by Jesmyn Ward
Now, Charine says, knowing how he lay behind that door breaks something inside of her.
Years later, Nerissa told me about Rog’s visit with her in February 2004. This would have been when Rog and our cousins were doing too much coke because C. J. had just died. This would have been when they were raw with love, with losing. This would have been when Rog passed out, when our cousin was afraid he wasn’t breathing, when he carried Rog into Nerissa’s bathroom and put him in the tub, ran the water cold, hoping for a miracle, for the flame not to go out. My cousin cried. He yelled, “Don’t do this to me!” Beat Rog on the chest. “Not you!” Yelled at Rog, “Not again!” And then Rog drew a breath and opened his eyes.
Rog did cocaine, and then he took a few Lortabs on the night of June 3, 2004. For once, there was no party, no casual gathering of friends at his mother’s house. Then Rog, the boy with the beautiful smile and the long face, lay back in his bed, feeling high and low, feeling everything and nothing, all at once. Perhaps he was thinking he should be somewhere else, maybe out under the palm trees in California, walking along Venice Beach with his cousins, smelling incense that you could almost mistake for weed. Maybe he thought of the sky over the Pacific Ocean, the water stretching away to meet the clouds and disappear over the horizon, the way it seemed to go on forever. Maybe he was thinking of his family, of his mama’s return from working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig. Maybe he was thinking about the air conditioner, how good it was to lie in a cool dark bed at home, to be. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about any of these things, but I like to imagine that he was thinking about all of them when the seed of the bad heart that had killed his father sent out roots and bloomed violently in Rog’s chest. Sometime that night Rog died of a heart attack.
I was at my mother’s house, alone, when my brother’s last girlfriend, Tasha, called and told me Rog had died.
“They killed my brother!” she sobbed. She’d been close to Rog.
I left my mother’s house and drove through DeLisle, deep into the country. I drove with the windows down and my lights low. On a solitary road I ran into my ex-boyfriend from high school, Brandon; we stopped our cars in the middle of the empty darkness that is endemic to rural Mississippi. I’d known Brandon since I was seven years old, and his face was as familiar as my own. I walked to his car and passed a hand over my forehead and leaned into the driver’s-side window. His own eyes were wide and black, and the woods around us burned with calling insects.
“You heard?” I said.
I hugged him. Rog was his first cousin, his younger cousin. They had the same black eyes, the same curly black hair. Brandon nodded. My face brushed against his as I pulled away. His skin was wet: the night was so hot I didn’t know if it was sweat or tears.
“You heading to Oak Park?” I asked. After days of others knocking but not walking in, Rog’s sister Rhea had found Rog. I do not like to imagine what it must have been like for her.
“Yes,” Brandon said.
I left him behind in the middle of the street. When I arrived in the Oak Park subdivision, I parked my car on a cement curb and walked over to stand on the lawn in front of Rog’s house. People stood in drifting pockets at the edge of the same street we had partied on. Charine and Tasha met me there. We faced the house. A long hearse, gray and black with silver accents, took Rog away. It had a hard time maneuvering the driveway. The street lamps buzzed. When they rolled Rog out on the stretcher and loaded him into the back, I cried, my mouth open. I hated the hearse. I wanted to set it on fire. As the driver clumsily crushed the grass and swerved out of the yard, I thought of what my ex had said to me before I drove away.
“They picking us off, one by one,” Brandon had breathed.
After the people dispersed and Rog’s immediate family locked the house and turned off all the lights, we milled in the street, waiting. We waited as if we could will the hearse back to the house, will Rog to rise out of the back, alive. Will him to joke, to smile. I drove home across the black, inky bayou by myself. I thought about Josh. I thought about C. J., about Demond, about Ronald. I rode with the windows open and thought about Rog.
I thought about what Tasha and Brandon had said, and I wondered who they were. Rog had died by his own hand, by his own heart; were they us? Or was there a larger story that I was missing as all these deaths accumulated, as those I loved died? Were they even human? My headlights lit a slim sliver in the darkness, and suddenly they seemed as immense as the darkness, as deep, as pressing. I turned off my music and rode home without the narrative of song, with only the bugs’ shrill cry and hot wind whipping past my window. I tried to hear the narrative in that, to figure out who the they that wrote our story might be.
After Rog’s funeral, I tapped Rhea’s shoulder. I opened my arms, hugged her. Her big, expressive eyes were bloodshot and wandering. I wondered what I would have wanted someone, anyone, to say to me when my brother died, anything beyond Are you all right? and Are you okay? I knew the answers to those questions. I whispered into her ear: “He will always be your brother, and you will always be his sister.”
What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s not here? Doesn’t it? Because in order to get out of bed this morning, this is what I had to believe about my brother, Rhea. But I didn’t know how to say that.
After every funeral in the hood, including Rog’s, there is a gathering or a repast. Older women brought large pans containing casseroles and meat to Mrs. P.’s house. We all found our way there, and we parked in front of her house, some of us in neighboring yards, our cars half on the grass, half on the asphalt, this time in the middle of the day. We ate with plates balanced on our laps, one foot in our cars, the other out. We smoothed our shirts down, white T-shirts with pictures of Rog framed in blue. In Rog’s picture, he has deep dimples and an even, blinding smile. We breathed heavily.
The memorial shirt is most common at funerals for young people. I do not know if it is common in Black neighborhoods in the North or East or West, but in the South, it has become as traditional as the repast. Rog’s shirt was made by his cousins: they gathered the pictures for the shirt, designed it, and then offered one to anyone who could afford the $20 it cost to make it. In this way, the young memorialize the young. On his memorial T-shirt, Rog has a charming grin, looks as if he is on the verge of saying, Hey, how you doing, what we getting into tonight? Around Rog’s larger picture, there are pictures of the other dead young men: Ronald, C. J., Demond, Joshua, and two others who had died years before and whom I was not so close to, one in a car wreck and the other by suicide. They are all smiling in what look like school photos or family reunion shots. My brother looks like a young thug in his picture, like he could run with the best of the phantom menace in New Orleans. He holds my father’s SK gun and postures for the camera, a bandana over the bottom half of his face, his hair cut close to his head. He must have been sixteen then. I had never seen this picture of Joshua before, and seeing him there with all the other dead young men made me cry while I ate. I chewed my funeral food on a hot Mississippi summer day and looked at my brother’s eyes, large and brown and wide, in a picture that revealed nothing of what he was, and represented everything that he wasn’t.
Yagga yo and what you mean? it said on the back of Rog’s memorial shirt. This was something he said often, I was told, but his cousins did not tell me its meaning. OPT, the shirt also read. Rog’s picture was an insult to the living man, too blurry, too static for the smiling, open-armed twenty-three-year-old he’d been. Written on the front of the shirt and finished on the back was the declaration: THE SAME THING THAT MAKE YOU LAUGH MAKE YOU CRY. This was too pat, I thought as I wiped my tears. In that moment, I could not remember ev
er laughing, could not recall what it felt like to open my mouth and scream my loud, embarrassing laugh with Rog. I looked at my family and friends, all of us crying and looking away from each other, and I could not recall having the ability to laugh at all. Only this loss, this pain. I could not understand why there was always this.
We Are Born
1977–1984
I was born early at six months, on April Fools’ Day, 1977. My mother was eighteen, my father twenty. They were living with my father’s mother in Oakland, in his childhood room awash with the detritus of his teen years: Bruce Lee posters, nunchaku hung on nails, my father’s illustrations. My mother cannot remember the conversation that signaled my impending arrival, but I imagine my mother waking and telling my father, “I need to go to the hospital,” and my father laughing, thinking it a good April Fools’ joke. And then my mother would have curled over in pain on the bed. “I’m serious.” The look on her face: his doe catching a glancing blow from a car fender.
When I was born, I weighed two pounds and four ounces, and the doctors told my parents I would die. My skin was red, paper thin, and wrinkly, my eyes large and alien. My father took a picture of me, of my entire body, cupped in the palm of his hand. Because I weighed so little, I developed blood tumors, which swelled up and out: they were bulbous, swollen maroon, an abundance of blood barely contained by thin skin. Two burst and leaked. When I was around four years old, they would shrink completely flat and leave mottled scars where they’d sprouted and grown: on my stomach, my wrist, the back of my thigh. I had a growth in my abdomen, so the doctors sliced me open millimeters below my belly button for exploratory surgery before sewing me closed. The incision must have been done across the whole length of my small belly, and I imagine myself open like a frog on the operating table. Over the years, the scar would stretch, dimple, and pull where the stitches had been sewn. When the doctors realized I would survive, they told my parents I would have severe developmental problems. They were surprised that my lungs worked well, that I fought to breathe. She has a strong heart, they said. In another picture, the skin under my eyes wells in red bags, and my mother holds a breathing tube to my face. I look weary. I lived, silent and tenacious, in my incubator, my body riddled with multiple tubes. During the two months I lived at the hospital, my red color leached away. I slowly gained weight on my stomach, my gamy legs, my outstretched arms. My eyes shrank into my head. The medical staff discharged me, yellow, bald, fat, and scarred, on May 26, 1977: my mother’s nineteenth birthday.
We moved out of my grandmother’s house into our own one-bedroom apartment. I sprouted hair on my head, which grew half an inch, black and fine and curly, and stopped. It would not grow again until I turned three. In pictures of me from that time, my mother combed my hair forward in a silken cap in an effort to frame my face, to make me look more like a girl. In a picture from my second birthday, I am dressed in a long-sleeved red cotton peasant-style shirt, thick with maroon embroidery, and black pants. Red was the color my mother chose to dress me in, again and again: no pink or blue or green or purple, but red. Red as the blood tumors. I was not a pink girl. In one photograph, we are high in the hills above Berkeley and Oakland, dirt and yellow grass behind me. The dust in the dry hills makes the air look golden. I look healthy, like a beautiful boy. Most of the tumors, which were just beginning to shrink from their skin stretching red, were hidden by my outfit. My expression is serious as I gaze at the person behind the camera.
My father always told me he felt insulted when the doctors informed them that I would die. The doctor ignored me in the incubator, my head turned to the side, my lungs aflutter through the thin skin of my chest, and faced my parents and said: “Chances are she won’t survive.”
Daddy didn’t say anything. He stood there holding my mother’s hand. She would not cry until she could do so alone. There were a lot of things the doctors said to my mother and father when I was born, about my birth, the likelihood of my death, that they did not understand. Things they would not remember later when I asked them for the story. They were young and poor and Black in Oakland in the late seventies. My father waited until the doctor left, fit his solid hand into the plastic glove sealed into the side of the incubator, and brushed my tiny hand with one finger. He could not put his pointer finger in my palm for me to grab, since his finger was the size of my arm.
“I wanted to tell them you were a fighter,” he told me when I was a teenager. “I wanted to tell them that my baby wasn’t going to die because she was a warrior.”
We come from a line of men and women who have fought hard to live. My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, raised seven children on her own in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house. Over the years, she worked and saved and transformed those two bedrooms into four. She held jobs as a maid, a hairdresser, a seamstress, and finally a factory worker at a pharmaceutical plant. “We need a woman who can work like a man.” My grandmother got that factory job after a man saw her lift and carry a full-grown hog on her shoulders. The men in my family have worked for decades as gardeners, carpenters, factory men, bootleggers, and shop owners, and have built houses from the ground up with their own hands.
My father said he knew even then that I would not disappoint.
I can remember little of those first three years in the Bay Area. My father had been a hellion before my mother and I showed up. He was picked up in raids when the police would target all the members of his gang for suspected drug activity, for scuffles with other gangs over narrow sidewalks, small roads. There were tens of them in holding cells, yelling at the police, shaking their heads, laughing, talking shit to each other: What did you do? Naw, man, what did you do? The artist in him fell in love with Jimi Hendrix; he put chemicals in his hair so that he could wear an afro, an afro that fell instead of stood. He was offered a scholarship at an art school when he finished high school, but he chose not to attend; he had his mother and his seven siblings to think of, so he worked. He worked at gas stations in ailing neighborhoods where prostitutes walked up and down the street. He treated them well, let them use the bathroom without buying anything from the store, joked with them while they were waiting for customers. On weekends, he went to drag races in Fresno with his friends and tripped on acid. But when my mother came to California, he slowed down some. He stayed home more, but his new domestic life with my mother didn’t prevent him from straying. Remaining faithful to my mother required a kind of moral discipline he’d never developed, since it was constantly undermined by his natural gifts: his charm, his sense of humor, his uncommon beauty. My mother fought with him about it, but this only made him cleverer and sneakier about his cheating, even as he said all the things my mother wanted to hear. Neither of us had daddies, so of course we going to be a family. Of course I’m going to be here. My mother was taking community college classes and working at my preschool during those years. She wanted to major in early education, to be a preschool teacher.
My father said that she was shaped like a Coke bottle, and that she was beautiful. I have seen pictures of her from those days, and she was beautiful: sharp cheekbones and nose, large eyes, long silky hair that ran over her shoulders and down her back like water, and a tiny mole at the corner of her mouth. When she brought me to the grocery store, people complimented her on her beauty, on me, her adorable baby boy. She’s a girl, my mother said. Eventually, she heard me called a boy so much that she stopped correcting admiring strangers.
I was walking by then. I was two. I had a fat belly, short legs, large dark eyes. The silken cap of hair. My father and mother had a party, the kind of party one has for no other reason than to share a good time with loved ones. My mother put me in a green jumper, and I toddled around my father’s legs, his cousins’ legs, my mother’s, my fathers’ sisters’. They picked me up, a miracle baby, and kissed me on my cheeks, which were still fat as ripe peaches. I walked to my room, pulled on a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat my mother bought for me.
“What you doing, Mimi?” That
was my nickname. The upstairs neighbor in our apartment complex called her daughter that, and my mother liked the name so much she stole it for me. I jumped on my steel rocking horse, set up in the corner, careful to not pinch my legs in the springs, and I began rocking back and forth, squeaking against the chatter of the drinking and smoking adults. They laughed. As the party wore on, I picked up cans when the adults weren’t looking, sometimes when they were, and sipped the dregs of their beer before they took the cans from me with a No, Mimi. My mother took a picture of me while I held a can to my belly, beer dribbling from my chin, the can half the length of my torso, before taking it away. In the picture, I’m grinning, my feet planted wide, almost proud. I was part of the party.
My father remembers those days better than my mother, or he is more open about them, or he is more nostalgic for them, which is why he talks about them with me and my mother doesn’t. Despite his pleasant memories, when we lived in California he missed home, he said. My mother didn’t. She wanted to stay in California. She’s told me less about that time, but she says she liked the freedom of it, the vista of the cities rolling themselves out over the hills. There were no vistas in Mississippi, only dense thickets of trees all around. You could only see the closest house, the dog chained to a tree, your brother riding his bike by on the dirt road. At night, perhaps, a snatch of stars: in the day time, the leaden rain-heavy clouds closed in. But in California, my mother could look out over the horizon and watch the sun rise in the east, and then she could watch it set out over the mammoth Pacific in the west. In California, my family sat at the center of those hills, and my mother could tend to her husband and her child only, free of family and the South.
