mixt equally, I wanted to scream. Our loves be so alike, you and I, I wanted to whisper. But when I looked across the space that separated me from Ngoni, I couldn’t tell if he saw me anymore. If he wanted to take my hand.
Kathleen burned brimstone, filling the house with smoke and the smell of sulfur. Rings were exchanged, vows spoken, our hands were wrapped together in a colorful stole as Kathleen declared that those whom God has brought together no man can put asunder. But when I kissed him, for the smallest moment, it felt like make-believe.
Until my aunt Annie said, “Doesn’t it make you want to clap?” and there was loud applause and we stood in the living room closed in by walls my father Sheetrocked, surrounded by the people who raised me or came up with me there in that house on State Street, and I came back into myself and then I clapped, too.
When it came time for the toasts, Ngoni gathered me up by his side and wrapped his arm around me, and the people in the room formed a circle around us. He said, using his teacher voice, “In Zimbabwe, where I’m from,” as though anyone there didn’t know where he was from, “it is believed that when a person dies, his soul goes to the wind.”
I heard Annie moan just a little. I felt Ngoni’s arm tighten around my shoulder. “I would like to toast the winds that brought us together.” And then I knew that he felt it too, our dads blowing by in the November night. They were there for me and they were there for Ngoni, and we couldn’t see through them to us but we knew that everyone was there to help us try to see through them to us. We knew that we would try to see through them.
THAT NIGHT IN the hotel room I had the dream again. The one I had the night I met Ngoni. The one where my dad is really alive. This time he was a homeless man in my hometown. I came upon him in the dark cold entranceway to the old record store on Main Street. I’d walked by him my whole childhood and not seen him.
We talked for hours, and by the end I understood why he had to do it, why he had to make us believe he was dead. I promised to keep the secret and I walked around the next morning proud that he chose me, proud of this secret only I could hold.
8
THREE YEARS LATER, Ngoni and I sat huddled on an airplane hurtling ever closer to Harare for my first visit to Zimbabwe. His immigration status was tenuous even after we got married, and until his paperwork was in order it didn’t seem wise to leave the country. We had brought his grandparents—Gogo and Sekuru, who’d raised him—to visit us a couple of years before, so I knew there would be some familiar faces when we arrived. But for the most part I spent that plane ride wondering what these weeks would hold. What it would feel like to see Ngoni in his place. What it would feel like to be the outsider.
The plane was filled with Zimbabweans, and I watched them talk to their children and their spouses and their elderly parents thinking about where they’d been, if they were returning to stay. I listened to their voices when they spoke Shona and tried to discern syllables I recognized from Ngoni’s phone calls with his grandparents. I listened to their voices when they spoke English and tried to hear words that would answer my questions. I lowered my eyes when they caught me looking and wondered what they thought about me, white and American, by Ngoni’s side. If they were angry, if they saw me as having taken one of their own.
Ngoni flipped through a loose stack of pictures of home I didn’t know he’d stowed in his carry-on, and I was eager to see, too. I leaned closer and looked first at a picture of a house made of red bricks painted white. Then one of large grassy grounds that I would call a lawn, but when he pointed at it, he said, “I miss that garden.” There was a banana tree ripe with fruit, a bed of pink and yellow and maroon flowers circling it, a swimming pool in the background. Next I saw a wide-angle shot of the whole grounds and noticed two small buildings near the main house and tall corn plants growing in a plot behind, a cement-colored wall surrounding the property.
As the plane got closer to the ground, I shifted my focus to where I was going and gazed out the window at a patchwork of fields and farmland cut into squares and rectangles and trapezoids. It wasn’t as tidy as those in the Midwest I’d flown over, but each plot seemed monstrous from here, bigger than any land I could imagine. There were clusters of trees in some spots and brown lines long across the land marking roads. It was all so flat and extended out so far.
When we landed and were allowed to stand and pull our bags onto our backs, my legs felt weak underneath me. Like they might not know how to carry me through the exit tunnel and into the airport. A wave of exhaustion and fear of everything I did not know almost took me under, but I clapped my eyes on Ngoni’s back and followed, and once through I saw high glass walls and a sharp dark carpet on the floor and tourist booths advertising adventure trips. The customs lines were separate, and Ngoni with his Zimbabwean passport went one way while I went the other. I was supposed to be ready for this but still worried that one of us wouldn’t come out the other end. I counted and recounted the cash in my wallet, certain I would be wrong about the expectations and not have the exact change I’d heard was required for the entry visa. But the customs agent was polite and didn’t stumble on the contradiction of my Shona surname and white skin, and when he stamped my book and told me to enjoy my stay in Zimbabwe, I walked out and there was Ngoni, waiting.
“We have nothing to declare,” he said as we passed through a wide, open door with our luggage piled onto a cart, and I thought of the different ways to interpret that phrase. Ngoni just meant we weren’t carrying anything valuable, but I wanted him to mean that I didn’t need to explain my presence in this country. I wanted him to mean I would fit here.
On the other side of the doorway was a woman in a business suit who knew Ngoni. I watched him greet her as though they saw each other every day. I waited to be introduced, but instead he just stopped talking for a moment and in the empty space she said, “Hello, Julia.”
“Hi,” I said, confused. Who was this? No one was offering hands to shake, so I took a moment to watch, to see if I could figure this out on my own. This woman who knew my name wore her hair in long, neat braids pulled back into a bun. Her skin was darker than Ngoni’s, and she had high cheekbones and sparkling, almond-shaped eyes. Her laugh was loud and inviting, and I wanted so much to know her, to know who she was. But we hadn’t been introduced, and I didn’t know enough about Shona culture yet to understand the reason for that. I just assumed that if she knew me, I should know her. So when they walked toward the large open doorway and the bustle beyond, I grabbed the handle of my suitcase and followed. Outside, I was surprised by the bright sun and how fast I had to walk to keep up, searching in my handbag for sunglasses I knew were packed in my suitcase. My winter skin was tight in the heat.
When we got to a car and the woman climbed into the driver’s seat and Ngoni into the passenger’s, I realized this must be his aunt. She was just a couple of years older than we were, but her confidence and her connection with my husband intimidated me. As we drove out of the parking lot, they spoke to each other in Shona, and I tried to push aside the worry that this was how it would feel here. Tried to push aside that familiar fear of being left alone. I felt around in the backseat of the dusty old sedan for a seatbelt, and when I couldn’t find one I looked up front to see Ngoni wasn’t wearing one either. Decided to stop looking. The windows were down and the hot air pushed into my face and blew my hair back, and soon we were driving fast enough that I couldn’t hear the sounds from the front seat, so I distracted myself with what was out the window, this landscape like nothing I knew.
Ngoni had told me what to expect. He’d warned me about American stereotypes of thatched-roof huts, pervasive poverty, AIDS everywhere. He’d told me instead about swimming pools and large houses on large grounds, about beautiful suburban streets lined with jacaranda trees and a modern city center. He wanted to help me shake out the images of Africa I’d grown up hearing, but the result was a different kind of surprise. When we left the multiple-lane highway that led away from the airport and entered the outskirts of the city, I saw townships lining the street, wooden slabs of wall hitched together, canvas roofs, house after house after house lined up and falling down. Crowds of people walking along the sides of the road, their feet bare even when they wore business suits.
The road from the airport took us straight through downtown, and I gazed up at tall buildings and into