by Yaa Gyasi
When I’d asked Nana what it felt like to be high, he had smirked at me a little and rubbed his forehead.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t describe it.”
“Try.”
“It just feels good.”
“Try harder,” I said. The anger in my voice surprised us both. Nana had already become accustomed to all the yelling and pleading and crying from our mother as she tried to urge him to stop, but I never yelled. I was too scared to be angry, too sad.
Nana couldn’t bring himself to look at me, but when he finally did, I looked away. For years before he died, I would look at his face and think, What a pity. What a waste.
Nana sighed and said, “It feels amazing, like everything inside my head just empties out and then there’s nothing left—in a good way.”
29
My mother had to work the Sunday night after Nana’s accident. The bottle of OxyContin had not yet started to dwindle at a rate faster than it should have, and so we didn’t yet know to worry about anything other than his ankle. She had taken the week off to care for him, until an angry voice mail from her boss sent her back to the Palmer house.
I asked her if she would take me to church on her way to her night shift, and she was so excited to see me wanting to go to church on my own, without her prodding, that she didn’t even seem to mind that it was out of her way.
There weren’t that many people there that evening. I chose a seat in the middle pew and urged myself to stay awake. The worship leader that night was the woman with the warbling voice.
“To hiiiiim whooo siiiiiits onnnnn the thronnnnneeeee,” she sang, her vibrato so strong that it threw her a half step off beat.
I clapped along, fighting the urge to plug my ears until some other soloist got a chance to shine.
After worship, Pastor John went up to the pulpit. He preached from the book of Isaiah, a short, dull sermon that did little to move the few congregants who had decided to get some God in before their workweek. Even Pastor John seemed bored by his own message.
He cleared his throat and said a quick closing prayer, and then he made the altar call.
“Now, I know someone out there is sitting with a heavy heart. I know someone out there is tired of carrying a cross. And I’m telling you now, you don’t have to leave here the same as when you came in. Amen? God’s got a plan for you. Amen? All you have to do is ask Jesus into your heart. He’ll do the rest. Is there anyone who’d like to come down to the altar today? Is there anyone who’d like to give their life to Christ?”
The sanctuary was quiet. People started looking at their watches, packing up their Bibles, counting down the number of hours they had left until Monday came and work beckoned.
I didn’t move at all. Something came over me. Something came over me, filled me and took hold. I had heard that altar call hundreds of times and felt absolutely nothing. I had prayed my prayers, written my journal entries, and heard only the faintest whisper of Christ. And that whisper was one I distrusted, because maybe it was the whisper of my mother or of my own desperate need to be good, to please. I hadn’t expected to hear the loud knocking on my heart’s door, but that night I heard it. I heard it. These days, because I have been trained to ask questions, I find myself questioning that moment. I ask myself, “What came over you?” I say, “Be specific.”
I had never felt anything like it before, and I have never felt anything like it since. Sometimes I tell myself that I made it all up, the feeling of my heart full to bursting, the desire to know God and be known by him, but that is not true either. What I felt that night was real. It was as real as anything a person can feel, and insofar as we know anything at all, I knew what I needed to do.
I was in the fourth grade. I raised my hand as I had been taught to do in school. Pastor John, who had been closing his Bible, saw me in that tiny crowd, in that center pew.
“Praise God,” he said. “Praise God. Gifty, come on down to the altar.”
I walked that long, lonely walk of trembling. I knelt down before my pastor as he placed a hand on my forehead and I felt the pressure of his hand like a beam of light from God himself. It was almost unbearable. And the smattering of congregants in the sanctuary of the First Assemblies of God stretched out their hands toward me and prayed, some under their breaths, some shouting, some in tongues. And I repeated Pastor John’s prayer, asking Jesus to come into my heart, and when I stood up to leave the sanctuary, I knew, without even the slightest of doubts, that God was already there.
30
Being saved was incredible. Every day I would head to school, and look at my classmates with delicious pity, worrying over their poor, poor souls. My salvation was a secret, a wonderful secret, burning hot in my heart, and what a shame it was that they didn’t have it too. Even Mrs. Bell, my teacher, was the recipient of one of my benevolent smiles, my lunchtime prayers.
But this was Alabama, and who was I kidding? My secret wasn’t mine at all. As soon as I told Misty Moore that I was saved, she told me that she’d been saved two years before, and I felt embarrassed by what little joy I’d carried for a week. Consciously, I knew it wasn’t a contest, but subconsciously, I thought I had won, and to hear that Misty Moore, a girl who had once lifted up her shirt at recess so that Daniel Gentry could see the rumor of her breasts, had been sanctified before me, a girl with no rumors to speak of, stung. The shine wore off, but I did my best to hold on to the feeling of all those hands stretched out toward me, the sanctuary buzzing with prayers.
My mother was back at work, and Nana was always asleep on the couch. There was no one to share my good news with. I started volunteering at my church in an attempt to make use of my salvation. There wasn’t much that needed to be done at the First Assemblies. Occasionally, I would pick up the hymnals that had been left in the pews and put them back in their places. About once every two months my church would take a van down to the soup kitchen to help serve, but more often than not, I would be the only person to show up. P.T., who drove the van for those trips, would take one look at me, standing in my raggedy jeans and T-shirt, and sigh. “Just you today, huh?” he’d ask, and I’d wonder who else he’d been expecting.
The First Assemblies of God also had a fireworks stand, just off the highway at the Tennessee border, called Bama Boom!. I still don’t understand why we had it. Maybe we got it under the guise of ministry. Maybe it was about earning a little extra money. I suspect now that Pastor John just had a fireworks kink and used our church to live it out. I was technically too young to volunteer at the stand, but it wasn’t as though people came around to check ID, so once in a while I would put my name on the sign-up sheet and head to the border with P.T. and the older youth group kids, who were much more interested in hanging out at the stand selling rocket blasters than they were in ladling soup for the homeless.
I could tell that P.T. and the youth didn’t really want me around, but I was used to keeping quiet and out of the way. They put me at the register because I was the only one who could ring people up without having to use the head-sized calculator we kept under the counter. I would sit at the counter working my way through my huge stack of books while P.T. set off fireworks outside. We weren’t supposed to use the merchandise without paying, so every time P.T. skulked off with a box of Roman candles, I would clear my throat loudly and make sure that he knew that I knew.
Ryan Green was one of the youth volunteers. He was Nana’s age, and he’d been over at our house for a couple of Nana’s parties. I knew him well enough to dislike him, but if I’d known him better, known that he was the biggest dealer at the high school, I probably would have hated him. He was loud, mean, dumb. I never signed up to volunteer if I saw his name on the sheet, but he was P.T.’s protégé, and, as such, he got to come sometimes even when the list was full.
“Hey, Gifty, when’s your brother gonna get back on the court? We’re getting our asses w
hooped without him.”
It was two months after Nana’s injury. The doctor said that he was healing up nicely, but he was still being cautious with his right side, favoring his other ankle, scared to get hurt again. Our mother and Nana’s doctor had cut him off from the pain pill refills, but still, we would find him on the couch more often than not, watching television, or simply looking ahead with that dreamy stare. He had started going back to practice, but he still wasn’t putting much weight on that leg and he always came home complaining of pain.
“I don’t know,” I said to Ryan.
“Well, shit. Tell him we need him.”
I made a noncommittal noise and went back to my book. Ryan looked outside to make sure P.T. wasn’t heading back in. He was different in front of P.T., still loud and obnoxious, but with a prayerful edge. He didn’t curse or spit. He raised both hands during worship and closed his eyes tightly, singing loudly and swaying softly. I disliked him, not just because of his duplicitousness, but because he always carried an empty plastic water bottle around so that he could spit his dip into it. And I would see that thin brown liquid sloshing around in the bottle, and I would see the way he looked at me as though I were no better than the sludge he spit from his mouth, and it would force me to remember that there was an imbalance in my world.
“Hey, why you always reading them books?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Be better if you tried sports like your brother.” He raised his hands up in mock surrender, though I hadn’t said anything. “Don’t call the NAACP on me or nothing, but them books ain’t gonna get you nowhere and sports just might do it. Too bad Nana don’t play football though. That’s a real game.”
He reached across the counter and shut my book. I opened it and he shut it again. I kept the book closed and looked up at him with all of my fury, and he laughed and laughed.
P.T. finally came in, and Ryan immediately straightened up.
“Anybody come in here yet?” P.T. asked.
I was burning mad, but I knew that telling on Ryan would only make my life worse. He pulled out that water bottle and spit into it, still smiling from the memory of his devilment. In church that Sunday, I saw Ryan up in the first pew standing next to P.T., his arms stretched up toward Heaven and tears streaming down his face as the worship leader asked, “How great is our God?” I tried to focus on the music. I tried to focus on Christ, but I couldn’t stop looking at Ryan. If the Kingdom of Heaven allowed someone like him in, how could there also be a place for me?
31
I miss thinking in terms of the ordinary, the straight line from birth to death that constitutes most people’s lives. The line of those drug-addled years of Nana’s life is not so easy to draw, so direct. It zigs and it zags and it slashes.
Nana got hooked on the OxyContin; that much became clear to my mother about two months in, when he asked to go back to the doctor for a second refill. She said no, and then she found more hidden in his light fixture. She thought the problem would just go away, because what did we know about addiction? What, other than the “just say no” campaigns, was there to guide any of us through the jungle of this?
I didn’t really understand what was going on yet. I just knew that Nana was always sleepy or sleeping. His head was always nodding, chin to chest, before rolling or bouncing violently back up. I would see him on our couch with this dreamy look on his face and wonder how an ankle injury had knocked him so flat. He, who had always been in motion, how could he now be so still? I asked my mother for money, and the few times she gave it to me, I walked to Publix and picked up instant coffee. No one in our house had ever touched coffee, but I had heard the way people talked about it at church, how rapturously they approached the dispensers in the Sunday school classroom. I fixed the coffee in our kitchen, following the instructions on the back of the package. I stirred the powder into the water until it turned a deep, dark brown. I tasted it and found it disgusting and so figured it would be sufficiently medicinal. I’d present it to Nana, push his shoulder, his chest, try to rouse him long enough for him to drink it. He never did.
“Can you die from sleeping?” I asked my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Bell, after school one day.
She was sitting at her desk, shuffling the papers from the homework assignment we had all turned in. She gave me a funny look, but I was used to getting funny looks for the questions I asked. Always too many, too strange, off topic.
“No, sweetie,” Mrs. Bell said. “You can’t die from sleeping.”
I don’t know why I put my faith in her.
* * *
—
Nana sweat so much that his shirts were drenched through mere minutes after he put them on. This was after my mother cleaned out his light fixture, throwing away the last of the prescription pills that he had squirreled away. He had to keep a trash can nearby at all times because he was constantly vomiting. He was constantly shaking. He shit himself more than once. He looked like walking, breathing misery, and I was more scared for him then, sick in his sobriety, than I had been when he was high.
My mother wasn’t scared at all. She was a caregiver by profession, and she did what she had always done when a patient was in distress. She would hoist Nana up, lifting him by the armpits, and lower him into the bathtub. She always closed the door, but I could hear them. Him, embarrassed and angry; her, down-to-business. She washed him the way she had when he was a child, the way I knew she must have washed Mr. Thomas, Mrs. Reynolds, Mrs. Palmer, and everyone else in between.
“Lift your leg,” I’d hear her command, and then softer, gentler, “Ebeyeyie.” It will be all right.
There must be some Oedipal shame about lying in the bathtub at sixteen, crying as your mother washes the shit and vomit and sweat off your body. I would avoid Nana for several hours after one of these cleanings, because I knew that somehow my being witness made him feel all the worse. He’d skulk off to his room and hide there until the entire event had to be repeated.
But if I saw my mother in the moments after she’d cleaned her firstborn child, I would go stand by her, be buoyed by her and this wellspring of strength she seemed so capable of drawing from. She never had even the faintest hint of shame. She would see me, my worry and fear and embarrassment and anger, and she would say, “There will come a time when you will need someone to wipe your ass for you,” and that would be that.
* * *
—
My mother was accustomed to sickness. She knew what it meant to be close to death, to be around it. She knew that there was a sound to it, that raspy, gurgling noise that comes out and up from whatever part of the body where death hides, lurking, waiting its turn, waiting for life to tag out.
She was with Mrs. Palmer in her final hours. Like my mother, Mrs. Palmer had been a pious, churchgoing woman, and she’d requested that my mother be at her bedside to read her Scripture before she went on to receive her reward.
“This is what death sounds like,” my mother said, and she imitated that crackling noise. “You shouldn’t be afraid of it, but you should know it. You should know it when you hear it, because it is the last sound and we all make it.”
Mrs. Palmer had been given morphine to ease her pain. She had smoked all her life, even in that final week, and her lungs had become ornamental. Instead of an exhale there was collapse, and every inhale was a whisper. Morphine didn’t reshape her lungs into the air-filled sponges they were meant to be, but it offered a distraction, telling the brain, “Instead of air, I can give you a kind of freedom from need.”
“That’s what drugs are for,” my mother lectured Nana and me the first night she returned home from Mrs. Palmer’s bedside. “To ease pain.”
Nana rolled his eyes and stomped off, and my mother sighed a heavy sigh.
I was afraid of death and of pain. I was afraid of old people. When my mother came home from Mrs. Palmer’s house, I wouldn�
�t go near her until after she had taken a shower, washed off whatever it was I worried was clinging to her skin. When she smelled like my mother again, I would go to her, sit beside her and listen to her talk about Mrs. Palmer’s decline as though I were gathering before a campfire waiting for the woman holding a flashlight to her face to tell ghost stories.
Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. My mother would read me the Scriptures that she had read to Mrs. Palmer, and this one in particular always stood out. To this day, it brings tears to my eyes. You are not alone, it says, and that is a comfort, not to the dying, but to those of us who are terrified of being left behind.
Because really, it wasn’t Mrs. Palmer’s death that I was afraid of; that wasn’t the reason my mother had started trying to teach us about the sound and the relief of pain. I was scared for Nana. Scared of Nana and the death rattle that none of us wanted to acknowledge we were listening for. I have seen people who suffer from addiction and the family and friends who love them in various places and at various points in my life. I’ve seen them sitting on stoops and on park benches. I’ve been with them in the lobbies of rehab centers. And the thing that always strikes me is how there is always someone in the room who is listening for the sound, waiting for the arrival of that rasping rattle, knowing that it will come. Eventually, it will come. The Scriptures my mother read were as much for us as they were for Mrs. Palmer. My mother and I wanted blessed assurance because Nana couldn’t offer us assurances of any kind.
