Men We Reaped

by Jesmyn Ward

  When I attended college in the Bay Area, I missed the Mississippi air. I wonder if my father felt the same, if the steady cold of the bay made him miss the close heat of Mississippi. When my father brought up the idea of moving back home, my mother balked. They argued over it. But eventually my mother relented because she loved my father. She was also pregnant with my brother by then, and perhaps she wanted the support of her family if she was to have a second child. It was 1980. I was three.

  My father and mother packed all of their possessions into their cars, a station wagon and a lowrider Riviera, and we made the long drive down California to L.A. on I-5, then crossed the desert Southwest on I-10. Somewhere in Arizona, my mother, big with my brother, walked into a grocery store and fainted. Our cars had no air-conditioning, yet she still drove those twenty-three hundred miles, her mouth set, my brother large and kicking in her stomach, his feet separated from the metal link of the Riviera’s chain steering wheel by the thin balloon of her fat and skin, windows down, wind blowing. I lay curled in the passenger seat in that car. As my mother drove through the burning desert, I slept, dreaming burning dreams. We sped through the long, seemingly endless stretch of Texas to the blooming green of Louisiana, and finally to DeLisle: home.

  One day my brother wasn’t there, and the next day he was. He was born at Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi. He was yellow and fat, his eyes large and liquid. His mouth gaped with gums. Sometimes my mother let me sit in a chair and hold him, his body stretching from my shoulder down and across my legs. I remember snippets of him as a baby, but not enough to grow him from infant to toddler in the narrative of his life. Joshua was born on time at nine months, but he wasn’t an easy delivery. My mother says he was born looking at a sky he could not yet see: sunny-side up, the doctor called it. The doctor turned Joshua facedown in my mother’s womb, three times. Every time, my mother said, she felt him turning to face the world again, as if he knew from the first that he wanted to see for himself. He was a beautiful baby: sandy skin, dark brown hair that later fell out and grew in blond. One day he isn’t there, and the next day he is. And just like that, I’m his big sister.

  Once home, we moved often. We lived in a small white two-bedroom house in Pass Christian, but our life there is fuzzy in my memory. We then moved to a small blue house, this one a three-bedroom, built on my great-grandmother Ellen’s land in DeLisle where my father had played as a child and lost his eye. The house was built on cinder blocks, so the steps seemed impossibly high to me, and it was in a corner of the field. The field seemed immense. Mother Ellen’s house, small and faded gray, sat three hundred yards away, and the woods bordering the field clung closely to the back and sides of the house. There was a small chicken coop under the trees behind our house, and my father put two dog houses out on the other side for our dogs: one a black pit bull called Home-boy, and the other a short white pit bull mix called Mr. Cool.

  I grew taller. My mother combed my hair up into multiple pigtails, secured them with large plastic bobs we called knockers. When I slept at night, they dug into my scalp. By the time I was five, my brother was three, and he came up to my waist. He wanted us to be a team, but when my mother had somewhere to go and my father stayed home and watched us, I left my brother and walked up the long drive that led to the road and played with my cousin Farrah. We played house and snuck to watch TV under the curtain that her father tacked in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Sometimes we played in the field that separated our houses, and one such day my brother came looking for me. He could walk easily now, and his blond afro bloomed. He wore a diaper and nothing else. He walked from one end of the railless front porch to the other, looking off into the grass. He stopped at the edge of the steps, turned around, angled one leg behind him until he found the top step, and then slid the rest of the way down so he stood on that step before turning in a circle to face the yard again.

  “Mimi!” Joshua called.

  I ducked lower so that only my eyes showed over the brick. I watched him. I did not want to call back, to have him come out into the yard, to have to take care of him instead of playing my game.

  “Mimi!” Josh yelled.

  He was so skinny, only his belly round as a ball. I did not say anything. He looked out in wonder over the yard, which must have seemed even larger to him than it did to me: it was a vast stretch of overgrown grass, and then those silent houses in the murky distance where his sister had disappeared.

  My father slammed out of the front door. He was in shorts and nothing else. He had probably been asleep. He grabbed my brother by one arm, yanked him so he dangled in the air, and began whipping him.

  “Boy! What I told you about going outside by yourself!”

  My brother wailed, turning in circles like a sinker on a fishing line. My father’s hand whacked my brother’s diaper again and again, and I was afraid. I’d seldom seen my father angry, violent. I could not understand why Daddy was so upset with Joshua, could not understand what lesson my father was trying to teach my brother. I could not understand why Joshua dangled like a baby doll. And even today, that whipping he received feels like my fault. I’m still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say: Here I am, brother. I’m here.

  My father was not usually quick-tempered. He dealt with me mostly with forbearance and tenderness; he never whipped me. But he whipped my brother. He was stricter with him. With Joshua, my father’s patience was thin. There was no room for error in disciplining my brother, my father thought, because my brother was a boy. A son. A child who would be harder pressed to be a fighter, even more than the girl who’d been born early with the strong heart. My brother would have to be stronger than that. My brother would have to grow up and be a Black man in the South. My brother would have to fight in ways that I would not. Perhaps my father dreamed about the men in his family who died young in all the wrong ways, and this forced his hand when he woke to my brother standing next to my parents’ bed: pink-mouthed and grinning, green to the world, innocent.

  When he wasn’t disciplining Joshua, my father was playful. When my mother left us home with him one evening, after he’d had a long day of work, my father covered himself with a blanket and crouched in the middle of the mattress. Joshua and I clutched each other. We skittered around the corners of the room as my father scuttled from side to side under the blanket. He circled the bed, following us, making strange guttural noises. Joshua and I laughed. We were breathless. We tiptoed closer to the bed, and my father swiped an arm out, a great knuckle-scarred claw, and we shrieked, the joy and terror rising in our throats, almost choking us. We darted away. My father played with us until we grew frazzled in the hot room. The sweat ran down our small bodies, our hair alive on our heads, standing in dense halos. At the end of the night, my father snatched us both under the covers with him and tickled us. We yelled for mercy.

  On weekday mornings before my father went to work at the glass factory in Gulfport, the family would have breakfast together. My father would turn up the radio in the kitchen. It was 1982 and my mother was pregnant with my sister Nerissa. New Edition crooned; Joshua and I loved New Edition. My father would grab my hand, and then he’d grab Joshua’s, and I’d grab Joshua’s small moist palm in my own, and we’d dance in a ring in the middle of the kitchen. My mother shook her head at us, smiled, waved my father away when he tried to get her to dance with him. She would have been feeling pressure then as her family grew, as my father continued to cheat and plead his innocence and devotion and cheat more. She was afraid of what she saw on the horizon. She could not dance in the kitchen. She fried our eggs sunny side up, and as a family, we sat at the table and ate.

  But my father could be dark, too. He was attracted to violence, to the basic beauty of fighting, the way it turned his body and those he fought into meticulously constructed machines. He taught his purebred pit bull to fight with d
eflated bike tires. Alternately he coddled his dog, treated it as tenderly as one of his children, but the dog’s ability to fight was paramount, and my father had little mercy for him in his quest to make him harder to kill. Like my brother, my father’s dog required a hard hand if he would be his toughest.

  My father stood in the doorway of the house with a machete in his hand, the blade so dark gray it looked black. He held it lightly, loosely. My mother was in her room watching television, and Joshua and I crowded around my father’s legs, looking out at the yard, at Homeboy, squat and as finely muscled as my father. Homeboy gleamed black and panted with his tongue out. He smiled at us.

  “Stay inside,” my father said, and he trotted down the steps. Joshua and I dug into the door jamb, waited until Daddy walked around the house, leading Homeboy by his studded collar, to lean far out. We were determined to watch. One of my father’s first cousins, also shirtless in white shorts, grabbed Homeboy’s tail, held it down still and tight over a pillar of cinder blocks. Homeboy waited patiently, quietly, glanced back over his shoulder, and then snapped at a gnat. He trusted my father. Daddy whipped the machete up and brought it down hard on Homeboy’s tail, inches below where the tail merged into his backside. Blood spurted across the gray cinder in a steady gush. Homeboy yelped and jerked. My father dropped the machete and tied a bandage around Homeboy’s stump, and then smoothed his sides. Homeboy whimpered and quieted.

  “Good boy,” my father said. Homeboy licked my father’s hand, butted him with his head.

  Later, Joshua and I lay in our room, a room that was still decorated only for me; there were Cinderella curtains at the windows, and a rough Cinderella bedspread on my twin bed. When we moved in, Joshua had had his own room, but when my father decided he wanted a room for his weight bench and his kung-fu weapons, they moved Joshua into my room. This made me angry for a week or so because I felt territorial; this was my space. But that night Joshua and I lay quietly in our small beds, Joshua breathing softly, almost snoring, while I lay awake and listened to my father and his cousin in the other room, listened to them take smoking pipes down off the wall where my father had mounted them for decoration, listened to the clink of the weights, all this drifting down the hot hallway in the dark. The wind blew my curtains; they wafted out and stilled. The humid air coming into all the open windows of the house drew the smell of weed into my room. I knew this was some sort of smoke, like cigarettes. My father smoked it and my mother didn’t. Maybe my father and his cousin talked about their dogs. Maybe they talked about their cars. Maybe they whispered about women.

  My mother had given birth to Nerissa by then. She’d also come to realize the hopelessness of her dreams that our growing family would bind my father to her and encourage his loyalty to her. She’d carried Nerissa to term, and my sister had been a hard birth. She’d been the heaviest of all of us, and had refused to descend down the birth canal, so the doctors and nurses had to drive her out of my mother by taking their forearms and sweeping down my mother’s stomach from rib cage to hip, and then grabbing Nerissa’s head with forceps. She didn’t want to leave me, my mother says. When Nerissa was born, she looked the most like my father: she had black hair and large, black eyes shaped like quotation marks in her face when she smiled.

  The violence of my sister’s birth and the slow unraveling of our family marked my mother when she came home. She was more withdrawn. She turned inward. When her patience waned, she argued with my father over his infidelities, and while my father was dramatic and flamboyant with his anger, flipping mattresses from beds, my mother was curt. I imagine she wanted to spare us the spectacle of their arguments, the way violence hovered at the edges of their confrontations. They never touched each other in anger, but the small things in that house suffered.

  That year, the world outside our house taught me and my brother different lessons about violence. Our play taught us that violence could be sudden, unpredictable, and severe, soon.

  My mother’s brother took Joshua for a ride on his moped. Uncle Thomas was around nineteen, and his moped was white with a maroon seat. My brother sat on my uncle’s lap, and my uncle whooped and hollered as they rode in circles around the yard. My uncle had the kind of face that was so hard when he was serious that I could hardly believe it was the same face when he smiled. I wanted a turn on the moped. Joshua leaned forward and grabbed the handlebars, and pretended to steer. The moped accelerated. My uncle clicked the clutch so he could slow down while my brother pressed the gas, and they surged forward. My uncle cut the wheel to stop and they crashed in the sandy ditch. Joshua screamed. Blood ran steadily from his mouth. My uncle apologized again and again: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, he said. My mother held Josh’s mouth wide to look inside and saw that the thin film of flesh that held his tongue to the floor of his mouth had been ripped. They made him suck on ice to dull the pain, to bring the swelling down. His sobs subsided and he went to sleep. They did not take him to the hospital. Perhaps they thought it would heal on its own, or they were afraid of the bill, or they were distracted by their failing relationship. Regardless, the slice healed.

  My own lesson in sudden violence involved pit bulls, of course. My father had just purchased a full-grown white pit bull from another man in DeLisle; the dog’s name was Chief. One of my father’s dogs, Mr. Cool, the gentle white half-breed pit bull who’d comforted me when I was younger, had recently gotten sick. My cousin Larry had taken him out into the backyard into the deep woods behind the house with a rifle in hand, a job my father didn’t have the heart to do himself. My father planned to fight the new dog, Chief, along with Homeboy, whom he’d had since he was a puppy. This new dog was twice Mr. Cool’s size and less interested in my father’s human brood. Homeboy could be tender like Mr. Cool. He would shield me with his body, while Chief looked at me, unmoved.

  On an unexceptional hot and bright day, I met Farrah and her brother Marty in the middle of the gravel driveway. Homeboy was asleep under the house. A stray girl dog trotted around us. Chief wandered over to investigate her. He stood to her side very stiffly, smelled her rear, her tail, her belly. He found something to interest him. Both of them stood still before me, entranced with each other. The sun was high. I was hot and cross, and Chief stood in my way.

  “Move,” I said.

  Chief’s ear twitched.

  “Move, Chief!”

  Farrah laughed.

  “Move!” I said, and I hit Chief on his broad white back.

  He growled and leapt at me. I fell, screaming. He bit me, again and again, on my back, in the back of my head, on my ear; his stomach, white and furry, sinuous and strong, rolled from side to side over me. His growl drowned all sound. I kicked. I punched him with my fists, left and right, over and over again.

  Suddenly he was off me, yelping, running away with his back curved. My great-aunt Pernella, who lived in the smallest house in the field, was beating Chief away with a yellow broom. She picked me up off the ground. I wailed.

  “Go home,” she told Marty and Farrah.

  She placed a palm tenderly where my neck met my back, and she walked me down the long drive to our house. My head and back and arms were burning, red, hotter than the day. Walking was a scream. My mother stood in the doorway of our house. I was barefoot: blood plain on my face and streaming down my body to my feet. The back of my shirt was torn and turning black. Years later, my mother told me, “I saw him attacking you in front of Pernella’s house, saw her beating him off. I couldn’t move.” She was paralyzed by fear.

  “The dog. It bit Jesmyn,” my aunt said.

  Her voice freed my mother from her shock. She called my father, who turned on the water in the bathtub. He picked me up, put me in the water. I hollered. The water turned red. My mother pulled off my shirt, took the cup she kept near the tub to rinse us with when she gave us a bath and poured water over my head. The cuts and gashes sizzled. I screamed.

  “We have to wash you off, Mimi,” they said. “It’s okay.”

 
; My mother bloodied her towels as they dried me off, and when she dressed me, I bled through my T-shirt. My father drove us to the hospital. Joshua sat quietly and solemnly in the passenger seat. My mother and I sat in the back of the car, and I lay my head on her lap; my mother laid her hands lightly on the cotton towel they’d wrapped around my head, the cotton staining red. At the hospital, a nurse, tall and White, said to me: “Oh, you got bit by a dog, did you?” My wounds throbbed, and I thought she was stupid. What did she think had happened? When the doctors gave me a rabies shot, they called in four men, and each held one of my five-year-old limbs. I bucked against them. Afterward, they sewed me up. I had three deep puncture wounds on my back. I had a three-inch gash running from the top of my left ear, parallel to my collarbone, back to the nape of my skull. They did not sew any of these. These they disinfected and bandaged. What they did sew was the bottom of my left ear, which had been ripped nearly off, and which hung on by a centimeter of flesh and skin.

  “A pit bull did this?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “She fought,” my mother said.

  “These dogs go for the neck,” the doctor said. “If she hadn’t fought …”

  “I know,” my father said.

  My parents brought me home and I crept around the house. Cousins and neighbors visited. Marty brought my mother the small gold hoop earring I’d worn in my left ear, which he’d found in the bloody gravel. When my father stood in the middle of a gathering of boys and men in the front yard, some who leaned on the hoods of their cars, some who squatted on the ground, some who stood like my father, some of whom were young as fourteen, some of whom were old as sixty, my father said that if I had not fought, I would have died. He said the dog had been trying to rip out my throat. He said the girl dog must have been in heat, and Chief must have thought I was a threat. All of the men held rifles, some like babies in the crooks of their elbows, some thrown over their shoulders. My father dispersed the men, and they went off to hunt the dog: he’d been slinking around the neighborhood, trying to find his way back home. My father found him and shot Chief in the head and buried him in a ditch. I did not tell them that I had started the fight. That I had smacked Chief on his back. I felt guilty. Now, the long scar in my head feels like a thin plastic cocktail straw, and like all war wounds, it itches.