When my father arrived in America from Ethiopia in 1978, he was resettled, with the help of an immigration agency, to Peoria, Ill. He found a job working on the factory floor of a Caterpillar Inc. plant, and by the time my mother, sister, and I joined him two years later, he’d already found a two-bedroom apartment two blocks from the Catholic school my sister and I would attend.
It was a startlingly American childhood, made more so by the fact that we spent our weekends at a Southern Baptist church on the other side of town. My parents, raised in the Ethiopian Orthodox church, had never heard of Southern Baptists before coming to America. But every Sunday, there we were, in