Where is Home?

by Jackson Jones

When someone asks me where I’m from, I wonder how much they mean it. Do you want to know where I was born? Where I was raised? Where I’m loyal to? What I love?

I could show you my life across a map. Tracing my finger across the eastern seaboard, up from the deep south, west over miles of green, I could draw you my family tree. Where I’ve been has directly informed who I am. Through travel I have taken on the characteristics of the places I’ve lived. I could play connect the dots across the major U.S. cities and give you a pretty good idea of who I am. My homes have made me into the person I am.

If someone has the time, Ill ask them. I always mean it. I can read your map and feel your topography. Tell me where you were born, where your grandmother lived, what hand soap is in the bathrooms of your childhood home. Let me into your kitchen and tell me what it smells like. What color was your ceiling. I could ask you 1000 superficial questions, or I could ask you one.

I met a man at a school event, and I introduced myself. He introduced himself, and I asked him. He paused, and told me there are two important questions, and they represent you. I knew I didn’t have the time then, but that I had to hear his story eventually. We spend the night talking in groups, and I picked up pieces of his story where I could find them. I walked out with a partial picture and a name, unsatisfied.

Weeks later, I called him with time and the question, again. He unfurled his story. It began in Sierra Leon, where he was born. His parents completed education available in Sierra Leon, and pursued school in America when Abdul was two. Through his adolescence he only knew his parents through letters and photos.  Abdul primarily lived with his grandmother but felt raised by the community.

“I had a lot of people who step in to fill that void of me not having my parents around. And then, my grandmother was very, very close to me. They used to tease me and say, I was her purse…she defined to me what loving my understanding of what love is.”

Even being so connected to the community, Abdul still felt the weight of his situation. He described that even in a tightly communal culture, there is still an emotional rift and separation. He described a native word, something he is“ yet to be able to translate in English for as, as I've lived here. And this word is, beyah. You know, it sounded like what you drink, but it's not, it's not the same way.”

He says “so you, you've come to me and you're like, oh, Abdul, I broke my, my leg. You know, I don't have insurance. I'm going to tell you. Beyah, beyah. So which says take it, deal with it, cope with it. It's going to be okay. Tomorrow will be better there today have old. All of that is encapsulated in that one.”

In this word lives the sentiment of the culture, and Abdul’s tumultuous upbringing. An acknowledgment of hardship, but a look to a brighter future.

At nine, Abdul is uprooted again. He had outgrown the confines of his small province and was becoming too much for just his grandmother to handle.

“In Africa, boy, when you have a family member who's successful, very common to adopt brother and sister's kids. And its not a formal adaptation process. But its just like bring them to my house. I have enough space I have enough room I have enough money. I'll feed them, I'll clothe them ill get them t school. So I came over. “

Abdul went to live with his uncle, in the nearby city of Freetown. In the city, he had amenities and opportunities unavailable out in the country.

“I was the Fresh Prince of Bel Air… we had maids… every evening we sat down and drank tea and hot coco.” While his new life in the city was luxurious, it was a far cry from perfect. He felt ostracized by his uncles wife, who “created that he created a dynamic of the house… who because I wasn't related to by blood, did not like me. She didn't like me. She knew me as an outsider who came up the problem. And she was trying to reserve as well for her children with him. “

Even in this new home, among family, Abdul still felt slightly on the outskirts. In this absence, he focused on his studies. Through his entire upbringing, education has been an emphasis, and he thrived in the opportunities of the city. A provision of his eventual immigration to America had always been his completion of school in sierra Leon. Abdul thrived in his new school, and nestled into a new home.

After three years in the city, Abdul received an urgent call.

“I came home on Monday after school and my uncle called and he said today is your last day going school. I was, I was very confused. I didn't understand what he meant when I asked for clarification. So, oh yeah. You said, uh, your dad and your mom sent a ticket. You're leaving Wednesday. To go to the states. “  Abdul was mailed a one way ticket to Washington DC, where he lived in government housing with his aunt as he finalized paperwork that would reunite him with his family in Portland. Before leaving for new lands, he returned home to McKinney, to say his final goodbyes. At only 13 years old, Abdul was laid with his family’s hopes and expectations.

“Now that you're going over to the heaven, well you go to the land of milk, do not forget how difficult things are for those that you left behind. Yeah. So then later on, that is what we call survivor's guilt. “ With only a plane ticket, Abdul crossed an ocean to the life he had imagined since childhood.

America was not what he expected. Upon arrival, Abdul lived in the rough projects of D.C., a world completely foreign. He was introduced to the very real concept racial tensions, and was thrust into a centuries old struggle that was not his. He felt immediately distinguished from the majority of students in his majority African American high school. Even among people who looked like him he felt isolated, and was confused why people of his kin did not acknowledge him as one of their own.  

He felt it especially painful to be ostracized “by people who look like you, that's devastating. Um, you know what and confusing as hell. I mean I cannot even grapple with your layers of confusion, but yeah. You know, to what extent did you feel like you were trying to or did have to hide elements of your native culture? Lose touch with those or, or mask those? “ In order to survive Abdul said he got “rid of anything that makes me different fashions I could. I don't have to deal with it. “ While D.C. was rough, it was only a temporary stay, and before long Abdul was cleared to meet his parents in Portland Oregon.

Upon arriving to Portland, his reuniting with his parents was not what he expected. The 14 years away had rendered them nearly strangers. While he found it easier to rekindle his relationship with his mother, as he says “she very much resembled my grandmother, who raised me”, Abdul describes his father as “a hard nosed disciplinarian.” He says his father desperately wished to teach and bond, looking to fulfil the lost time. Abdul did not appreciate his father’s lectures, having already traveled the world before puberty he did not find them meaningful.

“My dad still and he was wanting us to go play soccer at the waterfront park and I'm looking at him like, dude. And he wants to give me this lecture about what you do with the ball and he wants to explain it and I'm thinking, stop talking. Put the ball down and let me show you what I got because I was so freaking good that I was already, I was, I was a prospect of play for the national team back home. “

Abdul felt a disconnect from his native culture as he assimilated to American culture, and says that it took his own children to rekindle his ties to his homeland. Through his hardships, he reflected on the values he had taken from Sierra Leon.

“When you get a lot of disappointment, a lot of, uh, uh, hurt from this larger societal world, you learn to know that sometimes those people who were there who was telling you those things like you didn't want to hear are the ones that could be there for you in ways that these other people can't. So just for me, I went back and we built my relationship with my parents. I made it, it was intentional for me to spend as much time as I could. I ask as many questions as I could about, to, to ask as many questions as I could about our heritage, our family. Um, all of, because this was all valuable information that I could pass on to my son.”

I asked Abdul where he was from, and was taken across the world. While I’ve only met him twice, through his experiences I can feel his homeland and his culture. I see his map and can appreciate his journey.

Only through such a simple question can I begin to understand and empathize with someone’s life.