How do you sing a border song? Start by taking a deep breath, because it’s another Thursday at O’Hare airport. Hang up your peacoat, reapply lip balm, and fill your favorite Contigo mug with coffee. Let the lone coat rack, white, fluorescent lighting, and sparsely decorated office space remind you that you like your work. But no one comes to the airport to stay, so you’ve learned to follow process and keep it moving.
Pray, as Mama taught you to. As your fingers find the smooth edges of your badge, pray. Clasp it like a totem and shuffle over to clock-in, exhaling these prayers: No drama today. No escalations. No fraught passengers or officers. Not today. Let the steady hum of voices and machines in the Midwest’s busiest airport greet your restless mind as one unified sound. In a few minutes, you will have to tune in and pay attention—to individual voices, phrases, tones—like listening for layers of stacked vocals on a well-loved track. For now, you let it wash over you in a single wave.
• • •
Every day at this job tests your resolve, but knowing how to follow the rules—appraise, inspect, question, admit, detain—gets you through each encounter intact.
“Morning, Glover,” your supervisor says, her voice echoing. “You’re on Primary today?”
“Yes. Morning.” You turn around with your coat half off and give a slight smile. You’re several months into your primary inspection assignment—she knows this—but she still goes over things like it’s the first day.
“Good,” she says. “You’re just in time for the incoming from Charles de Gaulle.”
Out on the Arrivals floor, you start to interview and process migrants. Travel documents, questions, more questions. Let through. Mark for secondary investigation. Stamp, stamp, stamp.
You’re tuned in now, deep in the flow, when a cloud of voices cuts through your focus. Twelve or so arriving migrants of all ages, all male except for one woman. They’re dressed identically, in fitted white linen suits with royal blue trim. You chuckle at the identical blue shako hats sitting atop their heads, each finished with a brass emblem and immaculate white feather trim.
Villagers join the march.
How do you sing a border song? Stay away from bands of all kinds: marching bands, jazz bands, heck, R&B bands. Stay away, especially, from those horns and flutes. Something about woodwinds—their wail as they sit so intimately in the musician’s hands and lips—feels like they’re calling your name, Nafisa, over and over, reminding you of Baba’s flute. The sonic waves zoom straight into your chest and hold tight.
You’ve always stayed away, but it looks like this migrant band is coming for you, whether you like it or not. Close up, you can make out their words. They speak a language you don’t understand yet it excites, like an unexpected voice note from an old friend.
“Good morning officer,” the oldest-looking one says, his eyes bloodshot from the long flight.
“Good morning. Are you all traveling together?”
One man leans forward from behind and whispers into the spokesperson’s ear. The older man leans back and scratches his salt and pepper beard.
“I’ll speak to just one person at a time,” you say, trying to nail a firm, yet friendly tone.
“Yes, officer,” the older man says, his eyes darting from side to side, “we’re all traveling together on our way to California. We are going to audition for America’s Got Talent.”
You smile. You once watched the show religiously with your ex, Delle. You two even made a game of guessing which performer would get what—the three “yes” votes, the golden buzzer, or the dreaded four Xs. The loser took two shots of whiskey after each vote. By the end of the show, you and Delle would be kissing and tugging each other’s clothes off, your belly curdling with excitement and hope and Honey Jack.
“Where are you from?” you ask the leader of the talent-show hopefuls gathered in front of you.
“We’re coming in from Freetown, through Paris,” he says.
“Freetown?” Your heart picks up speed, and that troublesome spot in your right shoulder spasms.
“Yes,” he says, glancing at your badge, then back at you. Without your first and middle names—now compressed into initials—printed out in full, he cannot tell what the lilt in your voice as you repeated Freetown meant. "N. A. Glover" doesn’t give much away, but might he be able to see in the set of your jaw, in your cheekbones and your forehead, that you are kin?
You clear your throat. “Is this your first time in the U.S.?” you ask, appraising the group again. The youngest of the troop waves and flashes a shy smile as you make eye contact. “Has any of you visited the U.S. before?”
They all answer in the negative. You ask for their passports and log into the Automated Targeting System to look up travel records.
• • •
How do you sing a border song? Accept that your loved ones will never understand why you love this work. You’ve explained that airports are charged with polar opposite forces, taut energy between structure and emotion, frazzled passengers and officers trying to keep the process. Machines fastened to the ground like rocks, an ever-flowing stream of passengers. But most people don’t have the eyes or ears for all that. Your folks least of all. You’ve been fascinated with airports since you were six, since that long-haul trip where the kind airhostesses and officers with endless supplies of candy and little toys first shepherded you from one airport to another then another and yet another, until you arrived in America. The trip is still fresh in your mind decades later, but you rarely recount it because you never want to seem ungrateful. After all, you were—are—one of the few children from your hometown who got such a clean slate.
You are now the only child of proud and loving American parents who raised you to slather your skin with Palmer’s cocoa butter, land confidently on the gym floor with your muscular legs and whip your thick locks with sass at anyone who dared question their beauty. Beyond that first rough year at school, when you were still perfecting your American accent, you learned well. You blended in.
Scrolling through travel records, you see that one member of the migrant band—the one who whispered something into the spokesman’s ear earlier—has an immigration violation in the United Kingdom.
“Lamin Momodu,” you say. “Please step forward.”
He clenches his fists and exchanges a look with the spokesperson, who takes a step back.
“How long do you plan to stay in the U.S.?” you ask him.
• • •
How do you sing a border song? Lie. Bend the truth, at the very least. When a new acquaintance asks what you do for a living, pause briefly, then say: “I work at O’Hare”. Their eyes will squint and their brows will furrow as they try to fit you—short and muscular, with chunky, shoulder-length locs—into an airport job. Over time, you’ve learned that saying, “I work in Customs and Border Protection” or “I work at the Department of Homeland Security” halts conversations. So, before anyone can guess what airport job yours could be, flash a smile and throw questions back, like, “And you? And what do you do outside of work?” Better to steer the discussion away before you’re asked to deep-dive into complex details.
Bend the truth, too, when people ask where you’re from. “I’m from Chicago,” works just fine. Your adopted parents are from here, you’ve lived here more than twenty years, and you will drag anyone to filth who talks shit about the Bears, Bulls, or Blackhawks.
Keep close to your chest, except for a handful of very dear, trusted ones—like Delle once was—that you were born in the city between the hill and the sea: Susan’s Bay, Freetown. It’s best to keep to yourself that your birth family scattered, and when it was all said and done, you ended up in lost and found, delivered permanently into the eager arms of Americans looking to complete their family. You’re thankful to have been the missing x in the Glovers’ domestic formula, and that they brought you to Chicago, a kind of rebirth.
• • •
“I’m—I’m—here for the same reason as the others,” Lamin Momodu says. He averts his eyes. “We’re all here—to—to play Bubu music at America’s Got Talent. Our music came from the underworld.” He laughs and adjusts his suit, revealing sweat patches under his arms. “Well, that’s according to a historic myth. Centuries ago, someone had a dream, and in that dream, he saw a band like ours, playing horns. He was taught to play Bubu music in the underworld. It would be an honor to share it with the world.”
“How long do you plan to stay in the U.S.?” you ask again.
“I’m sorry, officer,” he says. “I—I—will return after the competition, together with the group. It’s my first time in the U.S. I’ve never been here before, and I will return once the competition is over.”
He can’t stop adjusting his suit hem, his sleeves, his hat as he speaks. The group is fidgety too, and even the little boy is looking at you a little more earnestly. You bag the group’s travel documents and call in for Secondary investigation. You wish them the best, but you’re not holding your breath. Some songs, sadly, fade before the final chorus.
• • •
How do you sing a border song? Choose your battles. As a child, the world stood still whenever you saw an airplane fly by. Their speed, their power, the threat of imminent destruction should anything go wrong, kept your feet grounded and your eyes glued to the sky until the giant white object became a speck too small to see. Those moments took you right back to your overseas trip that started it all, but no further. Woodwinds, you could resist, but airplanes and airports, you couldn’t. So here you are.
Getting hired as a Customs and Border Protection Officer was intense, just as the on-campus recruiter had promised. You didn’t want to head to law school or med school, neither did you want an "elite" corporate job—tech or banking or worse, consulting, where you’d have to spend the entire year swotting over "Look Past My Shoulder" or whatever that boring case prep program was called. You wanted to be part of something boundless, bigger than any cluster of downtown high-rises, a vast orchestra of sorts. A band but not a band. So you sat through the hours-long application, took the exam, accepted the conditional offer, submitted to a background check, sat through interviews about said background, went for medical tests, took polygraph and drug tests, and more tests, until you got the offer.
The instant messenger on your desktop screen flashes. It’s your supervisor. Chavez is on lunch, I want you to take Secondary on this as well.
Your damned shoulder starts to spasm again. You hug your shoulder blades together and recall your prayers from earlier: No drama, no escalations, no fraught migrants.
• • •
How do you sing a border song? Do not ache for things you cannot name. With each airport transfer all those years ago, you felt tugged further and further into a new life; away from Mama and Baba who’d lain unmoving on the floor of your home, rolled into bloodstained white sheets while you stared, other adults wailing, and one swiping you off your feet and forcing you to turn away and run. Your young, underdeveloped brain blunted the horror, but it was clear that everything had changed.
You’d slept in strangers’ houses for several weeks, playing with their children and watching the adults whisper and sigh and shake their heads. And when the twin white sheets returned to your mind, and heaviness wiggled its way into your heart, one of the children would shriek and you would run over to him, shaking the weight off with the happy music of childish laughter.
• • •
Do not ache, either, for Delle, who the last time you saw him, lay shirtless underneath your duvet, clutching his mobile phone to his chest.
“I’d rather stay for a bit, to sort things out,” he’d said.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” you said. “This goes against everything I… my job stands for… I can’t, sorry,” you said, shifting away from the magnetic pull of his warmth. The options and consequences seemed black and white to you.
“Once you overstay your visa, things get tricky,” you said. “That’s not a road… I’m willing to go down.”
Delle raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The “with you” at the end of your sentence was silent, but he’d heard it loud and clear.
Hours after he’d put his clothes back on, gathered his things, and left as you held back tears, a text arrived that burned like whiskey in your throat: Not every good thing will come on its own. There are some good things we’ll have to go out of our way to fight for. If our relationship was dead on arrival, it isn’t because of how we’d met or how little time we spent together, it was because the possibility of you turning me in stood between us the entire time. Goodbye, Nafisa.
You were not born into a lineage of blue passports. If most people didn’t have the eyes for the mucilaginous nature of home, if even your folks didn’t have the ears for the musicality of borders, you, more than anyone else, did. You should have known better.
Sampa dancing to the music.
• • •
How do you sing a border song? Do better, now that you know better. You head toward the secondary investigation hall, inhaling and exhaling lungsful of air. The little boy smiles and waves again as soon as he spots you, though the rest of the group eyes you warily, along with the other hopeful migrants from earlier who are waiting to be called up and given a verdict.
You call the members of the band one by one for questioning, and you compare their claims. You inspect their carry-ons; reach into one and rummage through pens, a soiled handkerchief, a laptop, charging cables. There are several long, smooth, hollow sticks of different sizes; bamboo pipes decorated with multicolored knitting wool. Eight in total, and so much like Baba’s. You already know what they are, but you still ask.
“That’s my horn,” one man says, his eyes misting over.
“Sirs and Ma’am, I’m sorry,” you say, hating that you even have to say the words. “But these are against the rules. You can’t bring untreated bamboo across the border. It’s considered an agricultural product.”
“They’re our horns,” the original spokesman says, vowels dragging softly. “Not untreated bamboo.”
“I know. But according to our rules, your horns are made of ‘untreated bamboo’, and they have to be confiscated and destroyed.”
The word destroyed hangs in the air like a flat note.
You log the seizures into the system, fingers typing on autopilot while your chest tightens. You’ve had to make hundreds of decisions like this.
“I’ve been playing since before I could remember,” one man says. “Do you know Janka Nabay?”
“It’s just pawpaw leaves,” says another. “We play our music with the trunk of the pawpaw leaves.”
The woman speaks up last, in a voice steadier than all the men. “Bubu music is close to the earth,” she says. “It is sustainable because all of the instruments can be thrown in the garbage without harming the planet. We will find new pipes. We will find a way.”
A message pops up on your desktop screen. It’s your supervisor again, asking you to come into Private Questioning Room 1.
“Glover, I need a briefing. Who are the migrants? Interesting uniforms they have on.”
“They all have proper documentation,” you say, “but one of them has a prior immigration violation in the U.K.”
“Ah, send them all back.”
“No.” The word comes out of your mouth before you even realize. Your head feels light. You’ve just confiscated the troupe’s flutes and cannot imagine going back out there to cause more heartbreak. “I believe they’re not a risk. They’re telling the truth.”
“Even if one of them is lying and plans to overstay, we can’t risk it.”
“And what about the others?” you ask. “They all had their story straight. Some nerves, but that is to be expected. Should we rob them of their chance?”
Your supervisor exhales. “I don’t love it, but I’ll trust your judgment. Ensure everything is properly documented.”
I always do, you think.
You step back outside to the lone woman returning from the bathroom with a rolled-up cloth under her arm. You’re pretty sure she went in there to pray. The young boy is now jumping in place, oblivious. Yasaneh—a Temne word—tickles the back of your mind as you watch him. You haven’t recalled this word in almost twenty years. If you’re remembering correctly, it means to dance with the joy of being alive.
You call them up. “Can you sing for us?” you ask.
• • •
How do you sing a border song? Stand still. A few nights ago, you dreamed you were standing in Susan’s Bay, holding hands with Delle. His laughter was music, minor chords from a synth, and beats from a bass drum, and somewhere above it all, a flute’s soulful wail echoing from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, like the impeccable beat drop on your favorite song.
Now, on the Arrivals floor at O’Hare, their voices and handclaps rise and fall in songs older than anyone in the room. The small crowd in Secondary is no doubt enjoying the brief respite from the gloom of fluorescent lights and stale air and pending migration decisions.
Maybe this is how you sing a border song: not by choosing a side, but by letting music and mercy pass through you. By standing still and opening the gate.
“Welcome to America,” you say, stamping their passports one by one. “I look forward to seeing you all on TV soon.”
Damilola Onwah is a Nigerian writer and culture critic whose work explores identity, migration, and fractured family life. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Transition Magazine, Brittle Paper, The Bangalore Review, and more. Damilola's writing has received support from fellowships and residencies including Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, and the Writers’ League of Texas. Her in-progress novel and essay collection explore themes of faith, inheritance, and the immigrant experience. The latter was named a finalist for the 2024 Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship. Beyond the page, Damilola is the host of Zero Generation, a podcast that amplifies the voices of young African immigrants navigating life in the Global West. She holds both an MBA and a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Chicago, where she was awarded the Booth 1898 and PEO International Peace Scholarships. Damilola lives in Seattle with her husband and dreams of returning to Ibadan or Chicago, her first and second homes. She is delighted to bring to Tender Visions her deep love for language, community, and storytelling that bridges cultures and transcends borders.
Throughout December, Tender Photos has showcased Bubu Music in Northern Sierra Leone by Sierra Leone-based photographer Abdul Hamid Kanu. This short story expands on the images by Kanu, and was preceded by a contextual essay by Olaniyi Omiwale. For press, sponsorship and other media inquiries, contact us.
