The joke at the junction

On Friday evening at the junction a crowd beat a man. I did not see the start. By the time I got there he was on the ground and the okada boys were kicking and somebody was filming and the word was going round the crowd like a match passed hand to hand. You know the word. A woman was shouting that he had touched her brother. He was maybe thirty. He had one shoe.

Somebody eventually pulled him up and he ran, in one shoe, toward the Port Harcourt road, and the crowd laughed and the laugh was the worst part, the relief in it, the party of it.

At home Papa said good, they should. Mama said nothing. Charles asked me what the man did and I said I did not know, which is the first lie I have told Charles.

Today in church people were still joking about it. One shoe. I laughed the half-second after. I write this down so that there is one place in Owerri where it is recorded that a man was beaten in the road for something I am, and that I stood at the edge of the crowd and did nothing, and that I am not laughing.