Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: Cleaning Lady

In Memory of Sharon Sue Denk (1945-2023)

I moved around the house that Saturday morning in Kentwood, one of the finest suburbs in the sprawling Michigan city of Grand Rapids, preparing to leave the house. I had a bucket, some cleaning tools, and had slipped on my tennis shoes, ready to get to my first job. My husband and I had no car, but I didn’t worry about a car. I would have to walk the distance, probably, a little over a mile with these cleaning tools. These were not the sort of streets you could walk without notice, and Kalamazoo Avenue was one of the busiest streets in the city. After all, this was the life of a war survivor, a newcomer to America, that one opportunity to live again. I was fast learning how to navigate my new world. 

We were some of the newest Liberian civil war immigrants to America, among some of the first survivors of Liberia’s ongoing series of civil wars. Our family of five had escaped the first in a series of wars that devastated our homeland during the first ceasefire, fragile, but a ceasefire anyway. The ceasefire allowed the West African Peace Keeping Force, led by the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, (ECOMOG) to install the first Interim Head of State, Dr. Amos Sawyer into office and bring a brief pause to the incessant fighting. ECOMOG liberated many regions, including our camp on October 23, 1990, and helped us return to our devastated home in Congo Town. In February, we learned that the Daniel Denk family, in collaboration with the US State Department, and their church friends, had negotiated our evacuation, and were inviting us to come to Grand Rapids.

The war had already overrun the entire country even as we awaited our evacuation in March of 1991. Charles Taylor was making his on and off comeback to kidnap residents in the city suburbs, And missiles were still landing in our backyard soon after the ceasefire agreement. The civil war had already devastated Liberia and displaced millions from East to West, North to South, the east Atlantic Coast to the mountains of Lofa and Nimba, from the central regions of Liberia to the southeast, including our home into Cape Palmas of Maryland County. We escaped a war that would continue many years of massacres, annihilation of hundreds of thousands, a series of catastrophic fourteen-year wars, stretching from the end of one decade into the next. 

One day in June, we learned that “any Liberian refugee who had entered the country by March 15, 1991, was now eligible for TPS (Temporary Protective Status). Refugee status for exiles like us was not yet a thing. There is a difference between Temporary Protective Status and Refugee Status, we learned. We were what I’d called “accidental refugees,” or unofficial guests of the country. War is a devil of its own.

TPS, that little piece of document, allows the war refugee to unwind after their traumatic journey from the bloodbath, death valleys, bombings, or the border crossings of the unofficial immigrant. We could now work in the US, but it was 1991, the last years of President George H. W. Bush. There were no jobs to be had. Not that a thirty-five year old war refugee woman, mother of three from West Africa could easily get a full time or even a part time job in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1991. My husband and I could not even get a gas station attendant job with our bachelor’s degrees from Liberia’s University of Liberia and 1985 Master of Science degrees in Business Education and English Education from one of America’s finest universities. 

After a few weeks of calling around, reading newspaper ads, and trying to prove my worth on the phone, I was ready for an alternative, a house-cleaning job. A couple weeks earlier, I had a friend drive me up to Calvin College in Grand Rapids where I filled out a job application with a job agency. It was the kind of agency that hired house cleaners, grass cutters, and unskilled workers. My husband and I were on a job hunt that would provide us some money to support our children and find a suitable rental so we would move out. Other than living for two weeks with my Cousin Bertha when we fled our home during Taylor’s takeover of Monrovia in July, 1990, and living four months in the Soul Clinic Internally Displaced Refugee Center with thousands, we had never before lived with another family. Three months were too long to live with another family who had to put up with our busy five member family. We could not wait to get back our independence. Dan, we called Bro Dan and his wife, Sharon, now passed, we called Sis Sharon, had worked for several months even when we did not know it, to get us out of Liberia, and settled us in a beautiful suite they had fixed up in their basement. But soon, we knew that it was time to get back on our own feet.

After our arrival, the Denk home became a household of eleven, their four children, two older and two who were a few years older than our oldest children, my husband, our three children, Besie-Nyesuah, our daughter, the eldest who was now seven years, Mlen-Too II, we call MT, five years old, and our youngest, son, Gee, who was now eighteen months old. It was about time to move out, but we had no money, no means of getting an apartment, or even food to feed our family. So, here I was, a bucket in hand, on my way to work. 

I arrived at the assigned home in less than thirty minutes. I would do a two hour cleaning every Saturday for the meager pay of seven dollars an hour. If I made fourteen dollars every week, and probably far less after taxes, maybe I could purchase milk or diapers for our one year old son. As unofficial refugees, we were not qualified to receive anything from the American government, no food stamps or the sort of support Americans or regular refugees qualify for. There was no refugee resettlement for us because we were not really what they call, “Asylum seekers.” Liberia’s war, even with tens of thousands already dead, did not yet qualify us as refugees. Maybe , more destruction was necessary, maybe, more deaths, more massacres, more devastation. This is one of the mysteries of war. 

To get to my assigned home from the Denk’s Kentwood home, I had to walk through back roads and cross Kalamazoo Avenue. At the door, a slender, tall, beautiful blond woman let me in. She could have been my age or older. Her smile was that of the Dutch American woman of Grand Rapids, a city filled with first and second generation immigrants of the World War II era, mostly of Dutch descent. “Welcome,” she said, pointing me to the kitchen. 

Her home, a ranch style, sparkled with elegance, luxurious sofas and chairs, a huge living room that flowed into the sparkling white kitchen, a home that told you these were upper middle class people, living a comfortable life. I was afraid to step on her plush carpeting from the look she gave me, but I was here to clean, not to be accepted. When you have been a college professional for more than ten years in your home country, you have to remember to pinch yourself when something someone does or says makes you feel uncomfortable to be a house cleaner. I had dressed well for this job, a pair of pants that covered my knees, a clean pair of tennis shoes I had bought at a Garage sale, a decent T shirt that said something about “Christ,” since I knew that this was a very Dutch American, Christian town. I also wore my usual smile, and buried inside my heart was my inherited sense of humor from my Mama. I knew how to laugh at everything life tossed at me. I had all used clothing, donated by people at church. 

We looked at each other as women can do on first meeting.

“Introduce yourself,” the woman said softly, smiling. 

“I am Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. I’m a new immigrant from Liberia. I live in Kentwood, not too far from here, a mother of three little children, and am married.” I said uncomfortably.

“Welcome,” she said dryly. “I’m a homemaker. My husband works a lot. I’m a student at the Grand Rapids Community College,” her hands waving as she spoke. Even though she was in a community college, she spoke with an air of privilege, power, and confidence. I knew confidence that belongs to one and confidence that is both inherited and secured by property and wealth. I also knew how possessions can, like water, evaporate. I had my own confidence my father had instilled in me, not from inherited wealth, but inherited still, from a long lineage of the Whyne and Jabbeh, the Toebo Clan of the Grebo people, nurtured by the beauty of our oral traditions. I was brought up as an African child who grew up knowing how important she is, her tribal roots and customs, on top of western education we fight to acquire in a country where most of the population was not educated. Material wealth or lack of did not take away the pride for my identity instilled in me by my paternal grandfather, Bai (Great father or grandfather) Jabbeh and my maternal grandmother, Iyeeh (Great mother or Grandmother ) Juway. I also had a personality that exhumes confidence instilled by genetic inheritance and values taught by tribal tradition. 

But today, I almost lost all of my usual audacity. After all, I was the cleaning lady here, one who had not only lost property and wares, customs and tradition, family, and inheritance, but homeland, the place of my birth, my familiar world where people knew who I was. I had also lost many relatives, schoolmates and teachers, neighbors, and close family, and everything I had worked so hard for in my short life. And here I was, being examined like a specimen. Maybe, I could be taken for anything. I was a cleaning woman who had no experience in this new role. 

But deep down, I knew I was somebody. I was born to be somebody. My heritage had prepared me for this. My dead Iyeeh (Grandmother or great mother) had prepared my mind decades earlier when as a child, she would make me walk with her from one village to another. At six and again between the ages of eleven and thirteen when I lived temporarily as a boarding student in my father’s hometown, Iyeeh introduced me to our extended family across our towns of Dolokeh, Manokeh, Gbamakeh, Bonekeh, Yederobo, everywhere in the Kaluway District of my people, particularly, my maternal relations. She validated my validity, that I was a special child. She used to say in her powerful Grebo language, “When you become somebody great one day, remember that these are your people.”

My Bai, the great father, (Grand or great father) Duoju Jabbeh, my father’s father, the patriot father of my bloodline also prepared my mind for my future. I came from strong roots, from a proud people, and early in my stay in Tugbake, Bai Jabbeh made sure I knew that I was supposed to be a great one, over and over, telling me that I was destined for greatness and that one day, I would write many books. But I was just a tiny eleven, twelve, or thirteen year old hearing this prophecy from the eldest man in our homeland then. That future, however, did not include my current job as a cleaning lady or my new identity as a war survivor, or anything outside the greatness of my name. But I was named, “Dawanyeno,” at birth, or one is an alien, a woman who did not belong, a stranger from a far country. In that name was the greatness of the name when interpreted differently. Today, war was interpreting that name differently.

In that moment of recalling memory in a time that seemed lost, I remembered that I was Dawanyeno, a woman out of this world. So, I sat there gathering myself after my long walk, a small chitchat between my new employer and me. And then, the cleaning began. I took the bathrooms to task first. I was a good cleaner of my own bathrooms back in Liberia, modern bathrooms, not a luxurious house, but a home since my marriage and even before. I knew these things. I did not need to be told how to do a great bathroom cleaning job, vacuuming floors, mopping floors, dusting, and cleaning windows happily. I was delighted in work, cooking, cleaning, serving, the only things my stepmother forced me to learn by her obsession with being served. I knew how to work happily even in the worst of situations. Today, I sang softly as I worked. The lady busied herself watching TV, going up and down her large house, often checking on me from a doorway. Maybe, she was not too sure of who I was. 

I kept reminding myself that I was a survivor of a bloody war that had killed and was still killing my friends and family. I was here to live after some of the finest people in my country had been killed. I worked for two hours without taking much of a break. I had to do everything here in two hours. She would not pay for anything over. I kept that in mind, and worked up and down the house, even taking the basement to task. I grew up, a stepchild who lived like a slave of my stepmother’s. All of my father’s children and other children fostered by my stepmother, including her nieces and nephews were treated like houseslaves, cleaning, washing, dusting, polishing her shining floors to her satisfaction. 

Many Liberian homes inherited that ugly culture of African servanthood and that other slave culture from the America that the founders of Liberia brought over from the Slave Plantations of the American south, where the enslaved worked under the watch of their masters. My stepmother would check how clean the floors were by standing up to check her features in the beautiful tiles in our Capitol Bypass home. If you did the work wrong, she’d either whip you or complain to Pa to whip you. Of course, my father never whipped me for not cleaning well. He’d scream his head off, and me, a strong-willed girl, I let his words fly over me while I stood there. But I learned early how to clean well, to do it unhappily until I decided to do it for the goodness of a servant. In Africa, we children did not come with protection from government. Even today, children are still treated as domestic servants, petty goods sellers by cruel people, often abused, working for an opportunity to get some form of education.

That first cleaning day was over after I was done with the entire home top to bottom, washing the pots and dishes she’d left overnight in the sink, and stacking them in the dishwasher. There was a baby that was not at home for some reason, a baby outing on a Saturday morning, perhaps, taken away by a grandparent or the father. After all, a total stranger was coming into the baby’s space, so, it was just the mother, following me around to keep her eye on me these two hours of my first in my life as a cleaning lady. 

By the end of my cleaning hours, I was not as exhausted from work as I was from being in a home that made me uncomfortable in every sense of the word, not that a home in itself could do that. I don’t know how people who own their own cleaning companies feel compared to someone who had signed up as a minimum wage worker with a company that underrates the cleaning person through minimum wage. Maybe, I should have had this day included as one of the roads I’d have to walk towards my life goals. Someone should have prepared me for the day when I would become an unofficial refugee. The status of the war exile is determined by political decisions the exiles care very little about. The exile simply wants to survive, to live, to be given a second chance at living again. It is a dream we exiles have known, the one that the war wearied runner carries at their breasts. I did not know that all the education I had worked so hard for would bring me to these crossroads. But I was grateful. 

I quickly shut that self-pity down as I found my way through the cold streets of Kentwood, walking with my pail in hand, cars, speeding past me in the opposite direction. I was the lucky one who had survived a bloody war raging at home, a war that had already eaten up an entire nation, a country now still in flames, perhaps, a hundred thousand already dead, hundreds of thousands in exile, at least a million more with no means of escaping the bloodbath. I was happy to have served someone today. There is nothing greater than a second chance at life, having a place to lay your head, a home for your small children, and hope that the future was indeed, now more possible than a few months earlier. 

I crossed Kalamazoo Avenue, wound my way through winding sidewalks, walking past the beautiful homes of middle class families, perfect lawns of green grass, trimmed edges, sidewalks clean enough to sit on. Soon, I was back at the home of my hosts. My children and the youngest two Denk kids, Allison, just over ten years old, and  Ransom, eight, were at the door to welcome me when I rang the doorbell. The kids, being so close in age, got along very well those months, not even a fight between them. Our own children loved their American family and their  temporary home. They had survived other temporary homes they were too young to remember. 

A flood of peace enveloped me on entering the Denk home. From an outsider, this huge double household family would have been an inconvenience. But for us, this was a sanctuary from the worst experience anyone could have ever lived. We had been in the Denk’s home three months already, living and working together, cooking and eating together as one family with no problems. Many of their friends and church associates may not have understood how they did it, how they could welcome a family of five refugees into their family with no government support. I too, did not know how they did it. I only thanked God there were people like them who had such love and sacrifice to offer to people like us. 

Brother Dan and Sis Sharon were parents not only to their two youngest, Allison and Ransom who lived at home, but also to  their two older daughters, Ramona, the eldest, and Carmen Denk, college students who had just returned home for summer break from college. Their family of six along with our family of five were now the Daniel Denk family household. Coming home to this beautiful household, however awkward that may have seemed to outsiders, was my most treasured experience. But of course, I come from a culture of large family households, and having experienced refugee life, I knew how precious and sometimes, challenging living with others could be. 

I shut the door behind us and walked into this place of many voices chattering, children running around playing games, rewatching their usual, “Fiddler on the Roof,” or “Sound of Music,” VHS  tapes, our one-year-old Gee, his bowlegged self, chasing Allison around the living room. To him, Allison was like a second mother even though she was just a child herself. He cherished her with the innocence of pure baby love just as much as she loved him. He preferred being in Allison’s arms than in mine. So, I had a baby-sitter right under the roof.

Soon, Sis Sharon and I were on the couch as she had a way with, that quiet, big sisterly calm that helped heal the pain during our early years in America. Often, she was the calm in my chaotic memory from the war, and I could tell her everything without fear. “How was your day,” she held my hand in hers, looking into my teary eyes. She knew without any word from me that this had been a hard day. “It’s okay to cry,” she said as I fell into her arms, weeping. Not that a cleaning woman’s role was to be frowned on, but being forced to be one was not what I had planned for my life. But when you have lived in a Refugee Displaced center that was not really a refugee center, with ongoing bombings, killings, massacres, starvation, torture, and a daily near-death living, you know the relief of coming home to where laughter was a way of life. In this space of music, storytelling, singing of Christian choruses we all knew, with Bro Dan on his guitar and Sis Sharon, who had such a gift for singing, and most of all, living with that love, the kind of love you understand only by experiencing firsthand, I found healing. 

*****

When we finally received the letter of invitation on February 8, 1991, from Brother Dan to leave the war and come to Grand Rapids, Michigan, we did not know where we were going or how it would turn out. My husband, his calm, prayerful personality was the exact opposite of my very extroverted, independent, expressive personality. We were a team, him, the calm, and I, always the fire. I was overwhelmed with an inexplainable happiness to get our immediate family out of the war, but scared of leaving my parents and siblings behind. But Mlen-Too, my person that keeps me on level ground, said, “My wife, this is the best thing that has happened to us in a long time.” 

We arrived in Grand Rapids on March 8, 1991, after nearly a year and half of being on the run, surviving a bloody Refugee Displaced Center where we experienced much torture and near death experiences. We had survived four months in a tight space with a hundred other refugees in the Boy’s dormitory of Soul Clinic Mission, a Christian boarding school outside of Paynesville that otherwise was named the Soul Clinic Internally Displaced Refugee Center during the war. The boarding school grounds and surrounding homes held at least six thousand refugees at any given time. It was more a killing field than a refugee center, and during new attacks on Monrovia and fresh outbreaks of fighting between the Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, (NPFL) rebel group and President Doe’s Armed Forces of Liberia, (AFL) forces, refugees poured into our camp. Many of those who had survived the annihilation of opposing tribes by both sides, moved on to other camps far into the interior of the country, or stayed with us in our campgrounds.

There in the refugee center, we saw killings, executions, and were ourselves often narrowly saved from a rebel execution every so often. One of the most constant activities included sudden executions of camp members by Taylor’s rebels who moved about freely with all kinds of weapons, including machetes, AK-47 rifles, grenades, knives, and other kinds of weapons intended to kill us refugees or their enemies. It was a regular thing to sit on our make-shift porches and smell decaying bodies of the recently and long killed, a mountain of the executed who did not make their way into our camp alive. Our building was closest to the Rubber killing bush right outside the the Soul Clinic Internally Displaced Refugee Center. 

My family of six, including a younger brother we fostered, my mother and her two sons and a nephew, lived in this building, sleeping on a cold floor with a hundred others, and living on roots and whatever we could pull out of the bushes, sometimes, spending the small money we had fled with from home. But money could buy nothing, the war refugee quickly discovers. In war, money cannot buy food when there is no food to buy. Each day in our camps, Charles Taylor’s NPFL rebels were in charge of daily massacres, tortures, intimidation, starting new fighting on and off around our area of the camp even though this was supposed to be a place of safety. Living until dusk did not mean you were safe. You could be picked up any time of day or night. We lived daily, afraid one moment we could be dead.

Though delayed for several months by the US Embassy in Monrovia, the invitation was the best gift of our lives other than being born to our parents. Many of our American friends we  knew during our graduate school years in Bloomington, Indiana and stayed connected with even after our return to Liberia, forgot us during our time of need. They refused to have anything to do with the war-weary refugees we had become. A friend we knew, outrightly called on others not to help us and that separated us from some of our best American and Asian American friends who were members with us in the Chinese Christian Fellowship at IU. After, all, this woman said that Africans were a burden to America. We needed to take care of our own problems. 

As many Liberians with connection to the US evacuated to be with friends and family, and the city was engulfed in flames, we fled our home into Charles Taylor’s territory. In a final desperation, however, just before we left home, we turned to the one group of friends we knew would not abandon us, the Daniel Denk family. They knew us more than others who knew us only as international graduate students, we realized. So, one day as the war ate up the hundreds of miles between Nimba County where the war began and Monrovia, where we lived, I wrote a desperate letter to Daniel Denk, the then Head of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s Great Lake East Region, the one friend who had led dozens of IVCF missions teams to Liberia, and with whom we had worked in the very country that was now at war. This was the same desperate sort of letter I had sent our friends in Bloomington, but not only a letter, but an SOS call that was to no avail. My husband and I thought if no one came to our aid, the Denks would. In a time of war and desperation, you get to see who your true friends are. 

The Denk family were not strangers to us. Prior to the outbreak of war, my husband, Mlen-Too, and I worked for the Liberian Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is a sister movement of the American group, Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship, (IVCF) that Daniel Denk worked for. My husband was the first Traveling Secretary, (Missionary) of our Liberian movement for several years, helping to establish sister movements in West Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. That was before we left to study at IU. And in the years preceding the war, he and I volunteered as hosts to the American, sister movement, the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship’s (IVCF) Summer Missions teams to Liberia between 1987 and 1989. Daniel Denk led the first group of IVCF team, and met us in 1987. 

By the onset of the Liberian civil war which began on December 26, 1989, we had worked with more than sixty IVCF mission team of students and staff, helping them find lodging and care in our home and the homes of friends in the Liberian movement in the summer of 1988 and 1989. Like IVCF, our African movements ministered to college students. The Liberian movement was an arm of Pan African Fellowship of Evangelical Students, (PAFES), scattered across Africa. My husband and I were in charge of leading the Liberian movement and supervising the work of our Traveling Missionary. Mlen-Too chaired and supervised the Advisory Committee of our Board and I was Chair of the Graduate Christian Fellowship (GCF), the financial and spiritual supporting arm of our movement. We devoted our time between teaching full time at the University of Liberia, raising our young children, training young leaders on college campuses, serving as the liaison between our movement and other PAFES groups. 

Through the GCF, I coordinated and organized the lodging of Inter Varsity staff members and their teams of dozens of students and staff. Our collaboration helped IVCF teams gain an international experience living in the homes of Liberians of similar vision of ministering to the college student. In the summer of 1988 and 1989, we hosted two of the teams in our home for six weeks each year, and placed the other team members, close to two dozen each year in the homes of fellow Graduate Fellowship members who took care of their stay, their meals, and gave them that family experience a young missionary needs in a strange city. 

That collaboration as well as more than a decade of teamwork with our Liberian Fellowship of Evangelical Students and other West African movements, taught me much about Christian service and welcoming the stranger into our homeland and into our homes. In 1990, that mission was canceled due to the ongoing guerilla war which had already overrun the entire country by July 2, 1990, making all travel to Liberia impossible. 

One day, February 8, 1991, a US Embassy official handed us the letter on one of my weekly visits to plea with the US Embassy help us evacuate our American daughter, Besie-Nyesuah and us. We had done this routine for half a year to no avail, but today, the official handed us a file of protest letters from dozens of Americans who had been pleading for our evacuation. One of those was a letter from the Director of IVCF Great Lakes East Region, Daniel Denk. Mlen-Too grabbed my hand as we ran out of the Embassy grounds, into the street. I opened the letter, sitting in the middle of Benson Street, Mlen-Too sitting next to me. There were no cars in the city due to the war. “Welcome to the United States, we cannot wait to see you,” the letter said, and I screamed, weeping, “We’re going to Ame—ri-cah- ohhhh,” I rose, my husband, holding my hand as we ran. Onlookers watched as I continued screaming. We walked more than ten miles home without resting along the empty streets of our war city. 

By the day of our departure from Liberia, the three opposing war factions had devastated every corner of the nation. Charles Taylor’s NPFL and the breakaway rebel faction of Prince Johnson’s Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia’s (INPFL) had been at war with each other and independently at war with the Liberian government’s dwindling Armed Forces of Liberia, (AFL) for nearly two years. Even as we departed Liberia, we knew that the war would go on for many more years. 

****

My husband continued searching for work after I began my small cleaning job. He searched for anything he could do to support our family, a part-time attendant position at a gas station, a street cleaning job, anything, looking through newspaper ads and making phone calls. Each call produced no possibility for employment. That second week as cleaning lady, I showed up for work, and this time, the man of the house was at the door to let me in. I greeted him, and he led me into the kitchen where his wife stood, ready to begin new instructions for the day’s cleaning. Soon, he was off with their beautiful little toddler, leaving the woman of the house to keep watch over my cleaning. I quickly took all the bathrooms and bedrooms to task again, singing and enjoying my work. I dusted everything, bent over, and cleaned under everything there was to be cleaned. I arranged shoes in closets, after which I moved to the kitchen and cleaned everything I could with renewed energy. Today, I was no longer afraid to take on such a job. Somehow, this was becoming familiar to me. I felt a need to prove something to someone, perhaps, myself, that I was up to this moment in our history.

Soon, two hours were over, and before I would leave, the lady of the house asked to sit with me to go over a conversation she had begun with me earlier. I drew a chair opposite her at her kitchen table. For the first time since beginning work here, she offered me a drink. I did not need one because Sis Sharon had made sure I had a drink in my pouch each time I left the house. She was one of those women who knew how to prepare you for whatever you needed to take on. She had a way of making sure you had a bottle of water, some snacks, some cookies, anything you needed to survive the outdoors or wherever we needed to be when we left the house. It did not matter whether we were taking the kids on a walk to the library, the park, to Garage sales, or whether only I was going out to run errands. She was a mother to you, whether you loved it or not. And she had a million ways of helping you carry whatever she encouraged you to take along. So, I had come with a small pouch strapped around my waist with everything I needed. 

Before the conversation began, I thought I was the only one nervous about our meeting. But when I saw my boss’s hands fiddling with napkins on her table, I knew there was something up her sleeves. “Did you say you used to be a professor in Liberia,” she said in that soft sort of way a girl raised in the finest of Dutch American tradition had a way with. It was a Grand Rapids Dutch kind of soft, a mix of religious conservative upbringing in a town where comfort came easily to those who had inherited much from hardworking parents, grandparents, people deep rooted in family tradition where the line between church and politics was as blur as a cloudy evening. There was also that Midwestern smile which I did not yet know. But there was always that kindness or goodness you could not really be sure was goodness, as if it was mandatory for just the moment. You only had to step away, and it was no longer there.

I sat up in my chair, unsure where this questioning was going. We had had a brief conversation somewhere in the bathroom area as I was cleaning. Now I could clearly see that she seemed curious about my refined English, my perfect grammar, my lack of the usual Black colloquialism she may have heard about, probably, never seen in her entire life where on her side of the world of Christian schooling, church, and upper middle class existence, she may have never had a Black friend. But of course, my accent was African, something she investigated my first few minutes in her home. But this educated attitude, despite my attempt at disguising myself must have been a bit unsettling. So, I was now the unsure one, the one fearful the nervousness of the underclass, a deep fear of losing my small employment. “Yes, I taught English and literature at the University of Liberia for ten years prior to the outbreak of war,” I said, “but now, I’m a newcomer to America, a refugee, and your house cleaner. I like this opportunity,” I said slowly.

“I see. So, will you now be a house cleaner?” She asked under her breath. There was a silence, and I was not one for silence. The air in the room stood still. 

“Maybe, who knows? There’s nothing out there, and I love it here. It’s what God says for now,” I said. “I’m doing a great job, right?” I looked up into her eyes. She was blond like many of the Dutch American people in the area, long, blond hair, blue eyes, tall, probably, about six foot or more. She was beautiful, that fine West Michigan beauty that reminds you that you are seeing the descendants of Dutch immigrants who came to America during the Second World war. Standing in a room in church, everyone was taller than me, and across a school auditorium where later in my Grand Rapids living, I was often invited to speak to school children about my time in the Liberian Civil war, nearly everyone was blond, and in the winter, their hair became so blond, it was almost white, thin, long.

“Do you have a college degree?” She asked, to my shock. 

“Yes, I do,” I said, not revealing any more information. I could not tell this woman that I had a master’s degree from Indiana University-Bloomington. This was not necessary. But I could not lie to her now. How many without a college degree could get a job teaching at a college? I wanted to laugh at her question, but that would have been an insult, so I smiled. 

“D’you have any plans to teach in Grand Rapids,” she asked. Now, she was pushing me. I was getting very uncomfortable. I wanted to get out and go home. She was not paying for this interview, and I needed to get on home to take care of my kids. Even with my husband at home, my children, running around with the Denk kids in the house could be quite a handful. I could not let Sis Sharon have that kind of burden taking care of all of those kids. I knew that Mlen-Too was probably somewhere reading a book as the kids ran around, bumping into everything. 

“Yes,” I said, impatiently. “I have plans to teach at local colleges. I have plans to apply to local colleges like Grand Valley State and Davenport College when we get a place to live. We live with our host family, the Dan Denk family for now. You know we are refugees, Ma’am?” I said, standing now. “I need to get on home now. Is anything the matter?” I asked with that audacity I had almost lost here. I knew how to lose myself, but eventually, I found myself and gained my wits if someone pushed me a bit too far. I knew that something was bothering her, so, I said, “It will be fine. I can do a great job while you have me. Am I doing fine?” 

“I like you,” she said, “yes, you are doing very well. But do you have other degrees, like a degree from the US? How can you teach with only one college degree?”

            “Of course,” I said, almost flatly. She followed me towards the front door. I was not going to stand here and have this very uncomfortable conversation. “I have a Master of Science degree in English Education from Indiana University-Bloomington, Ma’am,” I said, “and before the war, I taught English at the University of Liberia for ten years,” I added, as she followed me to the door. Maybe, I needed to get it all out now.

“A master’s degree from IU, wow,” she said in that West Michigan tone. 

I loved their “Wow,” and I always thought the word began right here in the middle of Dutch country. Soon, my children would understand the power of that “Wow.” They said it with such precision, that finality of the surprise, the silencer of all conversation. I escaped with that wow from her lips. I ran down the road, curving my way out of the neighborhood of wide lawns as green as could be, beautiful homes that were built as if to flaunt themselves, onto Kalamazoo Ave., and down the road where it departs from Kalamazoo Ave, leading me to where I lived. There, I found a sanctuary from such questioning that cuts deeply, where the questioner expects answers to which they have no rights. I needed air now, I realized as I entered the home where everyone knew and loved us for who we were even now, as destitute refugees.

***

My third week as a cleaning lady arrived that Saturday early. Usually, on Saturdays, Bro. Dan was in charge of the large family breakfast. Even though he worked all week, and Sis Sharon and I shared the household cooking equally, preparing breakfast, lunch, and dinner as a team, Saturdays were our off day. Dinner was more tasking; therefore, the two of us women had a fixed schedule of who would cook dinner for this combined family each day. On the days I was in charge, the family was happy to try my Liberian cuisine and loved my cooking. I had to take care not to make the food spicy since of course, Americans don’t eat hot spices. During the week, I’d make breakfast if the children were hungry for some pancakes or something, but cold cereals were a big thing for the four active children, and Gee, the youngest of them, ate anything they decided to eat. Sis Sharon, ten years my senior, would whip up anything in the fridge for lunch. She had a good hand at whipping up leftovers for lunch, and we would sit around the table, eat, laugh, the children giggling about the things kids find amusing. She homeschooled Allison and Ransom like she had the two older girls. Often, she would include our kids who had already lost some schooling time due to the war. They had also missed the current school year with teaching only from their dad who was a better teacher of kids than I was. 

But Saturdays, Bro. Dan, who was just one year older than his wife, enjoyed the kitchen. We woke up early to the sweet aroma of pancakes or Belgium waffles with all of the detail of American breakfast, bacon, eggs, sausages, strawberries, blueberries, yogurt, everything. It took us a while to learn how to eat so much and so many varieties of toppings on our pancakes. We who had lived on tiny rations of aid food or nothing many days now were becoming accustomed to making choices with what we wanted and did not want to eat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. 

I could not wait for everyone to sit and eat breakfast before leaving the house, so, Brother Dan let me grab my breakfast and gulp it down fast. Our children were still getting dressed for the day, my husband down in the basement where we spent our evenings, getting each child ready for this communal living we were now accustomed to. I grabbed my pail and cleaning tools and was about to leave the house when the phone rang. Sis Sharon, who had been watching me bounce around the house, getting ready, answered the one phone in the kitchen. There was just one phone line as in most homes. Those were not the days of cell phones. There was a phone in the basement for our convenience, but we hardly had any use for it.

“It’s for you, Patricia,” Sis Sharon called from the kitchen where the phone hung to a wall. I ran over to her. Who was calling me at 8 am in the morning, I wondered, my heart pounding. No one really knew us at any number in America. Any calls we got were from friends of the Denk’s at church who were already forming bonds with us, their friends, and their supporters of their vision to settle us in America. “I think it’s the agency you work for,” she said as I took the phone from her. 

“Hello,” I said into the phone. In our home country, we did not say, “Hi,” or “Hey,” like Americans. We said “Hello, how are you?” So, I waited for the person on the other line to speak. I was scared. Why would the agency be calling me this early when I was expected to be at work, I wondered as the voice on the other end broke through my thoughts. 

“May I speak to Patricia Wesley,” the flat voice said in a very low tone, a flatness that reminds you that this is a professional, not a friendship call, not one that was supposed to carry feelings. It was meant to be cold, brief, crisp, final. 

“Yes, this is Patricia Wesley, how are you?” I asked. I was still very African, informal, my round voice still carried years of another culture that was so alien to the American way of life. I was the sort of person who spoke to everyone in a grocery store, walked up to someone I believed was African, and interrupted their life by introducing myself with a handshake. I had already made enough friends across town just by walking up to them at Meijer. “Hello, you look so African, how are you?” I’d approach a total stranger, and hold out my hand for a handshake, and I’d be laughing like I knew them from another planet. And soon, we were exchanging phone numbers, and soon, I was calling them, and before long, I had a new friend. Within a few months, I had dozens of women friends from one end of Grand Rapids to the suburbs. It took me decades to discard that other Patricia out of my life, years of people finally realizing they did not have that kind of time for this strange woman who did not only bring herself to America, but also her African culture of looking after everyone and everyone’s business as if they were family. 

“Ms. Wesley, I’m calling from the Job service with not so good news,” the voice said. It was a man, a cold voice, and he sounded white, quick, that voice that is all business. His voice was, however, very American. It was the voice of a Director or Office Manager or supervisor of something. It was trained to give out bad news to employees, even employees like me who made only pennies on the dollar. “I’m happy to have caught you in time before you left home. Your work with us has been terminated. The family you work for has decided they do not need your services anymore and are replacing you,” he said. 

I stood there, holding the phone at my ear, waiting to hear something more. I was shocked, devastated, glued. I could not understand. The money was really not enough, but it gave me a sense of movement towards something, like, I was worth something. “But why?” I asked after a long pause. And I was never one for pauses, or silence, never the one to hold on to my voice as if air had taken it away from me. I was nearly thirty-six now, energetic, ready for this hard, new world. This was not the time to quit or to stand still waiting for the cold voice on the other end of the line to speak. “Why did they not want me? What did I do to them? Did I not know how to clean?” I pounded the questions at him, my eyes, balding with tears. Sis. Sharon had already left her computer in the family room to stand by me. She was a protector, my friend, sister, my woman person who knew how to stand in the gap between the refugee and the world.

“There’s nothing you’ve done, Ms. Wesley. That’s what happens. She says she wants someone else, we find them. I wish the best for you,” he said, his goodbye as hard and devoid of anything. He was simply doing his job. Was he wondering why anyone even cared about a seven dollars an hour job? Maybe, he did not care to waste his time on something as unnecessary as regret for a stranger, I thought. He probably had several others to call and tell the same news. 

            Sis Sharon took the phone from me with one hand as she held my shoulder with the other. It felt as if she was afraid my shoulders would give way. I was crying hot tears now, and she held me in her arms. Bro. Dan, who was still making breakfast, stepped away from it and came to us, both of them holding me. By then, Mlen-Too was upstairs with our three bouncing children who had already gathered with the other children in the main living room. Mlen-Too stood there, sorry for me, but allowed Sis Sharon to lead me to a couch. I sat next to her. My husband sat on the other side of me, looking ahead, waiting to comfort me. 

I was in Sis Sharon’s arms, wailing. They let me cry it out. I needed something other than the war killing our family and friends at home to cry about. I needed to weep for me now, to find a moment to weep for me. The war had taught us how to carry a kind of strength we did not really possess. To stay alive, we needed to be strong, to not cry for us, not for our family who were being killed, not for our neighbors, not even for our own near-death misses. But today, I was a free woman in America with the liberty to weep over the things that didn’t matter when we were on the run. One did not weep because they couldn’t get a job, or because their car was damaged or stolen by fighters who ransacked our towns. We did not even weep when someone we loved was killed in our presence. We needed all of our heart and mind to stay alive. Today, I had the luxury of tears over the loss of a house cleaning job. 

            Sis Sharon got some tissues and wiped my face. Every time new tears came, she wiped them, until all the box of tissues was empty, and she took an end of her apron to dry my tears. I let her do that. I loved her in so many ways I could not count. She was my older sister I always wanted. After I was done crying, she held my face in between her palms, “Look at me, my sister,” she said, “Stop weeping. You’ve been crying for years now. It’s time to stop,” she said, “you will be fine. There will be a day when you’ll have all the jobs you want and deserve, not a cleaning job. Did  you think God saved your life in all of that bloodbath, helped you get out, and brought you and your family here so you’d be a house cleaner? So you’d clean someone’s toilets after working so hard for the best education you could get?” 

            I stopped weeping and looked at her. She had shaken me awake, “No,” I said, and threw myself in her arms again, and we fell on the couch, laughing, “Hahahahahaha, no way,” I said, and everyone joined us laughing along. The children heard the laughing, and rushed into the family room, asking, “What happened, Mommy, What happened,” and their dad took me in his arms, finally. He’d been there waiting for his moment to comfort his wife as always.

~~~~~

Copyright 2025 Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

 Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University. She is a Liberian Civil War survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991 and the author of six books of poetry and a children’s book. Her awards include the 2023 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award