Another Brooklyn

6

In 1968, the children of Biafra were starving. My brother was not yet born and I was too young to understand what it meant to be a child, to be Biafran, to starve. Biafra was a country that lived only inside my mother’s admonitions—Eat your peas, there are children starving in Biafra—and in the empty-eyed, brown, big-bellied children moving across my parents’ television screen. But long after Biafra melted back into Nigeria, the country from which it had fought so hard to secede, the faces and swollen bellies of those children haunted me. In a pile of old magazines my father kept on our kitchen table in Brooklyn, I found a copy of Life with two genderless children on the cover and the words STARVING CHILDREN OF BIAFRA WAR blared across the ragged white garment of the taller child.

How do we dream ourselves out of this?

I stared at the cover of Life. The children’s distrusting eyes stared back at me, too large for their small, brown heads, too small for their protruding bones and distended bellies. My mother hadn’t lied. There were indeed children suffering. Here was proof. Here they were on the cover of Life magazine. I spent hours stroking their nearly bald heads, running my fingers across their almost beatific faces. If angels truly existed, I thought, they had come to earth as Biafran children, haunting and only halfway here.

No, we were not poor like this. Our bellies were filled and taut. Our legs were thin but muscled. Our hair was oiled, clean.

But still.

One day a woman wearing a sky-blue skirt suit showed up in front of our building. She had two small children with her, dark brown like Jennie and younger than my brother, who had just turned eight. My babies, we heard Jennie yell as she ran down the stairs. Ay, Dios mío, mis niños han llegado a casa. When the woman left again, Jennie knocked on our door. Please watch them, she whispered. I go get food.

The children were tiny and silent, staring up at my brother and me with huge dark eyes. The girl might have been four and the boy not yet two. The girl wore a frilly pink dress, too short and too small. Her shoes were white patent leather. Her feet, sockless. The boy wore a T-shirt and pair of cutoff shorts, a diaper bulging beneath. His white high-top leather baby-shoes had the front cut out to expose his small overhanging toes. I pulled them into our apartment and relocked the door. After a few moments had passed, both started crying. My brother fed them from his bag of potato chips, which they devoured hungrily. We gave them apples and nuts, slices of bologna and Jell-O. Whatever we put in front of them, they ate.

Hours passed. When Jennie finally returned, she was sleepy-eyed, scratching at her arms and legs, her wig at a strange angle. We watched her enter our building, waited for her to come up to our floor. After a long while, we took the children down to her apartment, watched her take them inside absently and close the door. Later, through the floorboards, we could hear them crying.

I went over to our radio, turned the dial until music rose up above every other sound.