Homeward Bound

Photo by James Lee on Unsplash

By the rivers of Babylon where we sat down
And there we wept when we remembered Zion

For the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
How can we sing King Alpha's song in a strange land

The Melodians

I live in an area some distance away from the village where I grew up. I was born and raised there after my parents immigrated to the US from Jamaica. My wife and I now have a house, our dog, a couple of cars and made a life where we live now. Yet, when people ask me where I’m from, my initial reaction is to go back to the beginning.

If I’m out of town and people ask where I’m from, I’ll tell them where I currently live, almost immediately followed with an explanation that it’s not where I’ve always lived. That is, I do that if I haven’t already gone on autopilot and given them the name of my original hometown. I didn’t fit in there in some ways, but it’s where I was forged. Its ways and habits are more familiar to me, even though both places are in the same state and I’ve lived a longer part of my life where we are now. My hometown wasn’t perfect but it’s what I knew, and its rhythms are woven into the fabric of my essence.

It’s made me wonder: where is home, really? Is it where you grew up? Is it wherever you live now? Is it the place you enjoyed most, the place you were most comfortable or some combination of all of the above, plus a few more characteristics?

My parents acclimated and scratched out a life here in America. They made friends, got their citizenship and stood in as established residents for aspiring immigrating family members who applied for visas to come here. They’re part of their local community and have strong bonds with members of the religious sect (I say cult, tomayto, tomahto) from years of worship services together. Yet, whenever they mentioned their country of origin, I noticed they’d refer to it as “back home.”

As a kid whose only home was here, it stood out. You’d hear them on the phone with a friend or relative from the same country, that person usually also in the States and they’d say, “Yes. I heard so-and-so is headed back home next month.” Or, “Have you heard from anybody back home?”

Depending on my age at the time, both parents were here for about a decade or sometimes longer when I heard that phrase. No matter. Whenever the subject of their birthplace came up, it wasn’t referred to as its name. It was back home. It made me wonder, when would America be their home? It was my home, and they made me here. How could I be of them and, quite literally, the Springsteen chorus, born in the USA and my home wasn’t their home?

I noticed that sometimes the cause was food. Ok, almost all the time the thing that they lamented missing was food. The freshly caught fish, seasoned and fried to perfection, the juicy mangos, jerked chicken or pork, ackee and saltfish, bumpy bananas, bammy and many other things. You’ve not heard true homesickness, until you’ve heard a crowd of Jamaican expats groaning in passionate longing over some food item or dish, because you can’t get anything where they are that does justice to the genuine article.

Other times, it was weather. There’s nothing like a sub-zero winter’s day to make you long for the clime of a tropical country you used to take for granted. My poor mom would look outside in December to see the bright sunshine and clear blue skies, that normally meant a comfortably warm day where she was from, and she’d be continually disappointed when the stark arctic reality would hit as soon as you walked outside. She reliably lamented how a day could be so brutally cold where the sun shone with such promise of warmth.

Or was it that? Was it a lack of warmth that wasn’t limited to just weather?

Mom got her citizenship pretty quickly after arriving. She dove headfirst into America; learning its governance, history, culture, picking up its lingo and breathing it back out with her own lightly accented flair. She was ready to embrace America, and I honestly believe that she mostly has done so. I also look back and think of stories she’d tell where you’re reminded that, “you’re not from around here, are you?”

When she arrived, she was sponsored by a local family, which is how we landed in the small village we lived and not in a major city like many other immigrants. The family was kind and she lived in an apartment above their garage while she worked as a housekeeper for a while but left that job before I was born. She’s told a few times about one night where they all went out for ice cream at a local stand.

Each person chose their flavor and then it was Mom’s turn. Without scanning the menu board, she promptly asked for one of her favorites from back home: grape nut. Now, dear reader, your local stand or store may currently carry it, or you’ve traveled abroad and had it, but at this time that flavor of ice cream was nowhere to be found in the entire state, and probably not in any surrounding states either. However, if you’re from a small island and coming to what is advertised as THE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH (*reverb* earth-earth-earth-earth…) you’re absolutely sure they’re going to have at least as many offerings as the place you’re from.

The server and the majority of patrons within earshot laughed her to scorn. As the server gathered themselves, they explained to Mom between sporadic chortles, and in the pedantic tone many in our nation can be so adept at, that she was confused because that’s cereal. Mom insisted, no it’s an ice cream flavor, to which the group of untraveled hyenas laughed harder again, as though she’d escaped from an asylum and said she was looking for the spaceship to take her home.

I wasn’t there but I know my mother. I’ve seen her facial expressions in the retelling. At this point of the story, I can see her back then, seething, quietly composed and eyes narrowing into slits. If Mom were from Krypton, the server’s last moments would have ended in a flash of bright red light before total vaporization. She’s not from there, though. As a classy daughter of the land of wood and water, she held herself with calm control and waited for the laughter of the gastronomically sheltered to die down. After breaking their serve, she held court and proceeded to nonchalantly order one of the serviceable flavors from the board and salvage the rest of the night.

There were the times where both parents’ Queen’s English pronunciation induced claims that they were hard to understand. When it wasn’t that, it came from the other direction, with compliments marveling at their British-inflected speech and how well they spoke, as though they’d done something akin to watching the family dog do an appendectomy.

American culture is a jambalaya served with an anglicized demi-glaze, but its longtime residents don’t seem to understand that. For good or ill, anything that doesn’t fit into the homogenized norm is noted. Constantly. Sometimes the notice of differences in new arrivals is menacing. Other times it’s innocent curiosity. Nevertheless, both can serve to have the same effect; letting you know that even if you’re not unwelcome, you don’t quite fit in.

Now, we come back full circle. How can a place become home, when it constantly reminds you that you’re from somewhere else? My dad didn’t get his citizenship for many years. Whenever we’d ask, he’d say that at some point he thought he’d go back home. No, not the heavenly home promised to Bible believers after your carcass takes its final residence under six feet of dirt. The country of his birth. I’ve had other relatives that came and took residence here for a long time, who decided to go back to live out their old age, and not just for the slower pace and warmer temperatures. When asked, they say they wanted to spend their last days back home.

I thought it funny and strange as a kid that so many relatives could live here for so long but call somewhere else home. Now, I do it too referring to places in the same state but I don’t think it’s for the same reasons they do. Like others with a conscience, I’ve been angrily observing the state-sanctioned terrorizing of anyone with a complexion darker than milk whom ICE agents suspect is not murrican. Any look, last name, accented speech, style of dress, tattoo or anything else that some agent thinks looks “foreign”, is grounds for being snatched up by armed, masked and unidentified men, dressed like cartel members pouring out of some unmarked truck.

The resistance to call America home doesn’t look so funny to me now. It looks prescient. I used to ponder how they held onto a place they sometimes didn’t see more than once or twice a year in visits as home. Now, I think that, just like wild animals can feel the slightest tremors and flee to safety long before human beings feel a full-blown quake, my family members and their immigrant fellows could feel the underlying tension of tenuous acceptance here. It’s as if they knew that behind the smiles of many faces hid a sword of Damocles. The thin cord holding it threatened to snap at any moment, with the razor-sharp blade falling to sever them from whatever lives they worked so hard to build here.

Meanwhile, the news fills with stories of parents dragged from their children, children dragged from their parents, kids kidnapped from schools and patients receiving lifesaving care all being abducted for deportation without processing. Those old heads that referred to their places of origin as “back home” seem to have done the best calculations all along.

Yet, I’m from here. I am American. I’m a citizen born and raised here. My parents are citizens too. Jamaica doesn’t allow dual citizenship, so they had to renounce the citizenship of their home country to make this one theirs. The White supremacist caucus running the government says that doesn’t matter, and their naturalized citizenship shouldn’t afford them any protection. Hell, this crowd is arguing that my birthright citizenship is apparently up for dismissal. Let’s assume they don’t pursue that after they realize the can of worms it is for a prominent family with children from three different wives, and only two of those women coming from the US.

If this country isn’t home for mine, can it be home for me? Those running the government my parents paid income taxes to for decades, are working overtime to find ways to ship them and others out of here forcibly and without cause. My parents funded this government out of the humble earnings they made as legal residents the entirety of their time here, both as resident aliens and citizens. Having established that, anyone reading the aforementioned who initially thought to formulate some “but thuh ulleeguls” argument against their presence can STFU and GTFO.

Even if people are undocumented, this mad dash of raids to remove immigrants is stupid. Farming, meat packing, construction and other industries are all reeling from raids that are disappearing workforces like a David Copperfield special. Even more importantly than economics, it’s inhumane and evil. The leader of this band of Nazis was documented in the past saying he wanted people from Nordic countries to immigrate here, instead of the Asian, Brown and Black people he’s attacking.

I wonder what aspect of this country he’d believe was tantalizing for his desired quarry now?

Is it the high likelihood that the women in their family could die in desperate search of reproductive healthcare that’s readily available where they already are? Is it that if they got the same healthcare in one of the few remaining states offering it, it wouldn’t be covered by insurance and could bankrupt their family after they got it? Is it the nutjob lawyer running the national health department, who got the job because he has the same name as his more accomplished father, pushing nonsensical and unsubstantiated conspiracies, pathologizing autistic people and relying on the germ and vaccine understanding of a kook from the 1740’s?

Or is it the destruction of national education, led by a woman whose claim to fame is producing “wrestling entertainment”, with an energetic assist by people who want the Bible taught as objective fact? Maybe its nightly images of streets teeming with armed soldiers to respond to peaceful protests, like the banana republics this country used to mock? Could it be possible they’re excited about being abducted by one of the teams of government-sanctioned armed bandits, kidnapping and disappearing people to overseas torture prisons? Oooh-ooh-oooh, I’ve got it! It’s got to be the endless trade war flare-ups making everything more expensive across the board.

See, my folks and others came here because this country was a shining beacon of opportunity, freedom and a place they hoped to make home. What they found wasn’t the mythological paradise spun from legends and American TV shows, but they made lives here just the same. They gave this country their best years, some achieving more career acclaim than others but all doing their best to integrate into the communities they landed in. All enriched their destinations with insights and innovations inspired from experiences and ideas they brought with them from “back home.” Many of them even dedicated their bodies to defend this nation, with some of them giving the ultimate sacrifice.

All of those who held out hope of full acceptance, while still holding their hearts at a distance just in case, may have been bracing for the eventual arrival of what we’re witnessing. Some are self-deporting. Some are being forcibly removed to nations they’ve never been to. Now, the America of past imagination is beginning to look like an abandoned mall or a forgotten rust belt town. Even settled citizens are thinking its better days are in the past, and you don’t want to be the last one left to shut the lights off.

Like most migrations from developed countries, those who weigh options and choose to leave are skilled, credentialed and can afford it. Don’t believe me? Read this account:

Leaving Las Vegas

We’ve chatted with friends who are considering making the same decision Dr. Hull made in the article above. We know a few people, but our circle of people is comparatively small compared to others. How many more from this country are thinking the same thing and planning like Snake Plissken for their Escape from America? How many more from abroad with abundant promise, who used to aspire to come here, have now stricken it from their list?

If you make the country unwelcome to whomever the regime in power determines is undesirable, the rules can change at any minute to widen that net. One minute you’re preferred. The next minute, you’re being pummeled, cuffed and dragged to a waiting plane, disappeared in some black site without any of your family being told where you went.

We’re still committed to staying and hopeful that Mayday beats back the Commanders. It’s looking dire. America is ejecting a growing list of “undesirables”, scaring off talented prospective immigrants and bleeding away educated minds into waiting arms overseas. I doubt this country ever got to become home to my parents, and given their advanced ages and its current condition, it probably never will. It is my home and it increasingly feels like I don’t belong here. Where do you go if you don’t belong where you’ve always been from? Maybe you find another way to get “back home.”