The Gone Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  He is waiting for her to respond. Finally she says, “I guess it could have been suicide, but it was a fall, so I don’t see how that works. And I find the idea of my uncle hurting my father ridiculous.” Her throat is tight. “I just want the report and to read it for myself. Can I do that please?”

  “Of course.” He picks up the folder under his hands. “I just wanted to share with you what I knew.”

  But it’s not what he knows, it’s what he thinks. She stuffs the folder in her purse and stands.

  “I apologize for not being of more use. I wish my father was still around to give you the particulars.”

  “Great, thanks.” She takes one last look at him in his congratulatory office. “You’ve seen a lot, being a sheriff.”

  He stands as well. “Sure have.”

  “What happens to all that?”

  “All what?”

  “All you’ve seen.”

  “It’s right here.” He taps the side of his head.

  “It must be hard,” she says. “So many bad things.” She goes to the door.

  “You in town for long?”

  She stops, turns. “No.”

  “Well, you let me know if you have any questions. I’d be happy to try to answer them for you.” He digs in his desk drawer and holds out a card. “Let me give you this in case you think of anything.”

  “I won’t need it,” she says and is out the door.

  IN THE CAR, SHE TEARS OPEN THE REPORT AS IF SHE WILL NOT LIVE long enough to see it, but the details don’t make much of a narrative. Bruises on his face, penetrating wounds on his arms—could have been caused by a fall. Contusions, abrasions on head and face, upper and lower extremities, blood spatter on the ground—the subdural hematoma that killed him. Cause of death ruled blunt force trauma. Found in the yard. No signs in the house of a struggle or forced entry or burglary. No witnesses. Front door left ajar. His brother concerned of his whereabouts, he came by the house and found him. Nine one one was called. Ruby James identified the body of her son. Ruled an accident, multiple falls while intoxicated.

  She can’t remember the first time that she was told of her father’s death, can’t picture the exact day. Or remember when it was that she later thought to ask exactly how he died and her mother told her an accident, a misadventure she said. Not suicide. Not Uncle Dee. Nothing but a tragic freak accident, which can happen, does happen, and happened to Daddy.

  She turns the AC up full blast and bends her face to the vent. The sweet synthetic funk of her deodorant fills the car. She digs through her bag to find her phone. The call to her uncle goes straight to voice mail. She could call Jude but instead she reads the report again. Deputy Oakes, that’s Sheriff Oakes’s father. Deputy Roberts, no idea. Deputy McGee. How did she miss that? McGee. She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes. Everywhere her family was, the McGees were too. Goddamn it, Mississippi.

  On the drive back, she racks her brain for actual experiences of her father. Not stories about him, or things that he wrote—just her with him. There’s a day they were rushing through a market as it started to rain and everyone was hurrying to pack up and cover their wares. Her hand was in his and he was pulling her along. Fat raindrops on the plastic over racks of clothes. They were laughing.

  Then one time he was lifting her onto his mother’s bed. Grandmomma Ruby sitting up to hold her with hands exquisitely dark and bone thin. She was sick with something and Billie was a little scared but didn’t want to act scared in front of him. Soon she didn’t mind the smiling, sunken face of the old woman. Then the door closed and they were alone in the darkened room muffled by heat and curtains. Because he left. Without saying where he was going. But he would be back. She knew that. Just not when.

  Her mother wrote a paper about parenthood in the fourteenth century that examined the high mortality rate of children and then the apprentice system, where rich kids were sent to serve and live in another house at a young age. At the time of its publication, some believed that medieval parents were inured to the frequent death of their children, indifferent to them out of necessity. But her mother argued that it wasn’t that they didn’t feel deep grief or love, but that they cultivated a kind of compassionate detachment toward their small children, since they couldn’t control what might easily befall them. That and they believed that they would be reunited. If Billie could believe that she would be reunited with her parents, she could forgive her life for everything.

  She walks with Rufus through the woods. The wind is high and the trees shift and groan as if getting comfortable. They take a different path to the creek, this one softly plowed through the mud. On the bank is a white church steeple sitting on the grass as if the body of the church is growing underground. At the top of the steeple is a broken cross. It looks like a forlorn vestige of a world that is an exact replica of theirs but now a level below. As if every few thousand years, the earth buries itself and remakes everyone all over again, and they arrive bringing the same chaos, the same longing, the same blind, inevitable end.

  She sits, temporarily unafraid of snakes—the black racers or ribbon snakes, speckled kings or cottonmouths. Or is she welcoming a bite in this bloom of old grief? Her uncle says do not try and suck the poison, do not get a knife to cut it out. If she stepped into that milky red water, it would keep her from seeing or hearing, it would swallow her up, it would be the warm earth all around, pulsing lazily against her aching head.

  Rufus knocks into her leg. She strokes his nose as he lies down next to her on the bank. The sparse wet grass is seeping into her pants. Above them the sky is made of bright gray light.

  Back at the house, she paces the living room with a bottle of whiskey. The calls to her uncle have gone unanswered. Rufus lies on the floor by the screen door, his eyes half open, paws going as he dreams. Outside, thunder claps so hard that it shakes the floor, suspended as it is only a few feet from the ground. Rufus opens his bleary eyes, locates her, and closes them again.

  On the porch in the warm spatter of rain, Billie feels perilously sober. No witnesses the report said. So where was she that night? When she goes back in, she wraps herself in her sleeping bag and walks into the closet, shutting the door. She sits and closes her eyes. There would be the darkness of her narrow room, flickering colored light over the kitchen from the TV in the living room. The laughter track bursting between the clicking of the rotating fan. The front door opens and closes, opens and slams. Feet. The clatter of something falling to the floor that does not break. If someone looks in, she mustn’t move. Not be seen or heard. Eyes closed or something bad.

  Dr. Melvin Hurley

  HE IS SURPRISED TO LEAVE HIS MOTEL AND STUMBLE UPON A REMARKABLY well-curated bookstore among the vacant buildings downtown. As he holds the door, a series of coiffed older white women shuffle past him in their precariously stacked heels. Under their smiles, he senses a smidgeon of confusion as he goes in, walking toward the photo books through their unrelenting perfume.

  He will of course be told that he is not from around here. It happens multiple times whenever he visits. Embedded in this phrase is not so much a reference to his accent or his (cosmopolitan) wit, but to his unexpected lack of deference. The way in which his posture does not ask if his body is allowed to take up its space. Or sometimes, in more casual interactions, they’ll say You don’t see color. The utter irony of this has always struck him, as he told his partner last night on the phone. On a certain level it seems like the only way they can explain him is to imagine he is safe from being reminded at any moment of the weight of his color—little peltings he calls them—like being hit with rotten eggs when he didn’t even know he was onstage. Even now, even now in his early fifties, these small displays of hostility have the ability to take him by surprise. He still finds himself asking if it is really happening. Did that flight attendant really ignore him? Did that white woman really clutch her purse and cross the street? Did that cabbie really stop and take one look at him then drive away?

 
All that aside, it is a gloriously sunny morning in the Delta where the air has the sense of being washed clean and he is standing in the Southern Writers section holding a lightly used copy of Cliff’s last book of poetry, Flatbottom Unrest. If he expected to unearth anything at all, it would have been Cliff’s first book, Race Records, which is much more accessible, more of a fluid meditation on the contradictory spell of the South.

  When Cliff’s biography comes out—he has just had a wonderful conversation with his editor this morning—there should be a reissuing of Cliff’s poetry with the new introduction to Flatbottom that he started working on in the shower. Something along the lines of . . . a mythic refutation of the conventional, a reclamation of Blackness, by which he would be gesturing toward the phrases in Arabic, its psychedelic odes, references to Boccaccio, Jean Toomer, C. L. R. James, etc. But the author photo must remain the same: Cliff, unsmiling in a black beret.

  Melvin flips to the poem “Story 1937.”

  the leather strap the broom the switch

  habits before freedom

  freedom: the lie which is true

  before: kept fed but close to death

  the penitentiary the gun the rope

  is at hand now that you free

  free: kept down with your eyes down

  now: night riders patrol in cars

  those born again die free

  a lie for grateful slaves

  grateful: who are better off

  lie: who is better off

  dig down into the unmarked earth

  lay there and be free

  Perhaps in the introduction he should note that it wasn’t until his first year in his Ph.D. program that he encountered Clifton James, a footnote in an essay in a Black Arts anthology. The footnote offered a truly fascinating description of Cliff’s poetry as provocatively moving—from collective diasporic dirges to the simply vivid poems of the dispossessed. But no one Melvin knew seemed to have a copy of Cliff’s work. The university library listed a copy of Race Records (1967) as available, but it was not in the prescribed spot. One of his professors had let an old student borrow his copy of Flatbottom Unrest (1969) but couldn’t remember who the student was, or even what year they had graduated. The small press that had published scant copies of both books had been shuttered in 1972, which was the year that Cliff died. But rather than signal the end of his search, the detective story became something of a quest.

  He was rewarded almost a year later, when at a conference, a speaker quoted from one of Cliff’s poems. The poem, unknown to Melvin at the time, had this profoundly tribal intimacy. The invaluable speaker turned out to be an old friend of Cliff’s. It was this crucial happenstance that culminated in a first edition of each book and even an old copy of a 1969 literary magazine called Shadowplay.

  Not that he would include this part, but it wasn’t until Melvin’s paper on Cliff had met with a certain level of success that he truly began thinking of writing a biography. By then his friends were joking that as the only Clifford James scholar he should be called the (Other) Jamesian. But he wasn’t emboldened enough to undertake it until his first book on Langston Hughes and George Schuyler was under contract. Buoyed by this, he contacted Cliff’s brother and made his first visit to the Delta. At the time, Dee James had just been made Cliff’s literary executor. To begin with, Dee seemed grateful that his brother’s work was getting serious critical attention, but when Melvin brought up the biography, Dee became distant, even when Melvin assured him that though it would follow the narrative of Cliff’s life, revealing his way of looking at the world, at its deepest root it would be a scholarly work and give Cliff’s poetry the attention it deserved. But once Melvin left the Delta, Dee stopped taking his calls. Nevertheless, Melvin forged ahead, finding artists who had known Cliff, even a couple of distant family members willing to talk. Getting in touch with Pia proved elusive until she joined a university faculty in the mid-eighties. But in her, he found his staunchest opponent. Cliff would never want that, she said. For the public to read about his failures, his affairs, his sad, useless death. He would never want Billie to read about that. But it turns out she was wrong about Billie.

  On one hand, it is true that any number of artists’ biographies feature bereft children, haunted widows, bitterly fractured families left behind by the alcoholic poet, or the hermit poet, Gilded Age poet, fractured war poet, the poet with other families, other lives. But to place Clifton James within his historical context, a black poet so prolific during his short life and amid such a turbulent time, is to understand what he had left to write, and somehow, Melvin suspects, why he died at that particular moment. Over the years, he has been inclined to think it more likely than not that Cliff’s death was probably an accident. But for him this has never meant that there were not forces conspiring to bring it about. Think of the return to the uneasy tension of a partially desegregated rural Mississippi, the agitated marriage to a white woman and subsequent divorce, the separation from his young child, the moving home to care for his elderly mother, add alcohol and that something else which persists. In essence, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the life of Melvin Hurley has been haunted by the life of Clifton James.

  Melvin doesn’t buy the book. By now he has countless copies not to mention every literary journal that ever featured or mentioned Cliff, and besides the toothpicks, his briefcase is full with Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry edited by Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman; and a copy of the spring edition of the African American Review. He actually has a book review coming out in September in their summer/fall “Amiri Baraka” issue.

  On the drive to meet Billie, Melvin admires the serene expanse of the fields, their verdure, though even at that moment his pleasure is problematized by his imagining the long ten-foot cotton sacks black folk dragged through the turnrows, working from can to can’t.

  When he pulls into what functions as a driveway, Billie is sitting on the edge of the porch, swinging one foot, in a kind of roller derby ensemble: T-shirt, ripped denim shorts, and striped socks. A file folder sits between her and the dog who leaps off the porch as Melvin steps from the car, bounding ominously toward him.

  “Rufus,” she says.

  The dog slows, sniffing his leg. Melvin tries to pat its head, but it’s moving too much.

  “You remember him, Rufus.” She snaps her fingers, then stands and slaps her leg. The dog returns to her side.

  “More obedient today,” he says, walking up the porch steps.

  “I’ve been working on his manners.” She looks down at the file. “Well, there it is.” Her voice is a little hoarse. “I’ve read it a few times. I think . . . I’ll let you be the judge.” She picks up the file and hands it to him. “I’ll tell you about the bizarre time I had at the station when you’re done reading.” There’s a certain kind of brittle languor about her today.

  “Thank you for getting this. I realize that it must have been an especially difficult task for you. But I do think it’s incredibly important for us to have it. And when I use the term difficult, I am deeply aware of how insufficient it is in this case.”

  “Yeah.” She pushes a wisp of hair behind her ear. “It just makes me feel tired. I was thinking last night of him all alone out there in trouble.” She looks at the front yard then into the woods. “He could have collapsed anywhere out here. I guess I knew that. And there’s—” Her eyes are shiny. “He lost a tooth. It got knocked out somehow.”

  “Are you still comfortable staying here?”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say comfortable.” She yanks a string off of the edge of her shorts. “I feel like it’s where I need to be. I’ll leave you to it.” She goes inside.

  To a certain degree, very little in the file is a surprise. Except for one thing that poses a considerable number of new questions.

  Inside, Billie is sitting on a dirty sleeping bag on the floor, her knees curled to her chest, an unopene
d book by her side. She looks up. “That was fast.”

  “Let me begin with this: I would say that I know something of the complex relationship between your family and the McGees. And there’s a long tradition of these kind of quasi-familial bonds in the Delta between plantation owners and their black sharecroppers. That being said, there’s nothing cut-and-dry about these relationships, they’re tremendously fluid. I mean, what has always fascinated me is that while there may be love and care exchanged, the white family would never typically socialize with the black family, not past the age of twelve or thirteen. You wouldn’t see them having each other over for dinner or going to the movies together. And this is what I get the sense was the case with your father and Mr. McGee. In his own fashion, Mr. McGee confirmed this with me when I interviewed him in the early nineties. But what makes me—I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say what shocks me—is that at no time did he mention that he was one of the officers who found your father’s body.”

  She gets to her knees, sitting back on her heels. “But not only that. My uncle never said anything about it. Honestly, I might not even think it was that big of a deal if people didn’t keep leaving it out.”

  “Though this particular officer may not be our Mr. McGee. It could be that it’s a relative, a cousin perhaps.”

  “It could be but I bet it wasn’t.” She chews her bottom lip. “You know, my uncle told me to go to Mr. McGee if I needed any help. He said Mr. McGee knew our family. That seems so cryptic now.”

  He sets down his briefcase. “And then there is the fact that your grandmother bought this piece of land from them, which was quite unusual for the time. Many farmers in the Delta have sold land to large agricultural companies, but very rarely to former black tenants.”