ii

The flight was scary, especially because I had never been up in the sky before. Watching the clouds bunch up and dissipate as the big aircraft glided through them, remarking the sounds and smells and motion around me speak of far away, I felt a gravity to the journey that transcended going to America or any fixed spot on the face of the earth. It was as if we were winging our way through a celestial passageway, with the suspended possibility of a life-changing descent. Sometimes, the plane would rock and sway, and that was sufficient to keep me awake most of the time. Looking down, when there was anything to see, at cities spread like toys, at water-bodies coiled like self-elongating boa-constrictors was also not calming.

            My first moment of panic, a mild one, was trying to operate the small screen attached to the back of the seat in front of me. I had been impressed that every passenger had his own screen, but the underarm of my seat had so many gadgets with confusing markings – such that when I finally managed to turn the television on, I could not channel-select. The elderly woman beside me, who was dressed in ankara, silently watched me fidgeting with the remote control, which I was determined to master on my own. She leaned across without a word and pressed a knob or two on the remote control in my hand; the screen in front of me became a mini theater.  

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’ve been long in Nigeria,” she responded, smugly.

It was not even a question, and it pained me that my expression of gratitude was already beyond recall. I looked at her again, no longer sure that she was on her way to visit her son or daughter, as I had first thought. Maybe she was one of these new-age merchants who now traveled overseas so much, importing everything from expired biscuits to used handkerchiefs, that they no longer felt any need or even had the time to change their mode of dressing either to or fro their latest destination.

            I was a bit mollified when, during dinner, she asked a flight attendant for a second dinner pack and was rebuffed. “I’m sorry,” said the attendant, with a modulated smile, “but we don’t have any seconds over here.” I felt that the attendant had subtly asked her the question I would have loved to: “You’ve been in the air long, you in economy class?”

            My major moment of panic was toward the end of the flight, shortly before the in-flight announcer broadcast our impending descent into JFK International. Landing forms in different color codes had since been distributed in preparation for the event. The elderly woman beside me, with whom I had not exchanged another word since her smug response, stood up, opened the overhead compartment and began to fumble in one of her bags. Everywhere I looked now, people were burrowing out thick jackets and masquerade-like overcoats. I needed no telling that I was in a special kind of trouble.

The thickest dress I had was the suit I was wearing, which I had supposed would withstand any kind of cold. At the airport in Lagos, seeing none of my fellow passengers dressed in exceptionally chunky robes had reassured me. Some had even boarded the plane wearing short-sleeved vests or navel-length blouses. All through the flight, I had used the overnight blanket distributed by the flight attendants as additional protection against the conditioned temperature of the aircraft interior. My only hope now was that my host would be waiting for me in the arrival hall and that he would have a quick-fix solution to my problem.

            He was not, although he had confirmed that he would pick me up at the airport. I had had a smooth passage through immigration and customs, so it could not be that he had waited around for me and left. Or, had he been held up unexpectedly? I hung around the arrival hall, pacing and praying, watching out for anyone that looked like the light-skinned man with high cheekbones whose appearance I had studied in detail in the photograph that he had sent to me.

After about two hours, by which time my co-travelers had left and the flurry in the arrival hall now spun around a new planeload of passengers, I decided I would have to brave going into the city on my own – to Tunde’s home address. But I was hardly out of the door before I turned around and scurried back inside. It was so unbelievably cold outside the heated airport interior that my recent resolve had pitifully collapsed. 

            It was only then that I seriously began to consider using the telephone. There were many phone booths around, but I was simply unused to the telephone – even more so a public telephone in a new, overwhelming environment in which I suspected that people were looking at me in a knowing manner. I must have watched the traffic around the nearest phone booth for about half an hour, gradually bolstering my confidence. I had to do something, I kept telling myself. It had taken a lot to get me to America, and the rest was principally up to me. I could not just sit around, until maybe the police began to take a closer interest in me. 

            “Hello.”

The soft voice came from behind me, breaking into my concentration with its miscellaneous accent. I swung around.

            “You must be Eti-aba?”

            He must be Tunde, my host, with a voice I had not expected. Even in the wool jacket he was wearing, I could not have failed to recognize him.

            “I’m sorry I’m late. I got the date mixed up. I thought you were arriving tomorrow.”

            I was so relieved to see him that all my cumulating resentment vanished. I felt saved from a trial that had been growing in my imagination during the three hours or so that I had been waiting, too petrified to even seriously begin to contemplate how to deal with the situation. All I had seen of America, of New York, so far was the architecture and the traffic at the airport, but I already had a sense of being in a new world in which my Sa’ra wisdom and my insufficient Lagos savvy would not immediately suffice.

            “Why didn’t you call?” he asked me when we were in his car, en route to his house in lower Manhattan. “I know I sent you my cell phone number.”

            “I…I lost my address book.” I was too embarrassed to tell the truth, although he had shown greater understanding than his first mail had led me to expect. Seeing that I was ill fitted for the weather outside, he had asked me to wait while he brought the car around, as close to the door as was possible; then, he had helped me carry my bags into the boot of the car. 

            “You lost your address book – at the airport?”

            “Oh no, I think I forgot to pack it.”

            “It’s fortunate then that I asked the secretary in my department to remind me about your arrival today.”

            As I learnt more about Tunde, it became clear that he was not the irritable grunt that I had presumed, only someone who wanted things straightened out right from the start. He was a professor of Physics at New York University, but he had decided to move back to Oxford at the end of the current semester. That meant I had only three months to stay with him before he left.  “You’ll survive,” he said to me. “This is a country of immigrants.”

            I would learn, on the streets of New York, that Tunde’s “immigrants” did not properly include people like me who had arrived from the back of beyond, and recently too. That title only fondly embraced the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and, among others, Jewish and Irish families who had passed through Ellis Island several years ago. I was a black man with an un-American accent and a six-month visa, cut down to three months by the immigration officer who had stamped me in, which I intended to contravene. I was an alien. 

            “Do you go to church?” Tunde asked me the next day.

            “Not really,” I said truthfully.

            “You should start. The church people here could help you settle down fast. I know they’ve helped a couple of people in your situation.”

            I had been raised a Catholic, because my father never entirely lost his faith – although he had become an infrequent churchgoer since after he lost his family and an arm in the Nigeria-Biafra war, sometimes doubting as much as he wanted to believe. It was not difficult, therefore, for me to show up the next Sunday at the Church of St Francis of Assisi in our predominantly white neighborhood. Tunde, who did not go to church himself, dropped me off, rehearsed me on finding my way home, and left. It was a small church and could easily have been tucked into St Dominic’s Cathedral in Lagos that my father irregularly attended. But, even as small as it was, it was almost empty, except mainly for old people who wanted to make their peace with God before departing this world – or who simply needed the social relations that the church facilitated.