Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  Some comedic notes were crude, in the style of performers he admired—Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor—and were tough for a hero-worshipping sister to read: “Been meeting a lot of girls lately who don’t like to fuck,” Darrell wrote. “They like to get high and Disco. I say you dig on this dicko.” And “Why dream about me when you can cream about me?” And “I can tell when someone needs sex—I spend a lot of time in the mirror…. I grew up in Gary and it used to be pretty rough. I mean, I wasn’t handsome, cool, or smart so I didn’t get much…. Gary bitches didn’t give no pussy to just another muthafucker.”

  The sheer volume of material in the bag was mind-bending. Darrell had written enough for more than a dozen comedy routines, several essays, a portfolio of songs, and a book of poetry. His mind had been ablaze; it must have taken months to have plucked so many words, so much inspiration and insight, from his life and others’. When he left home, I used to wonder how he filled his time when he was alone. Darrell had been serious about his comedy, his poetry, his writing, in ways I had never suspected.

  The most probing of women, I have over the years persuaded countless men to reveal themselves to me. Yet I’d never been offered a thrown-open window to a man’s naked soul. In a rough draft of a letter to someone unnamed, Darrell wrote:

  “I’ve got nobody special now and too much time on my hands. I like you so very, very much. We seem to have fun when we get together so I don’t see why we can’t get together more instead of feeling sorry for ourselves…. If you’re any kind of judge of character, then you should know I’ll be only good for you. And if you don’t know what kind of man I am, then I invite you to find out.”

  Who was she? Did he ever mail the finished letter?

  A love poem: “When I remember you I shall re-create in my mind those fathomless eyes that… invite me to bathe in the tropical blue waters of your soul. And I’ll remember your hands, small and gentle, eager to fill themselves with love. But would it be my love?”

  I read and reread the poem entitled “Learnin’ How to Die”:

  Saw a man bent half-backwards

  Throwin’ up his life,

  Couldn’t keep it down inside of him

  He was learnin’ how to die….

  Seems people stopped trying to live

  And started learnin’ how to die.

  And this, another poem without a title:

  The point of the story,

  If you didn’t catch it

  From our friends,

  And Stepin Fetchit

  Is that although things for us

  Are better than ever before

  We’ve got to come to the slavemaster

  If we want more….

  Niggers for sale, Niggers for sale

  Big as a mountain, dumb as a door

  Fine black beauties, make a hell of a whore….

  The chains that were once on our bodies

  Are now on our minds.

  And the key to unlock them,

  No one’s trying to find.

  Entranced, I read through the cigar box’s contents for more than an hour—proud, shocked, convulsed, as I drank in the man from whom I had hidden for three decades. Two-thirds of the way through, I paused to breathe in the enormity of holding these bits and traces of my brother in my hands, hearing his voice in my ear. A knot closed my throat. Without warning, a river of hot, confused tears boiled down my face.

  I was reading Darrell’s private musings, his art, his scattershot, unedited thoughts, secrets he never expected anyone to see. Absorbing them felt as wrong as it was necessary. How often had I refused to let editors see my scribblings before I’d shaped them into something reasoned, fluid? Yet I was reading Darrell’s nakedest fancies—and planning to reveal his uncensored reflections to the world in my book.

  But how could I keep them hidden? These were Darrell’s words, written in the carefully slanted script I’d forgotten. Thousands of them, all the more sacred for their incaution and incompleteness. Here was proof that my brother had been alive, that he’d been real. Proof of his humanity. His worth.

  And mine. Suddenly I remembered the other obvious yet shattering thing that the psychologist had suggested as I sat sniffling in her office.

  “Darrell could have reached out to you,” she said. “He was an adult; he was equally responsible for the two of you falling out of touch. Yet you’ve blamed yourself for that. That’s not fair to you.”

  Thirty years after I began giving to men in his memory, my brother was offering himself to me. The more I read, the more certain I was that Darrell wanted me to have this box, to become reacquainted with him at last. Much that was offered, I didn’t understand; half skits and musings as free-flowing and limitless as he had been, as uncaged by logic and judgment. Many of the box’s offerings lacked the concreteness to satisfy a sister searching for answers. Fragments couldn’t explain everything about the man my dearest brother had become. Yet I did know this:

  The box clasped in my hands was Darrell’s last gift to me.

  There were two more: A layaway receipt dated two days before my birthday in April 1976, from The Hanging Tree: Clothing for the Contemporary Ms., for a “woman’s clothing” item costing $27 on which Darrell had paid $10. And on a folded white paper bag, a long-forgotten Ann Arbor phone number Darrell had recorded. Beneath it was a name, written in my brother’s precious, now-remembered hand:

  Donna.

  Finding Donna

  Donna, 1963.

  Life is a process of moving in and out of opposites: from light to dark, from day to night, from growing to shrinking to enlarging again. Inhaling, we expand our lungs; exhaling, we deflate them. Blood stampedes into the heart, barely pausing before tunneling out. The tide flings itself at the shore, only to capriciously abandon it. Yet the perfect place may be the between, the sliver of time and space intersecting the opposites: The beach where sea and land unite. The chord born of an impeccable violin note, overlapped by a perfect, harmonizing strain. The gasp of a moment during sex as foreplay ends and intercourse begins, when a woman feels herself opening to receive.

  The between. That’s why we feel God in the center of our being—the perfection in the midst of our confounding opposites.

  Reconnecting with Darrell felt so right, I could hardly recall why I’d been so terrified to find him. It was painful, unearthing once-familiar details I’d entombed. But there was profound comfort in remembering why he’d been so necessary to me—and so unthinkable to lose. For weeks, I did nothing with the information I’d unearthed. I just sat with it, savoring every tidbit, enjoying feeling, seeing, knowing Darrell again.

  Two months after getting my brother back, I felt ready to truly examine how his life and death had influenced me, especially in regard to my “giving thing.” I’d “disappeared” Darrell’s memory for decades, yet I had rarely doubted that he’d affected every day of my life. What I had never been sure of was how. Had his slaying closed me off or opened me up? Left me in some ways better? Had his dying really turned a barely noticed childhood giving impulse into an adult imperative? I had always been sure of the rightness of giving, of its necessity, if only to soften the world’s harsh edges.

  Like the Mexican vacation I decided to treat Kevin and my son Darrell to after Christmas 2009. Kevin was exhausted from his demanding new job. Darrell, just out of college, was fearful about moving to Los Angeles to act full-time. I found a great postholiday deal on a beach condo but couldn’t afford four plane tickets to Cancun; Skye and I would have to stay home. That was okay, I decided. Kevin and Darrell needed the break more. Yet for a moment, I hesitated. Here you go again, giving away something you could use! Ignoring the voice, I offered the trip. The guys were thrilled.

  On the January night they returned, I was pulling into the airport pickup area when I noticed: Kevin and Darrell, not needing coats in summery Mexico, had left them in the car. The night was frigid. They’d freeze! Putting the car in park, I made sure no ticket-writing cops saw me before
dashing into the baggage area. Tossing the guys their coats, I yelled, “You’ll need these!” and sprinted back.

  Driving home, I savored Darrell’s and Kevin’s descriptions of eating just-caught fish and watching the sea shimmer from their condo. We were turning onto our street when it hit me: neither had thanked me for blowing my wad to send them to Mexico! They’d sunned on a beach while I froze my ass off at home. I wanted some acknowledgment, like the time I returned from a trip and Skye blurted, “Thank God you’re back! We were pathetic without you!”

  Suddenly I felt pathetic. Kevin, seeing my face, asked why. Of course he and Darrell thanked me profusely when I told them. But my annoyance had already shifted, from them to me. What was my problem? So what if their excitement about returning home prevented them from paying homage to me? Why did I need props for what I’d gladly given? Or—this felt truly treasonous—should I have heeded the inner voice that questioned the offer?

  Later, Darrell, who increasingly seemed as attuned to my feelings as the man I’d named him after, joined me in my office and asked for my New Year’s resolution. “To not care when I do stuff for people and they’re not as grateful as I’d like,” I told him. “To truly let giving be its own reward.”

  Darrell sighed. “Listen, Mom, I’ve been thinking about this,” he began. “Nobody brings coats inside the airport for people who don’t ask them to.”

  I just looked at him.

  “They don’t,” he said. “If I’m picking somebody up after a trip, they just better be glad my black ass showed up. But you—you get coats out of the car, run them across two streets, and hand them to people who didn’t even ask you to.

  “Giving is your gift,” he added, pausing to see if I was getting it. “Pretend I’m the world’s best snow shoveler. When I do it, the driveway is perfectly clear. But when Mani shovels it, he just does it well enough for cars to get up the hill. What matters most? That your car’s where you need it, or that he didn’t shovel perfectly?”

  I started to answer, but Darrell wasn’t finished.

  “Or look at how Skye is so humble. He just doesn’t have that puffed-up thing about him.” He laughed. “If you gave me classes on humility, maybe I’d be less of an asshole. But I’d never be like Skye. He’s a genius at it.”

  “People give in their own way,” he said. “We’re grateful in our own way. We just won’t be geniuses at it, like you.”

  Like many genius-level self-sacrificers, I had a problem with accepting—the harsh fact that few people I loved were built to give or to express gratitude as reliably as I. My difficulty with keeping my need for reciprocity in check often made me a royal pain in the ass. But I was even worse at something else:

  Feeling purely and undilutedly wonderful about my giving.

  How could I? I’d made peace with my brother, but not, as I’d hoped, with this stubborn proclivity. I had no idea why I was still doing more than my share at home and in relationships. Every here you go again admonition reminded me: I didn’t trust my gotta-give reflex.

  Such mistrust can make sense. Take my friend Sarah, who supervises a staff of two hundred at a government agency while caring for her attorney husband and three teenagers. My exhausted pal was griping about the hassle of juggling needy workers, messy kids, and a husband so clueless that he asked if antidepressants—rather than a helping hand—would relieve her, when she admitted something astonishing. Sarah not only cooks dinner after her hour-long nightly commute; she then rouses herself to wash the dishes. Her family had cowed her, the busiest person in the house, into taking this on, too.

  “I hate begging and browbeating to make them do stuff,” Sarah explained, looking mortified. “Besides, I’m a feminist. Aren’t we supposed to show women can do anything?”

  This was too much. “Doing everything for your family and letting everyone else off the hook is feminist?” I blurted.

  We both laughed. But Sarah’s lopsided interpretation of feminism’s demands wasn’t funny. Many women have self-defeating perceptions of what their independence requires. My impulse to send my guys on a needed vacation was loving and apt, yet I wondered if I would have been smarter to keep the trip for myself. Sarah felt “doing it all” proved her equality, even if it wore her out and made her a servant in her own home. Another friend’s pride that her lucrative job lets her indulge her kids in ways her own homemaker mom couldn’t pushes her to go overboard. Among the gifts for her daughter’s thirteenth birthday: a spa massage, a facial, brunch for ten, a movie outing for six kids, and videotaped shout-outs from four mentors. When I suggested this was, um, generous, my friend half joked, “I thought I’d kept myself in check.”

  It’s hard, keeping our giving in check when it comes to people we love. It’s even harder admitting how often we leap over the line drawn in the sand that suggests, “Today’s independent woman gives to herself first, then to others who deserve it.” Wanting to be tougher and more uncompromising than our self-sacrificing foremothers, we conceal or explain away our inconsistencies, admitting our “weakness” only to friends who harbor similar secrets. As if centuries of women being expected to give profusely could be wiped from our collective consciousness.

  Confused by our over-the-top generosity toward loved ones (especially to men who hardly seem to “deserve” it), women fear being used yet can’t curb their helping impulse. As an executive powerless to cut off her big-spending gadabout brother told me: “If another woman in my situation told me she was doing what I do, I’d be wagging my finger at her, saying, ‘Girl, you’ve got to stop!’ ”

  Is it any wonder women sometimes see their “gift” of giving as an affliction?

  “Giving truly is a gift,” a female life coach once told me. “But it’s also a responsibility. Without discipline, anything you’re responsible for gets out of hand.”

  Say you’ve gotten a puppy, she explained. Without discipline, the creature that enchants you when it burrows in your lap will turn your life into a chewed-shoe, urine-stained nightmare. Over and over, I’d seen mindful giving enrich me—and giving-gone-wild compromise everything from my budget to my self-esteem.

  My generosity felt like an out-of-control puppy. But how could I housebreak a stubbornly entrenched impulse?

  I was lucky. I had no doubt that the people who could best help me tame this habit—my family—would want to assist. Yet it would be tricky, cutting off the giving gravy train to which my guys had grown accustomed. Who wants to do more and get less?

  And though I didn’t need anyone’s permission to take control of my giving, I wanted my family’s support. I recalled my basement lint revelation, how crucial it felt, but how impossible to explain to a man who’d stopped seeing me. Counseling taught me to effectively express my frustration without judgment. Could better communication help with this problem, too?

  I had something in my favor: I’m a woman. Any English teacher can tell you girls’ language skills tend to be superior to boys’. Men’s brains are usually larger, but the parts dealing with emotion, memory, and language are much bigger in women. Researchers say that’s why the charge we get from intimate conversation nearly rivals that of orgasm. Is it any wonder women connect through talking, in the coffee klatches, book clubs, and tête-à-têtes that the busiest of us build into our lives?

  Communicating wasn’t just fun for me. It was my calling. Why not use these skills to help my guys get my concerns?

  For months, I’d been reminding Kevin of the multitude of supportive things I’d done when he was writing his books. “Clearly,” I’d huffed, “my work isn’t as important to you!” This observation not only failed to inspire his warmth, but it suggested I knew his feelings, when in truth, I wasn’t always certain of my own. When I changed my curt “You’d do more around here if you cared about my book” to the more honest “This book is vital to me; doing more than my share around the house bothers me as a wife and an author,” Kevin heard me.

  Rocket science it wasn’t. Mounting verbal attack
s on folks sparks their need to fight back; loving expressions inspire commensurate warmth. When the gentle approach proved effective with my sons, I took the next steps: delegating more, making honey-do lists, stuff wiser women had always done. Admittedly, the patient technique was no swing in a hammock. I bristled at having to ask nicely, sometimes more than once, for what should have been freely given. But things got done.

  Which was great. And yet…

  Changing my family’s behavior didn’t change me. Disciplining my generosity didn’t extinguish the still-powerful urge to cave in to it. Happiness wasn’t necessarily a warm, in-control puppy.

  To be truly content, I needed to figure out why I’d bought the damn dog in the first place.

  My frustration notwithstanding, I’d come a long way since that day on the couch when I realized Darrell’s death had set me on a path of unexamined giving. New mindfulness had freed me from my most thoughtless offerings; I understood how Mom’s childhood traumas, Daddy’s coolness, and my sibling-imbued love for men exacerbated the impulse. Resurrecting my brother’s memory had brought me peace. But I still had precious little insight into his death’s hidden effects. And for all my newfound discipline, I hadn’t stopped wanting to offer myself more freely than anyone who wasn’t named Mother Teresa.

  I was stuck.

  One day, Mom brought over a sack of old letters she’d found. Filled with correspondence between friends and me when we were in our late teens, the letters made a disconcerting suggestion: I’d hardly changed in thirty years.

  Stuff I was passionate about—movies, culture, race—went unmentioned. The letters focused almost entirely on one thing:

  Men. Letter after letter between my friends and me detailed breakups, hookups, luring strategies, outrage at guys who’d stomped on our hearts, and our reconsideration of exes craving another shot. But the more I read, the more I noticed: our fixation was less on particular guys than on the place where most women lived, in the shifting landscape of our relationships. These missives from the 1970s reminded me of exchanges I’d recently overheard between my goddaughter, twelve, and her girlfriends; between me and women in their twenties, thirties, and beyond. It’s where we live.