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Accident of Birth: A Novel - Softcover

Neff, Heather

 
9780767917513: Accident of Birth: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767917510 ISBN 13: 9780767917513
Verlag: Crown, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A woman must decide between two lovers and two worlds—Africa and America—in a riveting, courageous journey
 
“A modern romance with global scope . . . Not since Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart has a writer so deftly played the heartstrings that swing between Africa and African Americans.”—Veronica Chambers
 
Reba Freeman’s current husband, Carl, has given her all the wealth a suburban wife could hope for. But Reba’s life is turned inside out once she learns that her first husband, Joseph Thomas, is being held by the World Court for crimes against humanity.
 
Joseph, a gifted Liberian student, had dreams of returning to his native land with his wife and educating his people, yet because of mysterious circumstances, Reba didn’t accompany him to Liberia. Now, twenty years later, she must decide if helping her first husband is worth the risk of losing her comfortable world.
 
Alternating between present-day action and flashbacks, Accident of Birth creates an intricate tapestry of suspense, drama, and romance. Neff boldly exposes the rift between American comforts and the traumas of the world we choose to ignore, creating a moving novel that readers will talk about for a long time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Neff, Ph.D., is a professor of literatures in the African diaspora at Eastern Michigan University and holds a doctorate from the University of Zurich. She is the author of four novels: Blackgammon, Wisdom, which was named an Honor Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Accident of Birth, and Harlem. She lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

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Chapter 1


Alexandria, Virginia


2004


Children with guns.

Barrels tilted downward, the weight of the steel forcing their knotty knees into mocking bows. Faces like plague masks, their leering grins hiding their indifference to the odors of rotting flesh and raw sewage in the equatorial sun. They speak quickly, and in a brief movement the cameras reveal their cavernous chests, hidden beneath uniforms with sleeves ripped off to accommodate the scarecrow arms. Their small feet vanish into laceless boots, the leather tongues torn sideways like the mutilated faces of the murdered. An elderly woman in rags flinches when one child raises his hand, and she slides off into the shadows, stooped in terror. The children laugh. One proudly hoists his rifle into the air and fires it.

It was late; long after midnight on a Tuesday. Although it could have been a Wednesday or a Thursday--nights without sleep all end up feeling the same to me.

I was sick of the television, even though I couldn't seem to turn it off. God knows I had more important things to think about: my big presentation for Senator Jacobs. The down payment on our next vacation. Even Marisa's orthodontist bills. I crossed the kitchen and took out the vanilla ice cream while the journalist droned on about the escalation of the civil war and new evidence proving that the Liberian military was recruiting orphans as young as nine years old as soldiers. Of course--I thought as I fished for a spoon in a rattling drawer and pried open the tight lid--they know that children raised in death hate any evidence of life.

Something bitter rose up in my throat, barely soothed by the melting sweetness of the ice cream. I pressed my hips against the counter, the spoon making a smooth orbit between the carton and my lips. I wouldn't think about those children. I couldn't think about them. It was pointless to think about them, because there was still so much to do right here, with my own life, and with the lives of my husband and daughter and the people I was trying to save here, in the comparative safety of America.

Comparative, I thought as the icy tip of the spoon again met my tongue. Rachid and his wife, Fatima, and their five children fled Afghanistan only to end up living in a two-room apartment in a neighborhood where I wouldn't let my dog run free for fear that someone would use it for target practice.

And what about the Ortiz family from Guatemala? The one our government wanted to put in a "safe, healthy" place? They ended up in a town in northern Michigan where the white supremacists take their shotguns to church.

The news broadcast moved on. My thoughts moved on. A rise in the price of gasoline, a heat wave in Texas. A fourteen-year-old caught in a hotel with a fifty-year-old man she'd met on the Internet--a man who intended to marry her the very next day. Right.

There I stood in my spotless porcelain kitchen, the sound turned down low so I wouldn't disturb Marisa or Carl, my eyes red from yet another night without sleep, my body hungry not for food but rather for something intangibly near and indescribably far away. I knew coffee would put an edge on my thoughts and drive that deep sense of the insatiable out into the night, but caffeine was not an option: I needed to get some sleep before that presentation on the resettlement of the Rwandan group. Senator Aaron Jacobs was coming down from the Hill to look at our operation, and I needed to at least appear to have everything under control.

I didn't get more than two hours of sleep that Tuesday night--but I finally turned off the TV and wrestled that news report into the darkest corner of my cave. On Wednesday morning I painted my face and put on a power suit and drove to my job as a specialist in the Office for the Placement of Permanent Refugees, on L'Enfant Plaza in downtown D.C. Welcoming Senator Jacobs with my trademark confidence and grace, I then laid out the facts with drop-jaw precision. The senator invited me to lunch, promising us more money from the Refugee Resettlement committee. I even got a compliment from my boss, who thought compliments were a foreign language.

And let's face it: I had good reason to be proud--our office had managed to find placements for over two thousand political asylum seekers in the past year. The upshot was that I had single-handedly convinced a bleached-white suburb to accept those forty Rwandans into its subsidized family housing: new homes for the Blacks, and much-needed color for the rest. I was helping America live up to its melting pot claims.

I made it through that entire week without making the mistake of letting the entrance to my cave slide open. Then came Saturday. I found myself standing in the living room, looking out at the early spring morning when that news report about those child soldiers in Liberia hit me again, like an anvil falling off a cliff in the cartoon of my life. I couldn't protect myself. Couldn't stop it from happening. Just like that stupid, pitiful coyote, I raised my eyes just in time to see it coming. Yet even then, it came in the most unexpected way.

It was the petals. Millions of them, littering the heady emerald grass like a widow's tears. Pure white--the color of mourning in many parts of the world. A blanket of them, like gossamer snow, settling around the roots of the blossoming crabapple trees.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a silver and scarlet training suit as Marisa flounced down the stairs, exhaling demonstratively.

"Mom--I really don't feel like going to my lesson today."

I turned to look at her. "It's too late to cancel, honey."

"Don't you think I'm old enough to decide if I want to study piano?"

"No, Marisa, I don't."

"But Kelsey's not taking lessons anymore!"

"Kelsey's not the soloist with the District of Columbia's Youth Symphony."

"But I don't care if I'm their soloist!"

"That's right," I snapped, weary of this argument but secretly relieved that she had yanked me away from those petals. "You don't care if you have a gift. You don't care if that gift could get you into one of the best music schools in the world. You don't care if you could have a life surrounded by the beauty of music. No--you just want to spend your time shaking your rear and chasing boys, like everybody else."

"Oh, Mom!"

"'Oh Mom' nothing. Hurry up and get your shoes. You know I have a lot to do before the party tonight."

Ignoring the look of vengeance in her gray eyes, I kept my back to the window, focusing my thoughts on exactly what the morning would look like.

First I'd drive Marisa to the Conservatory, leaving her with her piano teacher, a papyrus-thin Austrian who was probably already performing back in the era of Kaiser Wilhelm.

Then I'd rush to the Gourmet Foods Market, gritting my teeth against the mind-numbing process of deciding which of two hundred green peppers would look most enticing when quartered and skewered for Carl's famous barbequed brochettes. During that hour I'd also buy the other items on the evening's menu: five bottles of Bordeaux, aged French camembert, imported gorgonzola and brie, sour cream, strawberries, water crackers and cappuccino ice cream.

Then I'd jet back to the Conservatory, where I'd hope like hell that Marisa's lesson would be finished so that cappuccino ice cream wouldn't melt all over the leather upholstery of my new car.

When I got back to the house it would be my job to put together the perfect grill party for our closest friends, knowing all the while that Samantha would refuse everything but wine and salad ("Reba, I've got to get into a swimsuit on our cruise in three weeks!")....

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767917510
ISBN 13 
9780767917513
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
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