everything had changed. After a couple of round trips, he told me, he had begun to understand: “The
farther you go uptown, the blacker and poorer the people, and also when you go downtown. And I
realized I didn’t fit anywhere.”
I thought I could picture him as he was then, a skinny, worried-looking youth, moving from panic to
exhaustion and finally giving up all hope of escaping the subway. He remembered the moment when he
had told himself, “No one is in control of his own life,” as he’d dozed off on the screeching, roaring
trains. For a moment when we came above ground, I found it hard to reconcile that picture of Deo with
Deo as he had become.
I had two images of him in New York’s SoHo district. In the first it was evening twelve years back and
he was being led by Sharon—led by the hand, so to speak—out of the subway station on Prince Street,
past the lighted windows of chain stores, art galleries, and boutiques, toward the Wolfs’ apartment. In the
second, the apartment was his home, and he was lounging on the sofa, laughing uproariously as Charlie,
for my benefit, reminisced about those contentious dinner-table lessons in American idioms. What lay
between those two images was an extraordinary act. A perfectly sane, reasonable couple had taken in a
needy stranger from Africa who didn’t speak their language, who had no means of support, who might
become their dependent for the rest of their lives. What sort of people would do that? Who were Nancy
and Charlie?
I went to see them alone. I rode up to their loft, as Deo and Sharon had done on the night when they had
first come for dinner, in the small old-fashioned elevator, with unpainted wooden walls and a metal gate.
You rang for a ride and Nancy or Charlie would bring the machine down. It was Charlie who came for
me. I remarked on the apparent age of the elevator, and Charlie began—in a deep and measured voice,
which wasn’t a drawl but carried traces of the South, like phrases of an old song: “The original
passenger elevator was installed across the street. In the Haughwout Building. Built by old man Elisha
Otis, in 1857. Without which, of course, the high-rise would not be possible. That and structural steel.
Cast iron was the last-generation technology….”
The elevator opened right into the living area, itself open to the kitchen. The furniture was plain.
Everything in the tidy kitchen seemed to have been there for years. I didn’t see a single gleaming
culinary gadget. There was no TV in the living room. Books covered most of the walls. I noticed some
small African objects—carvings, bowls—on a shelf and a table, but most of all I noticed the wall that
faced the street. It was all windows, large, old-fashioned double-hung windows that looked out on a
grand geometric collage of rooftops and round wooden rooftop water towers and restored, imitation-
Renaissance fa.ades across the street. From Nancy and Charlie’s windows on a summer day, it was
possible to imagine a Venetian canal.
At the rear of the loft, in Nancy’s studio, the floor was rough unfinished wood. Several works in
progress stood on the easels and hung on the walls, large and meticulous drawings that made me think of
dreams, familiar as if I’d just remembered them—troubling dreams of cityscapes, where human beings
had shrunk beneath monolithic architecture or been consigned to old, abandoned buildings. I thought of
the building PEN, of course.
Between the living room and studio lay the Black Hole, still intact, as if awaiting Deo’s return, as it
always did await him. The photograph of his uncle still hung above the bed. The threatening email from
the self-proclaimed member of PALIPEHUTU was still taped to the wall above the desk.
Nancy and Charlie had moved into their loft back in the 1970s, when the building still reeked of
printer’s ink from the factory below and SoHo was still block after block of derelict buildings and
machine shops. A friend of theirs had told me that, unlike the neighborhood, their apartment hadn’t
really changed at all: “It’s a time capsule, a mid-seventies SoHo artist’s time capsule.” Not that there
was anything outlandish about them, but out on the streets in their evening clothes they seemed to me a
little like time capsules themselves: blond, long-legged Nancy dressed like an art student, in sandals and
worn corduroys, interesting earrings (with Russian constructivist designs on them), and a floppy
Renaissance beret; and Charlie with a trimmed beard, and a plain Parisian beret perched on his gray hair.
Convention, of course, has everything to do with children. For a married American couple of their era,
not to have children was in itself a rather unconventional act, yielding ample freedom for other
unconventional acts. And the lives they had led before Deo arrived had been unusual, even adventurous.
Deo had told me Charlie was modest about his accomplishments. “You ask him, ‘What do you do?’ And
he will say, ‘I wish I could know.’” Charlie got his Ph.D. in sociology at Princeton. He had taught at
Brown University, Dalhousie University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, the
University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, Carleton College, the Polytechnic University of New
York University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater. He had been the
president or organizer, and on occasion the reorganizer, of various sociological associations. He
specialized in what is called “social impact assessment,” the side of environmental impact assessment
that worries about the effects of technology on human beings. Among many other things, he was a
fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and had directed research or
consulted on various projects for the states of Mississippi and Washington, for the United Nations, for
the Army Corps of Engineers, for Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment, and for the presidential
commission that investigated the accident at Three Mile Island.
Nowadays, Charlie worked mainly as a consultant, quite often in African countries. He called himself “a
reformed academic.” I think by way of trying to tell me something about his adoptive father, Deo had
given me an article Charlie wrote many years before. The paper was about Athens, Ohio, where Charlie
had attended a conference called “Engineering and Society.” Charlie found events in Athens more
interesting once he discovered that the town was in the process of diverting its river. He tried to interest
his fellow conferees in the matter, with limited success. Undeterred, he conducted his own sociological
investigation, reading documents, interviewing officials and citizens. He concluded his paper as follows:
Did I, as instructed, “get the whole story”? There is no “the whole story.” What is the story in Athens,
anyway? The short detour of a sorry river? Not at all. It is the college and the town, the river and the
road, man and nature, truth and beauty. Palpable though writ small, the story in Athens is the story
everywhere, always: the human condition. If that is pretentious I do not apologize.
When he and Nancy had first moved to New York, in 1977, Charlie had volunteered to take care of
pruning all the publicly owned trees south of Forty-second Street. “I’m a country boy in my heart, and a
country boy in my soul,” he explained. A bad bicycle accident had put him out of commission for a time,
but he’d given up tree work only after Deo had arrived and had insisted that it wasn’t good for Charlie’s
injured arm.
The Wolfs had traveled. While at Brown, Charlie had taught a course called “Technology and the Moral
Order.” His favorite student had been Ethelbert Chukwu, Sharon’s old family friend from Nigeria, now a
professor of applied mathematics. Chukwu had invited Nancy and Charlie to help him get a new
technological university started in Nigeria. They had accepted at once. They had lived in Nigeria, in the
town of Yola, for two years in the early 1980s, and the experience had affected both of them strongly.
Nancy remembered being driven for the first time into the remote northern part of the country. She had
gazed out the car windows at the passing towns: open sewers, houses and stores with cinderblock walls
and corrugated-zinc roofs, old tires and innards of automobiles scattered everywhere. She was reminded
of the landscape she had known as a child when walking beside Route 1 in New Jersey. Off in the
distance, though, she’d caught glimpses of traditional villages—round houses, smoke rising through the
holes in thatched roofs. These seemed beautiful to her. Her first impression, of a society torn between
tradition and modernity, lingered and grew over the next two years.
In Yola, Charlie helped Chukwu get the new university organized and taught Nigerian students his
“Technology and the Moral Order.” And Nancy taught art, feeling as though she learned more than she
taught. “It struck me very forcefully in Nigeria that art wasn’t just something out there, a commodity
that people bought. It was a part of everyday life, it was a basic necessity,” she later said. She got to
know a lot of Nigerians. Their traditional crafts, it seemed to her, were providing the people with “a
sense of order in times of chaos.” She told an art critic some years later, “I believe it is human to hope to
find order and a connection between one’s soul and the world outside.”
Clearly, they were a couple disposed to take chances and to look kindly on a young African. Deo’s
neediness had been obvious. Nancy remembered, from that first time they’d met him, at dinner here in
the loft, suffering through Deo’s attempts to speak English, suffering the way one suffers inwardly for a
person afflicted with a stutter. On that occasion, she and Charlie hadn’t tried to tell him about their own
experiences in Africa. Deo’s story was more interesting to them; besides, communication was difficult
and, for Nancy, nerve-racking. She said that during the whole meal she kept thinking, “This man is so
skinny! This man needs to eat!”
At that dinner, Charlie said, he had sized Deo up as a “serious” person. From the way Deo had talked
about his tortured country, Charlie had concluded that he had “depth.”
Charlie had been in his sixties then, Nancy in her fifties. They weren’t young, and their loft, which
wasn’t large, served as both Charlie’s office and Nancy’s studio. Years before, when Charlie was away
teaching for six months, Nancy had shared the apartment with Lelia, later James O’Malley’s wife. Lelia
had planned to look for another place once Charlie returned, but they all got along so well there seemed
no point in this. “Stay on!” Charlie had declared. Lelia, helping out with expenses, had ended up staying
parts of four years in the loft. So when it came to sharing their lives, the Wolfs had a precedent.
Then again, Charlie told me, speaking of Nancy, “Worry is her natural state.” And when he said this,
Nancy replied, “But it’s true!” Every argument for sheltering a stranger would have come with at least
two worries about the consequences. One thing at least seemed clear, though: the Wolfs didn’t regret
what they’d done.
In their living room, we sat and talked about the time just before they’d first met Deo, when the
genocide in Rwanda had been all over the newspapers and TV. The news had struck Nancy all the more
forcefully because of the time they had spent in Nigeria. She thought of those years as the most
important of her life. The troubled thoughts and feelings about the modern world that she’d been striving
to express in her American pictures had all been magnified in Nigeria. For about a month, she and
Charlie had been obliged to stay in safe houses, because of eruptions of factional violence near the
university in Yola: some two thousand people had been killed. That memory had made the news of the
Rwandan genocide seem near.
“You had paid attention to what was happening in Rwanda,” I said.
“Oh my God!” said Nancy.
“Paid attention?” said Charlie. “After the fact, like everybody else.”
“There was this footage on television,” said Nancy. “I’ll never forget seeing that.”
“I was in Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya in April 1994,” said Charlie. “And we didn’t hear the first thing.
I never heard anything until I got back to New York.”
By that time, Nancy said, she’d had her fill of hearing about slaughter on the radio and staring at footage
of bodies floating down Rwandan rivers. “I had been watching it and listening to it, and I couldn’t even
talk about it, I was so upset. I couldn’t even read about it. And so anyway, when Sharon called us about
Deo, and then it turned out he was from Burundi, I of course didn’t know that Rwanda and Burundi had
anything to do with each other.”
Nancy hadn’t known that this young man had escaped a civil war and a genocide, until Sharon brought
him to dinner: “She explained for Deo that it was the same process, that he’d been caught in all that. And
then the other thing that was so interesting was that he said, or Sharon translated, that he was a third-
year medical student in Burundi, but his father ran cows. And we knew cows from Nigeria, from the
Fulani. We would watch the cows and the young boys and the shepherds go up and down the hills. So
we knew that scene, and that seemed like a long way from medical school.”
“But to look at the boys at the back end of a cow, directing traffic, and one of them could have been
Deo,” said Charlie. “In Burundi instead of Nigeria. Just like on the street in New York today. I look at
the delivery people, at the people working in the supermarkets. Almost all of them seem to be Africans.”
“And you think, ‘Where did this person come from?’” I suggested.
“And what kind of human potential does he have?” Charlie said. “Potential that is not going to be
discovered, is not going to be expressed, is not going to be shared. So I think it really was … Well, we
wouldn’t have stopped just anyone, or even Deo, on the street and said, ‘You look like a bright young
chap, a likely fellow, why don’t you come around for dinner.’ No. No.”
After meeting Deo, Nancy and Charlie had kept track of Sharon’s quest to find a place for him. On one
occasion, the failures mounting up, they had told Sharon they would take Deo in, then called her back to
