mind’s turn to run.
If only he could surrender himself to sleep. He had slept on dirt floors most of his life, and in forests and
fields, but it was hard to surrender to sleep on the piece of floor that Muhammad had staked out inside
the tenement. At night the adjacent rooms filled up with other squatters. Lying awake in the dark, on his
blanket, his mind cycling through images he couldn’t find a way to stop, he heard babies crying,
drunken voices arguing, muffled moans and grunts that he recognized as sounds of sex, disgusting
because public. Usually he dozed off only a little before dawn. Awakening at first light, he was apt to
think, “Oh, it’s samoya.” The word meant “one o’clock” literally, but on the hill where Deo grew up
there were no clocks, and samoya was the name for the first hour of daylight. For a moment he was
himself again, a medical student with a family that loved him and owned a fine herd of cows. Then he’d
realize that the light was coming through the broken windows of the tenement, and he wondered who
was Deo now.
Muhammad reminded Deo a little of his favorite uncle, a man of few words and completely reliable. On
a Saturday morning, Muhammad handed him a subway map, and Deo spent the day learning how to
read it, as they rode the trains beneath Manhattan. Along the way he followed Muhammad to a store
named Gristedes, on the Upper East Side. The job was delivering groceries, and the terms were twelve
hours a day, six days a week, fifteen dollars a day, no lunch break.
At a bookstore near the grocery, Deo bought a pocket-size French-English dictionary and a little
notebook. “Slow” was one of the first words he looked up. It also had a practical meaning at the grocery.
When one of the cashiers made a sour face and declared, “Slow,” she was saying that there weren’t
many customers around, and this meant that Deo would be ordered to stock shelves or be sent to the
basement to clean up or, once in a while, be dispatched to another store, called A&P or Sloan’s or Food
Emporium, which all seemed to be connected somehow. The A&P was across town. He’d be driven
there in the back of a van, riding among brooms and other tools. There was no seat. He tried to brace
himself against the walls, but the first time the van made a turn, he lost his balance and slammed into
one of the walls, clattering among the tools. One of the men riding up front—he was African and spoke
French—called back over his shoulder, “Hey! Careful with the tools back there!” Sounding worried, the
man asked, “Did one of my brooms fall out?” In his mind, Deo answered, “No, it’s just me.” He laughed
to himself—this was the way you managed discomfort back home—and thought: “Somehow I wish I
could be treated like a broom.”
Mostly he delivered groceries, from seven in the morning until seven at night. He had looked up the
essential words. These were “service” and “entrance” and “delivery.” “Where is the service entrance?”
was the first English phrase he mastered. Having no one else to tell them to, he told himself his jokes.
“Delivery,” he decided, was his American name. Out on foot with his grocery cart, he would ring the
bell at the door or metal gate that read “Service Entrance.” A voice would growl through the intercom,
“Who is it?”
“Delivery.”
Some addresses were better than others. Some were only a short walk away, some had service entrances
at street level which weren’t hard to negotiate, some were easier than others to find—along Park
Avenue, for instance, the street signs showed the numbers on a block. By the end of his day, though, it
seemed as if every delivery was fifteen blocks from the store and every entrance was like the one off
Park Avenue that had a wrought-iron gate fringed with barbed wire and a sign by the bell that read
“Please wait five minutes for superintendent.” The first time Deo came there, he took out his pocket
dictionary and spent the five minutes looking up those words. Now he simply stood and waited at the
iron door, weary in his legs, weary all over, feeling a wave of nausea waft upward toward his chest,
threatening to turn into tears. When the superintendents arrived, often after more than five minutes, Deo
would say, “Hi”—according to his pocket dictionary, this was a friendly greeting—but as often as not
the superintendents wouldn’t bother to answer. They unlocked the gates, but only a few held the doors
open for him. Deo would lift the bags of groceries out of his shopping cart, hold the gate open with his
foot, and inch down narrow, clanging metal stairs. He’d shoulder open the next door, make his way past
the trash cans of an untidy, gray basement, ride up on the service elevator, then lug the bags down
carpeted hallways to apartment doors. Behind some of them he had glimpses of rooms that looked like
pictures he’d seen at school of Belgian palaces. Most of the people who opened the doors were polite
but brusque and almost never friendly. Many just looked at him oddly when he offered his “Hi.”
Sometimes as he walked back toward the store near the end of another long day, he’d stop and stare at
the canopied, carpeted front entrances of Park Avenue apartment buildings, and bitter thoughts rose up:
“I just do not deserve to use an entrance like that. And yet I am bringing them their food. Don’t respect
me, but at least respect your food.”
To return to the Gristedes was no relief. The manager was a white, middle-aged man whom everyone
called Goss, and right from the start Deo knew that Goss hated him. The man kept a long wooden pole
near his desk. Deo would see the tip of the pole coming at him and force out a smile, wanting to break
the pole in half. Goss would poke him with it to get his attention, to send him in one direction or
another, or sometimes, it seemed, just for fun.
Deo searched his dictionary for English equivalents to adieu. He wanted something with more feeling
than “goodbye.” He settled on “I’m finished” and “See you tomorrow.” Maybe if he said those words to
Goss at the end of the day, the man would realize Deo was a good person and would keep him. Deo
couldn’t afford to lose his pay, and he couldn’t bear to think he might be judged unfit even for a job as a
grocery boy. But the farewells did no good. If anything, Goss seemed to hate him more. Goss would say
something loudly, and the cashiers and the other delivery boys would turn and look at Deo and everyone
would laugh—even the fellow delivery boy who also came from French-speaking Africa and who Deo
thought was his friend.
When no one else was nearby, when he and the other young African were stocking shelves together, Deo
asked in French what it was Goss said about him that made everyone laugh.
His friend looked away as he spoke. “For example, he says that the people where you come from are
starving, and that’s why they’re killing each other. So they can eat each other.”
Most of the other workers, Deo thought, couldn’t really be amused by a joke like that. They were only
trying to please Goss. They were probably afraid for their jobs, too. And, Deo realized after a while,
every delivery boy wanted Goss to favor him with the good deliveries, the deliveries to customers
known for giving tips.
Deo had a lot of experience with bargaining, but the whole idea of soliciting tips was new, and, once he
understood it, repugnant. His French-speaking African friend at the store explained. No one could
survive in New York on fifteen dollars a day. You had to get tips. You lingered in doorways, you cleared
your throat, sometimes you asked for a tip outright. But this was the same as begging, Deo thought.
Back home a self-respecting person didn’t even yawn in public, because to yawn meant you were
hungry, and to admit that you were hungry was to admit that you were incompetent or, worse, that you
were lazy. The beggars you saw in cities like Bujumbura were mainly displaced country people who had
lost their pride. The first time a customer in a doorway held out a dollar bill toward Deo, he raised his
hands as if to push the money back, and said in his thickly accented English, “No. No. Thank you very
much. Eeet is okay.”
But this didn’t happen often. It wasn’t hard to tell that whenever possible Goss sent him to tipless
destinations—to addresses where a doorman took the groceries and delivered them himself and got the
tip, or where customers received the groceries and quickly shut the door or said they were sorry but they
didn’t have any change. It was also clear by then that the other delivery boys were usually the ones Goss
picked to work at one of the other stores on days when the cashiers declared, “Slow.” Not that Deo liked
riding in the back of the van across town to the A&P, but he felt wounded. By now it seemed obvious
that a delivery boy belonged to a layer near the bottom of New York’s hierarchy, and also that there was
a bottom to that near-bottom, which he occupied. Standing at another service entrance—they all might
as well have been fringed with barbed wire—waiting for another brusque superintendent who would
hardly even look at him, he wondered whether this could really be the station he had been put on earth to
occupy. Not long ago he had been a student so accomplished he’d been offered a scholarship to college
in Belgium. Not long ago he had been a medical student at the top of his class. “And here I am,” he
thought, “being treated as someone who has a primate brain.” “God,” he said silently. “Take my life.”
“A New Yorker.” Deo had heard the phrase around the store. Even Muhammad used it, and the
Senegalese tailors and sidewalk merchants. This world, he was beginning to understand, was divided,
among other ways, between people who were “New Yorkers” and people who weren’t. Within a couple
of weeks, he felt he had all but mastered the subway. The trains ran like rivers, taking you anywhere. To
look at his subway map was pleasing, like looking at a set of differential equations he’d solved. Never
mind that he had solved only one, his route between Harlem and the Upper East Side, or that he always
rode in the first car, so as to gain a little extra time to peer out the windows at the station signs and
decide whether he’d reached the right stop. Riding along, subway map sticking out of his hip pocket,
Deo told himself he was becoming a New Yorker, too.
He had discovered Central Park. The first time he’d walked into it, curious about the trees on the other
side of Fifth Avenue, he had thought, “My God, I just discovered a forest!” It had become one of his
favorite places, along with bookstores.
Some of the stores were like forests themselves, forests of books, more books than he’d thought there
were in the world, and all in one place. He often went to the stores in the evening after work, just to
recover from being poked with Goss’s stick, just to walk among the tables and shelves and pick up
books and turn the pages and imagine he was reading them. The stores he liked best had chairs where he
could sit and look at books he hoped one day to read. Sometimes he fell asleep in the chairs. Bookstores,
he found, were one place he could sleep, but never for long, before a clerk or manager woke him up and
asked him to leave.
He always spent some time with the dictionaries. Many people had looked at him oddly when he’d said,
“Hi.” There had to be something wrong with the way he was saying it. At the Barnes & Noble on
Eighty-third Street, he found a dictionary with an international phonetic alphabet, something his pocket
dictionary didn’t have, and after a little study it all came clear. He had been pronouncing the word as if it
were French. He’d been saying “Hee” instead of “Hi.” He looked around in the store for the cheapest
dictionary that contained the phonetic alphabet. But it was an English-only dictionary, and after he spent
half a day’s pay to own it, he realized he had solved only half his problem. When he heard a new word,
he would if possible get someone to spell it for him or guess at the spelling and write the word in his
notebook. Then he’d look it up in his new English dictionary and learn how to pronounce it. But most of
the time he couldn’t decipher the English definition in his little phrasebook. So he’d take his notebook to
the bookstore and look up the word in a French-English dictionary. It was a laborious process.
Performing it was often the best part of his day.
Many evenings he composed English sentences out of dictionaries and wrote down the words and
sounded out the pronunciations in his mind. Some of the sentences he made up produced puzzled looks
when he tried them out at the grocery or on a customer, but he managed to explain to a pharmacist—in a
low voice so no one else would hear—that his feet were afflicted with a disgusting fungus. The cause
was obvious to Deo: six months on the run in wet sneakers.
When he had left Bujumbura, a close friend from medical school named Claude had been living in an
apartment with other displaced young men. The apartment had been equipped with a telephone. Deo had
made sure to take the number with him. He kept it on a piece of paper in his pocket. He asked the
Senegalese clothing merchants whether he could call from the phone in their apartment. Too expensive,
they said, but they showed him how to make a streetcorner call from Harlem to Bujumbura. You went
out to the sidewalk to one of the open telephone stands and right away someone, almost always a man,
would come up to you. He’d get you to write down the number you wanted to call, and he’d take the
phone and punch in a bunch of numbers. Usually, the phone man would turn his back as he dialed—so
that you couldn’t see the numbers he was pressing, Deo figured. He didn’t want to know the details of
the phone men’s business, because if they were doing something illegal and he knew it, he wouldn’t
want to use their services, and he didn’t know any other way he could afford to call Burundi.
The first time Deo made a streetcorner call, the phone man demanded five dollars. Deo parted with the
money reluctantly. Miraculously, the phone rang on the other end, and a voice answered in Kirundi and
said that, yes, Claude was there.
The news was bad. Civil war continued. Claude came from the same region as Deo. To speak to him was
almost like speaking with family. Deo could have talked to him for hours. The phone man was making a
