Umbrella

It had been several days since my father was detained by ICE and I hadn’t cried once. Unlike my mother who was inconsolable, or my siblings who seemed dazed at all times, gutted by the shock of coming home from school Monday only to be told that their father had been taken away to a place where they couldn’t reach him.

​The serenity of what was my junior of college had been stripped before my eyes and in the midst of telling my sisters and mother that everything will be alright, I felt anger; not at the circumstances that had seen to me dropping school in order to fill the space left behind by my father, but at the world at large.

​I do not consider myself a pessimistic individual – far from it. For all the ugliness I had witnessed in the world from the time I was a small child to a young woman of twenty years, I had always held onto the belief that this world was worth living and that its people were kind. Yet, on the day my father called from a prison cell and told us that he had been detained and was facing deportation to a country were slavery against Afro-Mauritanians was still present, where he had no citizenship status and the possibility of death awaited him, I had only felt rage that day.

​Against the law that dictated there would be no consideration or tolerance; against the people that supported it. I hated how my father had built a life here for more than thirty years, married and raised his children only to be taken away from them by a country he loved.

​In the days following his detainment and the wake of the growing despair that had taken over my household, I was the only one who did not cry. At times, I felt like something was wrong with me – I was always angry, bitter and resentful and it was a dark, ugly feeling like twisted my stomach. On the last days I was attending classes to finish up the semester before working full time to help support my family, I would often find myself wanting everything around me to simply vanish.

​I wanted others to feel what I could not: grief.

​There were moments when the thought of someone else being hurt consoled me, as much as I hate to say it, often to the point where for just a moment I felt like myself again. I was not burdened by the ugliness of my own anger and my inability to do anything to help my father out of his situation.

​Truthfully, I thought I would carry this rage for months, if not years, but that was not the case.

​On a day that I knew it would rain, I left my car at home and walked to school instead. The hour that it took for me to get there was enough for my head to clear, just enough that I could focus on the work waiting for me. It was on the walk back that the rain finally came and in a matter of minutes I was soaked.

​I must have looked wretched, soaked down to my soaks and wearing only a light blue dress. I remember being thankful that I hadn’t brought my laptop that day – my backpack, already heavy with textbooks, seemed to weigh me down further when wet.

​It took me far longer to get even halfway home than it did it to get to school that morning. There were so many cars that passed me by that I barely remember them. I probably would have kept walking with my head down, wet and miserable and angry every step of the way home if not for that man who honked at me.

​It shocked me out of my stupor, just enough for me to look up at him.

​He had blue eyes and they were the first kind eyes I had seen in more than a week. He didn’t look at me with pity, which thinking back on it now I’m grateful for.

​He asked me which direction I was heading and when I told him I was going the opposite way from him, he apologized. I was shocked, to say the least. He didn’t have to apologize to me – he didn’t know me or owe me anything, but he apologized and he offered me his umbrella.

​Out of all the people who had driven past me, he was the only one who had stopped and offered me, a stranger, a ride; and when he could not take me home, he gave me his umbrella instead.

​I regret not asking for his name at that time. It’s been more than two years since that day but I still have the umbrella he gave me and I still find myself crying the same way I did on that day.

​In the days that followed my father being detained, all the stress and anger and terrible, suffocating pain I had been feeling loosened and I found myself crying there on the sidewalk with a strangers umbrella in hand.

​His kindness gave me hope and it gave me the strength needed to go through an entire year of fighting for my father’s release.

​These days, I sometimes imagine meeting him again and returning his umbrella to him.

​I want to thank him personally for the kindness he showed me on that day. In my darkest hour, he was the brightest light.