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
