by Jesmyn Ward
I was too young to realize this, but others saw the self-loathing sprouting in me, and they responded to it. At the end of the summer, my mother enrolled us in the unfamiliar local elementary school. I was in the fifth grade. For the first two weeks of the term before my aptitude test scores were processed, I was in a class with a large boy who singled me out for taunting and abuse. Anytime he found me alone in a corner of the library or near the back of our homeroom, he grabbed me by the joints, pinned me to the floor or to my desk or to a wall, and tried to grab my butt. I yanked away from him and did my best to avoid him, but it did no good. I fought like the rabbit I was: timid until grabbed, and then frantic, kicking and twisting. In three weeks, I moved to a more advanced class. But I did not shed my innate sense of worthlessness. I was friends for around a month with the other three Black girls in the class. Then they began bullying me, and my grades dropped. I was miserable, perpetually afraid, and addled on adrenaline, but secretly I was not surprised by it. I thought I deserved it because others were only seeing what I saw, that I was a miserable nothing, and they were acting accordingly. I was depressed at home when I had no idea what depression was, so much so that my mother became concerned enough to pull me out of the school and enroll me in the middle school in Pass Christian during the winter break.
I was excited and anxious at once. I would know some of the other kids. Most students who graduated from DeLisle Elementary were transferred to Pass Christian middle school. But it would be my second school in half a year, and the other experience had been miserable. What if the bullying continued? I knew without knowing that others would see me as a target, and they did. At Pass Middle, I was bullied by three separate groups of girls. I spent all my spare time in the underequipped library, which seemed to have fewer books than my elementary school. I made only two friends, a Black girl and a Vietnamese girl, and we spent our time eating crackers we’d stolen out of the cafeteria, talking about boys and books. I felt more of a kinship with the Vietnamese girl; she was as much of an outsider as I was. I spent my time with her trying to learn Vietnamese through Vietnamese pop songs she taught me. But I was alone in the locker rooms, in the gym, in most of my classes with all the other groups of bullies, and my grades continued to slide southward.
My mother didn’t know what to do. Her understanding of my hatred for myself was muddied, unclear. Instead of seeing it as directed at myself, she read it as a sullen anger, a prepubescent hatred that was aimed at her for leaving my father and breaking up the family. This made her pull me even closer, demand even more of me as a cleaner and caretaker in the household. She thought she could discipline it out of me, this sulky hatred. When I turned twelve, I began watching my siblings alone while my mother was at work. My mother knew I was still smart even though my grades were plummeting, so when the employer she’d worked for as a housekeeper since leaving my father and moving to Gulfport asked about my grades, she was honest. Her employer was a White lawyer who’d attended Harvard and practiced corporate law in New Orleans, and in her early days of working for the family, he’d heard stories about her oldest, who was smart, who’d excelled in public school and been in gifted programs. My mother told him that my grades were bad. That I was being bullied at all the schools I attended. Perhaps her employer had been bullied as a child, because even though he had the build of a linebacker, he was soft-spoken and gentle, which would be easy for others to read as weakness. Whatever his reasons, it was unusual, but he offered to pay my tuition to attend the private Episcopalian school his children attended. My mother, always loath to accept help after being betrayed by my father (when he left, she had no credit because he’d had all the cars and bills in his name, and she was left with four children to feed and a nonexistent financial history; she still hates to accept help today, for fear that after it’s given it will be taken back), mulled it over for a bit but then accepted the offer. When she asked me if I wanted to switch schools, I gladly accepted. I think my mother would have worked for the family whether or not the husband offered to pay for my schooling, but in accepting his offer, I’d locked her into this employment situation for at least six more years, the time I would need to graduate from high school, regardless of whether she was happy or wanted to work elsewhere. But she saw no other options; this was the job she would work to provide for her children so she could still have enough time out of work to raise them. She would not be an absent mother.
I wasn’t the only one having trouble in school. Joshua was only doing enough work to scrape by in second grade. Nerissa was also having trouble in kindergarten; her teacher sent her to the school counselor, who called my mother in for a conference and told her she thought Nerissa had an attention disorder and should be medicated. My mother refused. Charine was oblivious and swimming through preschool. My mother tried her best to support us academically at home. Homework was always a priority. But all of us felt our father’s loss keenly, and this sense of being lost and unbalanced found its way into our schoolwork. Even though she tried her hardest, our mother could not be there in school with us during the day; there were some ways that our mother could not help us. Every day after school, we sat at the table with our books, all of us desperately trying to do better and all aware, in the bewildered way that children are, that we were failing.
My father had visited once or twice since we’d moved into the house in Gulfport, and when he did, our mother spoke to him briefly and then confined herself to the kitchen or to her room, her door shut. Often she listened to us talking to him, dancing around him, dizzy with longing. It must have been palpable to her, how we changed when we were around him; he had the luxury of being emotionally engaging and attentive while he was with us, while my mother, ever the disciplinarian, felt that she could not. Perhaps she saw in our worshipful faces some of what she’d felt toward her father when she was a child. Perhaps this was why, unbeknownst to us, she began talking to my father about reconciliation.
On his third or so visit, my father sat in the living room, a tray on his lap. My mother had cooked for him, served him food; usually she ignored him. After we’d eaten, we all sat in the living room, watching television, until my mother told us to take baths. We did, and then she sent us to our rooms. Nerissa, Charine, and I lay in the dark, undulating gently on the waterbed. Nerissa and Charine fell asleep, but I was awake, waiting for the side door to open, to close, for my father to catch his ride, or for my mother to take him wherever he was living at the time. He’d been drifting from job to job since leaving my mother, and at the time he was unemployed. He’d wrecked his motorcycle and his car was broken. But the sound of the door didn’t come. I eased off the bed, hoping I wouldn’t wake my sisters, and crawled across the floor to the door of our room. I eased it open. All the lights were off in the house except my mother’s, and her door was closed. I crawled out into the hallway to my brother’s room.
“Josh?”
“Huh?”
“You up?”
Stupid question. I crawled into the room, stopped beside the bottom bunk bed.
“Daddy ain’t left yet.”
“I know,” he said.
I didn’t know what else to say. We sat in the dark for a while, listening to the other rooms, hearing nothing, talking once in a while: Do you hear that? Do you think? We wondered in silence if our father had returned. I sat on Joshua’s floor and lay my head on his bed. Josh’s breathing grew deeper, until I could tell he was asleep. When he snored, I crawled back to our room, afraid to walk, afraid for my mother to find I was out of bed when I shouldn’t be. I climbed into bed with my sisters, pushing Charine over to sleep next to Nerissa, but it was a long time before I fell asleep, my heart beating wildly in my chest with hope and fear.
This is how my father came back.
After my father moved his clothing and his kung fu knickknacks in with us, his dream, he told my mother, was to open a kung fu school. Perhaps having my father vocalize his dreams made her realize how strongly my father yearned for them. My mo
ther acquiesced: You can do it, she said. He would take his children on as his first students, recruit others, find a space. Okay, my mother said. What my mother left unsaid: I’ll keep working, supporting us all, while you try to live your dream. Her sacrifice remained unacknowledged. One day, my father said, the school will support the family. I think a part of my mother wanted to believe that this was the truth, so she agreed.
First, my father arranged to teach classes in an after-school program in Biloxi, and then he arranged to teach a class at a dance studio in Pass Christian, and another in Gulf-port. He recruited students. The Biloxi program never had more than two, so he cancelled those classes and concentrated on the others, which had more, around ten in Pass Christian and fifteen in Gulfport. He carted us around with him to classes four out of five nights of the week, classes that lasted three hours at a time. We were decent students; he’d taught us forms and one-step sparring since we’d lived in my grandmother’s house in DeLisle. We learned the Eight Elbow form out on the patchy, sandy front yard. In our classes in Gulf-port and Pass Christian, my father made us do endless sets of sit-ups, push-ups on our knuckles, forms, and sparring. While this was a great start for his business, there still wasn’t enough money coming in from students to cover expenses. Once he paid to rent the spaces, there was barely enough money to put gas in the car. This became apparent to me one night after our kung fu class. We were all in the car, including my cousin Aldon, leaving Pass Christian and returning to Gulfport. I noticed the car was gradually slowing.
“We ran out of gas,” my father said. I thought he was playing a joke on us. I started laughing.
“No, really,” he said.
“We’re running out of gas?” Josh asked. Aldon sat up straighter beside him and leaned forward. The car rolled to a stop. The road was dark.
“We have to push,” my father said. “Everybody but Nerissa and Charine out of the car.” This meant me, Josh, and Aldon. I was twelve, and they were both nine. We were all sore from our workout, still in our uniforms.
“Out,” my father said.
We got out.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” he said, his teeth white in the dark. There were streetlights every quarter mile or so, but no traffic on this lonely country road, and my father didn’t want to leave us alone with the car. “There’s a gas station up at the corner. We need to make it to the pay phone.” We nodded. “Now, I’m going to steer and push from the front, while y’all three get in the back. Grab the bumper…. Yeah, that’s it.” My father walked around to the front of the car, leaned into the driver’s-side door, and grunted, straining.
“Now push!” he said.
We leaned against the car. It rocked but did not move.
“Come on. You have to push harder!”
We dug the toes of our tennis shoes into the rutted asphalt and pushed with our legs, our backs, our arms. We grunted like our father, straining, and the car rolled forward so slowly I could hardly believe it budged.
“Keep going!” Daddy said. “It’s right up the road.”
It wasn’t right up the road. It was at least a half mile up the road, but I didn’t know that. Every time I felt like I couldn’t push any longer, like my arms had burned to ash and my legs would crumple under me, I wanted to ask my father, Are we almost there? How close are we? But I wouldn’t. I didn’t have the energy to, and he wouldn’t have heard me anyhow. Instead I stared at the faint gleam of the car in the darkness and listened to Joshua and Aldon, on both sides of me, breathing in quick little huffs. I imagined a car coming up behind us, slowing to pass us, and then rolling down a window, offering us a ride to a gas station, gas from a spare gas can they kept in the back of their truck, anything so I could stop straining with everything in me, but no cars came. No kind strangers appeared. The air was warm as tepid bathwater, and as close, and the night bugs and the wind were the only things singing and moving in the patches of woods and yards around us. The final stretch of road before the store was up a hill, a steep hill. My father sounded like something in him tore when we crested the hill and rolled into the driveway of the closed gas station, and I felt quivery and soft: useless. The car came to a stop in the parking lot, which had been paved so long ago that it had been ground to gravel. My dad fished out a quarter from his gym bag in the car and dialed my mother from the pay phone on the sidewalk that fronted the shuttered corner store. Joshua and Aldon and I climbed into the car, so tired we didn’t speak. Nerissa and Charine slept in the front seat. My father joined us. He too was quiet until my mother arrived with a can full of gas.
“When we get home, y’all need to take a bath and get in bed,” she said as she handed my father the gas can. It was late. Her mouth was tight. She climbed back into her car, which she had left running, and waited for us.
I imagine my mother nursing her resentment that her hard work, her cleaning of toilet bowls and mopping of four-thousand-square-foot houses, was allowing my father to pursue his dream. I imagine that the reality of pursuing his dream took my father aback; that in his head, he saw himself with eager, malleable students like a wise martial arts master in the kung fu films we sometimes watched as a family on Sundays. For those masters, money was never a concern, and they seemed to be childless. I imagine both my parents began to resent their roles in the family. My mother’s coping mechanism for this was to become even more silent, even more strict and remote; one of my father’s was to watch movies, which was an escape he could share with us.
My father led us through the woods behind our house into a cluster of backyards and on through the neighborhood to a strip mall along Dedeaux Road in Gulfport. At the video store, my father would pick out three movies he wanted to see, and then he allowed me and Joshua to pick the other.
Joshua and I lived in the horror section. We stood side by side, studying the pictures on the movie cases, which were always badly drawn and mildly threatening. I read the synopses seriously, ravenously, which was the way I read books. After we’d rented all the store’s mainstream horror movies, we began renting the less well-known: movies with leprechauns and ghoulies and blobs and strange sewer-dwelling animals. My mother purchased a popcorn machine, and most weekends found us on the carpeted floor with a big bowl of popcorn between us. It was the cheapest way for my parents to entertain four children. We loved it. For those hour-and-a-half increments, the fantasy of a two-parent family, what we’d longed for in my father’s absence, lived for us in perfect snatches. Ignorant of my father’s and mother’s dissatisfaction, we were butter-faced and giggling and happy.
One night in the winter of 1990, my mother received a phone call. It was from a woman she knew from DeLisle, who worked at the local police department in Gulfport.
“Do you know where your car is?”
When the woman told my mother the address, my mother knew where my father was. He was with his teenage love. He had parked my mother’s car around the corner from his girl’s house. I assume he’d told my mother he wasn’t seeing her anymore, that he was committed to their relationship and to raising a family together while she worked and he tried to establish his martial arts school. She wouldn’t have taken him back without those words. I can imagine the dread she felt when she heard that woman’s voice on the phone, the way it washed to pain across her chest before it sank to her stomach. She would have sat for a moment when she got off the phone, staring at the floor, looking at a wall, hearing us through the perfect, awful silence in her head fussing or playing or watching TV in the background. My mother would have steeled herself, but this steel would have been worked thin, thin as aluminum over her love. And underneath it all would have been fatigue. Her joints would have hurt, the marbles of her knuckles already releasing a steady, slim stream of pain that would, five years later, be diagnosed as arthritis. This was what it meant to clean. This was what it meant to work. This was what it meant to forget whatever she had dreamed the night before and to stand up every day because there were things that needed to be done and she was t
he only person who could do them.
She told me to watch my siblings, and she walked out of the door to get her car. She’d purchased a second car by then, a small blue Toyota Corolla, a stick shift that was new enough to shine a slick blue. She drove to the girl’s house, looked past the girl as she sat in my father’s lap, and told my father to get in the Caprice and drive it home, and once he did that, she said, he could get the fuck out.
My father has always worn his dreams on the outside, so even as a preteen I knew what they were. I’d known for years he’d wanted to have his own school. He had other dreams that I recognized but still can’t articulate, even as I’ve gotten older. His ill-advised motorcycle purchase; his leather suits, studded and fringed, that he wore in ninety-degree weather; the Prince he listened to on his Walkman while he rode: there was something at the heart of my father that felt too big for the life he’d been born into. He was forever in love with the promise of the horizon: the girls he cheated with, fell in love with, one after another, all corporeal telescopes to another reality.
