The Urban Fantasy Anthology (43 page)

“It was the White Man,” Tawana said.

Rev. Blount nodded. “It was the White Man. He tasted the different kinds of blood we sent him, and those boys had the taste the White Man liked best. So he kept coming back for more. And once a vampire has had his first taste, there’s nothing you can do to stop him coming back for more. That old movie had it right there. I don’t know how the vampires got to them, but those four boys sure as hell didn’t commit suicide, which was what some of them at the Seminary was insinuating. Their whole religion is against suicide. No. No. The White Man got them, plain and simple.”

“Tawana!” Ms. McLeod exclaimed with her customary excess of gusto. “Come in, come in!” The school’s principal placed her wire-framed reading glasses atop a stack of multiple-choice Personnel Evaluation forms that had occupied the same corner of her desk since the start of the spring quarter, an emblem of her supervisory status and a clear sign that her rank as principal set her apart from graders of papers and monitors of lunch rooms.

Tawana entered the Principal’s office holding up the yellow slip that had summoned her from Numerical Thinking, her last class before lunch.

“Is this your essay, Tawana?” Ms. McLeod asked, producing three pages of ruled paper. The title—OUR SOMALI BROTHERS AND SISTERS: A Minnesota Perspective—was written with orange magic marker in letters two inches high. Under it, on a more modest scale, was the author’s name, Tawana Makwinja.

“Yes, Ms. McLeod.”

“And the assignment was to write a letter about your family’s cultural heritage. Is that right?”

Tawana dipped her head in agreement.

“Would you,” purred Ms. McLeod, handing the paper to Tawana “read it aloud—so I can hear it in the author’s own voice?”

Tawana looked down at the paper, then up at Ms. McLeod, whose thin, plucked eyebrows were lifted high to pantomime attentiveness and curiosity. “Just begin at the beginning.”

Tawana began to read from her essay:

It is difficult to determine exactly the number of Somalis living in the Twin Cities. Minnesota Department of Human Services has estimated as many as 15,000, but the Somalia Council of Minnesota maintains that these figures are greatly inflated. Over 95% of Somali people in Minnesota are refugees. Many Somalis in Minnesota are single women with five or more children, because so many men were killed in the war.

According to Mohammed Essa, director of the Somali Community in Minnesota, the role of women as authority figures in U.S. society is different from Somalia where few women work outside the home and men do not take instruction from women. For instance, the two sexes do not shake hands. Somalis practice corporal punishment, and many complain that the child protection workers are too quick to take away their children.

Somali religious tradition requires female circumcision at the youngest possible age, in order in ensure a woman’s virginity, to increase a man’s sexual pleasure, and promote marital fidelity. However, this practice is outlawed in Minnesota. Before the circumcision of an infant daughter there is a 40-day period called the “afartanbah,” followed by important celebrations attended by friends and family members that involve the killing of a goat.

Somalis are proud of their heritage and lineage. Children and family are deeply valued by Somalis, who favor large families. Seven or more children are common. Due to resettlement and the inability to keep families together in refugee situations, few Somali children in Minnesota live with both parents. The availability of culturally appropriate childcare is a major issue in Minnesota.

Tawana looked up cautiously, as after a sustained punishment. Ms. McLeod had made her read the whole thing out loud. She would rather have been whipped with a belt.

“Thank you, Tawana,” said Ms. McLeod, reaching out to take back the essay. “There were a
few
pronunciation problems along the way, but that often happens when we read words we know only from books. I’m sure you know what all the words
mean
, don’t you?”

Tawana nodded, glowering.

“This one, for instance—‘corporal’? What kind of punishment might that be? Hmm? Or ‘lineage’? Why exactly is that a source of pride, Tawana?”

Ms. McLeod went on with word after word. It really was not fair. Tawana wasn’t stupid, but Ms. McLeod was trying to make her look stupid. Making her read her essay aloud had been a trap.

“Have
you
ever attended an ‘afartanbah,’ Tawana?”

Tawana raised her eyes in despair. What kind of question was that! “What is a… the word you said?”

“You answered that question in your own essay, Tawana. It is a celebration forty days after the birth of a baby sister. Have you had such a celebration at your home, where there was goat?”

“Who eats goats in Minnesota?” Tawana protested. “You can’t get goats with food stamps. I don’t even
like
goat!”

With a thin smile Ms. McLeod conceded defeat in that line of interrogation and shifted back to pedagogic mode. “I want you to understand, Tawana, that there is nothing
wrong
with quoting from legitimate sources. All scholars do that. But note that I said ‘sources,’ plural. To copy out someone else’s work word for word is not scholarship, it is plagiarism, and that is simply against all the rules. Students are expelled from university classes for doing what you have done. So you will have to write your essay over, from scratch, and not just copy out …this!” She produced a print-out of the same study from the Center for Cross-Cultural Health, “Somali Culture in Minnesota,” that the school librarian had called up on the Internet for Tawana’s use.

“That was the bad news,” said Ms. McLeod with a sympathetic smile. “The
good
news is that you have really lovely handwriting!”

“I do?”

“Indeed. Firm, well-rounded, but not…childish. I don’t know where you developed such a hand—not here at Diversitas, I’m sorry to say. The emphasis here has never been on fine penmanship.”

“The nuns taught the Palmer Method at my last school.”

“Well, you must have been one of their best students. Now, penmanship is a genuine skill. And anyone with a skill is in a position to earn money! How would you like a
job
, Miss Makwinja?”

Tawana regarded the Principal with ill-concealed dismay. “A job? But I’m just…a kid.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to send you off to a nine-to-five, full-time place of employment. No, this would be a part-time job, but it would pay more than you would earn by babysitting. And you could work as much or as little as you like, if you do a good job.”

“What would I have to do?”

“Just copy out the words of a letter with your clear, bold penmanship. We can have an audition for the job right now. Here is the text of the letter I want you to copy. And here is the stationery to write on. You should be able to fit the whole letter on a single page, if you use both sides of the paper. Don’t rush. Make it as neat as your essay.”

Tawana regarded the letterhead on the stationery:

Holy Angels School of Nursing and Widwifery
4217 Ralph Bunche Boulevard
Kampala
Uganda, East Africa.

“Here.” Ms. McLeod placed a fat fountain pen on top of the Holy Angels stationery. “A real pen always makes a better impression than ballpoint.”

Tawana began to copy the letter, neatly and accurately, including all its mistakes.

Dear friend in Christ’s Name,

I send you warm greeting hoping you are in a good-sounding health. I am so happy to write to you and I cry for your spiritual kindness to rescue me from this distressed moment.

I am Elesi Kuseliwa, a girl of 18 years old, and a first born in a family of 4 children. We are orphans.

I completed Ordinary level in 2003 and in 2004 I joined the above-mentioned school and took a course in midwifery. Unfortunately in October both our parents perished in a car accident on their way from church. We were left helpless in agony without any one to console or to take care of us. Life is difficult and unbearable.

This is my last and final year to complete my course of study. We study three terms a year and each term I am supposed to pay 450 UK pounds. The total fee for the year is 1350 pounds. I humbly request you to sympathize and become my sponsor so I may complete my course and to take my family responsibities, most importantly, paying school fees for my younger sisters.

Enclosed is a photocopy of my end of third term school report. I pray and await your kind and caring response.

Yours faithfully,

Elisi Kuseliwa

“Very good,” said Ms. McLeod, when she had looked over the finished copy. “That took you just a little over fifteen minutes, which means that in an hour you should be able to make four copies just like this. Now I understand that girls your age can earn as much as two-fifty at babysitting. I’ll do better than that. I’ll pay four dollars an hour. Or one dollar for each letter you copy. Do we have a deal?”

What could Tawana say but yes.

Tawana still had one friend left from when she’d gone to Our Lady of Mercy, Patricia Brown. That was not her Somali name, of course. She’d become Patricia Brown when her mother died and she was adopted into the Brown family. She was a quiet, plodding bully of a girl, already two hundred pounds when Tawana had met her in fourth grade, and now lighting up the screen on the scale at 253. Tawana had won her friendship by patiently listening to Patricia’s ceaseless complainings about her foster parents, her siblings, her teachers, and her classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, a skill she had learned from having sat still for Lucy’s long whines and Grandpa’s rants. In exchange for her nods and murmers Tawana was able to see shows on the Browns’ tv that Tawana couldn’t get at home. That is how Tawana (and Patricia as well) came to be a fan of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
.

At first the later afternoon reruns had been as hard to understand as if you arrived at a stranger’s house in the middle of a complicated family quarrel that had been going on for years. You couldn’t tell who was right and who was wrong. Or in this case who was the vampire and who wasn’t. Buffy herself definitely wasn’t, but she had her own superhuman powers. When she wanted to she could zap one of the vampires to the other side of the room with just a tap of her finger. Sometimes she would walk up to a vampire and start talking to him and then without a word of warning whack him through the heart with a wooden stake. But other times, confusingly, she would fall in love with some guy who would turn out to be a vampire, but that didn’t stop their being in love.

Patricia said there was a simple explanation. The vampires were able to confuse people by their good looks, and Buffy would eventually realize the mistake she was making with Spike and whack him just like the others. Tawana was not so sure. Spike might be a vampire but he seemed to really love Buffy. Also, he looked a lot like Mr. Forbush, with the same bleached hair and thin face and sarcastic smile. Though, as Patricia had pointed out, what did that have to do with anything! It was all just a story like
Days of Our Lives
, only more so since it was about vampires and vampires are only make-believe. Tawana did not tell Patricia about the real vampires in Malawi. Everything that she had learned about the White Man was between her and Rev. Gospel Blount.

But in the course of watching many episodes of
Buffy
and thinking them over and discussing them with other kids at Diversitas. Tawana developed a much broader understanding of the nature of vampires and the powers they possessed than you could get from an out-of-date movie like
Dracula
. Or even from reading books, though Tawana had never actually tried to do that. She was not much interested in books. Even their smell could get her feeling queasy.

The main thing to be learned was that here in America just the same as in Rev. Blount’s native land of Malawi there were vampires everywhere. Most people had no idea who the vampires were, but a few special individuals like Buffy, or Tawana, could recognize a vampire from the kind of fire that would flash from their eyes, or by other subtle signs.

The vampires in Minneapolis were usually white, and tended to be on the thin side, and older, especially the men. And they would watch you when they thought you weren’t looking. If you caught them at it, they would tilt their head backwards and pretend to be staring at the ceiling.

A lot of what people thought of as the drug problem was actually vampires. That was how they kept themselves out of the news. All the people who died from a so-called drug overdose? It was usually vampires.

Then one day in May toward the end of seventh grade Tawana developed a major insight into vampires that was all her own. She was in the Browns’ living room with Patricia and her younger brother Michael watching a rerun of
Buffy
that they all had seen before. Patricia and Michael were sitting side by side in the glider, spaced out on Michael’s medication, and Tawana was sitting behind them, keeping the glider rocking real slow with her toe, the same as if they were the twins in their stroller. Instead of looking at the story on the tv Tawana’s attention was fixed on the big statue of Jesus on the wall. There were silver spikes through his hands and feet, and his naked body was twisting around and his neck stretched up, trying to escape the crucifix. Tawana realized that Jesus looked exactly like one of the vampires when Buffy had pounded a wooden stake into him. Their skin was the same clouded white, the same expression on their faces, a kind of holy pain. Not only that but with Jesus, the same as with vampires, you might think you had killed him but then a day or two later he wasn’t in the coffin where you thought. He was out on the street again, alive.