On a warm, sunny day, I sit down at my dinner table with my husband and two young children. The table is set for me, with a white cloth and a vase of brightly colored flowers. I lift up the cloth an

For this assignment, I will rewrite the scene where Dee, who has renamed herself Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, introduces her companion Hakim-a-barber (Asalamalakim) to her family. This scene will be remodeled from the perspective of the younger daughter, Maggie. I remember it being a hot afternoon, the sticky Southern heat amplifying the nervous flutter in my stomach. I watched as my sister Dee, or Wangero as she prefers to be called, walked toward our humble home, a stranger loomed large beside her. I remember how his strange name, Asalamalakim, tumbled awkwardly from my lips, a tangy taste of foreign lands and unknown traditions. Dark glasses kept our rural life at distance from his urban practicality, seeming out of place against the hand-me-down fabrics and well-worn silence of our familial home. The dinner preparation was a surreal experience, with Wangero's city-infused exuberance spilling out into the cramped kitchen. The brightly patterned dashiki she wore clashed aggressively with the simplicity of our muted fabrics. A feeling of constrained frustration was swirling inside me, like a disturbed beehive. Her insensitive fawning over objects she'd once dismissed was too much to bear; she was treating our family's precious heirlooms as mere ethnographic curiosities. As we sat down to eat, Asalamalakim refused our pork and greens offering, claiming it wasn't clean. I wondered what he made of our humble home if he deemed our food unclean. Bile of shame rose unbidden as his disdainful gaze seemed to cast judgment upon our simple ways. It was an atmospheric shift from the camaraderie of meals shared with just Mama and me. We sighed as we devoured the food, a stark contrast to the man who sat in silence, splintering the sweetness with his urban sensibility lacking the undertones of home and family. The evening ended not with the comforting sound of scraping chairs and retiring sighs but with uncertainty hanging in the heavy air, marking the chasm between the past 'Dee' and the present 'Wangero,' widening the gulf between us, testing our bonds as we tread cautiously on unfamiliar grounds.