Behold the Dreamers

People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?

Our people say no condition is permanent, Mr. Edwards. Good times must come to an end, just like bad times, whether we want it or not.

indeed, bad news has a way of slithering into good days and making a mockery of complacent joys.

But the Universe gives us different sources of Love to unite us all as One. Who are we to decide what the source of our Love should be at any given time? Love is Love, and at any given point we have everything we need.

Home will never go away Home will be here when you come back You may go to bring back fortune You may go to escape misfortune You may even go, just because you want to go But when you come back We hope you’ll come back Home will still be here.

It's the fear that kills us, Leah," Jende said. "Sometimes it happens and it's not even as bad as the fear. That is what I have learned in this life. It is the fear.

Anyone can go to the shop and buy anything and give to anyone, he told Liomi when the boy asked him for the umpteenth time why he couldn’t get even a little toy truck. The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart.

Why should a man intentionally live his life with one kind of anxiety followed by another?

His years on earth had taught him that good things happen to those who honor the kindheartedness of others.

Rejoicing with others in their times of joy and your times of sorrow is a mark of true love,

I don't know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America.

while there existed great towns and cities all over the world, there was a certain kind of pleasure, a certain type of adventurous and audacious childhood, that only New York City could offer a child.

Different things are important to different people.

How could anyone have so much happiness and unhappiness skillfully wrapped up together?

That’s exactly the problem! People don’t want to open their eyes and see the Truth because the illusion suits them. As long as they’re fed whatever lies they want to hear they’re happy, because the Truth means nothing to them.

My advice to someone like you is to always stay close to the gray area and keep yourself and your family safe. Stay away from any place where you can run into police-that's the advice I give to you and to all young black men in this country. The police is for the protection of white people, my brother. Maybe black women and black children sometimes, but not black men. Never black men. Black men and police are palm oil and water. You understand me, eh?

She’d seen them on the news, compassionate Americans talking about how the United States should be more welcoming to people who came in peace. She believed these kindhearted people, like Natasha, would never betray them, and she wanted to tell Jende this, that the people of Judson Memorial Church loved immigrants, that their secret was safe with Natasha. But she also knew it would be futile reasoning with a raging man, so she decided to sit quietly with her head bowed as he unleashed a verbal lashing, as he called her a stupid idiot and a bloody fool. The man who had promised to always take care of her was standing above her vomiting a parade of insults, spewing out venom she never thought he had inside him. For the first time in a long love affair, she was afraid he would beat her. She was almost certain he would beat her. And if he had, she would have known that it was not her Jende who was beating her but a grotesque being created by the sufferings of an American immigrant life.

People act as if things in America have to be better than things everywhere else. America doesn’t have the best of everything,

But if America says they don’t want us in their country, you think I’m going to keep on begging them for the rest of my life? You think I’m going to sleep in a church? Never. Not for one day. You can go and sleep on the church floor all you want. The day you get tired, you can come and meet me and the children in Limbe. Nonsense!

She seemed nice, but she was most likely one of those American women whose knowledge of Africa was based largely on movies and National Geographic and thirdhand information from someone who knew someone who had been to somewhere on the continent, usually Kenya or South Africa. Whenever Jende met such women (at Liomi’s school; at Marcus Garvey Park; in the livery cab he used to drive), they often said something like, oh my God, I saw this really crazy show about such-and-such in Africa. Or, my cousin/friend/neighbor used to date an African man, and he was a really nice guy. Or, even worse, if they asked him where in Africa he was from and he said Cameroon, they proceeded to tell him that a friend’s daughter once went to Tanzania or Uganda. This comment used to irk him until Winston gave him the perfect response: Tell them your friend’s uncle lives in Toronto. Which was what he now did every time someone mentioned some other African country in response to him saying he was from Cameroon. Oh yeah, he would say in response to something said about Senegal, I watched a show the other day about San Antonio. Or, one day I hope to visit Montreal. Or, I hear Miami is a nice city. And every time he did this, he cracked up inside as the Americans’ faces scrunched up in confusion because they couldn’t understand what Toronto/San Antonio/Montreal/Miami had to do with New York.

The true measure of whether somebody really loves you, he lectured, is what they do for you with their hands and say to you with their mouth and think of you in their heart.

People hanging out in bars made no sense to Neni. Why would anyone want to stand in a crowded place for hours, screaming at the top of their voice to chat with a friend, when they could sit comfortably in their own home and talk to their friend in a calm voice? Why would they choose to sit in a dark space, consuming drinks that sold at the grocery store for a quarter of the bar's price? It was an off way of spending time and money.

In America today, having documents is not enough. Look at how many people with papers are struggling. Look at how even some Americans are suffering. They were born in this country.

It’s the fear that kills us, Leah,” Jende said. “Sometimes it happens and it is not even as bad as the fear. That is what I have learned in this life. It is the fear.

the problem is not some system. It is us. Each of us. We've got to fix ourselves before we can fix a whole damn country.

She decried the contemporary American definition of weary stranger as illegal alien. Remember when we welcomed our visitors at Ellis Island with lunch boxes? she asked to loud applause. And a free doctor’s checkup! someone in the back shouted. The church roared. Natasha smiled as she watched her congregants whispering among themselves. Sad, she said, shaking her head. Treating our friends in need of help the way we treat our enemies. Forgetting that we could find ourselves in search of a home someday, too. This bears no resemblance to the love the Bible speaks of, the love Jesus Christ preached about when he said we should love our neighbor as ourselves.

a great childhood there, my sister, Ceci,

Winston may be right,” Neni said after Jende told her about their conversation, “but if a river has carried a load halfway downstream, why not let it take it all the way to the ocean?” Jende agreed. Their fate was in the hands of others—what use would it be to get another opinion and find themselves weighing bleak option against bleak option? They would stay with Bubakar; it was all going to work out.