by Jesmyn Ward
Once, when I was nine and Joshua was six, my parents’ friend dared Joshua to drink from a bottle of hot sauce, and my brother, who always had a stomach of iron and had eaten dog food once when I dared him, drank it.
“Your booty going to be burning when you doo-doo,” she said.
He looked at her and smiled. His teeth were red. His breath was hot with Tabasco.
“No it’s not,” he piped up.
I was impressed. She tried to pass the bottle to me but I demurred. Sometimes he led and I followed. I realized that this time belonged to him. She made grilled cheese sandwiches for us and gave us small plastic cups of red Kool-Aid. My brother and I ate the sandwiches in big, breathless bites. Josh and I ran around barefoot in and out of the apartments, leaping from stairs, playing with stray cats, giving the Dumpsters in the parking lot a wide berth. They stank, and people sometimes missed the Dumpsters and left the garbage to rot next to them.
One day my parents’ friend left us downstairs, watching TV, while she visited her upstairs neighbors.
I was distracted. Maybe I wanted another grilled cheese sandwich, so I ascended the stairs to find the door to their apartment open. Their apartment was mostly dark, and pieces of art made of stretched velvet and glass etched with colored veins that made the glass look marbled hung from the walls. The couple was a white couple, and my parents’ friend and the man and woman sat in chairs around a smallish kitchen table. In the middle of the table, a mirror lay face up. The man was sliding a razor along the surface of the mirror, separating white powder into lines. He bent over and sniffed like he was sucking up his snot, like he was clearing his nose. His hair fell forward across his face. My parents’ friend looked up and saw me standing in the doorway and said, “Mimi, go downstairs.” I went. I did not know what it was. I did not know that I’d seen some of what grown-ups who were poor and felt cornered and at their wits’ end did to feel less like themselves for a time. I did not know this need would follow my generation to adulthood too.
Somehow my mother and father still scraped together enough for our Christmases. For days beforehand, my grandmother cooked, made big pots of seafood gumbo and homemade biscuits, pecan and sweet potato pies. The fire in the wood-burning stove in the living room ran so hot, the grownups went outside to feel the cool air and take turns pushing each other on my rope swing. My brother and I slept uneasily on Christmas Eve, Joshua because he was giddy about the prospect of presents, and me because I was nine and wanted a ten-speed with everything in me, and I was wondering if all the begging I’d done for one would pay off. If there would be a miracle. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed the county police had come to the house to take all my uncles and my father away to jail. In my dream, I cried, and when I woke up, my face was wet. I do not know why I had that dream that night; I wasn’t aware that my father or uncles were hustling or involved in criminal activities. Now, as an adult, I do not think they were. As an adult, I know they were men, rascals who loved to drink and smoke and raise hell on the weekends. But as a child, I listened to my grandmother when she worried about her sons, about them being stopped by the police and searched for no other reasons than they were Black and male, about them getting into fights with White men at bars and being arrested for assault while the White men they fought went free. And I saw the tight line of my mother’s mouth when my father was absent and couldn’t be accounted for, and heard her worry about him riding his motorcycle and getting into an accident and being taken to jail for it. To an impressionable nine-year-old, trouble for the Black men of my family meant police. It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom. But after I woke from that dream and woke Joshua, we crept into my parents’ room to wake them and beg them to let us open presents, and a red ten-speed was propped in the corner of the living room for me, and I nearly forgot that dream.
My mother must have sat Joshua and me down and told us, perhaps in the living room on the same sofa where five years earlier my father had asked for my mother’s hand in marriage. After having two children, my parents married; after having two more, they’d decided to divorce.
“Your daddy’s not coming home. He’s going away.”
She didn’t say divorce. We wouldn’t have understood that word. But the next day, our father still had not come home from leaving for work the day before, and Joshua and I understood in our narrow, bony chests. Daddy was not coming home. He was going away. No more trailing around after him in the yard asking to hold nails or pieces of wood as he built rabbit hutches, no more fighting my way to the top of the rope swing, touching the branch, yelling “See!” to him, trying to make him proud.
Later, I would learn that my mother had said he should leave after she found out about his latest girlfriend, his youngest, the daughter of a coworker from the glass plant, who was fourteen when they met. She had worked a summer job at the plant the year that my father was fired. After my father lost his job and began working at the oyster plant and my mother found out about this latest infidelity, my mother realized my father would never change and their love was doomed. When my mother found out, she was pregnant with my fourth and last full sibling, Charine, but Joshua and I didn’t know it yet.
After my mother told us this, I took to the room we shared with our aunts and curled in the bottom bunk, Joshua’s bed, and alternately cried and read the latest book I’d checked out from the school library, shocked by the rejection of my father’s leaving, which felt like a rejection not of his wife or his domestic life but of me. Children often blame themselves when a parent leaves, and I was no exception.
Joshua took to the yard. It was summer, and it was hot. He ran around the house, lap after lap, round after round, wailing, crying for Daddy. The uncles and aunts ran after him, caught him, held him squirming to them, told him to stop, but he sobbed louder and fought and squirmed in their arms. He was six now, longer, his once blond afro shaved short, and he was strong. They let him go and he hit the ground running and crying. He circled the house for hours, and he only stopped when he fell to his knees, his sobbing dying to hiccups and moans. He fell asleep like that, his head bowed, outside in the dirt. One of the uncles carried him inside, and I made room for him in his bed.
Soon after, my mother filed for Section 8, a government subsidy for housing, and found a house two towns over in Orange Grove, Mississippi, in a suburb going to seed, and told my grandmother we would be moving that summer. I turned ten. Before we left to set out on our own, and even though I suspected I was too old for it, I wandered around Kidsland again, tried to conjure some of the old magic, the belief, and could not.
That summer before we moved, I hustled Aldon and Joshua and now Nerissa, old enough to sit still and pay attention, to the swing on the long concrete porch facing the road, and we played our favorite game: That’s My Car. The rules were simple: as the oldest, I assigned each of us a number, and afterward, we sat and waited for our corresponding cars to drive by.
“I’m first and you’re second.” I put a calming hand on Nerissa, and she nodded.
“You’re third.”
“Okay,” Aldon replied.
“And you’re fourth,” I told Josh.
The first car that passed the house from the direction of Du Pont, perhaps heading home from shift work, was dark blue, fairly new, and boxy.
“That’s my car!” I yelled, and the others cheered.
A white two-door with a long, pointy hood zipped by.
“That’s your car,” I told Nerissa. We cheered dutifully. It was an okay draw.
We heard the next car before we saw it: a loud, syncopated clunking weighted by an ornery engine.
“Oooooohhhhh,” Josh crowed.
The car, gray and brown in patches, puttered across the street before us. The driver, as if he knew he drove a car he should be ashamed of, did not wave or blow his horn as a neighbor might, but instead looked straight ahead.
“That’s your car!” I pointed at Aldon, laughin
g.
“Hunk of junk!” Josh screamed.
“Why I had to get the junky car?” Aldon said.
We all laughed. Aldon stood and waved his arms at the offending car as it chugged down the street, as if he imagined he could shoo it away as we did raccoons sniffing around the garbage or possums creeping with their pink feet through the fetid swamp of the backyard to disappear in the endless woods.
“Go! Go!” Aldon said, and we laughed harder. Nerissa clapped.
Aldon sat.
“Now it’s Josh’s turn,” I said, and we faced forward on the swing, packed tightly one next to another, and watched the road. We listened intently for a whoosh, for a loud bang, for a flash of color, for anything that would signal our future.
Charles Joseph Martin
Born: May 5, 1983
Died: January 5, 2004
The first time C. J., one of my many cousins, moves into sharp relief is when he was around six and I was around twelve. He was fair and had a face full of freckles. As a toddler, he’d been blond like Josh, but as he grew older his hair darkened, grew long and curly, and his mother braided it to his head or cut it low on the top and left a long lock of it to grow down his back in a rattail. He was small and lean, angled all over with muscle. His face was shaped like a triangle, and the only things that were dark about him were his eyes, which were so deep in color they were a surprise.
At family reunions for my father’s side, C. J. would be there, small and gold and wiry, his rattail touching him in the middle of his spine. We children ate hot dogs with ketchup and mustard, crunched potato chips, drank cold sodas in big gulps so that the fizzy acid burned our throats, and chased each other in packs around the yard.
“Flip,” someone would say.
“Okay,” C. J. said.
We lined up in a human corridor so he could showcase his skills. He jumped a couple of times and then ran headlong down the strip of grass we’d left. Near the end of the line he punched into a round-off, then a back handspring, and then another handspring, his rattail streaming out behind him. He was a human Slinky. We cheered. I felt hot and weak. Again and again he flipped down our aisle, hurling himself through the air, which was thick with humidity, and each time he cut it cleanly in two. When he landed on his feet, he bounced. When he grew tired, he’d run off to get a soda. The group would dissipate. I wandered off by myself, feeling dissatisfied with how earthbound my body was, how bound by the heat, until I wandered into a playhouse, a square of plywood and two-by-fours. Lying on the floor, sand scratching my back, I watched the other kids. They ran the yard in pairs, yanking at one another in the waning day, fighting for the last cold drinks. I watched C. J. dart between them, trip them, take what he wanted, and run away so quickly they couldn’t catch him.
For a long time I did not see C. J. I went away to college when he was twelve, and when I came back, there he was: taller, my height at least, but short for a man. He was shirtless. The little-boy body he’d had was now larger, but he was still wiry, and his muscles were like rocks under his skin. There was no fat on him. He had grown all of his hair long and braided it back to his head, so his face stood out in hard relief. He was pale, freckled, and still able to do things with his body I could not imagine possible.
At this point, most of us lived with our parents, and while some of us had parents who didn’t care if we had people over, others had parents who did (like my mother). And even most of the parents who didn’t mind company minded if company came over too often, if there were lots of cars parked in the yard, because that attracted something we called heat: police attention. While that might not matter in neighborhoods that were mostly White and working-class, in our Black working-class community, it mattered. So kids from their preteens to their twenties spent most of their time down at the park, a former field that sat between the priests’ rectory and the graveyard. The county hadn’t invested much into its construction: they poured a small basketball court, then put up two swing sets, a wooden jungle gym, and two sets of small wooden bleachers that quickly rotted in the humidity and heat. My mother called the park “pitiful.” It made her angry that our county park was markedly different from those in other towns in neighborhoods across the coast that were White or more moneyed. But we didn’t care; we avoided the rotten spots on the bleachers and watched kids closely when they played on the jungle gym, and spent hours there, studiously ignoring the county police as they circled us like vultures, suspecting us of using and selling drugs wherever we gathered.
The day I took pictures of C. J. at the park, he wasn’t in the game. We sat on the benches, watching some boys from the neighborhood play basketball on one of the four hoops. Some of them were shirtless, sweat-glazed and shiny, others not, the cotton pasted to their chests before pulling loose at the neck and stomach. That day C. J. sat at the foot of the bleachers, smoking. Charine waited near him, a basketball in hand. She was around fourteen then. Every few minutes he’d walk up to Charine, and she’d throw the ball to him, and he would toss it in the air toward the hoop closest to the bleachers. Charine took a jump shot and missed it. The day was hot, heavy, and overcast, the rain perpetually five minutes away. The wind moved, and for a second it was cool. A tall Spanish oak tree shaded the bleachers where I sat beneath its green canopy, slapping mosquitoes dead. The road glittered in the distance.
Cars had pulled onto the grass near the basketball court, parked next to the concrete benches. Typically, boys who did this opened their doors and trunks and played music on loud audio systems.
Charine shot the ball, attempting jumpers and fade-away shots at the hoop closest to the fence near the Catholic priests’ house. C. J. snatched the rebounds and ran for another basket, dribbling the ball hard and fast, picking up speed before throwing his body upward and through the air. The ball slammed against the backboard and then ricocheted out of his hand and flew back into the game at the opposite end of the court. C. J. flew so high that he dangled from the rim by the crook of his elbow, giggling madly, swinging slowly from side to side.
“Jesus,” I said. I’d never seen someone so short jump so high. I cradled my old manual Nikon camera, hefted its solid weight, and yelled, “Do it again, C. J.!”
He dropped from the goal and bounced. Charine passed him the ball. He sprinted to the other end of the court and ran at his goal again, threw himself up in the air. He flew. Again the ball smacked into the wrong spot on the backboard, rebounded off, and again Charine caught it and threw it back to C. J. I walked down the bleachers, stood closer to the hoop, and tried to snap pictures of him, of the miracle of him flying through the air. But he was too fast and my camera was too old. I could hear the shutter snap open, lick against metal, and then snap shut again. Too slow. Later, when I developed that film back at college, C. J. would look all wrong in the air: awkwardly bent, blurry, all his terrific grace lost in the frozen moment captured by the camera.
“I can’t do it, Mimi,” C. J. said, walking to the bleachers. He said Mimi but it swung off his tongue before jerking short: it sounded like May-me. He and his closest cousin on Daddy’s side of the family, Mario, were the only two people who said my name like that. “I can’t.” He laughed, shook his head, sweat streaming down his face, his hair turning wiry and golden at the root, giving him the blond halo Joshua’d had when we were children.
“Shit, you jump high enough,” I said.
“You got it?” he asked, motioning toward the camera.
“I hope,” I said.
C. J. was fourteen when he and Charine began dating. He charmed her into it. There was something physically appealing in him: he was so short, so thinly muscled, his body performed magic for him. She and C. J. felt physically well matched, like a team. They didn’t endure the lopsidedness that gendered differences in size and muscle could foster. They were cousins, which means many people, including some of our aunts, his mother, and my mother, hated that they were dating. But Charine didn’t care, and neither did C. J. Cousins dated, had childr
en, and married all the time in DeLisle and Pass Christian. They had for generations. In such small towns, in communities confined by race and class, this was inevitable. Charine loved C. J., and that’s what mattered above all else.
From the beginning, Charine and C. J. were inseparable, which was only possible because C. J. was a nomad. He had a room with a twin bed in his mother’s house in Pass Christian, but he rarely stayed there. Part of the roof and the ceiling in his room were caved in, and the floor and bed were covered in boxes of things that weren’t his. When he was home, C. J. slept in the back living room. This room held a sofa and a little TV. He folded his clothes and stacked them on the back of the sofa, the television. He put small pictures, photos Charine took from me when I developed my film, of him and Charine and his cousins, on a side table. The door into the room was open to the kitchen and the rest of the house. His mother was a single mother to two children, C. J. and his much younger sister, and had never married either of their fathers. She worked hard to provide a home for her children, pushing against all the constraints and limitations of who she was and where she lived. Perhaps C. J. felt like he was a burden; perhaps this is why he spent months living in other places, sleeping on other couches.
When he wasn’t living with his mother, he would sometimes live with his father in DeLisle, along with his father’s girlfriend and her daughters. His father tried to integrate C. J. into his new family, gave him a car, worked on it with him to get it running, but it was never fixed. When he wasn’t living with his father or his mother, he slept at our cousin Duck’s house, who was Joshua’s best friend. He slept in Duck’s room, at the front of the house; Duck’s mother didn’t mind him staying there because C. J. was family. Children moved from family to family in DeLisle and Pass Christian through the decades: women in my great-grandmother’s generation would sometimes give newborn children to childless couples after having five or ten or fourteen, and when children were older, they would often move out of the family home and live with different relatives. Sometimes they were driven away by their parents, and other times they were touched by the urge to wander. Here, family has always been a mutable concept. Sometimes it encompasses an entire community, which meant that C. J. also slept on the sofa in Rob’s living room and the sofa in Pot’s living room, though he was not related to them. At Duck’s house, C. J. wore the same clothes for a few days in a row, and sat sleepily picking out his braids in the middle, hottest part of the day on the roots of an ancient oak tree at the corner of Hill Road and St. Stephen’s. It was common knowledge that he was sitting on those massive roots waiting for his small clientele to show up so he could sell them drugs. I, like many others in the neighborhood, judged him for it. What I did not know at the time was that he hated sitting on that tree, that he wanted more for himself, but he didn’t know how to get it.
