Read Online Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejidé - Free Book Online Page A

forgotten about their father’s body on the concrete, their mother in white hospital robes, the way they’d had to live in their uncle’s basement? Could loving someone heal what lay agape and infected in him to this day?
    It was ever fresh in his mind, when at ten years old he sat down on the curb beside his father’s body. He listened to his mother scream above the police sirens. Stood in the door while visitor after visitor came to sit with their mother in the living room. Like that old woman called Ms. Pierce, with the sing-song lilt in her voice, her incessant talking bursting forth as if through a broken levee. They all came to give their condolences, to commiserate, to rage about what could be done about it. Which, after the angry talk, cards and flowers, pot pies and cold chicken, head bowing and tears, was nothing. He and Horus were the spectators of a quiet that settled into the house like poured cement, thickening, hardening. Then, slowly, their mother began to slip away. She sat by the kitchen window and did not move again. Manden remembered watching her fly out of that window on the winds of her mind, day after day, soaring above the city and flying all the way to the kingdom of James in her Bible. One day, her eyes emptied out, and she didn’t come back from there, that place. There was only a mannequin left sitting in a white robe in their kitchen, its head tilted toward the sky.
    That was when they came to get their mother from the apartment in New York. Someone, perhaps one of the neighbors who brought them food, had finally said something about the fact that Maria Thompson, wife of slain civil rights leader Jack Thompson, had forgotten the names and faces of her children (Manden and Horus), forgotten to eat and to bathe, forgotten that the apartment in which she sat by the window for days on end, urinating and defecating on herself, was still her home. Someone paid the rent for a while, and then someone called about Maria Thompson and her empty eyes and the children alone with her. Manden could still hear Horus cry and shriek (his own horror too vast and unspeakable to utter) when the people from the Utica Asylum came to get her. His little arms were wrapped around their mother’s leg as he screamed and begged her not to go, as she dragged him across the floor, oblivious. That was the last time either of them ever saw her again. Years later, Manden would come to think that the Bible she clutched had somehow led her through its pages and showed her a way out, away from her pain, away from them.
    Someone came with a car and drove him and Horus down to live with Uncle Randy, their mother’s brother, who lived on the northeast side of Washington, D.C. They hadn’t known they had an uncle before. Uncle Randy, as it turned out, hadn’t spoken to his own sister in years, hadn’t made any efforts to contact Maria when he heard she married that “radical hooligan” they called Jack Thompson. He didn’t know he had nephews, he said. He’d keep them out of trouble. Make men of them.
    On the day that he and Horus were delivered to the porch of their uncle’s rowhouse, Randy opened the front door, his face as grim as an undertaker. Manden felt as if he were standing at the entrance of some funeral parlor. The caseworker who accompanied them in the car introduced them to their uncle, thanking him for stepping up and taking responsibility for their care. “They’ve been through so much,” she said, “what with their father’s tragic death. Their poor mother.” She told him and Horus to shake Uncle Randy’s hand. When Manden looked up at him, there was an echo of familial resemblance to their mother’s face, with his yellow skin, high cheekbones, and thick brows. But his eyes were cold and lifeless.
    An accountant at a small tax service across the river in Anacos­tia, Uncle Randy lived alone in a three-story rowhouse painted white,