Lucky in Silk

The day I landed at Hartsfield-Jackson, my mother's parting gift was a plastic rosary and a warning: "America will eat you if you let it." I was twenty-five, had four hundred and twelve dollars folded into the lining of my carry-on, and I was already hungry. Not for food. For everything.

The airport smelled like carpet cleaner and cinnamon. I remember that because it was the first thing that didn't match the pictures. In Lagos, the airport smelled like exhaust and fried plantain and the sharp sweat of too many bodies pressed into a single hallway. Here, the air was conditioned into something neutral, almost sterile, like the inside of a new car. I stood at the exit doors with my two suitcases and watched a woman in a pink tracksuit argue with a man in a suit about who was supposed to pick up their daughter. They didn't lower their voices. Nobody looked at them. In Nigeria, a fight is a public event. Here, it was invisible.

The MARTA train took me to a station called Five Points. I didn't know then that the name meant nothing, that Atlanta had a hundred neighborhoods with names that sounded like they mattered and didn't. I had a room waiting in a house off Campbellton Road, rented from a man named Mr. Adeyemi, a Yoruba elder who'd been in Atlanta since the nineties and owned three properties he rented to new arrivals. He met me at the door in a dashiki and house slippers, looked at my bags, and said, "You brought books?"

"Some," I said.

"You'll need more. Georgia State doesn't play."

He showed me to a room the size of a closet. A twin bed, a desk, a window that looked out onto a parking lot. Four hundred a month. I paid him two months in cash, and the money in my carry-on dropped to a number I didn't want to calculate.

The first week, I ate rice and eggs. The second week, I found the Kroger on Metropolitan and learned that chicken thighs cost less than breasts, that a bag of dried beans could stretch for days if you soaked them right. I walked everywhere. My shoes wore thin at the heels. I memorized the bus routes, the train schedules, the exact time it took to walk from my room to the Georgia State campus, forty-two minutes if I didn't stop, fifty if I did.

I stopped a lot. Not because I was tired. Because I was looking.

Atlanta in August is a wet heat that sits on your chest. The girls walked in packs, legs oiled, hair in braids and twists and wigs that moved like water. They laughed loud enough to turn heads. They wore shorts that barely qualified as shorts and tank tops that showed the soft dip of their spines. I had never seen so much brown skin displayed so casually. In Lagos, you looked. You didn't stare. Here, the looking was the point. Everyone was on display. Everyone was watching.

I watched.

I told myself it was cultural adjustment. That I was studying, the way an anthropologist studies. But I knew better. I was hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.

My first semester, I took Introduction to Business, Microeconomics, Accounting 101, and a required course called American Government that I failed the first exam because I didn't understand the questions. Not the words. The words were simple. The logic was foreign. The professor asked about "checks and balances" and I wrote about the checks my father's bank used to bounce, and how he'd balance the household budget by borrowing from one account to cover another. I got a D. I kept the exam. I still have it somewhere.

I studied in the library until midnight, then walked home through streets that got quieter and darker the further I went from campus. I learned which corners to avoid. I learned that a black man walking alone at night in a hoodie was a threat in a way I had never been in Lagos, where everyone was black and the threat was poverty, not skin. Here, the threat was me. I felt it in the way cars slowed when I crossed the street. In the way women clutched their purses when I stepped onto an elevator. It made me angry. It made me careful. I started wearing collared shirts everywhere. I started smiling at strangers. I started saying "Good evening" to white people in a voice I practiced in the mirror until it sounded harmless.

I hated that voice. I used it anyway.

The money ran out in October. I found a job at a warehouse off Fulton Industrial, loading trucks from six at night to two in the morning. Twelve dollars an hour. Cash. The supervisor was a black man named Terrence who called me "Nigeria" and never learned my name. I didn't correct him. I needed the check. I slept four hours a night, studied on the bus, ate protein bars because they were cheap and didn't require cooking. My grades slipped. I didn't care. I was surviving.

That's when I met Chidinma.

She was in my accounting class, a Nigerian girl from Enugu who'd come to Atlanta two years before me. She sat in the front row, took notes in a neat, slanted hand, and never looked at me until the day I got my midterm back and saw a C minus. She turned around and said, "You're not studying right."

"I'm studying fine," I said.

"You're studying to pass. That's different."

She offered to help. I said no. She offered again. I said no again. The third time, she didn't offer. She just sat down next to me in the library and opened her textbook to the chapter I'd been avoiding and started explaining depreciation like it was a story. I listened. I didn't have a choice.

Chidinma was beautiful in a way that made me nervous. Not because of her face, though her face was fine, high cheekbones and a mouth that curved up at one corner like she was always about to laugh at something you hadn't said yet. It was the way she carried herself. Like she knew exactly what she was worth and expected you to know it too. She wore her hair natural, a thick afro she picked out every morning. She didn't wear makeup. She didn't need to. She had a laugh that started low and ended high, and when she laughed, people turned.

We studied together three times a week. Then four. Then every day. She told me about Enugu, about her father who was a pharmacist and her mother who taught secondary school, about the boyfriend she'd left behind who still called her every Sunday. I told her about Lagos, about my father's failed import business, about my mother's rosary and her warning. She listened the way she studied, completely, without interruption.

"You're going to be rich," she said one night, closing her textbook. "I can tell."

"How?"

"You're too hungry not to be."

I laughed. She didn't.

The spring semester, I got a B plus in accounting. Chidinma got an A. We celebrated at a Jamaican restaurant off Auburn Avenue, and she ordered oxtail and rice and ate with her fingers, and I watched her and thought about how easy it would be to fall in love with her. I didn't. Not because I didn't want to. Because I was too hungry for that too. Love was a distraction. Love was a bill I couldn't pay.

She graduated that May. I had one more year. She took a job in Charlotte and hugged me goodbye at the train station and said, "Don't forget me when you're rich."

"I won't," I said.

I forgot her for a while. Not on purpose. Life got in the way.

The next year was a blur of night shifts and morning classes and protein bars and a girl named Keisha who sat next to me in marketing and let me copy her notes and sometimes let me kiss her in the stairwell between classes. She was from Decatur, had a smile that made me forget I was tired, and she never asked me about Nigeria. She asked me about me. That was different. That was new. I didn't know what to do with it, so I did nothing. I let it be what it was. A stairwell. A kiss. A moment I didn't have to pay for.

I graduated in May at twenty-nine, walked across the stage in a cap and gown I rented for forty dollars, shook the dean's hand, and went straight to work the next day.