Men We Reaped

by Jesmyn Ward

  “Y’all want another one?” Demond asked. The corner of his mouth made a gesture at a smile.

  “Yeah,” Nerissa said. I nodded, as did Tasha. He bought us each another drink, slid them across the bar to us. The clear plastic cups were cold to the touch, perspiring instantly. I drank. When I swallowed, I smiled at Demond in what was supposed to be an unspoken thank-you. Demond laughed and told me that he liked my outfit. His dreadlocks swung. He was handsome, fair, charming. Women approached him, lingered in his field of vision, waiting for him to talk to them, to hit on them, to say hello. He didn’t have to flirt. People were attracted to him, and he was charismatic enough to draw them even closer to him with conversation when he wanted to. When he didn’t the planes of his face were more severe and he was a closed door, his eyes peepholes viewed from the wrong side, obscuring everything. He had a temper. But that night he was all geniality.

  I sucked up the drink: I was thirsty, and it was cold and lemony. I danced at the bar. Nerissa threw her wrist over my shoulder and danced with me. Tasha, who could dance better than both of us, laughed and drank. Everything turned hazy then: Demond’s face blurred, and I told my sister I didn’t feel so good. We went to the bathroom together. She took the last available stall, and I heard her vomiting into the toilet. I swayed and my throat burned. Something was wringing my insides out. I was wretched.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and leaned over the garbage can, large and full to the brim. I threw up. Everything was hot and sticky: I could feel the bass thudding through the building from the dance floor downstairs through the grimy tile of the bathroom wall. Pretty girls using napkins to wipe sweat from their foreheads: they walked in and out of the bathroom, ignoring me. Some girl in purple and gold stumbled in wearing stilettos and said, “Get it all out, baby.” This was comforting, and I gurgled. Vomit splashed on the top layer of plastic cups. Nerissa came out of her stall, and suddenly I was finished. The world spun. I grabbed her shoulders, followed her out of the bathroom, and blacked out.

  When I came to, I was in the backseat of my car, slumped over in the center. Nerissa was on my right, leaning over on my shoulder. Tasha’s back was to me because her head rested on the upholstered seat. Brandon and Rob and Demond’s voices were loud. I opened my eyes only long enough to see them standing near the two open doors of the car, smiling down at us. The breeze from the Gulf cut cleanly through the car, hot and salty. I couldn’t move.

  “Walk-me-down, huh? It sure walked them down,” Brandon said.

  “Look at them,” Rob said.

  We were all sick.

  “It’s not funny!” Tasha yelled, and in my drunken stupor, I felt like laughing. They did this: despite all, they made us laugh damn near every time we were together. But I couldn’t open my mouth. I could only listen as Demond laughed for me, clean and cutting, and the wind carried it away across the parking lot to the Outback steak house, where it sputtered away like a desultory breeze. I curled in on myself. All I wanted in the world was for it to go dark, to not exist. I wanted to black out again. Then I did.

  The next time we met at Illusions was New Year’s Eve of 2004, over a year later, and there were more of us. This is when we took the picture with the God’s Gift background. I left my hair down, curly and big, wore a red one-shoulder shirt and red boots with silver studs and silver stiletto heels shaped skinny and sharp as knives. In the picture, we are all drunk, and everyone smiles. We know that taking this cheap picture is tacky, but we are a neighborhood, a community, a hood, a family, so we grin. Knees bend, hips angle, waists are grabbed. Drunk and sentimental, I loved every one of them for still being alive.

  I never drove home when I was drunk. One of my more sober cousins or friends, one of my sisters maybe, drove us back to DeLisle that night, where we ended up in Demond’s yard at 4:00 A.M. The sky was deepest black, salted with stars. We were all drunk, all high, all smoking packs of Black & Mild cigars while we perched on car hoods. The music played in the cars where some of us sat having conversations, club-sweaty, intoxicated and serious. Demond wove his way through the cars with a 22-ounce of beer in his hand, talking and laughing.

  “You on a all-night flight, huh?” he asked me as I leaned on the car next to my cousin Blake, passing a cigar back and forth, which I had never smoked before. It was so strong it was making me dizzy and tingly, and I liked the sensation, but not enough to smoke one again, I thought. It was making my throat burn.

  The night pulsed with bugs; they gave low, staccato ticks. I smiled at Demond, at all of them. There was no place I wanted to be more than that yard, leaning on that car, interior lights flashing on and off, a lone streetlight a block away leaving us wide-eyed, struggling to see each other in the dark.

  Demond ducked his head into the window of a car where two of my cousins were sitting and said, “Hey man, turn the music down.” He didn’t wait for them to reply and walked off, his dreads swinging. He liked the party, but he didn’t want the county cops to wander by and stop, drawn by the music, and he didn’t want the neighbors to complain. Not only did he have responsibilities, but he also had spent the last couple of years dodging the kind of bad luck that afflicts the innocent in drug-plagued neighborhoods, where every other cousin or friend is a drug dealer, every older cousin or friend an addict. Demond had been witness to the aftermath of a shooting and had agreed to testify against the alleged shooter. The shooting had occurred in DeLisle, during a holiday. He’d also agreed to testify against a drug dealer who wasn’t from DeLisle but had been operating in the neighborhood. His conscience had made him agree to testify in the first case, and since he’d been stopped while riding in a car with the drug dealer in the second case, self-preservation had made him agree to testify in the second. These things weighed on him and he felt he had no room for error.

  My cousins rolled their eyes, said “Fuck that nigga,” and kept the volume where it was. The sun came up, washed the yard a milky gray, then white, and we departed one by one to our houses, where we eased open doors, tiptoed inside, and fell into dead sleeps while the sun burned its way higher into the sky and the community rose to face the day. Everything about the night seemed stolen, lived in those murky hours while others slept or worked. We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.

  On February 26, 2004, Demond was working third shift, at night. He called Rob before he left work, told him he would call him when he made it home, that maybe Rob could ride with him to a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in Gulfport, to Walmart, to get diapers for his daughter.

  On another night, Demond would have driven to DeLisle, turned into Rob’s mother’s driveway, which dipped down from St. Stephen’s, and stopped to the side of Rob’s mother’s house. Rob would have loped out, slid into the passenger seat of the maroon two-door car, eased into conversation with Demond, and they would’ve driven up Lobouy Road, pine-cloaked under the night sky, thick with animal secrets, to the interstate. At that hour, Gulfport would have been desolate: a stretch of chain stores, fast-food restaurants, two-story hotels, neon lights, black and yellow oil-spotted parking lots, and beyond them, pines and ranch-style houses divided into subdivisions. Demond’s car would have been one of a few idling at stoplights, filling up in gas stations, parked near the doors at Walmart. They would have flicked the ashes from their cigars out the window to turn to dust on the asphalt. It would have been a night like any other, where the company of a friend eased Demond out of a shift spent standing, repetitively doing one thing or another. But this was not a night like any other night because Demond never showed up at Rob’s house.

  Later, talk around the factory where Demond worked, from the guard shack, would be that there was a truck lurking near the gates, that someone was watching the cars leave after second shift, arrive for third. Instead of going to Rob’s after he left work, Demond went home. Rob waited for him and fell asleep. In Rob’s blue room, the light from t
he television pulled him into his dreams: Rob slept, and the light shone over him with an aluminum crackle, flashing, but he didn’t wake. Neither did anyone in the houses next to Demond’s, or in the house across the street. Neither did Demond’s fiancée or his daughter when someone stepped out of the bushes in front of Demond’s house and shot him as he walked up to his door, tired and grimy with dried sweat, wanting a shower, maybe a beer. Hours later, Demond’s absence in that cavernous room, in a cold bed, woke his fiancée. She looked outside and saw his car. She walked out on the porch, her small feet making the wood creak, and saw someone asleep on the lawn. Who was asleep in the yard? Demond lay there, his dreads splayed away from his head, his face still, his eyes open, his chest red; but for that, he would have been asleep. She fell on him and screamed.

  Charine got the call at around seven o’clock the next morning. We had a de facto phone tree: the first person to hear would call the second person, who would call the third, who would call the fourth, and somewhere in that line someone would call Rob, who would call Nerissa, who would call Charine, who would tell me, no matter the time. I was home for my spring break, asleep, dreaming of nothing, when she came into my room in my mother’s house, switched on the light, and without preamble said, “Mimi, Demond’s been shot.” I heard her, covered my eyes, breathed. Death rushed me like water does the first summer jumper into a still-chill spring river.

  “What the fuck!” I said.

  Charine hopped from one foot to another.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I don’t know. It might be drug-related. You know he was supposed to testify against that dude from New Orleans.”

  Charine climbed into the bed with me, turned toward the wall. If she cried, she was silent, and I could not feel it in her back or her stomach. I spooned her, threw my arm over her ribs, held her like I had when she was a baby, when she was growing out of her chubby precociousness to walk, and I was an eight-year-old growing faster from the legs than anywhere else. She fell asleep, and every time my arm rose and fell with her breath, I thanked something that she still breathed, even as I was sick about it, whatever it was, that killed us one after the other. Senseless, I thought. This is never going to end, I thought. Never.

  I woke up four hours later. My eyes were puffy and red, matted at the seams from crying, from sleeping. I threw on a sweatshirt and drove with Charine to meet Nerissa at Demond’s house. I played one song over and over in my car, parked on the street, felt the acute sense that life had promised me something when I was younger, that it wouldn’t be this hard, perhaps, that my people wouldn’t keep dying without end. I’m only twenty-six, I thought. I’m tired of this shit.

  We sat with Demond’s fiancée, a widow at my age, her face swollen, red-tinged underneath the black. She smoked cigarette after cigarette.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “Nothing.”

  She said it as if the fact that she hadn’t heard the gunshot meant it couldn’t have happened. We did not know then that the police would conduct an investigation for a few months, post signs at the local gas stations near the interstate asking for any information about Demond’s murder. We did not know the murderer would remain faceless, like the great wolf trackless in the swamp, and the police’s search would be fruitless.

  On the day after Demond died, I sat on his concrete porch steps. When the sun set, the coven of bats that lived in Demond’s roof burst from the vents and out into the night in a black, squeaking mass. Where we had parked and drank and gotten high on Demond’s lawn, now there was yellow police tape draped from pine to pine, circumventing the mimosa. It read: CAUTION. Nerissa smoked, exhaling clouds into the cold air, the skin dry at the sides of her mouth, and I wondered who had come out of the dark and killed Demond. Even as I knew the figure that had waited hidden for him in the shivering pockets of the trees was human, I wanted to turn to Nerissa and ask her: What do you think it is? What?

  We Are Wounded

  1984–1987

  My mother, my father, Josh, Nerissa, and I moved from the small house in the big field to a cream and yellow single-wide trailer in DeLisle on a dead-end red-dirt road. The road was mostly wooded, but there was a cluster of houses near the dead end, and each of those houses contained boys whom I would be friends with for the rest of my life. I was seven then. Joshua and I and the boys spent our days swinging from my father’s punching bag, which he’d hung from a pecan tree in the front yard, having mud fights, running races down the middle of the road, picking unripe pears by the wagonful from my aunt’s house farther down the street and eating so many we grew sick. I thought my parents were mostly happy then, but now I know my own happiness blinded me.

  One day my father came home with a motorcycle. It was a Kawasaki Ninja, new, red and black, glossy.

  “Stay off of it,” my father said. “You can’t play on it.”

  “It’s yours?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” my father said. Then he squatted next to me, pointed to the silver parts on the machine near the steel bars where he rested his feet, and said, “You see them things there?”

  I nodded.

  “They get so hot that they can burn you. That’s why you can’t play on it.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. My parents taught me and my siblings that we should address them that way, with polite deference, when they gave us commands.

  My mother was quiet. She pushed her glasses, thick and wide in the style of the day, overpowering her small, beautiful face, up her nose. She sniffed, and a frown nicked the side of her mouth. She looked away and then walked back into the house, slamming the door. When we followed my father into the house after loitering around the bike, after watching my father rub it down with a cotton cloth, polish the metal, listening to the faint ticks the machine made as it cooled down, my mother was cooking. She said nothing to my father, but her back was a shut door. I was a child; there was much I did not know. I did not know my father had taken funds he’d been saving, at my mother’s insistence, to buy land, and had purchased his motorcycle with them. I did not know that his own father, my grandfather Big Jerry, who had been quite a playboy in his day but a devout caretaker to his children, had told my father: You can’t ride a wife and three kids on a goddamn motorcycle.

  “Go take a bath,” my mother told us. We went.

  After little more than a year, the neighbors we were renting the trailer from decided to rent it to their relative instead. We moved across DeLisle to live with my grandmother Dorothy. I was eight. This was the house my mother grew up in, the same house some of her siblings had been born in. It was long, finished with wood siding, and set low to the ground, elevated on two cinder blocks in the front and three in the back, as it was built on a hill. Originally it had had a sizeable living room, a narrow kitchen, a small dining room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. After my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman, she raised the seven children they’d had together on her own. She added two large bedrooms and a bathroom to the house. She took what my grandfather left her with, and she built it into something more, and she survived.

  This is a common refrain in my community, and more specifically in my family. I have always thought of my family as something of a matriarchy, since the women of my mother’s side have held my nuclear family and my immediate family and my extended family together through so much. But our story is not special. Nor had it always been this way. It used to be that the Catholic Church was a strong presence in my community and divorce unheard of; men did not leave their women and shared children. But in my grandmother’s generation, this changed. In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who’d grown up with the expectation that they’d have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man
in the South denied them. If they were not called “sir” in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who loved them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone. This is what my grandmother did.

  When we moved into her house, every one of my mother’s siblings, their children, and my own nuclear family lived there. There were thirteen of us: my four bachelor uncles, my two aunts, who each had one son at the time, my grandmother, my father, my mother, Nerissa, Joshua, and me. My uncles slept two to the two smaller bedrooms, and my grandmother kept the master bedroom in the back with the bathroom. My aunts slept in the other, larger, more recently added bedroom in the rear of the house; the room was so large there were two double beds there, so each aunt shared a bed with her child. My brother and I slept on bunk beds shoved into a corner of that room. I took the top bunk, and my brother took the bottom. My mother and father nailed a curtain over the dining room door, moved the dining table into storage, and moved their own double bed in, where they slept with Nerissa and, after she was born in 1985, Charine. For the next two years I would have most of the people I loved living in one house, which was mostly wonderful for us kids, and a horrible strain for all of the adults, driven as they were to my grandmother’s house by Reagan’s policies in the eighties, which undercut whatever shaky economic footing the poor had, and depressed the listless southern economy.

  By the time we’d moved into that rambling, lopsided wooden house, I’d already fallen in love with reading. I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens. Perhaps it was easier for me to navigate that world than my home, where my parents were having heated, whispered arguments in the dining room turned bedroom, and my father was disappearing after those arguments for weeks at a time to live at his mother’s house in Pass Christian before coming back to us. Perhaps it was easier for me to sink into those worlds than to navigate a world that would not explain anything to me, where I could not delineate good and bad. My grandmother worked ten-hour-long shifts at the plant. My mother had a job as a maid at a hotel. My father still worked at the glass plant, and when he was living with us, he would often disappear on his motorcycle. My youngest uncle was in high school, but the other uncles worked, as did my aunts. There was often only me, Josh, Aldon, who slept in one of the double beds in that back bedroom with his mother, and a lone uncle who was off for the day in the living room, watching a movie on PBS, one of the two channels we had. Sometimes my two aunts were in the kitchen, sweating over pots the size of my torso filled with bubbling beans, making biscuits for the family from scratch. “Go outside and play,” we heard. So I put my books away for a moment and went outside to play with Joshua and Aldon.