American Citizen
Ten autumns ago, in 2010, I attended Shada’s citizenship ceremony in Memorial Auditorium on Fourth Street in downtown Louisville (I’m calling her Shada; it wasn’t her name). Inside the cool marble structure, voices and footsteps echoed as she and I moved from the great front doors, through the lobby and into the theater area, which felt like a sanctuary, with its altar and distant ceiling.
A couple of weeks ago, and a few blocks down Fourth Street, after a grand jury declined to bring any charges for Breonna Taylor’s death by police, Attica Scott — the only African American woman in the Kentucky General Assembly — was one of the protestors arrested a couple of minutes before the 9 p.m. curfew as she was crossing the street from Main Library to the Unitarian Church, seeking legal refuge.
Shada was from the Sudan, as I recall, and she and her children had been in America for a few years before she applied for citizenship. She’d had a husband when she came to the United States, but they were no longer together. She had a good job and her own home, not far from Memorial Auditorium. I lived outside town and was a volunteer through Kentucky Refugee Ministries. On a mutually-agreed-upon schedule, I showed up at her home to prepare her for the citizenship interview and exam.
Each time I came, I sat on a sofa across from Shada in her tidy living room, spreading out practice papers on her coffee table. She offered me refreshment and I declined. Shada was not talkative, did not offer personal details, and we didn’t become close friends. She was reserved and focused on the task, having set aside this one weekly after-work hour for exam prep, shushing her children when they entered the living area. She’d sit up straight in her chair, hands in her lap, and respond purposely to each prompt, nodding.
In 2010, Shada had to understand and speak English well enough to make small talk at the citizenship interview.
“How are you?”
“I’m fine. How are you?”
“How old are your children?”
“My eldest daughter is thirteen. My two sons are ten and eight.”
“How long have you lived in Louisville?”
“Seven years.”
I have friends who’ve been volunteering, these past two years, with an ‘overground railroad,’ meeting asylum seekers in the Louisville bus station as they switch rides, following a route across the country to their proclaimed sponsors. My friends reach out their arms to deliver diapers and books and stuffed animals, crackers and formula, hairbrushes and bottles of water. They usher the anxious women, men, and children towards the next legs of their trips. They smile. They wave.
I wonder how long Shada waited for a ticket to America. If she had to live in a refugee camp in some intermediate locale, away from her first home, not yet in her next home. If she had trouble sleeping at night, worrying what would become of her children. Listening for noises she didn’t recognize, hoping for something better the next day. I imagine volunteers reaching out to her, handing her diapers and crackers and bottles of water — because it makes me feel better about the world.
In her citizenship interview, Shada would be asked to read aloud some prose about American history and then be instructed to transcribe a dictated sentence. She’d be asked questions about the United States government and history, which all of us might have learned in a high school civics class, had we taken one. One hundred possible questions and answers.
“How many amendments does the Constitution have?
“27.”
“What is the ‘rule of law’?”
“No one is above the law.”
“In what month do we vote for the President?”
“November.”
“When was the Constitution written?”
“1787.”
Shada was a good student, she did not need my help.
“Name one of the two longest rivers in the United States.”
“Missouri or Mississippi.”
“Name one U.S. Territory.”
“Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa.”
Obama was president in 2010. There was no looming presidential election when we were studying for the test. No sense that democracy was in jeopardy. I never offered Shada any context or qualifications. I never paused at the question, “How many justices are on the Supreme Court?” to consider the ethnic or religious or gender make-up of the nine. We never discussed who profited by barring the District of Columbia from statehood, or whether the majority of Puerto Ricans wanted Congressional representation. When we reached the federal power to declare war, I did not point out that America hasn’t declared war in quite a long time, but instead uses euphemisms like military action, incursion, overseas contingency operation. Maybe Shada knew more about war than I did. More than the people who designed this study guide.
I worked my way through the list of what our government wanted Shada to say when she appeared for her naturalization interview in the same building where Mitch McConnell has an office. I looked down to read each question, looked up at Shada’s calm face for her reply.
She passed, easily, and invited me to attend the ceremony.
On the bright morning of the appointed day, I picked Shada up in my minivan and we drove the few blocks to the auditorium. We parked on a side street and made our way inside the great doors, into the dimly lit lobby where Shada checked in at a desk. We found a seat among the many and watched the altar, awaiting the blessing.
The welcoming judge was beaming and cheerful, confident about the future for anyone who works hard and wants to be an American citizen.
Shada swore an Oath of Allegiance to our country that day without any children or family or friends as witnesses. She only had me, this woman who’d never sworn an oath to God to bear arms for America, never renounced a foreign sovereignty, never even paid much attention in American history class. I’d only been born inside the drawn borders.
Shada didn’t cheer or whistle or whoop when she became an American citizen. She smiled and seemed satisfied and we picked up our purses and headed up the aisle. She had succeeded. She could serve on a grand jury. She could vote, in 2016, for Attica Scott for Kentucky state representative. She lives in Attica’s district.
After the ceremony, outside, I took a terrible photograph of Shada with my flip phone and emailed it to her, later. But it wasn’t worth saving, really. Just a blurry image of a Black American woman about to cross Fourth Street.
Laura’s creative nonfiction pieces have been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Hippocampus, The Spectacle, Please See Me, and The Boom Project Anthology. (Once upon a time, she used to be a pediatrician.)
