Wings of a Bird

In Secret, Polygamy Follows Africans to N.Y. - N.Y. Times
... Aminata Kante, an immigrant from Ivory Coast who found help for herself and Ms. D. at Sanctuary for Families, an agency for battered women, uses her own story to urge rebellion.
Wed at 15 in Ivory Coast, over the telephone, to a New York City taxi driver thousands of miles away, Ms. Kante was delivered to her groom on a false passport. She said she endured his abuse for years, bore three children, turned over her paycheck from work as a health aide, and tried harder to appease him when he sent two of the children to Africa.
But something snapped, she said, when he announced that he had taken a teenage second wife, also married, just as she had been, over the phone — a valid wedding in Ivory Coast. Ms. Kante left him. Relatives pressed her to return. Uncles warned that she would be branded a bad woman, and that the stigma would follow her children in Africa. Without papers, vulnerable to deportation, she ended up in a homeless shelter.
But now, at 30, she tells the story in the warm glow of her own living room, her children restored to her, and a green card secured, through unusual legal efforts by lawyers at Sanctuary.
“I know a lady who lives with her husband and another woman in one room, a two-bedroom, with 11 kids,” she said. “I tell her, she has to move — it’s not a life.” And her own husband? His second wife is 23 now, with three children. And recently, Ms. Kante said, he married a third. ...