Tamba Hali Read online

  CHAPTER 4

  THE CROSSING

  One hundred and sixty-three years after the first Liberians arrived from America, Henry Hali made the return trip.

  Tamba Hali’s father was an educated man. He had studied math and chemistry at Cuttington University, located in the Suakoko District of Bong County, just to the northwest of Gbarnga on the way toward Monrovia. It was one of the oldest private four-year colleges on the African continent. Many of the leaders of Liberia’s government in the 1980s were educated at Cuttington.

  Henry was a learner and a teacher, and he didn’t like the direction he saw his country headed in. So, in 1985, he left for the original Land of the Free—the United States—where he hoped to set up residency and be able to bring his family someday, ideally before conditions in Liberia deteriorated any further. He left behind his four children, two of whom he fathered with Rachel Keita, and two from previous relationships. Tamba Hali and his siblings—full sister Kumba, and half brothers Tamba (who was twelve years older) and Saah (one year older)—were cared for by his mother, Rachel, and their stepfather, a pastor.

  Big Tamba, as the oldest brother was called, assumed a father-figure role for the younger children, especially for Little Tamba (odd, isn’t it, to think that an NFL linebacker would be considered “Little Tamba” in his own family?). He was eighteen years old when the war broke out; two years later, it was a twenty-year-old Big Tamba who helped his brothers leave Liberia.

  Rachel, Kumba, and Tamba’s stepfather left first, headed for Ivory Coast. The three boys remained behind, planning to follow them soon and reconnect across the border around the city of Danané.

  It wasn’t long before it was the boys’ turn to go. One day, Big Tamba was down the hill from his family’s home in Gbarnga where he was greeted with some startling news. “Someone told me, ‘Tamba says he wants to go fight,’ ” Big Tamba said.

  This couldn’t have come as a total surprise. Child soldiers at checkpoints were always trying to recruit kids their own age. They had guns and confidence and always seemed to be the ones in control of these tense standoffs—why wouldn’t that appeal to an eight- or nine-year-old boy on the run?

  Apparently, Tamba had seen someone his age in the village with an AK-47 who had decided to join the war. Now, for the first time, Tamba was expressing an interest in joining too.

  Big Tamba knew he’d reached a critical crossroads. He couldn’t deprive his brother of the chance to fight, if that was indeed his choice. But he couldn’t allow his brother to do it, either.

  “I told him, ‘You gotta kill me first,’ ” Big Tamba said.

  That gave Tamba enough pause for Big Tamba to act. One morning soon thereafter, shortly after 5 a.m., the three Hali boys climbed into a crowded car for the daylong drive to the border.

  Leaving Liberia was the last choice most families wanted to make, but it was the decision so many of them ultimately arrived at. It is estimated that over the course of thirteen years of war—which encompassed the First and Second Liberian Civil Wars and the brief pocket of relative peace that separated them—virtually all of the country’s two to three million inhabitants were displaced at some point. More than two hundred thousand Liberians died. Several hundred thousand more would leave the country, flooding into Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Ivory Coast. In 1996 alone, more than 780,000 refugees had fled beyond Liberia’s borders—roughly one out of every three people in the country was gone.

  Escaping the country was no easier than hiding in the bush. Many families began their flight without any warning or time to prepare. Bullets would start to fly and people fled. Family members would become separated in the chaos; often they would not be able to find one another again or know which relatives had even survived the attack.

  The roads to the border, of course, remained treacherous. Along the way, refugees would file through checkpoint after checkpoint, some separated by no more than a mile or so. It became like driving through a suburban development, where there are stop signs at every intersection. It was slow going, and every checkpoint offered a new danger.

  So much of the land had been captured by rebels, retaken by the government forces, then reclaimed by rebels or some other warlords. Control of any area likely changed hands so many times, people didn’t know who would be waiting for them at a given checkpoint. Or what would be required of them as payment. Villages that were safe one day were hot spots the next. Passing through them was like running a race where the finish line kept changing on you.

  Once people reached the border, the crossing became no easier. Official checkpoints were manned by people with one hand holding a gun and the other hand extended, awaiting some sort of bribe or “toll.” Many people chose to cross the border where it might be unguarded, which often meant crossing a river either by swimming, in some makeshift canoe, or by clinging to a floating tree or fallen branch. Not an insubstantial number of Liberians survived the long journey to the border, only to drown meters from their destination. Tamba, Big Tamba, and Saah would not have to risk a river crossing. They would take their chances at a guarded checkpoint.

  They spent seven hours that day jammed into a taxi already stuffed with passengers. Every seat was full, as was every lap. When they arrived at the border, Big Tamba instructed the younger boys to keep walking while he talked to the guards. Tamba didn’t want to leave his brother’s side. He and Saah were afraid something would happen and they would get across only to be stranded in a foreign place without their big brother, their protector.

  The two younger brothers watched as Big Tamba began his negotiation with the soldiers at the border with a promise: If you let me take my brothers across and drop them off, I will come back and bring you food. Anything you want.

  The guards—who probably were as hungry as everyone else in the starving country—were intrigued but unconvinced. Ultimately, it was an American president who did the trick: Ulysses S. Grant, whose face is on the fifty-dollar bill.

  There is a superstition among gamblers and even some casinos in the United States that a fifty-dollar bill is unlucky. But for the Hali brothers at the border between Liberia and Ivory Coast, it was the Golden Ticket.

  They were allowed to cross. Before they did, Tamba saw a dead body off to the side—one last glimpse into the killing fields their country had become. It wasn’t the first he’d seen, but this one at this place provided one sharp, final reminder of the world and the war they were leaving behind.

  “When we got to the border,” Big Tamba said, “it was up to the grace of God. He gave me the wisdom to say what I needed to say to get us to the other side.”

  The boys walked a short distance until they found cars waiting to take refugees from the border to the city. Shortly after they arrived, they were reunited with the rest of their family—a joyous experience not all refugee families had the good fortune to share.

  Soon after, Big Tamba found himself on a long line at a local pay phone. Everyone who had made it out of Liberia, it seemed, had someone to call somewhere else in the world. And every one of them, it seemed, was ahead of him in line.

  Eventually, he got to the front and placed a call to a phone number on the other side of an ocean. Until he answered the ringing phone a world away, Henry Hali had not spoken with his children since the war began and Gbarnga was essentially cut off from communicating with the rest of the world.

  That conversation began for Henry the long process of bringing his children to America. First, he flew to Ivory Coast to see his children, but his request to take them home with him was rejected by the officials charged with deciding who was allowed to live in the United States and who was not.

  It took about two years of paperwork and waiting, and no small financial investment. Red tape doesn’t come cheap. Finally, the rubber stamps came through and Tamba and his siblings were given the green light to join their father in the United States.

  Rachel was not. Since she was not married to Henry, she was not considered his immediate
family, so she didn’t qualify for the appropriate visa. She would remain behind indefinitely.

  After she said good-bye to them at the airport, she would not speak to her children much for the next twelve years. And she wouldn’t see her son Tamba again until he was a grown man with a job in the National Football League, a contract worth several million dollars (that’s a lot of Grants), and American citizenship.

  On September 15, 1994, Tamba Hali, Big Tamba, Saah, and Kumba found themselves on an airplane, the Pepper Coast shrinking into the distance. They were bound first for a stopover in Portugal and then on to a new life in a new world. Their new home offered such a fresh start, it even had “new” in its name: New Jersey.

  CHAPTER 5

  TACKLING A NEW LIFE

  Flying into Newark airport can be disconcerting for anyone, even a seasoned traveler. It is, after all, the busiest of the three international airports in the New York metropolitan area, which is the second busiest area in the world for airline traffic. In 1994, twenty-eight million passengers flew into, out of, or had a layover in Newark. Few could have been more bug-eyed and awestruck than Tamba Hali and his siblings when their wheels touched down in the least gardeny part of the Garden State.

  All the planes, the people, the pace . . .  Just walking through the terminal and seeing all the restaurant choices would have been enough to wobble their knees. It’s no wonder Tamba says he felt like he’d gone from zero to one hundred miles an hour in an instant. It may have taken a long time to get them to their destination, but suddenly, they were in America, fifteen miles from the Statue of Liberty, whose engraved invitation must have felt as if it were extended to them personally. The homeless and tempest tossed had landed in New Jersey, a state whose motto, proudly displayed on its own coat of arms, must have sounded warmly familiar to someone from Liberia: “Liberty and Prosperity.” The coat of arms even had a plow.

  Tamba and his siblings were home.

  They reunited with Henry and met his wife, their new stepmother, and then whisked up the Jersey Turnpike. Once again, they found themselves passing through miles of swamps, only this time they were doing it on an eight-lane interstate highway at a brisk sixty-five miles per hour—on their way to beginning their new life in a town called Teaneck.

  If it seemed to Tamba that Teaneck was the center of the universe, he could be forgiven. The town was situated between major roads—Interstate 95, which runs from Maine to Florida, and Interstate 80, which begins in Teaneck and runs twenty-nine hundred miles across the country before rolling up in San Francisco. A few miles to the east, the George Washington Bridge waited to carry you across the Hudson River and into New York City. From Teaneck, he surely felt, you could go anywhere.

  All the possibilities, all the choices . . . It all took a little getting used to for Tamba. How many food options could there be, he wondered? How many different pizza toppings do you really need? What does an eleven-year-old boy need with so many clothes? Back in Liberia, wardrobe options were a bit more limited and they never thought twice about it. “We walked around barefoot or wore sandals—if you had sandals,” Tamba said. “You’d have shorts on but we went shirtless the majority of the time. We didn’t have the means to have too many clothes, so we’d wear the same thing most of the time.”

  They were about as far from materialistic as kids could be. Still, their stepmother made sure they had new clothes and other staples they would need as they settled into their new surroundings.

  Video games were new to Tamba (a fun first discovery—especially Doom). The prevalence of television was new, too. He even was shocked to see women driving cars; back in Liberia, that was a privilege reserved for men.

  Every once in a while, Tamba would even find a little money had been left for him, a reward for helping clean his room or straighten up the house. Occasionally, there would be twenty dollars for the children to buy themselves something—that was nearly as much money as it cost to buy their freedom at the checkpoint into Ivory Coast.

  The transition wasn’t always smooth. For a long time, Tamba and his siblings would flinch every time they heard a plane overhead—which, when you live under some of the busiest airspace on the planet, was pretty often. He would hear the roar of the engines and brace for gunfire that would never come.

  A sudden loud noise, maybe just the slamming shut of a car door, would trigger a response they had learned living through a war. They would have to resist the impulse to drop to the ground, lie flat on their stomachs, even tuck their heels low so that absolutely no part of their body would show itself above the top of the grass.

  “I always had that feeling,” Tamba said. “I’m not sure we accepted the fact that we had escaped.”

  Everywhere he looked, things were different. This was, after all, New Jersey, and Tamba had never been exposed to a community made up of so many people from so many places.

  The white faces he saw all around him certainly were new. The accents from Asia and the Caribbean were different and exotic and confusing. Even the African Americans that he saw were somehow unfamiliar. They tended to be African by heritage, American by birth. Even in the midst of diversity, Tamba felt like he stuck out.

  Without question, the most challenging new experience was school. When the war began in Liberia, Tamba had just reached the age when children typically would start to go to school. But he was able to attend only infrequently the first year or two—most of his early education came from a life spent hiding in the bush, not in a classroom or from books.

  Ah, books.

  Tamba Hali had survived bullets and bombs, bugs in the bush, even the molasses-legged bureaucracy that left him in limbo as he waited to be accepted into the United States. Now that he was in America, in an American school, he was faced with a new enemy: books. Tamba did not know how to read or write.

  We’re not talking about struggling with some spelling, not knowing when to use an apostrophe, or the relationship between a silent E and long vowel sounds. He hadn’t been introduced to any of it, not his ABC’s or 123’s.

  “When I got into school and I was not able to read or write, it was shocking and humbling,” Tamba said.

  Tamba wasn’t a very talkative kid to begin with. He was soft-spoken. Not like Saah, who was more outgoing, more comfortable interacting and connecting with new people. But here, as the new kid in Benjamin Franklin Middle School—the one with the heavy West African accent and an inability to read or write—Tamba became even more quiet and guarded.

  When he listened to kids around his age, his mind would swim. They spoke so fast, had such command over what they wanted to say, Tamba’s ears couldn’t keep up. It wasn’t a matter of not knowing the words; he struggled just to pick out the individual words as they whooshed by.

  Enter Gail Dunn. Officially, she was the school’s reading specialist. In reality, she was Tamba Hali’s first coach.

  At first, the school didn’t know what to do with him. Tamba was eleven years old when he arrived at Benjamin Franklin. He was old enough for sixth grade, but he was so unprepared academically that they easily could have started him in elementary school. But that would not have been a beneficial fit for him socially.

  He didn’t need to be in a special-education program because he was not a student with any special needs or learning disabilities. He simply had been deprived of schooling. The fact that he spoke English certainly helped, but it also meant that the track designed for traditional ESL (English as a Second Language) students was not the right fit, either.

  So the school administrators placed him in a fifth-grade classroom—Benjamin Franklin is a middle school with students in fifth through eighth grades—and assigned him to Mrs. Dunn.

  Every day, Tamba would leave his classroom (fifth and sixth grades at Benjamin Franklin were single-teacher classrooms, like in an elementary school; seventh and eighth were departmentalized, with kids changing classes for every subject) and spend an hour in Mrs. Dunn’s reading room. It was a small room, without
any desks—not unlike the typical Liberian schoolroom. They would sit together at a table and together they would begin Tamba’s journey as a reader.

  “We started with the basics: the alphabet, phonics, basic sight vocabulary,” said Mrs. Dunn, who worked with Saah, too.

  Even that wasn’t easy, since most middle-school reading rooms don’t have materials for new readers. Those resources belonged at the elementary schools. Fortunately, Mrs. Dunn had a friend who taught first grade in nearby Plainfield who sent along materials she could use with Tamba.

  Because of his age, intelligence, and general aptitude for learning, Tamba picked up the basics quickly. What he learned from Mrs. Dunn was reinforced at home, where he spent hours and hours immersed in the Hooked on Phonics program provided by his father.

  Remember—Henry Hali was a teacher. He taught chemistry at Teaneck High School and also at Fairleigh Dickinson University, which had a campus in Teaneck, right on the banks of the Hackensack River. He invested in the Hooked on Phonics materials, which included flash cards and illustrated workbooks and cassette tapes (ask your parents . . . they’ll remember . . .) featuring lessons set to music that made them easier to remember.

  The products were marketed well, with the easiest of phone numbers to learn (1-800-ABCDEFG) and the catchiest slogan, delivered in the commercials by an adorable, happy preschooler in pigtails: “Hooked on Phonics worked for me!”

  “Those cards were hard,” Saah recalled. “If you can’t recognize the words, you feel like they’re trying to torture you.”

  However, Hooked on Phonics worked for Tamba and Saah, and so did the dedicated efforts of Gail Dunn. As Tamba progressed, she made sure to find materials that were age appropriate. The adventures of Dick and Jane don’t hold the interest of many eleven-year-old boys.

  In the forty-six years she would work as an educator, thirty-six of which were spent in the Teaneck school district, Mrs. Dunn never had a challenge like the one she faced with Tamba and Saah. Once, she worked with a Japanese student who had moved from Japan, a supersmart kid who spoke no English. But that was a different situation. At least he had a foundation, albeit in another language.