The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 33
We were traveling to Nigeria in an ostensibly holiday-themed edition of a pilgrimage my family has made infrequently since 1991. But I hardly thought of Christmas once and called it mercy. That it was the most wonderful time of the year didn’t cross my mind at the boarding gate at Dulles, where we waited for one in a series of progressively smaller airport wheelchairs that would deliver Dad to his seat on the plane. Nor when the chair eventually materialized, bringing with it the special airline staff that assists you when your body is broken and uncooperative and the experience of standing on your own feet, let alone walking, is an unapproachable memory. These people, distinguishable by their self-serious demeanor and uniform of dreary polo shirts and Dockers, are well trained to minimize airline liability and flight delays; less so, it became clear, to mitigate the routine suffering and indignity of the humans in their care. Mostly, they shared the grace and tact of their counterparts in bag handling, and whenever one seemed intent on wrangling Dad and his chair like an obstinate mattress, we intervened and took care of him ourselves, using all the little tricks and techniques each of us knows but never wanted to learn.
When we were finally in our seats, belts buckled and seat-back trays securely fastened in front of us, I focused my mind and vanished stubborn memories of our cul-de-sac, and the lit Christmas tree, and the framed photo of my younger brother, Chidi—not more than ten years old in a baggy T-shirt and white high-tops—that he had fashioned into an ornament with glue sticks, green and red glitter, and yarn. I steered my thoughts away from The Last Good Christmas two years ago when Chidi was twenty-one and Adaeze and I spoiled him like we usually did with a flight to visit me in New York, a trip that marked both his first time flying alone and the last time I would ever see him alive. And I allowed myself to forget the Christmas the year after, when I had insisted (to be normal? to be “strong”?) on trotting out the tree, and the lights, and the glitter-encrusted ornament, and quickly, tearfully, pitifully regretted all of it. We never said “Merry Christmas” as the plane arced fitfully over the Atlantic and then Africa for fifteen hours and across six time zones, while day bled into night and into day again. And I was grateful for that.
I.
I wish I could tell you this was a story with a silver lining, that the trip to the country of my parents’ birth was ultimately restorative for my mom, dad, sister, and me. If I could make the illusion stick, I’d say it was a trip worthy of the movies, a cathartic, third-act coda that brought our lives full circle and filled our hearts with sober gratitude. And the house that greeted us there? Dad’s decade-long obsession that we’d been building (in keeping with tribal tradition) in the lush, sun-baked village of my late paternal grandfather? It was finally completed, standing even as I write this as a shining monument to triumph over adversity and the immortal legacy of mankind’s struggle on earth, or something. Yes, we had fallen on hard times, to be sure. But somehow, during those two blistering weeks together, all of the ordinary and devastating tragedies that have fractured my family in ways both sudden and inexorable were put in proper perspective, their greater meaning climactically revealed as we held each other and wept under a mighty acacia tree. I would not be above telling a story like that if only any of it were true. But, of course, that’s not the way it happened.
After a transfer in Addis Ababa, our plane began its descent toward Enugu, capital of Enugu state, the Seattle-sized southeastern city where my father was born and with which my family shares both historical and etymological bonds. (In Igbo, “enu” = “top,” “ugwu” = “hill.”) By random coincidence, we discovered that we were sharing the flight with the gallant Nigerian-British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, star of 12 Years a Slave. Adaeze and I spotted him across the aisle chatting and laughing with what must have been a brother or cousin. We poked each other and spent idle minutes furtively guessing at the reason for his travel. (A later Google search solved the mystery: a sister’s wedding.) It was the kind of imaginary kinship with a celebrity that is customary in America, but all too rare when you’re the child of immigrants, born into the wrong color skin with a wrong-sounding name. It was exciting. But if I harbored any hope that Nigeria’s most famous living international movie star was an auspicious omen, it was extinguished before we left the Enugu airport.
My sister is shorter than me with long, glossy black hair. At thirty-two, she’s three years older, though her unreasonably faultless skin makes people think I’m the older one. At baggage claim—a Darwinian gauntlet even in countries with space programs—we were sentries, each standing watch at one of two carousels in a hot, un-air-conditioned room. We stood shoulder to shoulder with dozens of flustered-looking men from the plane, all of them sweat-soaked and combustible after a long flight. They erupted into shouting matches in Igbo and broken English whenever a foot was smashed or an elbow jammed. A stifling aroma of dust and body odor lingered in the room like burnt rubber at a stock race.
Given the length of our trip, Dad’s suite of medical equipment, and the assorted small gifts Mom brought for very extended family, we were traveling with so many bags that a Kardashian would have blanched at the excess. Even though on an intellectual level we recognized a certain recklessness in checking so much luggage across three flights and 7,000 miles, we had never dwelled on airline operational efficiency, just as we had never dwelled on the lack of cultural or infrastructural accommodations for disabled people in Nigeria, or on the vague assurances from relatives that our house in the village was in a habitable state, more or less, despite the fact that construction had been beleaguered and none of us had seen it in person in over six years.
You could say that we were delusional, that we weren’t sufficiently cautious or fearful. And I guess you’d be right. But the truth is that we were afraid. In fact, we were terrified. But our greatest fear wasn’t to do with luggage, or transportation, or housing, or any of the real and upsetting consequences that could and did await us for being reckless with such things. Our fear, the one that we couldn’t live with, was of what would happen if we weren’t—if we were sensible and stayed home, or waited for more convenient flights to present themselves, or for the house to be perfect. We were afraid of failing to act with appropriate urgency, of not pulling together even in all of our brokenness before it was too late. “I don’t want to die in this country,” Dad had said when he first showed us the blueprints of a house he hoped to retire in, before the stroke had robbed him of the chance. No. It was too risky, we decided, to be sensible. So we chose to be reckless.
After several minutes, the carousels at baggage claim whirred to life. Dad’s electric wheelchair was among the first wave of luggage to round the circuit. I exhaled. We had broken the chair down into three parts, which cumulatively weighed about 110 pounds. I plucked the black leather office chair–like seat from the track first, then the race car–red base, which was emblazoned with a manufacturer name that I had never noticed before. The name, “Pride Mobility,” struck me as both patronizing and a little on the nose, like a nightclub called Sad Dark Sex Preliminary. I set the base aside and noticed that the battery, a ten-pound brick with a handlebar that drops into the base, wasn’t with the other two pieces. Maybe it would come out later. Adaeze and I focused on retrieving the rest of our bags, quietly rejoicing whenever one would turn up, as if our number had been drawn in the Powerball. But after everything else had been accounted for, after we had searched the baggage claim area corner to corner, we were forced to accept the simplest conclusion. The battery was lost.
When I think of my dad walking, I think of his shoulders. They’re broad and slice purposefully through the air on a course just a couple degrees shy of George Jefferson. I see him and his aviator eyeglasses coming through the door of our brick house on the cul-de-sac after a long day of work, wide print necktie and white dress shirt exposed by a freshly unbuttoned suit jacket. The suit is gray and slightly oversize—the kind that has somehow never gone out of style in the South, with billowing fabric at the ankles—and he clutch
es a boxy leather briefcase firmly in his right hand. I see him at his gym, where he used to take me when I had hoop dreams and was in urgent need of bigger calves, pedaling relentlessly on a stationary bike in his white singlet and striped white tube socks. Beads of sweat accumulate on his hairy chest and on the top of his head, which is shaven so smooth that a reflective glare clings to it always like a tiny cap. I see him making the rounds in the church foyer after service—the only true extrovert in our family—smiling and gregarious while talking with the Greggs about their new car, or the Kobiljaks about their boy in Iraq.
In 1967, when he was sixteen or seventeen, Dad lied about his age and ran away to fight for the Republic of Biafra in the Nigerian Civil War. He went through the hell of basic training and worked his way up to lieutenant. He became acquainted with death—the way it looks and smells and sounds when life leaves the body. Men were razed like ripe sugar cane to his left and right. Once, in a firefight, a bullet struck his rifle and thwacked it right out of his hands. More than a million were killed or starved to death before the Biafrans were defeated, but, somehow, Dad made it home and his story continued. He finished secondary school with distinctions in math, or, as they called it in the Queen’s English his late parents never learned, “maths.” Through an application mailed from the U.S. embassy in Lagos, Dad won a chemical engineering scholarship to Michigan Tech, of all places, and was overjoyed. He bought a plane ticket in 1974, using money he had earned by convincing his brothers and sisters to sell one of the family’s plots of land. When he arrived in Michigan, with about $100 to his name, it was winter. He got clobbered by the cold; gobsmacked by the snow.
Dad went back home to Enugu the summer after graduation triumphant, a job offer in tow from the chemicals manufacturer Union Carbide in Indiana. That summer, he met Mom and vowed to make her his wife. He was a golden child, blessed by God Himself. Dad worked as many side jobs as he could get in preparation for a family, and to put Mom through school. They would both become PhDs (“Dr. and Dr. Ugwu”), but first he was a part-time ice cream truck driver, and semitruck driver, and door-to-door textbook salesman. My older brother Chiugo was the first of the kids, in 1980. Adaeze came along three years later; and then me, six hours into her third birthday (she still razzes me for crashing the party). Chidi was the last of us, in 1992—born with sickled blood cells and a bum liver, but ridiculously cute. By that time we were in Elyria, Ohio, a suburb outside Cleveland, living early ’90s Midwestern childhoods: Huffy mountain bikes and Super Soakers and Mario Kart for days.
Dad got an administrative job at Galveston College, but moved us all to Houston, a thirty-minute commute away, which had better school districts. The weather was amenable, much better than the Upper Peninsula, and there were other Nigerians around—the highest concentration of any city in America. Life was good. Dad and Mom bought us boomboxes and put us in YMCA leagues and took us to Rockets games to see Hakeem “The Dream.”
In 2000, when I was thirteen and finishing middle school, Dad announced a grand plan to send me back to our homeland for a year, to get a sense of where we’d come from and, perhaps, some discipline—tricky to teach in the Land of the Free. He hadn’t been able to afford to send his other children back when they were still young and pliant, but he’d be damned if he didn’t send at least one. I fought like hell but returned from the experience with my world a little larger. I told myself I’d leave Houston on my own odyssey one day. By then Chiugo had moved out, following an epic dispute with our parents over college and the direction of his own life. He rarely spoke to them for fourteen years; didn’t set foot in the brick house on the cul-de-sac again until after Chidi died. It was a dark sort of symmetry. One son taken, one returned.
II.
We left the airport in search of a hotel that might accommodate us. The house was still being cleaned. Dad and I were chauffeured in a small Peugeot sedan by my cousin Obiora—thirtysomething, tall and clean-shaven with black, rectangular glasses—while Mom and Adaeze rode with another cousin, Emeka—even taller and albino with sherbet-tinted skin and light hair. Both had been among a familial welcoming party that warmly received us after we emerged battery-less from baggage claim. It had been over six years since Dad and I last visited home, nearly a decade for Mom and my sister.
I didn’t remember there being so many hotels in town the last time I had visited. Now they seemed to have sprouted up everywhere, especially in Independence Layout, the prosperous capital district that was home to Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi—the newly elected governor of Enugu state. His fat cheeks and stilted, gap-tooth smile beamed from a legion of billboards as we drove around the city in ninety-four-degree weather on a December afternoon.
“Day by day, we are making Enugu state better.”
The billboards were imprinted with a fine layer of rust-colored dust—a side effect of red, iron-rich soil—as is everything in Nigeria during the dry season: roads, cars, buildings, palm trees . . . even the air. The entire visible world often took on a red-orange tint, as if someone had replaced my contacts with blue-light filters.
We drove to four different hotels before we found one that could work. This wasn’t a matter of pools or Wi-Fi or complimentary breakfast. It was the stairs. Each hotel telegraphed its suitability to wealthy foreigners with grand staircases at the entrance framed by Greek columns, or stone sculptures, or manicured hedges—ostentatious displays that suggested aspirational if not literal distance from the poorer, less developed sectors that composed most of the city.
But to us the stairs were an intractable, inescapable menace. Able-bodied people are not inclined to consider the stark tyranny of stairs. How a single step—invisible when the body is cooperative—can be a wall between a disabled person and the basic comforts of civilization: shelter, bathrooms, air conditioning. In Nigeria—where, despite decades of oil-backed anti-poverty initiatives, even the healthy and gainfully employed do not enjoy easy access to simple conveniences like reliable electricity and potable water—there is no national disabilities legislation. So our expectations that any of the buildings we encountered would be wheelchair accessible in a meaningful way were extremely low. We aimed instead for accessible-ish, which, in the case of a sixty-five-year-old, five-foot-ten, hemiplegic man in a 100-pound, semi-functional wheelchair, meant fewer stairs than Jay Gatsby’s imperial ballroom.
We settled on Dmatel Hotel and Resort in Independence Layout, a midscale, two-story residence with gray and tan exteriors and rooms available on the first floor. I counted six tiled steps between the parking lot and a set of steel and glass double doors that led to the guest quarters. Foot-long agama lizards, their black bodies capped with red heads and tails, flitted in and out of the brush.
Dad can no longer move the right side of his body, the consequence of a weak blood vessel in the left hemisphere of his brain that ruptured one ordinary summer night in 2010. In the years since, my family has devised an ad hoc catalog of precise, multipoint procedures to help him do many of the things he can no longer do for himself. In America, when it comes to getting around, this generally consists of picking up where the Pride Mobility chair leaves off: maneuvering him from the chair to his bed, or from the chair to the toilet, or from the chair to the car. Some procedures are more involved than others, but none typically require more than a moment or two of strenuous physical exertion: lift, support, pivot, place. None of our procedures account for stairs.
Obiora parked the Peugeot at an angle, the passenger-side door as near to the stairs as he could get. I bent at the knees, hoisted the wheelchair out of the trunk, and lugged it up the steps and through the glass doors. One of the back wheels was stuck, but if you switched the chair to manual mode and shoved hard, the skidding wasn’t exactly terrible. Mom came around the passenger side to help. Dad trusted her to hold him. She was soft but strong; had never shied from the hard things. She unbuckled him and pulled his legs toward her so that he was facing the car door. He reached with his left hand and grabbed it for support. As a boy,
he’d been taught to scorn the left hand; he’d never used it for eating or shaking. But since 2010, none of that had mattered, or could. Left was all there was.
Six steps. Dad didn’t want to be carried. His pride, now as ever, a blessing and a curse. I chose to be empathetic. I told myself he could ascend the stairs with our help, if we folded our bodies into his and made him strong. If we supported him like he had taught us to support each other. Mom grabbed him by the waist and lifted him up to his feet. He rested his hand on her shoulder. She crept backward slowly while drawing him with her, as if they were slow dancing and she had taken the lead. The right side of his body slumped at the shoulder. Dad stepped forward with his left leg, trailing Mom’s momentum. I grabbed hold of his right leg and made it follow. Obiora helped prop him up from the back. We were moving. Mom climbed the first step and then the second and Dad lifted his left foot and I lifted his right. I thought that the three of us must look like marionettes, except we, too, were puppets made of patchwork cloth, and the show wasn’t a show to us but all that we could know of life.