DALLAS - For once, Stephanie Umoh does not have a leading role.
Her big sister Sarah does - she gets to play Charlie Brown, and Violet, and Snoopy, while Stephanie is relegated to a minor one-line role as Linus, in the snowflake scene ("It sure tastes ripe to me!")
Watching - and giggling through - "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is a holiday ritual for the sisters, but this year they can't, so they're reenacting it themselves. For the first time since starting college, Umoh won't be spending the Christmas holiday at home in a Dallas suburb with her mother and siblings. Instead she'll be in a village half a world away in southern Nigeria with her father and his vast extended family, most of whom she's never met.
Umoh, 22, is a musical theater student in her senior year at the Boston Conservatory. One of the theater division's brightest lights, she's overcome tremendous odds (and racked up tremendous debt) in dogged pursuit of a career on the New York stage. With little formal training, she's quickly made a reputation in Boston's professional theater circles.
Now Nigeria is looming. "It will be good. I'm glad. I'm happy," Umoh is saying, sounding not entirely convinced. She's worried about a lot of things. Being so far away. The strange language. Getting sick. Being, in her words, "appropriate."
"I don't look like the typical Nigerian," says the light-skinned Umoh, whose mother is white. "I'll look different."
The trip to Africa is more than just an exotic vacation for Umoh. It's a personal journey to her father's ancestral home, a search for answers to her questions about his culture and heritage. Her parents divorced when she was 3, and Umoh and her older sister and brother were raised by their mother, though they saw her father on alternate weekends.
Now he's taking her to Nigeria for two and a half weeks - together with her stepmother, half-brother and two stepsisters - so she can attend a cousin's traditional Nigerian marriage ceremony and visit the small village in Akwa Ibom state where her father was born.
It's a long-awaited respite from an intense if exhilarating senior year, filled with rehearsals, performances, and quick jaunts to New York. But it's also uncharted territory.
Cultural complexity
Umoh has had a complicated relationship with her Nigerian side.
As a child, she was in many ways the ultimate all-American girl, growing up in a small bungalow with two dogs, colonial-style furniture, and needlepoint wall art. She played with white Barbie dolls and was homecoming princess in high school.
But although her father's home was within walking distance, it could hardly have been more different. A former Nigerian police officer who'd attended college in America and became a businessman, James Umoh remarried a Nigerian woman, went to Nigerian parties, listened to African music, and spoke to his wife and friends in rapid-fire, incomprehensible Ibibio, the main dialect of Akwa Ibom. He cooked native foods like rice and stew and fufu, a kind of dough made with plantains and yams, eaten with thick, peppery soup. It was a vibrant world she remembers as "loud and luscious and spicy."
But as a small girl it was a world where she was not always at ease. At Nigerian parties, she and her siblings stood out: "We were the three light-skinned, big-haired children," she says.
Over time this changed, as she learned more about her father's life and listened to his stories - the romance of growing up on a family-owned farm, the drama of his conscription into the Nigerian civil war to fight on the Biafran side. "I love that (being Nigerian) makes me different," says Umoh. "I'm very proud of it."
But cultural differences have caused friction over her choice of career.
Like many young Americans with an array of educational options, Umoh's goal - to be a performer on the New York stage - has largely been guided by her heart. But her father, who runs a home health care agency near Dallas, had something more practical in mind - he selected medicine - and his displeasure has sometimes irked her.
He says that he is proud of her. "When she graduates," he said in an interview, "I'll have a party, not just for me but the entire Nigerian community." Still, he's contributed little to her college expenses, which she's paying for through loans and jobs; and he matter-of-factly acknowledges he's never seen her perform in Boston, or even heard her sing, except for one high school musical.
What Umoh has come to understand, if not fully accept, is that his thoughts about her career are in some way related to his being Nigerian. "I have to understand it's cultural," she says. "He is stuck in his ways."
'I felt so welcome'
The night before departing, as she snacked on popcorn with her brother and sister in the shadow of the family Christmas tree, Umoh wondered whether the trip would be a mistake. She felt she hadn't had enough time with her family. And she dreaded the prospect of flying. It would be an 18-hour trip to Lagos, and she has a total aversion to airports.
But her anxiety was dispelled at the Lagos airport when she was embraced by a dozen Nigerian relatives, including one of her father's brothers and a crowd of cousins.
"I felt so much love and I felt so welcome," she wrote the next day in her journal. Later, she reflected, "It was almost as if I had met these people before and they were welcoming me home."
From the moment they settled into the hotel (and friends arrived with gifts of rice and goat meat, which Umoh artfully dodged), the visit was a blur of warm and lively family gatherings. All the women were "Auntie," the men "Uncle," even if they weren't really related.
Culture shock set in quickly, what with the scorching heat, eye-stinging smog, rash drivers, and ubiquitous street beggars. She was struck by the disparity of living standards between what she was used to and what she now saw around her.
"We Americans are so wasteful!" she wrote, observing that Nigerians rinse their hands in bowls of water instead of using napkins, and tolerate extreme heat without air conditioning.
While her relatives were among the Nigerian middle class, the world around them seemed tough. "Many of the things I see to my eye seemed poor," Umoh says. "The condition of the buildings, the cars with no emission standards. There are so many cars with broken doors, no mirrors - they would never pass inspection in America."
One disconcerting revelation was how little she knew about her own heritage. Nigerian young people seemed much more knowledgeable about history and culture than young Americans, Umoh says. She visited a museum in Lagos that displayed the history of Nigerian tribes, "and I felt so stupid," Umoh says. For the first time, she learned about the Nigerian connection to the slave trade.
Seeing a pair of shackles worn by slaves was "heartbreaking," as was a performance she saw in the seaport city of Calabar, where a troupe of dancers poignantly reenacted the slave experience. "I had assumed that since I lived in America and I know where my family comes from, I'm not really linked to the American slaves, but I am," she says. "Very closely."
After Lagos, they left for Akwa Ibom, which, compared to frenetic Lagos, seemed like an oasis with its exotic plants, coconut trees, large beautiful rivers, and men and women carrying loads on their heads.
After a frantic semester of rehearsals, recitals, and classes at Boston Conservatory, she was enchanted by simple pleasures - fried plantains, succulent pineapple, the sight of a little boy with a heavy water jug on his head riveted by a passing parade. She fell in love with music by the Nigerian-born singer Asa, who sings a blend of jazz, pop, and reggae in English and a dialect called Yoruba. She discovered that the people of Akwa Ibom were known for their love of song and dance, and she was impressed that everyone - old and young - seemed to know how to dance, including at the all-day marriage ceremony she attended. "It's in their blood," she says.
Umoh, an expressive performer who moves naturally and fluidly to music, has often felt it's in her blood, too, though she never understood why. "I can see a lot of me in this culture," she says. "I fit right in."
Yet Nigeria was so far removed from her intense daily life at the Conservatory. No one seemed particularly interested in what she was studying, though they seemed thrilled that she was in college. "A lot of people don't understand what theater is," she says. "They don't know what Broadway is. It's definitely an American thing."
Talking to other young people - several of whom studied medicine - she saw a "different mentality" about careers. "Over here, you are living for yourself. I can be an artist and still find a way to live. I can build my own life, and make my own decisions," she says. But in Nigeria, "if a child goes into a profession, they can make enough money to help the family. . . . What you do with your future is going to affect the entire family and sometimes your entire village."
She did see her father's village, Ibakachi, and tearfully describes how he drove her by his church and school, though not his home because it was destroyed in a fire during the civil war.
Seeing for herself how far he'd come - from an isolated missionary school in Africa to owning a successful business in Texas - gave her more insight into his attitudes. "I understand my father and some of his resistance to my choices a lot better," she says.
Now back for a few weeks, she is in the thick of her breathless Conservatory life, preparing for her lead roles in two imminent school musicals, "The Life" and "Dessa Rose," not to mention another play and other school and work commitments. This weekend she plans to be in New York to get her publicity photos taken for Senior Showcase, the springtime show at the conservatory performed by seniors for agents and casting directors.
Umoh says she feels closer to her father now; they talk on the phone and e-mail more frequently, and he's making plans to come to her graduation. When she looks at her photos or souvenirs, or listens to her Asa CD, she is transported back to his world. "I almost feel complete now," Umoh says. "I know where I come from, and I know where I'll always be welcome."
