Dreamer

“I can’t go with you.”

I faced Keerthana and forced her to look at me.

“You’re going,” I said, but not feeling half as confident as I sounded. A heavy burden weighed down my chest. My whole life I had walked and walked and walked until I toed the line of this day. A tear fell from my eye. My whole life I had walked and walked and yet still I had not gone anywhere.

“No.” Keerthana shook her head and her dark brown hair glistened in the sunlight. I closed my eyes and in my head I stomped on the ground a thousand times and flailed my arms and jumped in circles. When I opened my eyes again Keerthana had walked a few steps away from me and sat on a flat stone that overlooked the Central Park Lake. I kicked the dirt, watching as little stones tumbled their way down the cliff. I leaned down to pick up a little ladybug who had gotten caught in my dust storm.

“It’s such a gorgeous ring.” Keerthana leapt off her rock and lifted my fingers. My diamond glittered and reflected like a thousand tiny mirrors in her dark eyes. I grabbed her hands and squeezed them.

“Please, Keerthana. This isn’t my little sister’s birthday party. I’m getting married. I need you—please. I need you to be there.”

She examined our fingers twisted together, my ebony skin melting into her brown palms, my black hair tumbling past my elbows and sweeping past our hands, mingling with her brown ringlets. Life never felt more real to me then, sharper or brighter, than it had there in the park, with my best friend of five years, surrounded by trees and people and cars and rivers and airplanes and clouds and mountains and cities and countries and oceans, knowing that at the center of everything I had ever known was me sitting in this little corner of the world, holding another person’s hand and hoping, dreaming, praying that she loves you even a little bit enough to step past her fears and walk through the next stage of life with you. I slipped my hand away from hers and wiped tears from my eyes. She twiddled with her thumbs and started drawing small circles in the dirt with a stick.

“I’m sorry. You know I want to be there-”

“Then be there!” I swallowed. There was silence, although the city was bustling beneath us. I spread my skirt around my legs and leaned back to stare at the sky. Keerthana soon lay down next to me.

“G-d Keerthana,” I said. “Do you remember the first thing you asked me?”

She snorted. “I don’t want to bring it up.”

I smiled, pressing against the earth and trying to feel free again. “You said, ‘I didn’t know there were black Jews!’”

She covered her face and twisted onto her stomach, and I laughed out loud, nudging her side until she finally turned and attacked me. We poked each other and giggled, rolling onto the grass and kicking up dust.

Eventually Keerthana sat up, brushing dirt off her sleeve and smirking at me.

“You never were good at wrestling,” I said, my stomach aching delightfully.

She laughed and leaned back against a rock. I slithered up next to her.

“Every will look at me funny,” she said after a moment. “I’m not like you. I’m not one of you.”

I leaned my head against the rock and took in a deep breath. I didn’t know what to say. What could you say, in the face of fear, in the face of skin color and race and religion and everything that separates us? Honestly, after all the speeches and songs and poems were over, what was there to say?

I placed both of my hands on her shoulders and stared into her eyes.

“So what?”

She blinked. “What do you mean—I—I’m just different from everyone who will be there. I—”

“So. What.”

She blinked again, but this time, there was a spark in her eyes. A thieving smile began to steal the corner of her lips and I saw within her the same defiant determination that had enveloped me when I first met my fiancé. She leaned over and hugged me tightly, and I started to laugh.

“I’ll be there, Aliyah,” she said. “Of course I’ll be there.”

-----

Asher and I stood on the corner of the street, waiting for our parents to finish talking with the owners of the wedding hall. His mother kept glancing back through the glass at us, making sure that we were not alone or touching, even for a second, both considered violations of strict laws of conduct of the Torah. Asher stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at me from under his lashes. I giggled a bit, for no reason at all other than I found something in him which I had never seen in anyone else.

“My cousins from Miami called,” he said. “They said they wouldn’t come to the wedding unless you spoke Yiddish.”

I laughed. “Maybe you’ll just have to teach me.”

“In two weeks I should teach you Yiddish?”

“Well maybe my family won’t come unless you speak Amharic.”

He smiled, and it reminded me how unique his blue eyes and white skin would be to my family tree. “Could you really teach me Amharic?”

“I don’t think I really speak it well enough. My parents probably could, although I don’t think they’d have the patience.”

“Are you calling me stupid, Ms. Aliyah?”

“No, Asher. I just think you should stick to your math and I’ll do the language learning.”

“Fair enough,” he said. There was a warmth between us that held me close where he could not. Our parents eventually exited the building and we parted ways on the block, Asher and his parents getting into their black minivan, and my parents hailing a cab. My mother detailed every single thing she liked and disliked about the wedding hall, and I stared out the window, watching as it began to rain and trying to focus on each house as it passed. Two young girls ran into a house, reminding me of all of the rainy days I had spent with my good friend Ahuvah, who was now married and living in Israel. When I was younger, she had been the person I looked up to the most out of all of my friends. Once when I was twelve she invited me to spend the Sabbath at her house. Friday evening with her family was wonderful and warm and delicious, but later I lay awake in her room and compared the darkness of my hand against the blackness of the night.

In the morning, I informed Ahuvah that I would not be accompanying her to synagogue. She put down her hair brush and looked at me through her mirror.

“I can’t go,” I said, feeling sheepish. I sunk down onto her bed. “Everyone will see.”

“See what?” She pinned a few red curls against her temple and hooked a bracelet around her wrist.

“That I’m different.”

Ahuvah turned fully to look at me.

“You’re Jewish just like me. You’re a follower of the commandments. Does the Torah say that only white people can be religious?”

I shrugged, not being able to explain myself sufficiently, only seeing keenly that my dark skin seemed only darker against my white blouse.

“I won’t fit in,” I said. “Everyone will notice.”

Ahuvah shrugged too.

“So what?”

Ahuvah had been fourteen at the time, and probably a little wiser for her two years on me. It was her defiance that had strengthened me, and made me start looking for equality rather than separation. I knew there was intolerance in the world, lurking in shadows and behind closed doors, but as I got older and grew up with Ahuvah, I really wanted to change that. I tried as hard as I could to confront the issues head on and try to talk to people’s hearts. Undeniably I had a lot of painful setbacks. But I could never give up my dream. If I could even just change one person, then maybe I had changed a whole world.

-----

I went to work that night reminiscing about Ahuvah’s wedding and the first few times I met Asher. Keerthana was off on her break when I got there, leaning against a ledge with her boyfriend, Nitin.

“Hey Aliyah.” He waved at me, and I waved back, slipping my apron over my black shirt.

“Are you working all night, Keerthana?”

“No,” Nitin answered for her. “My lovely Indian princess and I are going out.” He tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. Keerthana giggled and squirmed out of his arms to link arms with me.

“Sorry, I should have told you,” she said. “I switched shifts with Amber.”

“That’s okay, I don’t mind.”

Keerthana threw my hat to me from where it hung on the hook and I titled it sideways and posed for her.

“How do I look?”

She laughed. “Like employee of the month, for sure.”

“Right. Because it’s my dream to serve coffee for the rest of my life.”

“Her, at least you have a job.” She winked at me, and then kissed me on the cheek and twirled away, back towards Nitin. The coffee shop I worked at wasn’t kosher, so no one from my community frequented the store. With Keerthana gone, and me not knowing many of the other employees very well, I spent my time observing the customers and thinking of what my married life would be like. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. No one told me it would be easy. I knew I was a dreamer. I was lucky that Asher’s family accepted me; that his who knows how many years of unsullied Jewish lineage from Ukraine hadn’t stopped them from seeing that we were just like them.

A stray customer dropped a small brownie on the table and I rang it up.

“Anything else, sir?”

“The Ethiopian brew, please?”

“The Yirgacheffe, sir?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.” He smiled at me and I swiped his credit card for him.

“If you wait over there we’ll bring it up in just a minute. Have a great night, sir.”

“Thank you.” He took his receipt and slid down the length of the table, and I turned to make his coffee. Every time I made this drink I wished I knew the field where it was grown. I wished I knew the farmer who grew it, and the lands that fed it. I wished I had felt the rain on my face and soaked in the sun. I wished I knew what it meant to be an Ethiopian. At least Keerthana had been born in India; at least she remembered a little bit of where she came from. I had never seen Ethiopia, but my parents had been born into its deserts; I heard the ancient stories and I spoke a bit of the tongue. It was tough, being in between, in between race, in between religion, in between lands. I was Jewish, Jewish for two thousand years, Jewish since the sand had been rock, and yet I was also African, African deeper than the color of my skin, but because it was in my soul, because it was the memory that I wish I had. My parents had been airlifted from Ethiopia to Israel by Operation Moses, but they left after they began to feel discriminated against for their color. They eventually emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn before I was born.

It is hard enough for me to be an Orthodox Jew in modern times when the secular world beckons at every corner for you to abandon your traditions, but being an Ethiopian Jew in Brooklyn, the center of Eastern European Hasidism, has been a challenge every step of the way. Asher’s two older brothers were both married to young girls who descended from Eastern European Jewry. I was the odd one out, in every sense. I felt out of place being black, because I was Jewish, and out of place being Jewish, because I black. Meeting Asher and leaning to trust him was the first big step I took towards defeating intolerance in my little corner of the world. And yet I knew; I was still just a dreamer.

Asher called me later that night before I went to sleep.

“What did Keerthana say? Will she come?”

“Yes.” I smiled, happy that he remembered. I had only briefly mentioned my frustrations with her refusal to attend the wedding.

“That’s good. I’m glad she can come.”

“But you’ve never even met her.”

“I know. But she’s your best friend, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. But she’s not Jewish. I thought your family might think that was a little weird.”

“If any of them do care, I think that’s a problem.”

“This is why I love you, Asher.”

I could hear him breathing on the other line and I closed my eyes, imagining his face.

“I’m a little scared of your cousins who haven’t met me yet,” I said quietly.

“Why?”

I swallowed. I didn’t want to say this. I didn’t want to say it, why was I going to say it?

“You know something Asher, I’m proud of who I am. I’m not going to give that up.”

“I never asked you to. I love you just the way you are.”

“But I’m different,” I whispered.

“Different,” he repeated.

“I mean, won’t your cousins be surprised that you’re marrying someone like me? I mean—”

“So what?”

I stopped. “What—I—what?”

“So what? Who cares?”

I blinked at my phone, and then I started laughing. My whole life I had walked and walked and walked until I finally stepped forward and flew into the sun.