New American High by Brooke Hauser

Author:Brooke Hauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A House on the Moon

Mohamed wakes for school at 6:30 AM. It always takes a few seconds to remember where he is. When he first moved in with the bootleggers, he slept on a couch in the living room, but recently he has started sharing a bed with one of the guys. Every morning when Mohamed opens his eyes, still groggy under a plush tiger-stripe bedspread, it is to see someone else’s reality. The posters of Tupac Shakur, Bob Marley, and Al Pacino as Scarface that decorate the wall are tributes to someone else’s heroes. The hanging plastic shoe organizer holds someone else’s sneakers: Adidas, Nikes, and Filas in bright gumball colors. Except for the dent in the sheets, the room bears almost no trace of Mohamed’s existence. Despite all the gifts he received from the people of Farmington, he left Connecticut much the way he came: with little more than the clothes on his back. He has no photographs from Sierra Leone, not even a picture of his mother. He has no mail with his name on it, no passport, no birth certificate—no evidence of the boy he was before he arrived in the United States a little more than two years before at the age of fourteen.

Every day when Mohamed walks out the door for school, it is as if he never walked in. But he did. In November of 2006 on the same day he vanished from Macy’s, Mohamed appeared at a pink-bricked building on a residential stretch of Bedford-Stuyvesant and spent the night in the apartment on the top floor. A Sierra Leonean landlord owns the building and has filled two of the three floors with Fula brethren: not actually brothers, but younger countrymen who come from the same neighborhood in Freetown and are related by culture, if not by blood. Over time, they have managed to create a makeshift African village smack in the middle of Brooklyn. Except for Mohamed, who calls everyone Uncle, all of the men call each other Brother. As a sign of respect, they refer to the landlord as the Eldest Brother, and he is, in essence, the chief-in-residence, the one whom the younger men consult on all important matters within the building, and beyond. Since coming from Sierra Leone, the Eldest Brother has helped to bring more than a dozen relatives and friends over to America, finding jobs for some and schools for others.

The Eldest Brother lives on the first floor with his own family, including his elderly mother, his wife, their children, and assorted friends and relatives. In the beginning, when Mohamed needed food, he sometimes came down and ate with the landlord or Abu and Binta, two kids around Mohamed’s age who also lived in the apartment on the first floor. For the most part, though, he stayed on the third floor. The younger men told Mohamed not to venture outside in case the police were looking for him—he didn’t want to get caught, did he? Mohamed spent

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