“He came. He took us from all those people,” Elsa told me while we sat in her living room, with, directly behind her, at least a half-dozen photographs of Solomon taken throughout the decades he had spent in America.

“He found a place, then he pulled us inside through all those people.”

* * *

In 1981, when Solomon arrived in Washington D.C., there were approximately 10,000 Ethiopians living in America. Over the next 10 years, roughly a thousand more were resettled each year, making the total Ethiopian-born population of America at the end of the decade roughly 20,000, or one-fifth of a professional football stadium’s capacity. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I would have guessed that at least 90 percent of that population was in D.C., among them my uncle Fekada, who arrived in D.C. never expecting to make it back home. Fekada fled Ethiopia while he was a teenager, and like nearly all Ethiopian immigrants of his generation, he found his way slowly to a refugee camp in Sudan. Four years after leaving his parents’ home in Addis Ababa, my uncle joined my parents, sister, and me in Peoria, Illinois. My only memory of him at that time is of him standing behind my sister while she learned to ride a bike.

Among his memories—the one that stands out the clearest—was when, after months of job-hunting, a well-intentioned employment officer sent him to an interview at a country club. “Everyone looked at me like, what was I doing there,” he told me recently. Several people told him that he must have made a mistake coming there, and when the manager my uncle had been sent to see finally did come out, he was so surprised to see my uncle that he took him into his office. He called the man at the employment agency to ask, without asking, what the hell he was thinking sending a black man to his office. The well-intentioned employment officer tried to explain that this young man was Ethiopian—a political refugee fleeing the evil empire of communism, which made him different. Different, of course, didn’t make my uncle any less black, and so he was politely told there was no job for him. My uncle gave up on the Midwest at that point, and like a true American, decided he would head west, to friends in California; but first he decided to stop in D.C., where an old friend from Ethiopia had recently landed. After two days in the capital, he was completely out of money, but this was D.C., and not Peoria, and before the day was over, my uncle’s friend had found him his first job in America as a busboy at a Holiday Inn.

My uncle moved into an apartment building in Adams Morgan one year later, and it was there he met Solomon. (Throughout this essay, I’ve omitted people’s last names to protect their privacy.) The building was on a narrow, tree-lined street just behind the National Zoo in a residential pocket of Adams Morgan that feels miles away from 18th Street. Solomon was living there, on the same floor, with his older brother, and he met my uncle by the simple fact that they were neighbors, who, by chance, were only a few years apart, and whose lives had followed distinctly similar paths. In Ethiopia, Solomon, just out high school, had fought in the armed faction of a political party opposed to the military dictatorship; my uncle, also just out high school, left in order not to be conscripted into any of the warring parties. Both men eventually ended up as refugees in Sudan, and in a detail that seems almost scripted to fit their story, Solomon, when they met, was working at a country club in Chevy Chase, Maryland.