The Illegal Read Online Free PDF Page A

President for Life.
    Yoyo missed the funeral. Two weeks later, he was finally able to fly back home. Shuffling with tiny steps and barely able to lift his head, Yoyo looked as if he had aged twenty years. He was unable to grieve in front of the children. He became silent and thoughtful. He moved as little as possible, like a reptile that has eaten too much. In the household, Yoyo remained formal and almost wordless. He would not laugh, smile or cry, but he told Charity and Keita to be strong.
    Keita did not feel strong. When he walked, his veins seemed filled with sludge. His breathing was as shallow as a barely dug grave. He should have attacked the leader with a cricket bat or hurled a vase at his head and spared his mother the confrontation. But he had done nothing.
    When Keita opened his mouth, his words sounded like they came from a stranger. He didn’t speak with Charity about his sadness or hers, but he often sat beside her on the couch when neighbours and friends brought roasted chickens and plantains and fresh mangoes to the house. On the couch, Keita absorbed the warmth from his sister’s shoulders, listened to her breath and parroted her inhalations and exhalations. She sat rigid and perfectly straight, just as her mother had done, and she had nothing to say either, but Keita felt he knew her thoughts and her sadness as they breathed together, in and out, in and out, on the same waves of isolation and shock.
    Keita longed to sit beside his father on the couch, but Yoyo spent hours a day at his desk on the other side of the living room, pounding furiously as he rolled page after page into the typewriter.
    “What are you writing?” Keita asked one day.
    “He’s writing about the coup,” Charity said. “It could be his last income for a while.”
    Yoyo tried for days to get a telephone line. He kept writing and revising, and when he finally got a phone line, he called the New York Times and dictated his story, word by word.
    Y OYO CALLED C HARITY AND K EITA INTO HIS STUDY. “Children, forgive me. I’ve been distant. It is only because I miss your mother so much.”
    Yoyo hugged Keita against his left side and Charity to his right. “Let’s sing together.”
    In Keita’s household, tears were never allowed with conversation. Only in song could they hug each other fiercely and let their grief flow.
    They stood close and sang “I Stood on the River of Jordan,” the way Keita had learned it in church, years earlier, from Deacon Andrews. Finally, Yoyo’s tears cascaded. Charity started bawling. Singing made Keita finally feel the real meaning of his loss. Singing made his mother’s death seem both inconceivable and insurmountable, and for the first time, Keita felt a thousand shards of sadness massing under his skin and threatening to cut their way free.
    I stood on da ribber ob Jerdon
    To see dat ship come sailin’ ober.
    I stood on da ribber ob Jerdon
    To see dat ship sail by.
    O don’t you weep
    When you see dat ship come sailin’ ober.
    Shout! Glory Hallelujah!
    When you see dat ship sail by.
    That night, Keita worried that the troops might come for his father. Who would care for them? Would Keita and Charity be raised by sympathetic neighbours? Faloos, but not people who knew them intimately?
    Keita fell asleep to the clacking of typewriter keys. It sounded like rain. It sounded like voices merging. Was it true what they saidin church, about his mother’s soul ascending to the heavens, where she would be forever peaceful and joyous among the angels? Keita could not stop thinking about his mother’s body, inert on the living room floor, and he found himself not believing in the heavens.
    When his father did not know where to put his pain, he wrote. Charity studied. Keita went running. Up the path that rose for two kilometres, ascending mercilessly up the mountainside. The climb was so difficult that the locals had given it a name: the Struggle. On days when he could not stop thinking about his