The Thing Around Your Neck

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2009

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“Tomorrow Is Too Far”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“Tomorrow Is Too Far” Summary

The main character remembers her childhood spending summers in Nigeria before her parents’ divorce. She remembers how her grandmother on her father’s side always favored her brother, Nonso, because he was the son of her son. The main character was close to her male cousin, Dozie, and hated Nonso. She remembers the summer Nonso died.

The day Nonso died had mild weather, and Nonso died in the evening. He fell from the avocado tree he was climbing. She remembers her grandmother screaming that Nonso had betrayed her by dying, and she recalls the argument that her grandmother had with her mother over the phone because her mother wanted Nonso’s body to be sent back to the US. Her grandmother didn’t like her mother, a Black American woman.

The main character has not been back to Nigeria since. In the present, 18 years after her brother’s death, the narrator returns for the first time. Dozie picks her up at the airport. He takes her to their grandmother’s house and says he is surprised she came back for their grandmother’s funeral as he knew that the main character hated her. She remembers Nonso’s funeral in Virginia, how it took three months for her mother to ask about Nonso’s death and to tell her she and her father were getting divorced. She told her mother what happened—how her grandmother had told Nonso to climb to the top of the avocado tree to prove what a man he was, how their grandmother had scared him as a joke by telling him there was a snake and that Nonso, spooked, fell. She tells her that Nonso was still alive after hitting the ground but that their grandmother yelled at him about how he was a disappointment until he died. She was lying, but her mother believed her.

It was actually the main character who told Nonso to climb to the top of the avocado tree, as she felt that “something had to happen to Nonso, so that [she] could survive” (171). It was the main character who did all of what she said her grandmother had done. As she and Dozie stand in front of the avocado tree, Dozie admits to dreaming about Nonso. The main character begins to weep.

“Tomorrow Is Too Far” Analysis

The family structure in “Tomorrow is Too Far” is key to the story’s events; namely, Nonso’s death and the unnamed main character’s conflicted feelings about her brother. The main character has fundamentally changed her place in the family due to her brother’s death. Her role in his death has left her an only child, left her grandmother without the heir to the family name she so wanted, and has split apart her parents. She says that “something had to happen to Nonso, so that [she] could survive” (171). As the only son of her grandmother’s son, Nonso was given all the attention, all the focus, all the best things, leading to the main character’s rage. Though she made the decisions that led to Nonso’s death, they were motivated by the unfair pedestaling of Nonso. She does not say she hated him for anything he had done—she barely discusses Nonso’s personality or character at all—but instead because of the way other people treated him compared to her.

Location also plays a role in the main character’s dissociation from her brother’s death. Leaving Nigeria after Nonso dies, she is able to distance the reality of what happened from the story she tells. She must, however, distance herself from everyone else in her family as well: She has not seen her cousin Dozie since then, her father left, and her mother became so hesitant that the main character “started to avoid her kisses by faking coughs and sneezes” (173). She only cries over her brother once she has finally returned to her grandmother’s house, unable to forget her role in his death when returned to the physical location it occurred in.