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

the windows framed with black shutters. His wife had left him years before any children could be born between them, and so he had filled his house with antiques picked up from Eastern Market, garage and estate sales, and junkyards. It smelled of mothballs and Jade East cologne, and everything was layered in dust. At the dining-room table, there was one chair, with others stacked in the corner, which he took out when the mailman or his old friend from the Washington Gas Company wanted to stop by for a “little nip” in the middle of his shift.
    Looking into Uncle Randy’s hard face, clutching a little bag of marbles in his pocket, Manden could not have known that there was such rancidness between his mother and her brother, much of it from the fact that Uncle Randy had not liked Jack Thompson from the start. In the first place, he was dark, an immediate demerit. And although Randy Goodwin was certain their family (the Goodwins) had not carried the preservation of status and skin color (or lack thereof) to the heights of vigilant families like the Proctors of Maryland, he had nevertheless been disappointed when he first laid eyes on Jack Thompson. Although Jack’s eyes held the amber light of a lantern behind them, he was as dark as a bitter nut. More than that, Randy knew nothing of his family, these Thompsons. What kind of people were they? When he quizzed Jack Thompson at the first visit with his sister, Maria, he’d said that he came from a family of old farmers and dog breeders in Louisiana. That most of them were gone now, and he came up North to start fresh. That was all.
    But Randy thought that there was something in the hoods of Jack’s eyes, which made him uneasy. Later, he and Jack had words when he pressed the issue about Jack’s background again. “There ain’t nothin’ virtuous about wanting to be the white man’s pet,” Jack Thompson had said. “See, I look at you, Randy Goodwin, with your high-riding ways and your high-yellow skin. You think it’s the most precious thing you have. And I seen millions before you, all of you mimes to who always hated you and always will. I know you think I ain’t nothin’, but you’re wrong. Your sister knows that. Maria’s got a good mind and a good heart, you know. But then, it don’t look like you ever noticed that.” Then, after a silence: “A man’s will can’t go but one way. Let it be of your own choosin’.”
    That was the last straw for Randy Goodwin from his sister’s beau. But most worrisome of all, even after they quarreled, was what he believed to be the slow, wholesale theft of his sister’s mind by Jack Thompson. She had stopped going to the family church and switched to another that was, according to her, more “progressive.” She was forever spewing commentary about what was in the papers. The racial mayhem in the South seemed to consume her, and there came about her a graveness that never subsided. All of this, Randy Goodwin felt, betrayed his unspoken belief that he alone was responsible for his sister’s safe delivery to a reputable family and life through marriage. He knew that their parents would have seen to her having a different life, if they had not been in the bus accident that had killed them both. The hooligan, Randy Goodwin surmised, had poisoned his sister’s mind, already bursting with wild dabbles into the political escapades of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University where she was a student, where she’d met Jack Thompson at some rally he’d come down from New York to stir up.
    And Randy had been proud of his sister until that point, his ward, whom he alone had been responsible for, even though they were both young adults when they lost their parents. With her fine features and good education, he had hoped—no, expected—that she would marry one of his accountant colleagues and move into a quiet