Gate of no return – Part 2

He wondered how someone from a royal family, like him, would descend so low as to do all these ‘useless’ and cheap jobs to eke out a living. But the reality on ground was harsh and very sad to bear.

This is America and not Nigeria, and employers didn’t even bother to take a look at his university certificate.

For four months, he couldn’t get a more dignifying job for himself and he felt really bad, annoyed and frustrated. He was now broke and completely poor.

He finally chose the option of working in a manufacturing factory as a cheap labourer, so that he could take care of himself and his immediate family.

He had a ready-made answer for his friends and family in Nigeria, who always wrote and phoned him to ask how he was fairing in America.

“Yeah men, I’m doing just fine and real great!” he would say in American slang.

For the past two years, Williams Adesupo had been working as a factory hand in South Base Manufacturing Company in downtown Harlem in New York City.

The meagre income he earned wasn’t enough to live a life of luxury he had dreamt of before leaving the shores of West Africa, nay Lagos, Nigeria, as he lived from hand-to-mouth.

The kind of paradise he hoped to live in was slippery and just like an illusion.

He thought America was a place where you pick dollars on the streets and live big, but it was all fairy tales and false fantasy.

Williams realised there were lots of poor people in America who lived in abject poverty and penury.

Even some Americans didn’t have homes to sleep in and food to eat. They were helpless and lived like church rats, in squalor.

Something painful, akin to a disaster, happened in his place of work one day.

While he was arranging the metals coming out of his machine, his hand mistakenly slipped inside the machine producing the metal plates and he screamed in agonising pains.

He had a fractured finger and a broken leg in the accident and spent one whole month at the orthopaedic hospital before he was certified medically fit to work again.

The very week he got home, his only son, Ope, threw dirt from the dustbin inside the family’s breakfast meal.

This action drew his anger and he took his leather belt and gave the young lad several lashes for being wasteful and rascally.

The young boy cried loudly for close to 10 minutes and this drew the attention of neighbours, who scurried to his apartment.

They found out that he had beaten his three-year-old son.

The Police were invited to the scene and Williams was arrested for beating his son. He was subsequently arraigned in court and sentenced to one-year imprisonment.

He soon realised that in America, it is a law that parents must not beat their children for any misdemeanor whatsoever, as it is considered as an assault by law.

While Williams was serving his one-year jail term, his father, King Adesupo, was dethroned.

Some few months later, he was released from prison and he joined his family once again. He went back to his former place of work to continue his job.

One early morning, he got a call from his father requesting that he should send him some money.

He was shocked when his father told him he had been dethroned and that he would need his financial assistance in that trying period.