Different Journeys, One Goal

This was the day they thought would never come. Fleeing the Nazis and the Communists and the tanks of Tiananmen Square, dodging bullets and rockets and long knives, escaping civil wars and mass arrests and torture squads, they didn’t dream that one day they would be here, standing on this mountaintop, soaring above this valley--free.

Not that this is the Promised Land. They don’t believe in promised lands. They didn’t know what to expect when they set out for this country, and they weren’t always welcomed when they arrived.

The only promise they had in mind was one they made themselves, to try for a little peace and dignity, to risk everything so their children might have a chance at happiness. America was the place that helped them keep that promise, and this mountaintop was where that promise would become a pledge. And Thursday was the day.

It happens every summer. Randomly chosen immigrants living in the Charlottesville area receive an invitation to Monticello, the magnificent white-columned mansion of Thomas Jefferson, to be sworn in as American citizens. The ceremony is meant to be a departure from the norm: Typically, after showing proof of residency, after undergoing background checks, after passing an American history test, immigrants become naturalized in some stuffy courthouse or bureaucrat’s office.

But every Fourth of July--the anniversary of Jefferson’s death as well as America’s birth--the process is transformed into something special, a lavish ceremony with speeches and bunting and hundreds of onlookers, which celebrates America’s four centuries of immigration as much as it honors the immigrants themselves.

Ceremony Has Added Meaning This Year

And this year, with America at war, with Americans wary about illegal immigrants in their midst, with every American citizen declared a target by terrorists, the 40th annual Monticello ceremony was sure to take on more meaning. Every immigrant who received an invitation last week knew that becoming a citizen would be an act of bravery as well as a moment of triumph.

The ceremony was scheduled for 11 a.m. Some were there by 5:45. So they had hours to trade stories. Why they left home. How they got here. Each story was different and each was the same. They came from vastly different places and cultures, but they stayed for one reason. America fed their hunger for freedom and made them hungry for more.

Daud Mahmoud’s story--which he told carefully, haltingly--begins and ends with the soil. Daud grows things for a living, and when he learned last week that he and his wife, Adela, would be among the 70 men and women from 33 countries being sworn Thursday, his heart opened like one of his prized flowers. He read aloud the letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, saying that he and Adela had been chosen, and they grew wild with excitement. A man of routine, Daud tried to focus for the rest of the week on his daily schedule--rise at dawn, exercise, shower, pray, off to work at the green nursery--but it was hard to concentrate.

As a boy in Kabul, Afghanistan, Daud loved his native land and never wanted to leave. Family meant everything to him, and in Kabul he was surrounded by 13 siblings and 100 first cousins. America was a distant planet swimming in a far-off galaxy. If he harbored any ideas of visiting, these were just vague dreams. They didn’t become desperate hopes until 1979, when the tanks appeared.

As troops from the Soviet Union came rumbling across the border, many in Daud’s world suddenly vanished. Some were killed; others fled into the mountains. A few managed to leave the country, like his brother, who crossed into Pakistan, then onward to America, with his wife and children.

Daud longed to join his brother, but his parents were old. Someone had to stay behind to care for them. “I couldn’t leave,” Daud said in the voice of a gentle man from a violent place.

Also, Daud had a good job in the ministry of agriculture. He was doing what he loved, studying crops and climate, learning to make things grow. He surveyed his life in Kabul--a family he loved, a house he owned, a fine orchard out back--and he felt rooted to the ground, like one of his apple trees.

Nine years passed. The Soviet invasion stalled. But as the troops pulled back, Afghanistan slid into civil war. The streets around Daud’s house crackled with gunfire.

“The rockets was passing our house,” Daud said. “Tens of rockets every night. Every second we thought, this rocket’s going to hit the house.”

Government officials pressured Daud to join the party, join the fight. One of his bosses even waved a pistol in his face. Daud simply kept working, kept making things grow and bided his time.

Husband Decides ‘It’s Time for Us to Go’

By then his parents had died, so Daud took Adela aside one morning and whispered, “It’s time for us to go.”

Seven months’ pregnant, Adela cringed. But she knew Daud was right.

“Of course it was life-threatening,” he said. “But I said, Let me to get this chance at life. I don’t like to be in danger every day. Better to be in danger one day than every day.”

It was early spring but biting cold. Snow and frozen mud covered the ground. Daud and Adela disguised themselves and their four children, all under 13, then hurried into a hired car and sped for the border.

No one said a word. Adela sat in the front seat, paralyzed.

“I had the Koran on my chest,” she said, “praying to God to save us.”

Her greatest fear wasn’t land mines but bandits. They might kill or kidnap Daud and leave her stranded with the children in the Khyber Pass. Armed men did stop the car twice, waving guns, demanding money, but Daud paid them each time and was allowed to proceed.

They reached Pakistan in 20 hours, dazed and weak. They had nothing. They lived for a time with Daud’s uncles and cousins, and Daud found a job at an office many miles away. He commuted on an old bicycle, a 45-minute ride each way.

Family Settles in Virginia, Via Dallas

Soon he had enough money to take his family to Dallas, where his brother had settled. “My brother picked us from the Dallas airport,” Daud said, “and we were crying, everyone crying.”

A sister had also made her way to America, to Virginia, and she told Daud about life here. Rolling farmland. Cool mountain air. He liked the sound of these mountains: Blue Ridge Mountains. He knew that he would need mountains around him to feel at home.

So 18 months later, he moved his family once more, to Waynesboro, a small town just 30 miles west of Monticello, where he and Adela began the process of becoming Americans. They bought a house at the end of a quiet street. They sent their children to the local school. They encouraged their oldest son to join the Marines. They learned English--a struggle for Daud, whose tongue spoke Dari and often wouldn’t listen to his American head.

He worked with a tutor in the evenings and on weekends.

Adela attended cosmetology school and found work as a hairdresser. But Daud had trouble getting a job. After eight months of looking, he grew desperate. He begged one nursery to take him on, even offering to volunteer, to demonstrate his work ethic. They gave him a try, at minimum wage.

He was overjoyed. At last he was making things grow again.

“I do a great job,” he said. “I’m proud of myself. I’m honest. Reliable. Dependable. Responsible for something when it is given to me.”

Last September, however, he was laid off. Business was down sharply. A week later came the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and Daud sank into a deep depression. “I had no job,” he said, “and every day you’re watching people that they were died. They were killed. They were under the whole debris.”

A doctor found that Daud’s blood pressure was dangerously high. The doctor prescribed pills and told Daud to control his stress. But how could he control stress when no one would hire him? Daud mailed 200 resumes: No one wanted a Muslim from Afghanistan last fall.

He focused his efforts on one nursery, visiting the owner again and again.

“I went there every day,” Daud said. “Then one day the owner said: ‘I like your consistency.’ ”

Daud got the job this year and threw himself into his work. “The plants talk to me,” he said. “I look at their faces and they say, I am hungry, I am sick, I am tired. They tell me what they need.”

He was delighted, and proud, when four of his new co-workers appeared in the audience a few minutes before the Monticello ceremony began.

“It’s been great since he started working there,” said Deborah Wilder. “He’s so professional, and he works so hard.”

And everything he touches, she added, just seems to grow.

Sometimes his life doesn’t seem real. “I don’t believe I could make all this journey,” Daud said. “If I know it would take me 14 years to make this journey, when I started it might make me weak.”

How can one life span contain two such distinct lives, he wonders. Did he dream the Afghanistan life? It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes between dreams and memories. “Some nights I am still dreaming I’m in Afghanistan,” he said, “and people are chasing me.”

But in the morning, when he wakes up, he’s in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’s wearing sport sandals and chinos and a white polo shirt. He’s watching Peter Jennings. He’s driving a shiny red Chevrolet. He’s drinking Coors Light and rooting for the Washington Redskins.

“I feel, and I’m sure my family feels, that we were born here,” he said. “And we are part of this country. We were born in Afghanistan, but now the United States feels like Afghanistan to me.”

And so the Monticello ceremony seemed more a confirmation of something already true than a transformation. An important confirmation, however, a day he and Adela thought would never come.

And for Adela it didn’t come. Not Thursday. When Daud phoned Monticello for details of the ceremony, he learned that Adela’s name wasn’t on the list. He had misread the letter. Only he was chosen to take part in the ceremony.

Adela will be sworn in later this summer, in a stuffy courthouse or a bureaucrat’s office.

She was devastated when he told her. She dropped her eyes and said nothing. He tried to comfort her, promising that when she became a citizen they would celebrate again, make that day special too. She smiled weakly and looked up at him.

“I know,” she said, barely audible.

But she was putting on a brave face for Daud. And she wore a special dress for the occasion that he was sure to love, covered with pink flowers. Daud also dressed up, wearing a crisp white shirt. Together they arrived at Monticello just before 8 a.m. They strolled across the lawn, with three of their children, and up to the registration table, in the shade of a spreading tulip poplar that Jefferson himself had planted.

Immigrants From All Over the World

Then they took a seat among the men and women from Fiji and Iran and El Salvador, from Guyana and Ukraine and Poland, from Malaysia and Taiwan and Albania. Daud sat in the front row, not far from Alla Roubinets, of Belarus, who escaped Adolf Hitler as a 5-year-old and survived Joseph Stalin as an adult. “My father and my husband’s father were killed in the war,” she said. “We have hard time. Not good. Then we come to America. America did good for us.”

He sat a few rows from Helen Shen of China, who came to California to study and stayed because of Tiananmen Square. He sat in front of Ilka Waufle of Brazil, who had spent much of the week memorizing the oath of citizenship as if it were a poem.

And for her, it was.

In the back row sat John Kanu, a third-year medical student at the University of Virginia. He came to America 13 years ago from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to avenge the death of his father, who became ill when Kanu was a boy.

Kanu believes his father’s illness was treatable. But Sierra Leone doctors misdiagnosed the condition, he said, and his father suffered horribly. After three years of pain, his father died.

To honor his father’s memory, Kanu came to America for college and medical school, paying his way with loans and grants. He was lonely and homesick when he arrived, a teenager speaking in a thick Krio accent in a place where everyone spoke in a languid drawl. And he couldn’t speak with his mother and sisters back home, because civil war had erupted in Sierra Leone. The only news he received was the occasional TV report about people being tortured and mutilated by the rebels.

“Children had their arms cut off,” he said. “It was a very trying time. It put a lot of strain on me.”

He survived those bleak days by concentrating on his father, who showed such courage. With no formal education, Kanu’s father worked as a custodian at a university. But he constantly urged Kanu to aim for college, for medical school, for the moon.

Now, Kanu’s mother and his family were settling themselves in the audience, waiting to see the young medical student become an American.

While waiting for the ceremony to begin, he studied the symptoms of pulmonary disease in one of his medical textbooks.

Across the great lawn, appraising the lines of Jefferson’s mansion carefully, was Paul Jasiurkowski, from Poland, for whom America is most vividly embodied by a house.

Living in Krakow in the 1970s, Jasiurkowski worked as a ditch digger. There were days, standing in his ditch, he would pause to gaze down the street at the American consulate. “I noticed that huge big American flag,” he said. “And always I could feel my skin crawling when I see that flag. I would get chills.”

Leaning on his shovel he would think: “Someday.”

In 1981, someday arrived. Jasiurkowski moved to Virginia to work as caretaker on a wealthy woman’s farm. He tended the woman’s alfalfa fields, stacked her hay, fed her Black Angus cows and fell in love with the landscape. Over time he convinced her to sell him a small piece of the farm, which he held on to for 20 years.

A few months ago, Jasiurkowski broke ground on that piece of land, and his new house, partly designed by him, will soon be finished. He drives there every day in his truck and had every intention of driving there Thursday after the ceremony, even though his wife made a batch of sauerkraut and friends were coming over to celebrate.

He almost can’t help himself, his wife said. He likes to go there and sit on the piles of dirt and grin at the giant hole in the ground.

Some days he joyfully digs a ditch around the house, for the drainage system. But now, in America, he uses a backhoe, which he borrows from his new next-door neighbors.

Daud wanted to meet his fellow immigrants, but he was shy. Also, he wanted to stay close to Adela, who felt left out, and often went missing among the gardens.

“Why you are staying away from me today?” he kidded her, and she smiled.

At last it was time for the ceremony. Irish author Frank McCourt was the guest speaker, and he described his “love” for America, emphasizing the word again and again. He recounted how his love swelled and broke his heart after the attacks on the World Trade Center, and he congratulated the immigrants on sharing this love, and he thanked them for “expanding” American society.

“You have so much to look forward to,” he said. “And your children have so much to look forward to. So thank you for becoming Americans. And welcome.”

At noon, it was time for Daud to walk up the front steps of Jefferson’s house and recite the oath of citizenship, to declare that he would defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States, and that he would bear arms on behalf of the United States. He raised his right hand and swore.

A judge declared him a citizen of these United States, and the band played “God Bless America,” and the crowd stood and applauded. Daud hugged Adela and his children and beamed at everyone.

Not with pride, but a sense of accomplishment. He had set out to do this thing, and this was the day he did it. He struggled to describe what he had done to everyone who stopped by to congratulate him, but the words weren’t there.

Still, you could see in his smile as he walked to his car, past the lovely flower beds and soaring sugar maples and blooming impatiens, what it was.

He had made America grow--by one.