Читать книгу Mapping My Way Home - Stephanie Urdang - Страница 14

6 — Slowly, Haltingly, I Became Acclimatized

I have been in New York for two weeks and I’m trying to get a handle on how to order from one of the surly guys on the other side of a deli counter on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Behind an expanse of slanted glass is a mind-boggling array of salads heavy with mayonnaise, slabs of processed ham and turkey, and bricks of bright yellow cheese. Nothing looks very enticing. I think longingly of friendly Milly’s, Cape Town’s version of the Jewish New York deli, or the Indian grocery store near our cottage where I was made to feel welcome before I even hinted at my order. There would be smiles and politeness and discussions of the weather or some congenial tidbit while I made my purchases. Here in Manhattan at the end of September 1967, I am having to cope with a rush-rush culture. I have tried. I say, “Hello, how are you?” when it comes my turn, anticipating a broad smile or a chatty response. Their irritation makes it clear—I was wasting their time. I’m learning though. When my turn comes, my voice is strong as I call out, “Half a pound of turkey!” And when the package is slapped down on the counter in front of me, I respond without a blink: “A medium container of potato salad!” When the second slap comes, I say, “Thank you,” and head for the cashier. I have done it! I have mastered the art of being a customer in a New York deli. Now anything is possible.

MY FIRST WEEKS WENT BY in a blur of strangeness and discord. I had to create a tough skin to withstand the constant grazes and pricks from the external world as I encountered one more bizarre sight, made one more astounding observation. I was on auditory overload: the intense drawls, the overly rolled r’s, the strangely pronounced a’s—an invasion of American accents that I was unable to differentiate. I had anticipated only mild culture shock. After all, I’d watched American movies and seen the suburban life I was familiar with. I’d read American magazines and found ads for the products I used every day—Colgate toothpaste, Coca-Cola, Lifebuoy soap. I’d grown up reading Nancy Drew mysteries and the adventures of the Bobbsey twins. I’d listened to Superman on the radio. This should have been easy.

I was oh so wrong.

Eric and I entered North America through Montreal and spent a few days with Sally and Michael in their new home. Then we drove south to the border in our dark blue Mini Minor station wagon—my parents’ wedding present that had accompanied me on an Irish cargo boat across the Atlantic from England—and entered the United States at Plattsburgh. As we drove down the New York Thruway, I gawked at the size of the semis that whizzed by, their drivers honking horns that sounded like foghorns, grinning down at our car, apparently finding its toy size hilarious. We pulled into one of the orange-roofed Howard Johnsons that dotted the highway and ordered breakfast. The coffee was weak, the eggs dry, the white toast paper-thin and tasteless. Nothing like the rich multigrain Cape bread, which was already entering my nostalgia store. I stared in disbelief as people around me tucked into mounds of eggs, bacon, pancakes, toast, and jam. I looked on astonished as diners forked scrambled eggs into their mouths and then added a bite of toast smothered with sweet jam and chewed them together. They might as well have added jam to their eggs while scrambling them. Gross.

It began to dawn on me that I had entered a truly foreign country. It would only become more pronounced in the weeks to follow.

There was the language: shovel for spade, sweater for jersey, candy for sweets, french fries for chips, gas for petrol. There was the pronunciation. One evening I stood before a small cured skin that hung on the wall of the apartment of a new acquaintance. It was silky soft, in hues of brown and white. I couldn’t figure out the animal. “What animal skin is this?”

“It’s a kaff skin from South America,” she told me.

What kind of wild animal was that, I wondered? My associations with the word “kaff” were not easy. “Kaffir”—the K-word akin to America’s N-word—was the ultimate in racist slurs. I must have seemed very dim to my host. Looking at me quizzically, she said, “You know, a baby cow.” Oh, for God’s sake, I thought to myself, as I repeated “cahf” in my head, the a drawn out.

Whatever the idiosyncrasies of this country, I had to figure out how to establish my life here in earnest. Eric’s student stipend of $250 per month could not support both of us and it was becoming clear that we were overstaying our welcome in the guest bedroom of a friend’s cousin’s apartment. First I had to find a job. Then we had to find an apartment. And fast. We were rapidly depleting our savings.

Finding a job had been easier than I dared dream. My typing skills provided me once again with a marketable skill. Introduced to the wonders of the Village Voice classified section, I scoured ads for secretarial positions that were not corporate or big office. I spotted the one for me: secretary for Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, a community-based organization on the Lower East Side between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. On my way from the subway to the storefront office for an interview I passed tall, unprepossessing public housing complexes, cheek by jowl with tenements and rows of storefronts—Italian bakeries, Chinese restaurants, a clothing store selling African-style dashikis, fish markets, bodegas. It was absolutely nothing like segregated South Africa: an alive, multi-ethnic New York community where African Americans, Chinese, Latino, and working-class whites all lived together. I was hooked. I was offered the job. All I needed was a work permit.

The next day standing in front an official at the immigration office I reported that I had found a job and I wanted to apply for a work permit. “And how do you propose to work if you don’t have a green card?” he asked in a patronizing voice.

Green card? I explained that all I wanted was a work permit, not a path to citizenship. And he explained that I could only work if I had a green card. What?! How could I be granted a visa but then not be allowed to work? This was irrational and cruel. Panic began to replace jaunty confidence, and I began to get teary. His face softened ever so slightly. He sighed.

“Okay, what job do you have?”

“Secretary for a community organization.”

He drew a fat ring binder toward him and flipped through it till he found the page he was looking for. “You’re in luck. Secretaries are in short supply in New York at the moment.” I looked back at him uncomprehending. “You can apply for a green card as long as your employer can show us that they can’t find an American to do the job. Is that clear?”

Clear indeed! As I left the building I passed others waiting in line—Latinos, blacks, Europeans, many not speaking English, some looking defeated—and I had a twinge of guilt. Would he have been so accommodating if I hadn’t been who I was? As in South Africa, white privilege ruled the day. I shook off these thoughts as I walked outside and headed back to the Lower East Side to deliver the forms to my new employer. In my exhilarated state I thought: “Well that was as easy as pie.” American pie.

My salary was $80 a week, one and a half times Eric’s stipend. We could begin apartment hunting in earnest. Back to the Village Voice. Ever since we arrived in the New York area Eric and I had wanted to live in the fabled center of hip culture, Greenwich Village. We soon discovered that the rents far exceeded the $100 per month we had budgeted. Just as we were giving way to despondency Eric heard about a newly completed middle-income housing project in Hoboken, a few blocks from the Stevens Institute. It wasn’t Manhattan but the rent was right. We moved in immediately.

I worked for Two Bridges for two years; there I encountered a level of poverty that I had naively thought I would not find in the United States. At first it wasn’t all that obvious. The community activists whose homes I visited had jobs. They were working-class men and women who could support their families without the specter of abject poverty. They could envision a better life for their children and were willing to fight for it within their community. This was the promise of the American dream. Then I began to see deeper into the places where the dream had failed.

At Christmastime Two Bridges received an allocation of toys from one of the city agencies to distribute to the children of needy families. I picked out a number of age-appropriate gifts for the young children of Amelia, a single mother I had befriended. A few days before Christmas I walked to Eldridge Street with its rows of dilapidated tenements, looking for her building. Carrying the bag of wrapped gifts, I climbed the two flights of stairs to her apartment. A dank smell emanated from the stairwell. Each landing was lit by a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, accentuating the peeling walls. I knocked on her door and she greeted me with a bright smile of surprise. I stepped into her cramped apartment and immediately felt embarrassed that I had arrived without warning. But when I handed her the presents, she hugged me through her tears. She had no money for presents and she’d been worried sick about her children’s disappointment on Christmas morning when there was nothing for them. “I can only thank the Lord for sending you to me,” she said. I walked back down the stairs, disturbed that a small, effortless gesture such as mine could mean so much.

Amelia and I had both left the countries of our birth. Eric and I were struggling too, or so we thought. We ate each night. We had money to buy inexpensive Christmas presents. Most of all, we knew this to be a temporary state: once he graduated, he could expect a financially secure future in academia. I could then choose to work or not. For Amelia, poverty defined her life. There was no way out, no choice, no safety net for disaster. Immigration to the United States meant very different things depending on one’s race, class, and language. I was taking for granted a future in my adopted country that Amelia could not even contemplate.

SLOWLY, HALTINGLY, I BECAME ACCLIMATIZED. For the first time in my life I did not routinely glance over my shoulder to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I no longer needed to head for the bottom of the garden to be out of earshot of bugs—the electronic kind—or monitor what I said on the telephone while listening for telltale clicks.

I wasn’t always careful. After D and A was banned and my parents had left South Africa, there was the immediate problem of covering legal fees, so I came up with a great solution—or so I thought. My parents still had money in South Africa. If my father transferred money from his account to the law firm in South Africa that was working on behalf of political activists, he could be reimbursed in London. But how could I explain this scheme to him? Mail sent overseas was regularly opened. So I naively asked an Afrikaner journalist friend who was traveling to London to take my letter and mail it when he got there. It didn’t occur to me that, given his strong criticism of the government, he might not be the ideal courier. Perhaps I thought that he was immune because he was an Afrikaner. Had he been searched we would all have landed in jail and my father’s money would have been confiscated. Luckily, he read my letter and then burned it—and never spoke to me again.

But now, in New York, I had never known such personal freedom—freedom aided by the nature of the city itself. A city of strangers. A city where strangers found other strangers and so the strange became the familiar.

At the same time my longing for home was still raw. Many a weekend Eric and I drove to Boston, Washington, or Montreal to connect with other South African exiles and émigrés. It was bliss to be able to cook together and recreate our Cape Town dinner parties, drinking California wine (naturally we were boycotting the South African varieties), catching up on our lives, and obsessing about South Africa. Oh, how superior we felt in our little South African enclave. I regaled our friends with stories about the foibles of Americans and the brashness of New York City.

For example, the guy unloading a truck on West 86th Street, who rested his dolly and, shaking his head in mock wonder, blew a five-fingered kiss into the air—mwah!—calling out, “Mama mia! For you I’d leave my wife, my nine children, and my mother-in-law!”

Or the time when I was coming out of the subway at Grand Street and I encountered a man standing at the top of the stairs, his fly open, peeing against the wall. Not wanting to miss the opportunity presented by the arrival of a stream of subway riders, he half-turned his torso and stretched out his free hand, calling out: “Anyone have some spare change?”

Or boarding the F train one morning at West 57th Street together with a posse of policemen in their dark blue uniforms, batons gripped in their hands, hips bulging with guns, walkie-talkies, and other paraphernalia so important to the image of a policeman. They stood looking down at a man stretched out asleep on the bench, his head resting on his hands, his shoes neatly arranged on the floor. I braced myself for an inevitable bullying, a physical shakedown, even handcuffs and a frog march off the train. Instead one of the policemen leaned forward and gently shook the man’s shoulder. “Wake up! Wake up!” he said in a strong Brooklyn accent. “Breakfast is being soived.” Another policeman held the door open while the napper sleepily put on his shoes and shuffled off the train. Only later did it occur to me that the man was white and so were all the policemen.

Ah, New York, New York. Collecting stories helped me settle into my new life. Yet something was missing from this new life. Leonie’s words kept playing in my head: “There is a lot of anti-apartheid work, if that’s what you want to do. You can probably make more of a difference outside, you know.” I still had to find that “outside.”