The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

The first woman wouldn’t tell me her name, but she spoke fast and clear with a slight squeak. She was about seventeen years old. Her mother had followed York from Brooklyn, where they had been devotees since she was young. She said York had an appetite for girls, and mothers sent daughters to his house to procure food or whatever they needed that they didn’t have. This girl said her mother handed her teenage sister over to York as a gift. She said she knew she was in a cult, knew that York just made things up to maintain control and feed his god complex. As was the case in Brooklyn, the teenager said the Nuwaubians had a daily quota of twenty-five to one hundred dollars to fill and faced expulsion if they came up short. She argued that York’s shape-shifting philosophies were proof he was a charlatan, and she couldn’t understand why the adults didn’t see it. I remember telling her that adults can be selfish. And stupid, she interjected. She explained how they were supposed to be Muslims when stationed in New York but Native Americans who were waiting for UFOs to rescue them by the time she and her mother had moved to Georgia. Dressing the part didn’t make it so, she explained.