Time of the Locust

by Morowa Yejidé

  From the makeshift stage, Jack Thompson wiped his brow and looked across the field of faces in the crowd. He was no longer concerned about the death threats he received the week before. The assaulted protesters in the streets and the accosted women who stood in front of municipal buildings. The midnight shootings. The dawn beatings. He did not think of the lynchings of his boyhood in Bed, Louisiana, and those he read about in the paper. How his grandfather dropped from the tree he’d swung from and walked away. How his grandfather cooled his broken neck in the Pearl River and sat by his wife’s bed at night to watch her sleep. Jack Thompson did not think about the rape of his young sweetheart Delia by Judd Baker in the high grasses of Boudreaux Field back in Louisiana or the things that grew wild inside of him when he grabbed the shotgun. Nor did he think about the cold New York alleys he slept in when he crossed the scratch line at last. He set it all aside and thought only of the promise he had made to himself at the Hudson River. He thought only of the promise of starting anew.

  Jack Thompson looked over the faces of the people. It did not matter that he didn’t recognize them individually. He didn’t need to, because he knew them all anyway. They were the men at the barbershop. They were the women of the church and the market and the children of the parks. He looked at the bright eyes of his boys, Manden and Horus, and his wife, Maria, holding each by the hand proudly. And when all of it had filled him to fullness, Jack Thompson began.

  “Brothers and sisters. Friends and enemies. Another of our slain black knights has left us with some important questions.”

  The crowd hummed.

  “Who are you? What was your name before you were brought here, and why ain’t it that today you don’t know what your name was? How come? If your name is Smith or Jefferson now, what was it before it was Smith or Jefferson? Can you tell me? No, you can’t. Because we don’t know. But that’s not the point anymore, brothers and sisters. I am not here today to speak of our suffering. We know the stories. We all got a trunk full of our grandmothers’ memories and what our grandfathers told us in the fields. We all got a river of tears we’ve cried, people we’ve buried, women and children we couldn’t save. These things are burned into our souls without us speakin’ of them. But today I am here to speak of rising. I speak of rising to who and what we are. What we were. What we are meant to be. And to know who and what you are is only half the journey. To be who and what you are is the prize.”

  Jack Thompson paused and looked at the sky. The men nodded, and the women hugged their breasts. They were all transfixed in the throng of testifying to what was being said, together fed by hope and outrage, a moving, living mass of energy. On the edges stood an assortment of onlookers. A few whites bothered with the spectacle, among them a man with crystal-blue eyes who no one knew was a police officer because he was not wearing a uniform. On the edges, too, stood the junkies, whores, pimps, thugs, and others who had long ago sat down on the curb of life.

  “Those of you with children, hear my words,” said Jack Thompson. “A man gotta know who and what he is before he can name himself, before he can understand anything, before he can show his children the way through. Because this place—this country—has made the black child, the black man and the black woman, invisible, brothers and sisters. And so a man has got to name himself anew. He gotta rebirth himself again before he can live. Before he can stop himself from dying.” And here he thought of his grandfather, Nathan Thompson, and how he died, and the thought fed the fires of his passion.

  “I got children, brothers and sisters. And I considered them before they was born. I considered what they would face. A world that hates them and would do anything to erase any trace that they ever existed. Even the ghost. You know, my grandma Lucy, God bless her soul, used to say that the ghost comes back and stays around sometimes to give the reasons. It stays to give the living some understanding of the reasons of a man’s life, of what he did and why. What are our reasons for what we did and what we tryin’ to do?”

  Jack Thompson looked down at his sons standing next to his wife. “I love my boys too. I want my boys to hear what kind of man I am now and understand what I was when I’m gone. And after I’m gone, I want to be nearby in case they got questions, in case they lose their way. I want my boys to live and thrive and streak the sky with all they can do, just like you, brothers and sisters. And I named my first boy Manden, for the great Mandinka empire that once was. Right now, that empire is far away from the South we know. It is far away from New York and the United States we know. But I put it in his heart. An empire in his heart. Not like in a book I read, not just in words, not in faded pictures, but in his heart. To remind him that empires lost can be built once again. That he is the keeper of greatness. And then I named my second boy Horus, ruler of the sky. Any of you heard of it? Read about it? About the son of a king who could fly? The sky is there for him to touch, brothers and sisters. It’s there for him and others like him to soar to. Always. That’s what I want my boy Horus to know. To remind him that he can be free anytime he wants. That he must—”

  Pop pop pop

  There was a loud sound that cracked over everything. Horus felt his mother drop his hand. He saw her open her mouth and scream—an otherworldly Jurassic scream, a sound made in the time of calcite seas, supercontinents, gastropods, and mammoth flora. His mother screamed, and the sound of it broke through the crowd like a shock wave, knocking Horus back. People dropped and ducked like a flock of startled birds. Legs and arms flailed everywhere. Bodies rocked and shook. Heads were thrown back. Hearts dropped and shattered into a million pieces. And there was much screeching and squawking and shouting, and there were murmurs and cries from women framed in apartment windows above. People ran in straight lines and circles. There was the loud, tense pulse of throbbing hearts thumping the ground. There were curses of men, unintelligible individually but audible in unison, that said, “They have taken another one from us.”

  Horus blinked in the unreality, wondering what his father was about to say. What was Jack Thompson going to say before the bullet stopped him? What else was he going to tell his boy? Then time thickened to a sludge, and in the long seconds, Horus watched his father falling, falling forever, like a razed skyscraper losing to gravity, imploding from interior detonations. Layer by layer. Story by story. A vertical descent of stone and concrete, of steel and iron, cascading down like a waterfall in great thundering shoals, like the apocalypse, like the End of Days. Horus could still feel the warmth of his mother’s hand in his palm, and in the sludge of time he looked down at it, thinking that the comfort of moments before would return time and dimension to where they once were. Horus looked for his brother, Manden, but could not find him. It seemed his own eyes had turned to rubies, for everything was bathed in red, crimson like his mother’s wet hands outstretched over his father’s body.

  Three days later, at the funeral, it seemed to Horus that all the world was chalked and shaded in charcoal. His father was pieced together in his coffin in a gray heap of ruin. Horus stared and stared, unable to understand how such a metamorphosis could have taken place. He sat in the pew as the cold overtook him, as the winter solstice rose above the altar, as his heart floated away on glaciers. He looked to Manden, who sat next to their mother like a ventriloquist’s doll. Then, from the satin-rimmed coffin, Horus thought he heard his father’s voice.

  “Promise me . . .”

  Horus looked around, then back at the coffin. Did he hear his father say something? Was his father really dead? Horus peered into the coffin, but his father’s eyes were closed. Horus looked at the women fanning their faces with the eulogy program and the men wiping their foreheads with monogrammed handkerchiefs. He looked at his big brother again to see if he heard the voice too. But Manden was leaned into a permanent crook, holding on to their mother’s limp hand. And then the animated choir behind the coffin rose like an electrical storm, the wrath of organs, the fury of tambourines, the whipcrack of claps. A woman moved to the center to sing. An old
Negro spiritual rose from her throat like an obelisk, the mezzo-soprano of Isis in the flesh. Horus clutched a marble in his pocket, hoping it would steady his grip on the world.

  Later, as Jack Thompson grayed in his grave and the eternal snow of ashes fell on his face, Horus, together with his brother, watched their mother leave. It was a long leaving, first begun when she dropped his hand and screamed, then when she sat by the window of their apartment. Horus and Manden would never know the nature of their mother’s journey when she departed from that window. Barefoot, she walked the hot coals of the Psalms of Solomon. She ice-climbed Corinthians. She rode bareback up the rocky inclines of Shomeron. She snaked black lakes and crossed the slate rock valleys of the Shadow of Death. She swam the rivers of Abana and Pharpar until her skin grew raw and iridescent. She blistered and scabbed atop a raft in Genesis, adrift on the ocean on the day it had been born. And when, at last, she stood before the burning bush, naked and bleeding, she asked why all that happened in her life had happened and got no response.

  That was when she turned to leave for the desert. There, amid a sea of sand, the question blazed in the sky above her and made beads of glass beneath her swollen, blistered feet. The sky burned above her head, and the question remained in heaps of ash that rode the acrid winds of her thoughts: Why was her husband murdered? And the question swirled around her, until dust clotted the last tear she would ever cry.

  But these were things that Horus and Manden knew nothing about. What they knew was the last time their mother cooked and they had dinner at the table, the last clean stack of folded shirts and socks in their drawer, the last night she kissed them and tucked them into bed. The two boys listened to her slip-down sounds by the window, the sing-song sound of her mind letting go and something else taking hold. She spoke only once and then no more:

  Butterfly, Butterfly

  Fluttering your wings of

  Emerald and amethyst

  Butterfly on the quick wind

  Fierce you are

  Ready you are

  Riding the quick wind across

  The seas and

  The lakes and

  The rivers and

  The creeks

  Up to the tall oaks

  Past the hawk nests and squirrel holes

  Down to the ivy and snapdragons

  Shining your wings in the sun

  Afraid of no one

  Years later, Horus would picture his mother in that sing-song way, with her shimmering butterfly wings, with the sun warming her back. Horus and Manden were never to hear their mother’s voice again. Whether she heard what she last said from somewhere and repeated it or she dredged it up from her soul, they would never know. Near the end of their mother’s leaving, her sorrows hung in the air like notes, and despair dripped about the apartment like a ceaseless rain, and she looked at them without seeing that they were there. And that was when Horus and Manden understood that they were alone: one boy with an empire frozen in his heart and the other who could no longer see the sky.

  Heart and Mind

  Beginning with the coldness of his uncle’s basement when he was seven years old, Horus had the eerie sense that the heart could make a decision long before the mind had realized it. This feeling, which dwelled somewhere in the ether of his subconscious, grew stronger as he grew older. He had the sense that the heart, with its own barometer of scope and impact, could experience something and make a choice that the mind would be helpless in resisting. The mind, in its arrogance of understanding and control of matters it has neither understanding of nor control over, could preach long and hard to the heart about what was and what wasn’t—never once realizing (until it was too late) that the heart has already decided.

  Secreted in Horus’s subconscious was the truth that no two hearts process anything in the same way. The tree limb from which two birds take their first flight does not wonder what is to become of them. It does not ask the questions: Where will one of them go? Which path will the other one take? No. It bears witness only to their departure and the wind left in their wake. And even if Horus and his brother had been through what they went through as twins, there was always the reality that each of their hearts would have had its own voice, its own calling. As it was, he and Manden, although they were from the same nest, felt what was to be felt differently. Two hearts made different decisions.

  For Horus, this dynamic seemed at first to be sparked by happenstance. Later, it seemed to him that it had all been mystic, almost destiny. He was at work, making his usual security guard rounds inside the Martin Luther King Library on Ninth Street. With his usual precision, he was checking that the employee-access areas were locked and securing the conference rooms. He headed to the library archives, which were always immaculate and empty. On a great wooden table were huge leather-bound books that had been left out, big black serious timeless books that held the recorded history of the world.

  Horus went over to the table and began thumbing through them. One of them held the entire New York Times newspaper printings starting with the year 1940. His eyes roved the pages, looking for nothing in particular. There were stories about the war. There were stories about the presidential election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There was an article about the wave of black tenants in the New York rent districts that the Jews had abandoned. Then he came across an article about the first Negro Day Parade on August 16, 1940. There was a list of some of the participants. And there it was: “Nola M. Pierce.”

  At first, Horus wondered what the M stood for without realizing why. He stared and stared at the name, as if circling the rim of something. “There could be a million women with the same middle initial,” his mind said. But only one awakened his heart: Nola Mae Pierce. She was the old woman who had spoken boldly to the police, who said that Jack Thompson’s killer was a member of their fraternal order. They brushed her aside as if she was raving mad. Her name was one of the few his mother had murmured before the time of her leaving. Horus wondered how it could have been possible, how it was that he went to work on that day of the year, at that library, and picked up that big black serious timeless book and turned to the name of Nola Mae Pierce. And then the question floated up through the blackness of stealth, and Horus did not feel it bursting through the surface of his mind until it was too late: Who killed my father?

  It was twenty years after the fact. He was a grown man now, with responsibilities. But over the weeks and months since the name of Nola Mae Pierce reappeared in Horus’s mind, he tried unsuccessfully to brace the gate against the memories the name would trigger, the thoughts he had put away in a box in the cellar of an abandoned place, far away from his mind so he wouldn’t have to think about it while the rest of it happened. Because to remember her name meant remembering what she said. Had he imagined it all? He was only a child at the time. He was no longer sure. Memory had become a clever chameleon, changing colors and hiding in plain view, in the light of what he did not want to see.

  Whether or not it was the same woman became irrelevant as his agitation, restlessness, and insomnia grew. In the daytime, he was stricken with fits of mania and could not calm himself unless he was constantly in motion. He walked flights of steps. He took circuitous routes everywhere. When he looked at the simplest of things, even something as ordinary as the kitchen stove, his mind ran long lists of strange details: the six seconds that the electronic wick clicked before the blue flame jumped, the lone elbow macaroni trapped just under the range cover, the pottery-kiln look of the inside of the oven, the mixture of sauce and cheese and gravy drippings fire-glazed onto the aluminum, the engaging smell of the gas.

  Anxiety coated him like a film. He began to worry over the smallest things: whether or not it would rain or if he had locked the upstairs windows, whether there would be Saturday mail, how many times the electric company sent someone to read the meter (did the man who came really work for the electric company?). In the nighttime, Horus would wake up after only a few hours to stare up from his pillow. In tho
se endless trances, the ceiling became a fifth wall that held a giant screen. There he saw flashes: his mother’s smile, his father’s shoulders, his brother’s eyes, his uncle’s basement. Horus lay there next to Brenda as he struggled to blink away the wisps of light and memory, the moving figures, the undulating mouths. He often got up to roam the house. Things in the night seemed to take on different shapes and significance: the paintings with faces that looked back at him in the dimness, the little sculptures on the bookcase that seemed fixed in macabre contortions, the condensation on the windows that ran down the panes like black tears.

  Horus told Brenda that lower back strains were keeping him awake (he was walking and standing on the job too much), promising that he would have it checked out by a doctor. After she fell back asleep, he would stare into her velvet skin and wonder how long he would be able to deflect the few questions she was starting to ask. Was he sick? Did he need her to get him something? She was asking questions and she might ask more. Until now, Brenda’s lack of questions about his past, about what he might be thinking when he was suddenly very quiet, was one of the reasons he had married her.

  He had also figured out when he first met Brenda that she was of a rare breed, one who could look at something that was damaged and still hope for the best. She could look at him when he wore an unexplained scowl, when silence settled over him like a thick blanket, and still smile. She could rearrange a bouquet of dying flowers, picking off the crinkled brown leaves and the wilted petals, and reposition them in a vase of fresh water. She could look at a rowhouse, its windows hollowed out by crackheads, its walls defaced by squatters, and see a home that could be yellow with hope, green with prosperity. He had watched her sleep in those insomniatic nights, thinking of the time when he used to believe that perhaps one day, she could repair him too. That she could wash the melancholy, the memories, the history away. But that was something he no longer believed. In those weeks and months, Horus learned (or, rather, he remembered from watching his mother) that self-destruction, that slow, lumbering roll toward death, was an all-consuming process. It was a thing that happened in stages, a series of essentials falling away. Nola Mae Pierce’s name became lodged in Horus’s mind like an aneurysm, a gnashing parasite in the silence of his head. Years later, Horus would come to understand that a memory exists always behind the doors of the mind, to be pulled like a file by some seemingly small thing.