The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 15

  The sponsors do not share everything about themselves either. Emma Waverman, the leader of another cluster, was telling her cosponsors about the stirring bar mitzvah speech her son had written about the Syrians they were aiding when another woman stopped her.

  “Do they know we’re Jewish?” she asked.

  Nurturing Without Nagging

  Few issues are as delicate as how hard the sponsors should push and when the refugees can say no. Should the Syrians live close to downtown sponsors or in outer-ring neighborhoods with more Middle Easterners—and is it right for sponsors to decide without consulting them? The Canadians raise tens of thousands of dollars for each newcomer family; who controls how it is spent?

  Some worry that sponsors are overpowering the refugees with the force of their enthusiasm. Kamal Al-Solaylee, a journalism professor at Ryerson University who is originally from Yemen, said he had noticed a patronizing tone, as when some sponsors highlighted their volunteering on social media. “The white savior narrative comes into play,” he said.

  When Muaz and Sawsan Ballani and their two-year-old son arrived here in February, they seemed so disoriented and alone that their sponsors became especially eager to nurture them. Mr. Ballani, twenty-six, had once worked in his father’s clothing store, which was run out of their home. Now he introduced himself to his sponsors by showing them a picture of his oldest brother: not a smiling snapshot, but an image of the young man lying dead back home, blood streaming from his body. (Mr. Ballani believed that his brother had been caught in fighting between the regime and the opposition, but in the chaos of the conflict, he said, he could not learn more.)

  Sawsan wed Muaz when she was sixteen in an arranged marriage, rushed because of bombings and failing electricity; a month later, they fled. Now twenty, she had not seen her family since.

  The couple had been languishing in Jordan, sleeping in a house crammed with too many people, not enough beds or blankets, and ants that crawled over their son, named Abdulrahman, after Mr. Ballani’s dead brother, and nicknamed Aboudi. One of Mr. Ballani’s brothers was still stuck in the house in Jordan, he said, and his brother’s widow was living in a park in Syria with her three children, foraging for food.

  “If we hadn’t come here, we would have died,” he said.

  The family’s sponsors started as mostly strangers to one another—a few former colleagues, a friend of a friend. Helga Breier, a market research consultant and one of the organizers, was drawn into sponsorship last summer, when she felt haunted during her Mediterranean vacation by the suffering across the water.

  The Ballanis became their galvanizing cause. Together they found a bright apartment near their homes and countered the bareness—the family had few belongings—with cheery posters and tags labeling everything in English: lamp, cupboard, wall, door. The couple spoke almost no English, so to teach Mr. Ballani to get where he needed to go, the sponsors helped him photograph the route. When Aboudi threw tantrums in day care, they sat with him so his mother could stay in language class. The couple cooked elaborate Middle Eastern thank-you meals for the sponsors and mostly welcomed their interventions. Mr. Ballani donned a Toronto Maple Leafs hat that he wore day after day, and his wife gamely hopped on a toboggan.

  Sometimes the sponsors barely hid their views of how the Ballanis should adjust. At a spring potluck dinner, Ms. Ballani described how she had recently traveled by subway on her own, a trip she could not have imagined taking just a few weeks before. The sponsors around the table, firm feminists, asked what else she might like to do herself.

  She turned to her husband. “I’m going to ask you an honest question,” she said. “Would you let me work here?” As they waited for the answer, the Canadian women held their breath.

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t have let you work back” in Jordan, he said, adding that even women who behaved traditionally there were often harassed and that those who appeared too independent faced worse. Ms. Ballani pressed forward: She wanted to attend university and have a career of her own, she said, a daunting set of goals for a woman with only a seventh-grade education. The Canadians beamed; two high-fived each other.

  At the same time, the sponsors worried that they were becoming helicopter parents, as Ms. Breier put it. When the Syrians skipped English lessons (Aboudi sometimes kept them awake at night) or missed an appointment for donated dental services (a misunderstanding), the sponsors agonized over what to say, debating on the messaging app Slack. Should they show up every morning at the Ballanis’ apartment to make sure they got to class? Aboudi did not nap regularly and seemed to consume a lot of sugar—he drank soda, sometimes for breakfast—so should they offer advice?

  Mr. Nammoura, the refugee advocate in Calgary, said he saw a pattern among the cases. The Canadians, who feel responsible for the refugees’ success, want to give them as much help and direction as possible. But many Syrians, finally safe after years of war and flight, want to exhale before launching into language regimens and job searches, and sometimes feel that sponsors are meddling.

  When the Ballani sponsors sought advice from an Arab community center caseworker and an older Syrian mother, they were told to be harsher—to threaten fines or loss of sponsorship if the couple did not accept their guidance. Instead, the sponsors tried to strike a balance, being insistent on issues like health and education but easing off in other areas.

  A few weeks before Ramadan, the Ballanis raised the prospect of missing school during the month of long fasts. “It’s really hard because we have to fast sixteen or eighteen hours,” Muaz Ballani told the sponsors.

  Ms. Breier and her partners dismissed the idea, saying they feared that the couple would lose their slots if they missed too many classes. The Ballanis quickly relented. It was not clear how much freedom they felt to express disagreement to outsiders; they seemed reluctant to acknowledge anything but gratitude.

  That morning, Ms. Ballani said she and her husband never had different opinions from the sponsors. “We’ve never felt like they were telling us what to do,” she added.

  Another weekend, the extended group gathered for a picnic, the first birthday party anyone had thrown for Mr. Ballani. He was deeply moved by the gesture. “A human life has value here,” he had said in an interview. “You can feel it everywhere.”

  But the conversation at the party turned to his relatives in Syria, and he seemed distant as the Canadians presented his cake. Like many of the newcomers, he regularly receives calls and texts from family members, some in harrowing straits, as news reports describe starvation back home and mass drownings in the Mediterranean.

  “I am really thankful to them; I don’t want them to misunderstand,” he said later about the sponsors. “It’s like I’m two people at the same time, one happy and one unhappy,” because of his family’s continued suffering.

  The sponsors had been working on that too, helping match Mr. Ballani’s brother in Jordan with another Toronto sponsor group and laboring over the paperwork. By late spring they had news: his relatives could arrive by year’s end.

  Mr. Ballani, overjoyed, started planning what he would show his relatives in the city that had taken him in. This time, he would be the guide.

  “Now it’s my turn to help,” he said.

  Navigating Their Own Way

  Three months after the Mohammads’ awkward first meeting with Kerry McLorg and the other sponsors at the airport hotel, they had clicked into a productive rhythm, settling into Canada faster than anyone had expected.

  They went on a picnic to Niagara Falls and danced around a maypole at a spring festival. The girls won student-of-the-month honors. Bayan, the eldest, who had whipped past the boys she raced on Jordanian streets, was now beating runners from schools across the city. When the sponsors came to give informal language lessons, Ahmad, the four-year-old, liked to try new phrases in English, such as “Good job!”

  Still, there was some culture shock. When Abdullah Mohammad took the children to a community pool, he encountered a woman
in a string bikini. “I ran away,” he said later. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

  Ms. McLorg, measured and methodical, had organized the sponsor group, but the most energetic member was an artist named Susan Stewart, with a seemingly endless list of activities for the family and long email exchanges with the children’s teachers. During her turn to give English lessons, she brought flash cards down to the courtyard, telling the children to alternate between loops on their bicycles and new words. She was sweetly relentless, which was partly why the family had made so much progress, the other sponsors said.

  When Mr. Mohammad voiced interest in working, Ms. Stewart became consumed with helping him find a job. Of all the tests for the family—and, by extension, the sponsors—this was perhaps the most crucial. So Ms. Stewart found an Arabic-speaking settlement counselor to advise Mr. Mohammad and drove him to a job fair for refugees, where they struck up a conversation with a Syrian supermarket owner. After he invited Mr. Mohammad for an interview, Ms. Stewart fashioned a résumé from a questionnaire she had helped him fill out.

  “I am keen to learn all aspects of the trade from stocking and organizing shelves to marketing strategies and Canadian shopping habits,” she wrote. Describing his work experience—doing odd jobs during his three years in Jordan—she wrote, “As a refugee I had to be resourceful and find work wherever I could.” Even though the interview would be in Arabic, she drilled him in English phrases like “I can stock shelves.”

  “Ten more times!” she told him as they drove to the interview.

  When he was offered the part-time position, the sponsors were thrilled. But a few days later, he called the Canadians to say he would turn it down. He struggled with taking money from the sponsors—back home, others had come to his family for help, and it was “really hard to be on the receiving end,” he said. But he wanted to consider options, such as becoming a mechanic. In Syria or Jordan, he had never had the freedom to choose his work. “It’s always what you have to do to earn a living rather than what you really want to do,” he said later.

  And he did not want to take a job until he improved his English, he said, because he did not want any more favors or charity. At the supermarket, unable to answer basic questions from customers, “I would be a burden to my employer,” he added. He had been annoyed at Ms. Stewart for pressing so hard, he said later, but mostly he was embarrassed to pass on the job after she had done so much.

  But Ms. McLorg saw a plus side: Mr. Mohammad was starting to navigate his own path in Canada, and the relationship between the sponsors and the family, so lopsided at the start, was beginning to balance out. “Our job was to help them come into Canada and show them the options that are here,” she said.

  In mid-May, at the end of a routine meeting with the sponsors and the Mohammads, she shared news of her own: She had breast cancer. Now that she was facing surgery, she was the one who was vulnerable, and the Syrians were the ones who were checking on her.

  They brought flowers and chocolates; the other sponsors, now practiced in the logistics of caring, offered meal deliveries and other assistance. “I had no intention of building my own support group, but I have one now,” Ms. McLorg said.

  Bayan and Batoul, the two oldest Mohammad children, made get-well cards using the same set of watercolors the sponsors had used to make greeting signs that first day at the airport hotel. The morning after Ms. McLorg’s operation, when she made her way down to her living room, the cards were the first things she saw.

  RANDALL KENAN

  Finding the Forgotten

  FROM Garden & Gun

  For some odd reason, I keep thinking of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. The classic novel is best remembered for the scene in which a black man and a white man dig up a body in order to clear another man jailed for murder. And though race, the dead, the South, and crime are all involved in the story of Richmond’s historic Evergreen Cemetery, the scene this morning is in many ways the complete opposite of Faulkner’s whodunit. Now the dead remain underground, and black and white folk are collaborating in the sunshine to clear and honor their resting places. A century ago Evergreen was the premier burial place for African Americans in Richmond. But the sixty-acre site has been severely neglected for decades. Attempts to reclaim it from the forest have started and stopped for more than thirty years. Today is the first concerted effort in three years, and it is remarkable to see how swiftly a forest can retake a graveyard.

  It’s Saturday, bright and early. A line of cars lead the way, and at the entrance to Evergreen, a silver-haired woman stands behind a folding table, taking names. Three men hang up a long banner—MAGGIE L. WALKER HIGH SCHOOL CLASS OF 1967 (an all-black school at the time)—and smile for pictures. Marvin Harris, a member of that class and the lead Volunteer Cleanup Coordinator for this formidable project, greets me. He is a powerfully built man with hands as strong as wire cables. In the distance: chain saws, lawn mowers, the sounds of chopping, cutting. People calling out to one another. About forty people have gathered, and all are at work.

  A Richmond native, Harris is the owner and CEO of Harris Group Promotions and Supply, an industrial supply company in the city. Eight years ago he read an article in the local paper about Evergreen and other African American cemeteries in Richmond. He called a friend who had a relative buried here, and scheduled twelve people to come help. Only four showed up. “It was quite a situation,” Harris says. This initial effort led to more and more investment of time, and sweat, and outreach for help. “Somebody had to step up to the plate,” he continues. “If we handle this as a community, we can get it back to the glory days.”

  The forest is dense and thick and reminds me of the woods I roamed as a boy. But this density was once a place for families to come honor their dead in pastoral reverence and green splendor. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having picnics in cemeteries was not uncommon for most Americans. Save for the marble markers now poking up periodically—choked by weeds, surrounded by tall grass, or swallowed by ivy—one might never realize we’re in the midst of a graveyard.

  II.

  This part of the city east of I-95 is distinctly suburban, the towers of Richmond receding in the distance. A multitude of cemeteries dot the landscape, decorously. Most are well manicured and unassuming. Hollywood—near the center of town, on the banks of the James River—is where the high and mighty ultimately come to rest. Presidents Monroe and Tyler and Confederate president Jefferson Davis are buried there. Following Reconstruction, four African American cemeteries were established in this eastern section of town, in light of Jim Crow segregation: East End, Colored Pauper’s Cemetery, Woodland Cemetery, and the largest, Evergreen. Established in 1891, Evergreen was meant to be the dark mirror of Hollywood.

  Of all the bustling cities of the American South during the Jim Crow era, Richmond laid claim to one of the nation’s largest black middle classes. As a result they had the means to memorialize their dead grandly.

  The most commanding grave marker stands in the central section of Evergreen, a marble cross about ten feet tall. It rests over Maggie L. Walker, the first woman (of any color) to establish and become president of a bank in the United States. In 1903, she successfully chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. This led to a merger with two other banks to form the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, which became a significant institution for African Americans in Richmond. Walker was also a teacher and a leader in education and women’s rights. Many organizations throughout Richmond and the rest of Virginia have been named after her, and her home has become a National Historic Site. Until this morning her grave and monument had been engulfed in impassable brush, hard to find, even harder to reach. But already volunteers have cleared the immediate area surrounding it, the grave and marker now free and clear, along with dozens of others.

  Not too far from Walker are the graves of John Mitchell Jr. and his mother. Mitchell was a bank president, and the editor and publisher of the Richmond Pl
anet, a leading voice against lynching at the turn of the twentieth century. He unsuccessfully ran for governor of Virginia in 1921.

  For more than thirty years African Americans were interred here, the prominent—eminent ministers, doctors, lawyers, successful businessmen, and their families—and the not-so-prominent. But something went sadly wrong. Neglect set in sometime after the Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. Burials continued for a while, but the graveyard slowly disappeared into the forest. Nobody knows exactly how many people are buried here. Some estimates run as high as 60,000 graves in Evergreen alone.

  III.

  John Shuck is originally from Iowa. A farm boy, he has lived in Virginia since 2001 and over the years has taken the lead in many ways in reclaiming much of the smaller, neighboring East End Cemetery. (He estimates East End, at sixteen acres, is now approximately 25 percent cleared.) Now he coordinates volunteer work for the reclamation of both Evergreen and East End, and most Saturday mornings you can find him cutting brush, raking, pointing out resting places of note.

  Shuck is tall and professorial, with the mien of a museum docent, and a touch of Indiana Jones with his wide-brimmed floppy explorer’s hat. No cemetery records for Evergreen exist prior to 1929, he tells me. “So there are no existing records of who is buried here, or where.” He had been a graveyard hobbyist, photographing tombstones and researching genealogies, when he first heard about the cemeteries and came out to photograph in June 2008. He had never seen a cemetery that looked like this. “I thought it might be interesting to clear a plot or two, and that was eight years ago,” he says. “Investigating the history of these people helped me learn the history of Richmond.” Shuck and his team of volunteers recently uncovered their two thousandth grave marker at East End. He posts photos of the markers online so that family members can find them.