fatma’s family had always walked a thin line between life and death. “It is difficult for we Africans to extract the land from our blood and the blood from our land,” her father said. “It is an inheritance from kingdoms past.” Death followed life and life followed death, moment to moment. Alive or dead? Sometimes it was hard to tell. So it had been for her grandfather, the king of Somalia, who was poisoned by enemies. And so it would be for her father, Muhammad Hakeem, who would be assassinated by his brother.

  *

  Promises had been made regarding Fatma’s adoption. She would be raised Muslim, which meant that she would learn the Koran and speak only Swahili with Auntie and Uncle Oliver. When she turned four, every summer, she would be sent to travel alone by plane, with only a flight attendant looking after her, to spend two months with her brothers and sisters at her mother’s thirty-six-room estate on the outskirts of Mogadishu, where she never felt welcome. There, Fatma would disappear to some cool corner of the sprawling ranch house with mazelike hallways for long periods of time and wait for her father to return. She was certain that the demand for her presence had come from him and not her mother, who paid little attention to her and then only to criticize her.

  “She can barely speak Somali because she lives in a Christian man’s home,” Fatma’s mother would say, ripping off Fatma’s skirt and sleeveless blouse and replacing them with a long robe and a scarf over her head and neck. Then, squatting before Fatma so that her black eyes looked directly into her daughter’s, Fatma’s mother would accuse her of forgetting every word of Arabic too.

  Fatma had not forgotten the language of her mother’s people, the language Auntie sometimes used with her, the language of the Koran.

  “Let her be.” Fatma’s older brother Hamal sometimes took her side. “She is only here for a short time.” Then handsome Hamal, tall and dark like Fatma’s father but with her mother’s angled features, would take Fatma to the movies. He always hid one of her western-style outfits behind a tree beforehand. They would pick it up after leaving the house and stop at a relative’s or friend’s along the way so that Fatma could change into her own clothing. One day Fatma asked Hamal why their mother didn’t like her. He led Fatma across the street and into the shade of the arched porticos beside the sand-colored buildings, as if to have her in a more comfortable place when she heard his answer.

  “Sometimes I do not think she cares much for anyone. Although our mother’s house is very big, Fatma, the door is small. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t.

  They returned home that evening to find their mother screaming and throwing pots at a Bantu man who was running down the gravel path from the house. Their mother had hired him to fix windows and now refused to pay him because he hadn’t done the job to her liking. Bantu were the people hired to do odd jobs that Somali people wouldn’t do even if they were starving, because Somalis thought they were above that type of labor. The Bantu, on the other hand, were hardworking people whom the Arabs had brought to Somalia from other parts of Africa to use as slaves. Somalis looked down on them and on their big lips and noses. Fatma was afraid of them. That night, however, it was her mother’s behavior that frightened her, that put pains in her stomach and caused her to wet her pants. Hamal had been right: even a mouse couldn’t fit through their mother’s door, her heart was so small. Fatma would come to believe that her mother had married her father, a black man, only because he had descended from a family of kings and was powerful. Fatma, on the other hand, would always see her father as a kind man, robust and charming but too often absent, and whose attention was divided among too many children.

  It was her uncle Ahmad who turned out to be the greediest of all. A four-star general, he led a military coup in the name of socialism and, promising to eliminate the society ruled by clans, seized control of Somalia overnight. Ahmad Siad Adan was Fatma’s father’s brother. When he banished Arabs and confiscated most Saudi property for himself, Fatma’s grandfather was sent back to Saudi Arabia, but because her mother was married to Ahmad’s brother, she was permitted to keep the cannery and banana farm, the clothing store, and the thirty-six-room house.

  It was not enough for Ahmad to rid Somalia of Arabs and Italians; he thought religion also posed a threat to his presidency. At four in the morning during one of Fatma’s visits to Mogadishu, soldiers banged on the doors of her mother’s home and ordered the family to the center of town. All over Somalia the scene was the same: ever yone, including small children like Fatma, was herded in nightclothes into the villages and made to witness the executions of sheiks and hajjis lined up with hands tied behind their backs. Fatma recognized many of them as neighbors and relatives. A captain gave the order, soldiers fired, and she watched the people she had grown up with fall into pools of blood. Though at the time she didn’t understand the motive behind the madness, she was aware of the high social position of the victims. Whimpering, she waited for the soldiers to take her mother, who had made the hajj seven times and as a result was revered as a priestess.

  “Keep still,” Hamal whispered, tugging at her hand.

  She tried harder than she had ever tried to do anything to keep still. She tried not to breathe. Her mother was spared again because her father, who trusted that his brother Ahmad would keep his promise and restore democracy to Somalia, was in those days allied with Ahmad. The demand for their presence at the executions had been a mere formality, Ahmad said. But in the end it would prove to have been as much of a warning to Fatma’s family as to any other that the government of Ahmad Siad Adan would not tolerate resistance, even when led by priestesses and high priests, even when led by his own flesh and blood.

  Fatma never spent another restful night in Mogadishu. She woke at odd hours and waited for the pounding on the door to echo through the long halls, for the firing of the guns, for her mother’s death and even her own. Years later, after he had returned the Somali republic to a monarchy against the will of its people, Ahmad would flee Somalia, and the very Muslims he had sought to stamp out would take over his justice system. The legal process would be just as swift and definitive as ever: if you stole, your hand would be cut off; if you murdered, you would be killed; if you blasphemed or slandered, your tongue would be cut out.

  *

  When she was ten, things began to happen to Fatma’s body. Blood trickled on its own from the secret fold between her legs where, when she was seven, a Somali midwife had used a sharpedged razor to circumcise her. Hair appeared in private places. Painful mounds formed on her chest. Auntie pulled her straight black hair back and covered her body with long colorful silk outfits typical of Somali women – a burnt orange or mauve or multicolored robe with long sleeves, and a white shawl that concealed her head and neck and bosom – because she had been born Somali and because now she was a woman and old enough to marry. This was, however, not enough for Fatma’s mother, who also insisted on a veil to
hide her face, exposing, as Saudi women did, only the almond-shaped eyes. Auntie, who never wore a veil, complied. Fatma became a prisoner of the sun she had loved and that now became trapped within the fibers of her robes, causing her pores to leak perspiration and her skin to prickle. Like a good Muslim woman she became accustomed to the discomfort, until it was as normal as the breeze off the ocean, as commonplace as morning tea – a reminder that she had not yet slid into death.

  Betrothed

  “Daniel Kornmeyer,” the young man said, extending his hand. “Hujambo?” He was standing in the large foyer, surrounded by a hand-painted English country scene. Uncle Oliver had brought the wallpaper back to Mombasa from London, as he had the many pieces of antique furniture in the house. Two staircases rose on either side of him, leading to the second-floor balcony. Their ebony balusters and handrails had been carved by local Kenyans.

  Uncle Oliver clasped the hand firmly, jerking it downward and back up again in one motion. This was what he considered the only way to shake a man’s hand, as though testing to see whether his greeter was virile enough to keep the hand from being snapped off. “Oliver Widdowson. Hujambo,” he said.

  Daniel was as tall as the Englishman. This seemed to please Uncle Oliver, who was accustomed to towering over most Kenyans. When Daniel removed his dripping army-green plastic poncho, he revealed a body as skinny as paper, so thin he could be folded over and over again and put into someone’s pocket for safekeeping, perhaps into his own narrow blue jeans. His hair was the color of weak tea and, tied back like a horse’s tail, hung in one sopping coil down his back. He had what looked like the beginnings of a beard; Fatma would later realize that it was in fact a full beard, hard to make out because of its blond color. But that would not be apparent until she became ver y close to him, so close she could see the blue in his eyes and taste the curr y on his lips. So close she could see two eyelashes pasted together with sleep.