My Side of Paradise: Plagued

Author Dashiell Hammet at a typewriter where he may have written classics like The Maltese Falcon, and the
Thin Man books which I took from my mother's bookshelf and read in secret in my room. 

CHAPTER X: Plagued

                Our mother, Era Morgan, victim of a loveless marriage and domestic violence, had run away. She left behind a bitter husband, Charles Morgan and three of her children. With no mother, our home died slowly of neglect. Opportunistic mice and roaches and termites moved in and took over.

*****

The night brought terror. The mice wanted food. I wanted sleep. I wrapped myself up in a blanket, making sure to cover my head. I turned my television down low so I could hear the entry of vermin into the room. 

My bed was in the corner. There was a hole in the plaster. The walled were a dingy lemon yellow with a white trim. Momma had painted the room herself. A winter storm captured an entire pane of glass from the back window. Father swore he wouldn't fix anything anymore. 

I cut cardboard from a yellow legal pad into a square big enough to cover the missing glass. I stapled it in place. Next, I took plastic from my father’s dry cleaning, and stapled it over the entire window. I had no heat in my room because our father had refused to do what Momma asked, “Get that damned heat duct repaired.” Fully clothed and wrapped in three blankets, I peered out from my fabric fortress when I heard a mouse run across the room. I kept a shoe nearby and I threw it in the direction of the sound. Everything was quiet for a moment, and then it started up again. 

                I had the brilliant idea of stuffing clothes in front of my door to keep the mice out. They just pushed their way in and eventually one jumped on me while I slept.

                Then I took a Cleveland Press newspaper, rolled it up and stuffed it under the door. I took Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett paperbacks and stacked them up to block the door. I was safe.

                I got under my blanket and turned my radio on, but down softly in case there was a breach in my security. I had forgotten to factor in going to the bathroom. I had to open my door and go pee. The hallway was freezing. A basement window was broken.

                The toilet seat was cold, and the linoleum was missing under my feet. There were holes in the floor around the toilet. The wood was exposed. There was no electricity in the bathroom, so I had to finish fast.

                On the way back to my room I saw that my father’s door was broken off its hinges. I saw the light from his television. Then I remembered what my little brother Chip had said, “We got termites in here. I think that’s where all these holes in the floor are coming from.”

                I went in my room. Set up the security measures and got back in my cold bed. I formed my cocoon and tried to sleep. It was 1:38 am. Something jumped on my head. My father banged on the wall – “Quiet!”

                I needed a new idea. The mice weren’t coming from under the door; they were coming in from beneath that gap between the floor and the wall.

                “I’ve got it! I’m going to fill that space between the floor and the baseboard with plaster,” I thought.

                My brother Craig remembered Momma's bag of plaster in the basement. I went down and got some. I made the gray mixture in one of my mother’s best bowls. She used to mix cake batter in it.

                I got on my hands and knees with a butter knife and filled in the space. The smell of fresh plaster trumped the staleness in the air. The magazines and books my mother had warned me about keeping in my room, were covered in dust. I stopped to read a page from Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. A thick splinter stabbed me in the knee. I pulled it out, but some fragments remained.

                I got back on my knees anyway. I moved furniture to get to the baseboard. I found coins, an old journal, more dust bunnies, pens and mice droppings galore.   

No one called me for dinner. After I had completed the perimeter of the room, I got cleaned up and into bed. I turned on the television to watch “The Avengers” on the CBC. I had forgotten to put my other security measures in place. I heard a mouse in my wastebasket.

                I threw a shoe and hollered, “Die bastard, die!!” In response, it screeched. The plastic on my window rippled in the wind, I pulled my blanket tight and tried to go to sleep.

A week later, a calico cat had climbed in the broken basement window and made herself at home. She ate the mice.

*****

                One day I had a plate in my room. Out the corner of my eye, I swore I saw something brown moving up the wall. Momma had told us to never bring food in our rooms.

                The next time I saw a cockroach, I was in the kitchen during the daylight hours when I cooked. It moved across the salmon pink counter top.

                “We got roaches,” Craig said on his way to the bathroom.

                Our father had bought these little gray anti-pest boxes. One was on the floor under the kitchen table. A red light pulsed on and off. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he was one plague behind. Or maybe there were mice in his room terrorizing him.

                Chip asked, “Did you see them boxes he bought? Doesn’t he know that shit don’t work?”

                “Do you want to tell him? Hurry up and clean this up. Momma hated a nasty kitchen. She said, ‘If you see roaches, get Boric Acid.’ We need to fill in this crack behind this sink,” I said.

My father kept his Kennedy .50 cent pieces in a can like this. 

                Sure enough the space behind the sink and the wall housed roach carcasses. Craig stole money out of our father’s Muriel cigar can to buy the Boric Acid. He snuck past our father who camped out in his lounge chair watching “The Wide World of Sports”. Chip and I kept him talking while Craig ran down to Ellis’ Drugstore.

                “Black people always got their hand out looking for the white man to give them something. They don’t buy property. They take their money and play the numbers. I tell people I hit every two weeks ― with my paycheck. Look at how y’all destroyed this house. Your mother...”

                I could take it up until he started in on Momma. Luckily, Craig was at the side door with a bag. Chip took the yellow and red bottle and cut the tip off of it with the butcher knife, Momma used to slice her London broiler.

I snatched the bottle from Chip and squeezed it generously and white powder shot out and went up my nostrils and into my eyes. Terror struck! My imaginary asthma attacks were worse than real ones.

                “Charlotte, give me the damned bottle,” Craig said. He snatched it from my hand and went about applying the powder to every surface and in every crack where we thought a roach might crawl. I never saw another roach.

*****

                Not long after we beat the mice and the roaches, Chip said, “Have you noticed Daddy hasn’t been to the grocery store?”

                I replied, “I did”.

About the author

Charlotte Morgan is a writer who was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio where she has been fortunate to teach First-Year English at her Alma mater Cleveland State University. She has led Non-Fiction workshops around town in the hopes of helping others find their voice. As a writer, from time to time, her work investigates the black experience in the urban pastoral in the hopes of understanding not only why her ancestors were brought to the States but what was their destiny and purpose here. Her aim is to rob the graveyard of her insights, and ideas so that future generations have access. As a longtime journalist, her use of literary reportage has been influenced by the works of New Journalism writers like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson and Cameron Crowe.  She seeks to skillfully capture images and dialogue which enlivens her prose.  

Excerpt from Glenville: My Side of Paradise. Copyright 2020© MorganWorks.  

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