We Came for the American Dream. It's Now a Tragedy.
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My mother is one of those “birthday-month” people. As soon as the snow begins its gentle descent from the barren tree limbs, you can count on her to remind you that she will be welcoming all manner of treats—from March 1 to March 31. Greeting cards and phone calls, fancy dinners and custom cakes. Have a grievance with her? Save it for April. My mother is too busy celebrating life.
But as her 59th birthday approaches, I notice a stark difference in her demeanor. She seems apprehensive, almost fragile. Her own mother, my grandmother Catherine, was this age when our family lost her. And though my mother’s own blood was never carelessly infected with HIV during an otherwise banal surgery, and though she never subsequently developed cancer in her bones, something told my mother that she, too, would die prematurely. That something then made her tell me the same, over and over again.
As a child, I thought nothing of it. Did other mothers not constantly pepper their scoldings with Ewondo insults and ominous threats that someday they would be gone, too dead to remind us to pick up our toys? Were we not all being prepared to survive a world in which our parents could disappear tomorrow?
How young our family died.
The unluckiest of us were picked off before proper childhood even began. In the dark of the night, our little foreheads delirious with fever, and under the high sun, cinched to our mothers’ backs by Ankara cloth while the women unwittingly yanked peanuts out of the earth. Later: complications from diabetes. Complications from malaria. Complications from giving birth. Complications from sickle-cell disease and HIV and the hepatitis alphabet. Complications from failures in public health. We died early and avoidably. Stupid deaths, all of them.
But not my mother. No, my mother survived. My mother fought her way from Cameroon to the United States, with layovers in France and England and little money to her name, plus a younger me in tow. What a feat, I remind her. A longer life is part of her prize. She deserves to see 59 and decades more, to grow old and gray as millions of westerners do. That is my theory. Because if these words can be true for her, can’t they also be true for me?
Stupid death is on my mind again the following year, as my mother turns 60 and surpasses her mother in life, just in time for a global pandemic to break out. I watch with astonishment and despair as a disjointed American government hoards the fruit of its scientific breakthroughs, loath to share a fraction of its enormous resources with countries like Cameroon. Never mind that experts agree that a little generosity would go a long way toward slowing the proliferation of variants around the world. Capitalism, the beloved, must be protected. It must be prioritized at all costs. And so the disease crests and wanes. It lingers for weeks, months, years. We must learn to live with the disease, to accept its deaths as the collateral of western freedom.
By some combination of precaution, luck, and, frankly, more luck, most of my family—here, in France, and in Cameroon—evades the sickness. A year into the pandemic, I even become pregnant by choice.
For 38 weeks, I am consumed with the life burgeoning in me—a life that, strangely enough, draws me closer to stupid death. All pregnancies—“easy” ones included—are fraught with danger for the carrier: preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, unruly placentas, hemorrhages, miscarriages, and now, the coronavirus. I am well aware that in this country, being pregnant while Black also raises the stakes. Even when controlling for economic class, education, and age, Black women and infants suffer higher rates of pregnancy-related deaths compared with their white counterparts. (The experience does not change my mind: To force this degree of risk, this bodily imposition, this financial burden, on anyone would be utter madness.)
I ponder my responsibility toward this child if I do make it past birth. The basic stuff feels easy. Love them. Protect them. Prioritize them. Love them some more. But another task keeps coming back to me: Grant them the skills to survive the violence of this world alone. Prepare them for a world without me.
How I am my mother’s daughter.
I want to shake off her pessimism even as America marks its millionth Covid-related death just as my family, now three of us, finally contracts the virus. I try even as my husband lies in bed, coughing, while I cool off the viral hives streaking our baby’s skin with a cold towel. But on the same day, a gunman murders 19 elementary-school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas. Details emerge through the fog of grief. Increasingly, it appears that police idled outside the building, armed to the teeth and ready to stop parents from intervening. A majority of the victims’ last names are Hispanic. I wonder if some of their ancestors also came to save the next generations from stupid death.
No such luck: A month later to the day, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ends the right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade. One needs only a modicum of common sense to foresee the consequences of setting the clock back 50 years on reproductive freedom. I brace for the magnitude of loss that will ensue from imposing continued pregnancy onto children, victims of abuse, people with medical issues, people with financial limitations, people who aren’t ready, people who cannot do it again, people who simply refuse to do it ever.
Astonishingly, the speaker of the House responds to the assault with a poetry reading. Meanwhile, the White House urges all sides to resist violence. Later, it dismisses calls to place abortion clinics on federal land. If there is a plan to rescue us, it is undetectable from where I sit.
Scrolling through the Fourth of July weekend fatalities ten days later—five killed in DC; seven at a parade in Highland Park, IL, including the parents of a toddler; almost certainly more elsewhere—I tell myself that my mother’s suspicions were well founded. Perhaps I should accept that the early, avoidable kind of death also thrives here. And that it will stay, linger, crest, because those who spend their every waking hour urging us to vote them into power one more time would rather stand outside, and prevent us from running in to stop the horrors, than deploy the state’s arsenal in our defense—a lesson that I, another mother preparing her child to survive a world without her, dread to teach someday.
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