Time of the Locust

by Morowa Yejidé

All them suckers in his way

  Fuckers hatin’ on his life

  Tryin’ to sink his battleship

  Tryin’ load him down with trife . . .

  The boys grew louder and louder, laughing and stomping their booted feet on the ground. A short boy with a scarf around his head took a joint out of his pocket and lit it. Older women looked on and shook their heads. Businessmen and students with backpacks skirted the circle. Small children pointed. But nobody said anything to them.

  Manden watched the boys play at shooting each other and sighed. He sighed because he would not have said anything, either. Even with the roughhousing, the dancing, and the loud profanity, he would not have said a word. But part of his job responsibility was to ensure that there was no smoking anywhere in the subway, let alone an illicit substance. He would have to approach them. He would have to attempt to put the fear in them that a grown man could put into a boy, and he knew that he did not have such power and they had never known such fear. He was not their father, they would remind him. And they would burn into him with the white heat of young, hateful eyes. And they would hate him for appearing as if he was trying to be their father, of reminding them of the fact that their fathers were not there. Or that men around them did not really want them in their lives. Like Uncle Randy. Manden knew this feeling. He grew up with it himself and carried it with him like a diamond that each day became harder and sharper. He knew that when he approached the boys with authority, they would not respect him any more than the other men who looked like him, those who glared at boys like them with hatred and disgust.

  Manden left the booth and walked slowly toward the boys, his back throbbing. Some of the teenagers saw him coming, and their faces became masks of stone.

  “There’s no smoking here,” said Manden. “And you all need to quiet down and move on.”

  The short boy with the joint took a long toke, pinched it out with his fingers, and stuck it behind his ear. “We ain’t got to do a damned thing, Mr. Officer. How you know we ain’t got somewhere important to be, toy cop?”

  The other boys were electrified by this opening exchange, and Manden could feel their excitement, their heat. Their eyes all said: “I dare you.”

  Manden said, “You all have to go.”

  The tall rubber-band boy said, “You ain’t none of my mama. Daddy, neither, wherever the fuck that niggah is. We ain’t going nowhere.”

  Manden put his hands in his pockets and looked at the boy. Although he wanted to smack him across the face, he understood the boy’s anger and disrespect. He understood the triggers and knew the boiling points as well as any alchemist, although his own fury had long ago been snuffed and cooled and hardened.

  Passengers rushed by, eager to get to their next subway destinations. Manden looked at the teenagers, and they glared back at him through the brimstone of defiance and rage and helplessness. One of the teenagers said again, “Man, we ain’t going nowhere.” The others cackled and nodded in agreement.

  Manden looked through them, into their frightened hearts and out to the dark and empty tunnel behind them. “Well, that’s one thing you boys are right about,” he said. “You ain’t going nowhere.”

  He left them there and returned to the glass booth. Their laughter and jeers followed him in the stagnant trail of air, until he closed the door behind him and they hit against the glass. He let other thoughts empty from his mind. Because it was easier, Manden reasoned, looking away from the boys, much easier to watch the other creatures of the herd that passed hurriedly through the subterranean chambers of the D.C. Metro system. Peacocks flashed their wares, chirping loudly in the hopes that the world would see and hear all of the reasons they were special and valued. Silver-backed gorillas, angry and bitter from years of anger and bitterness, pounded their chests as they walked, daring any challengers. Packs of hyenas scavenged for easy prey, stiff competition for the snakes waiting in the shadows. But sometimes there was a lone elephant that had long ago lost touch with its own kind, watching the jungle of creatures disapprovingly, despairing in the disappointing truth that its own reality differed not from the others. Manden watched the passengers go by. Had he become a lone elephant too?

  On the radio, the dispatcher began again, and since Manden heard his name this time, he could no longer ignore it with the ease with which he had done most of the morning. “Dispatch to Thompson. Come in . . . Thompson, what’s your twenty?”

  Manden snatched the radio, cursing under his breath. “This is Thompson. I’m stationed at the information booth at the west entrance today. Come back.” Manden waited for a response, grinding his teeth. Nothing.

  So except for the Code Purple, the day was ordinary. Still, a man had ended his life earlier that morning. He had his reasons, thought Manden, whatever they were. The man “jumped the fence,” as Manden and other guys working the subway sometimes joked about during break times when there were other such incidents. But after the chuckling died down, a coughing affliction always seemed to take hold of them all, and death hung heavy in the air like a smog that choked them the rest of the day. This no one ever discussed.

  Manden again caught a glimpse of his own watery figure mirrored in the booth glass. He leaned against the counter, his back aching. There was still that thing growing near his spine. He called it a thing, since the chiropractors and radiologists had found nothing there, nothing wrong with him. On damp days and in moments of uncertainty, he could feel the thing’s presence more than ever. It had started growing when he was sitting next to his mother all those long hours in the pew at his father’s funeral. She was holding his hand tightly, until the numbness in his fingers traveled up his arm. He felt the beginnings of the thing growing then, a hard kernel that formed and pressed into the high-backed wood as his mother swooned and the deacons shouted, a lodged pit that his spine had since curved around. He could feel it always.

  The sound of keys jingling the booth door interrupted Manden’s thoughts. His coworker, Piper, a red-headed man in his twenties, let himself inside. His face held a pale green pallor. He nodded at Manden. “Going home, Thompson. They got somebody to relieve me, thank God. Sick to my stomach. I guess it was too much excitement for me today,” he said.

  “What?” asked Manden.

  Piper covered his mouth with his hand, shaking his head. “I saw him.”

  “The jumper?”

  Piper nodded. “Some of him, anyway. Coroner had pieces of him on a black plastic sheet on the platform.” He covered his mouth again, as if staving off an urge to retch. “Did you know that it takes eighteen football fields for a train to come to full halt when it’s traveling at top speed? I’ve seen a lot of things. You probably seen it all, but Lord Jesus.”

  Manden felt nothing. “Bad, huh?”

  “You should have seen his hand, Thompson,” said Piper. “I swear, I’ll see it in my dreams tonight. Usually, they leave notes tucked in their pockets, you know? Or they spray-paint something. ‘Fuck You.’ ‘I hate life.’ ‘Love Always.’ You know, something. But this jumper had written one word on his damned palm. I had my flashlight, and I was scanning near the police line, and I saw it. On his palm, he wrote the word ‘WHY,’ with three question marks.” Piper rubbed his stomach. “That’s it. Just ‘WHY.’ It gave me the creeps. You know what I mean? For him to end his life and leave a one-word epilogue like that. To take himself out and leave only a question. I lost my breakfast right then. Spilled my guts, but I couldn’t help it.” Piper shook his head. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and exited the booth.

  Manden watched Piper walk away, thinking of the jumper. People ended their lives for a lot of reasons. Some of them didn’t seem serious enough to commit suicide over. Others might have been understandable. Like losing your mind bit by bit. Like a slow death in a cell. He wondered if Horus had ever thought about ending his life. Manden looked into the darkness of the tunnels. It was between train arrival and departure, and there was no air blowing about.

  And in spite of being
inside the Bastille he had fashioned for himself, Manden could not keep the rushing thoughts from breaking through the walls of his mind. Was he any better than the jumper? He woke up every day and asked himself why he was here. He could think only of what he hadn’t been able to save. But there was Brenda and Sephiri, both of whom he had let down today. Wasn’t there still something worth trying for with them? Surely his brother’s family was worth salvaging, but he didn’t know if that was possible, and he didn’t know how to find out. In those small, quiet moments, when Manden watched Sephiri staring or spinning or flailing, he wondered what he was waiting for. Maybe in his heart, he was waiting for some moment when the boy would somehow be different, when things were not what they were. So much of his life was still in conflict, still left blank. But he could not haunt the underbelly of the city forever, could he? He would have to face what he pretended did not exist at some point, for nothing was going away.

  And it was then that Manden wondered what Jack Thompson would have thought about his boys now. The man who had brought Bed, Louisiana, to its knees when he was only nineteen, then went to New York to become the man he was to be. At least, that was the stuff of bedtime stories with their mother long ago. What would he think of his sons now? The one who lived beneath the Rocky Mountains. The one who dwelled in tunnels under the city. Jack Thompson’s boys had fallen out of separate windows of the moving thing that their lives became. And his grandson, Sephiri, was floating in amniotic fluid, able to hear only his heartbeat and the muffled rumble of the world.

  Manden looked into the dark tunnel. The blackness stared back at him. “We’re all a long way from home,” he said.

  Leaping Spirits

  Bed, Louisiana. Summer of 1940.

  The old men said that Jack Thompson had too much blood in his eye. And every time his grandmother Lucy Thompson looked at him, when she was fireside to his obstinate ways and brazen nature, she was proud of him and scared to death. At such moments, she would press her hands into her soft gray tufts, her eyes twinkling from a deep chocolate, almost wrinkleless face. “Look like my Nathan is still here,” she would say, barely able to reach his shoulder to give him a pat. When she looked at Jack, she knew that his grandfather—her husband, Nathan—had returned. She was convinced of it. When Jack was born, she recorded the event on the limbs of the family tree sketched in the back of a heavy Bible, right next to their dead daughter’s name, which was Annie Mae.

  And when Lucy looked at young Jack Thompson’s smile, the one that lit his face when he came back from the river with his sack loaded down with fish, she knew that Nathan, her Nathan, hadn’t gone anywhere. No, he hadn’t left at all after Baker and his boys hung him from that tree. After everyone had their fill of gore and rage, and the children went hoarse from cheering alongside their parents as he swung in the evening breeze, Nathan Thompson hadn’t flown back to heaven like everyone thought. Lucy was sure of that now.

  That day, her Nathan waited until the mob left. Then he untied himself and dropped to the ground. And Lucy understood now that it hadn’t been safe for her Nathan to come by the barn where the women took her after she passed out, after she tried to fight off Simon Baker and his boys as they dragged her Nathan from the front porch and one butted her in the head with a rifle. The other women hid Lucy in the barn after that, out of sight, back there where the sows were suckling.

  And when Lucy swept the porch before sunrise, she sometimes thought of the stories the old women used to tell her about the leaping spirits when she was a young girl. Those spirits that refused to move, having so much left to do and having so much they needed to right, they came back. “When a man dies badly, and he angry about movin’ on, or if he got important things he want to finish first, his spirit leaps back across the gorge to the living,” they said. And that was when she understood that Nathan had become a leaping spirit. Lucy was sure that was what her Nathan did. How else was it that she could turn over under her quilt at night and crack her eyes to see him sitting by her side? There he was, smiling, with the same smile her grandbaby Jack had now. Yes, Lucy was sure that Nathan decided to come back when they tightened the noose around his neck, when the perfume of magnolia blossoms filled the air like perfume. He decided then to return after they were all finished with him.

  Lucy had worked it over many times in her mind. Jack’s grandfather Nathan untied himself after he was lynched and dropped to the ground. Then he went for a long, long walk. He strolled through the poplar groves, bogs, and wispy mounds of Spanish moss, crossed the Pearl River, and headed back up the dirt road to her porch on the bright morning their daughter Annie Mae was dying as she was giving birth to Jack. He waited until she sighed her last breath. He waited until Jack’s crown arrived at the threshold of her womb. He waited for Lucy to let go of their daughter’s cold hand and grab hold of Jack by the head, then the shoulders, then the arms. He waited until Lucy held little Jack in her arms, all bloody and furious. And right after she wrapped Jack up tight in the quilt that she spent all summer stitching for him, and he was all warm and new, why, that’s when her Nathan made the leap. Leaping spirits. Yes, indeed. So when the strapping Jack Thompson, all of nineteen, grinned at Lucy every time she handed him a glass of sweet tea, when he cocked his head that certain way, she knew it was Nathan.

  But it was the blood in his eyes that worried her. They were just like Nathan’s. The way those eyes stared down at someone, even if he was taller. And here again, it seemed like those eyes glared down from a watchtower Jack built somewhere in the sky. Her grandbaby became an inert substance when people tried to make him bend. No matter the request, his response was always the same if he thought it ate at his manhood. “I ain’t pickin’ no cotton, and I ain’t ’bout to bale no hay,” he would say.

  And by Jack’s nineteenth summer, the people of Bed, Louisiana, had more than enough of him. They complained of Jack’s sassy mouth, which they insisted would get him killed. “He won’t do right,” they said. “Why can’t the boy just do what he’s told?” they asked. To top all of this, when he was thirteen (and before Lucy knew or could do anything about it), Jack became Bad Man Hank’s adopted son. He was his protégé in both dog fighting and gun running. No one was bold enough to say anything to Bad Man Hank, so they emptied their grievances out on Lucy’s front porch over iced tea and spoon biscuits. “The boy’s too sure,” the old men warned from rocking chairs. He was too insistent, too questioning. “It’s a shame, the things he learnin’ from Hank. And plus your boy got that brass-runnin’ mouth. Can’t no good come of it,” they said.

  And even if the black people of Bed couldn’t purchase anything without first drawing up an account of debt, even if the water in the creeks on their farms was diverted away from their crops, even if the Bourbon family elite ruled the land like the hand of God, what business was it of this hard-headed boy? People said that Jack was “smelling himself,” which was what some young bucks did when the scent got too strong even for their own good and they took to stirring things up. And since Jack’s father was never around, and his mother and grandfather were in the ground, they shook their heads and looked to his grandmother Lucy for an answer to the problem.

  But when Jack announced that he was going to marry Delia, a slip of a girl whose family had been making furniture since the first slave quarters, the town of Bed sighed with relief. The area had long ago been christened Bed for the sturdy sleeping frames the girl’s great-great-grandfather made, popular with many plantation families far and wide. Lucy rejoiced in the anticipation of a family simmering her grandson’s temper down and clearing his eyes. She set about embroidering handkerchiefs and canning peaches for the harvest wedding. She smiled and told herself that her Nathan decided to sit on the porch with her this time around after all. She exulted in the thought that he had finally decided to leave the impossible task of altering evil alone.

  And all of this might have been true if one of Simon Baker’s sons hadn’t touched Delia. When they came looking for Jack at th
e Pearl River and told him what happened to Delia, how Judd Baker waited for her as she crossed Boudreaux Field and unleashed himself, the blood in Jack’s eyes deepened, and even the Pearl River flowed in currents of ruby before him.

  Upon hearing about the rape, Lucy looked everywhere for her grandson. She arrived back at the house, praying he would be there but knowing that the laws of cause and effect had already been set in motion. She saw that the shotgun was missing from its brace above the front doorway frame, where it had been since the day of Nathan Thompson’s hanging. Finally, some people came to tell her that Jack shot Judd Baker, that the sheriff had organized a manhunt for him, that she had better prepare herself for a funeral, because there would be nowhere he would be safe. “There’s a history,” one of the men said as he stood on Lucy’s porch, barely able to look her in the eye. “He too much like his grandfather.”

  A deathly silence settled over them all as they stood on the rotting planks, as they thought of what happened to Lucy’s husband, Nathan.

  Another man began again. “Before your boy run off, I heard Simon Baker sayin’ it’s time for a repeatin’ and none too soon.” He gave Lucy a hard look then. “Jack’s got too much of what they like to kill in him, Lucy. Can’t you see that? It’s him standin’ up what make ’em cut him down. We all seen it before. I just hope we can get to him ’fore we got to put him in the ground.” The women pleaded to Lucy with their eyes after this, unsure if they could handle one more. One more husband. One more lover. One more nephew. One more son. One more lynching in their lifetimes, in their memories, in their dreams.

  After the people left, Lucy stared into the sky for a long time. Then she stood up and went to the kitchen to get a bucket. She was going to do what she saw her Gullah grandmother do, an ebony-toned matron from the Georgia Sea Islands. Lucy went out into the yard to the pump and filled the bucket with water. Then she took the bucket to the front porch and sat down in her chair next to it. She stared into the water and began to pray. She prayed that her Nathan would help Jack get away. The wind blew across her cheeks.