The American Dream!
My father, Ibnou Sidibe, is from Senegal. His father was a politician who served as mayor of the third largest city in Senegal, Thiès (pronounced chess). Dad was his second son from his second marriage. The oldest son died at two years, leaving my father as the oldest boy, a very important position in a Senegalese family. Dad was sent to school in France to be an architect. Sometime after graduating, he figured he’d move to America. I’ve never asked him why—I always assumed it was to make his fortune, like in some fairy tale with him selling his prized cow for magic beans to grow a beanstalk to make a boat to sail to America. There is no evidence that my dad sailed here in a boat made out of a beanstalk that grew from magic beans that were purchased after the sale of an exceptional cow, but I’ve always preferred that idea. My dad has always been so boring that wherever there’s a blank space in his life story I fill it with whimsy in an attempt to like him more.
In all probability, he took a plane over. He stayed with family members or friends of family or wherever he could. He even slept in the hallways of hotels and apartment buildings, but I don’t think he did that for too long. He learned English pretty quickly, made friends, got a room, and found a few jobs. In order to stay in this country, though, he needed to find a wife. He let his new friends know of his plan, and through them, Ibnou met Alice. He offered her about $4,000 to marry him so he could get his green card.
She agreed. My mom says that she cared about him as a person and that that’s why she married him. She says the money wasn’t important.
My father courted her for a whole year after they got married before she finally fell for him enough to sleep with him. That’s right! My mom is so classy that you have to marry her and then wait a year before she gives you any play. He took her to Africa to his hometown, and that’s when she says she actually fell in love with him and decided that he was her husband for real and that they’d build a life together.
Before she visited Africa, she thought it was filled with savages with spears in their hands chasing lions. My mom grew up a dark-skinned girl in the most racist part of America: the Deep South. She survived “Whites Only” drinking fountains and the KKK knocking on her door looking for an uncle. Hollywood—Hollywood, where shiny tan white people play Egyptian pharaohs and queens—never told my mom that Cleopatra looked like her. That Cleopatra had dark skin and a round body. But when my mom landed in Senegal, she saw a sea of black people who looked like her. Who looked like her mother and father, like her entire family. And they were beautiful. They were doctors, lawyers, artists, mothers, sisters, brothers, fathers. None of them were savages. None of them were powerless people stolen and enslaved to build a nation that would kill and condemn them. Africa was a mirror to my mother. It was home. It’s easy to fall in love with Africa. It’s easy to fall in love in Africa. I believe that my mother fell in love with Africa, not with Ibnou. (That’s my theory, anyway.) Why else would my mom ignore the two major signs of impending doom that accompanied her green-card-but-I-care-for-you marriage?
Sign one: My mother and my father’s mother looked like twins. Really! Everyone in my dad’s family looks just like everyone in my mom’s family. Even my dad is identical to my mother’s brother, and not in a general “they all look alike” way. As it turns out, my mother’s ancestors, who were stolen from Africa and sold into slavery, were taken from Senegal. A blood test confirmed that Alice’s ancestors are Ibnou’s ancestors. My mother and father have the same bloodline! Isn’t that gross? Furthermore, they were both carriers of the same genetic blood disorder, hemoglobin C disease, which causes an abnormal breakdown of the red blood cells. They were told to not have children together. That was before they fell in love! Before Africa! After Africa, my mother apparently forgot all about the downside of marrying someone whose mother looked just like her.
Sign two: My dad’s ex-girlfriend. Yes! While they were in my dad’s hometown, my father introduced my mother to his first cousin Tola. He had dated Tola before he left Senegal for school in France. Upon meeting Alice, Tola asked if she could be my mother’s wife-in-law. You see, men in Senegal are allowed to marry multiple women at one time. Polygamy. My grandfather had more than one wife and many children. The wives all lived in separate homes with their children, and my grandfather sort of moved around from home to home, family to family. It’s their culture. This is the life my father was raised to lead, and the life that my grandmother and most Senegalese women were raised to accept.
Not Alice, though. She let Ibnou know that if he wanted to marry Tola he’d have to divorce her first. Ibnou assured Alice that it was all over between him and Tola, and that he was dedicated to Alice and their new marriage. She believed him. After leaving Africa, Alice took Ibnou to Georgia to meet her family before they went back home to New York City. A year later, they had Ahmed, who was born with hemoglobin C disease. Barely three months after giving birth to my brother, my mother became pregnant with me. There was a three-in-four chance that I would be born with the same blood disorder, but as would become the theme of my life, I beat the odds. Less than three years into their green-card-but-I-care-for-you marriage, Alice and Ibnou had the perfect nuclear family in a three-bedroom apartment with a terrace in one of Brooklyn’s roughest neighborhoods: Bed-Stuy (birthplace of Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, and me!). And they lived happily ever after. Oh, wait! Not really!