by Jesmyn Ward
When she wasn’t cooking, she was in her room watching television. She had one friend in the neighborhood, a woman who’d married my mother’s distant cousin. They lived across the street. My mother’s cousin was struggling with drug addiction, so my mother bought his wife and family food sometimes, allowed her children to come inside our house when they came over to play. My mother had one close friend who was also her cousin, who’d moved away to Atlanta. Other than that, she was alone. Even as she nurtured a general suspicion of men, she saw the cunning, messy cruelty of women, too; the various women my father had affairs with, some of whom had been her friends, some of whom had known her since they’d been children, had gloried in my mother’s disgrace, had called her and told her: He doesn’t love you—he loves me. She didn’t trust women or men. Her children were her only company, but we were a boisterous, gregarious tribe she loved wholeheartedly yet had little patience for, since she had been raising children her entire life. All the choices and all the circumstance of her existence heated to a rolling boil that summer of 1990, boiled and bubbled over and burned her. It was too much for one person to bear. She stumbled.
When one of us did something wrong, like leaving our clothes on the bathroom floor one too many times after bathing, or getting into arguments with each other and fighting, she whipped all of us. Sometimes she used the short shaft of a wooden toy broom. When Joshua found it one day while she was at work, he snuck out into the woods and threw it away. She bought another one. After months of touching us only when she physically disciplined us, she switched to psychological tactics. One day she threatened to give us up for adoption, and when she heard me crying in our room late at night, she called me to her doorway and asked me why.
“Because you said you want to give us up,” I said.
“Maybe if y’all weren’t so bad,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to threaten y’all.”
And still we felt our behavior would never be good enough. I was failing her. Driven by her sense of isolation or loneliness or a desire to reveal something about her sense of discipline to me or to warn me against what she might have seen of her legacy coming to life in me, she parked her car in the carport after a trip to the store one day and told me brother and sisters to go inside, and then said to me: “Wait—stay here.” And then she did something that must have been incredibly hard for her since it was so opposite to her nature; she talked to me. She told me stories. “Mimi,” she said, “your father …” And then she opened herself up in ways she wouldn’t do for many years. She told me some things I understood at the time, and other things I wouldn’t understand until I was her age, and other things I still don’t understand, about how she grew up as the caretaker for her brothers and sisters, about her relationship with her mother, about how she loved her father and her husband and lost them both, again and again. At thirteen, I glimpsed something of what my mother had suffered. For an afternoon, I knew some of my mother’s burdens, some of which mirrored my own. For a moment, I felt keenly what it meant to be my mother’s daughter. For a little while, I was wiser than I had the maturity to be, and I did what I could. I listened.
And my mother listened too, when she could, to our furtive whisperings. We missed DeLisle, we said. We missed running barefoot along the dirt roads and eating blackberries, hot with juice and sugar and sun, and floating in the current of the river. We didn’t like walking in a little tight group down to Bel-Air Elementary in the summer to eat free lunch in the cafeteria, feeling awkward and poor. So she asked us: “Do y’all want to move back to DeLisle?” And we said yes.
My mother, frugal by necessity, had saved enough money to buy half an acre of land from her father’s sister. In the summer of 1990, she set out to clear it, armed with machetes and chainsaws along with her brothers. Sometimes she brought us along on her days off that summer before we moved, and sometimes she didn’t. On one of the days when she didn’t, Joshua and I left Nerissa and Charine in the house and walked back into the woods. If my mother knew, she’d be angry I left my two youngest siblings alone, but I wanted to see that cellar again. I needed to see if it still gaped in that small clearing. I didn’t fully understand that it had taken on a symbolic importance for me, a physical representation of all the hatred and loathing and sorrow I carried inside, the dark embodiment of all the times in Gulfport when I had been terrorized or sexually threatened. I didn’t understand that it had become an omen for me. When Joshua and I got there, we found the plywood that had covered the top of the cellar gone, so what remained was a large, open ditch lined with pine straw, perfectly square and dark. Somehow it was even more awful to see the dim recesses of that man-made hole, and my response was visceral. I felt as if I were down in it, as if my world had shrunk to its confines: the pine straw pricking my legs and arms, the walls a cavern around me, tall as a line of trees, the sky itself obscured. I couldn’t escape it. Its specter would follow me my entire life. Joshua and I stared into its maw without talking, and then left. I wonder if he felt something as well, standing there on the crumbling edge of that awful hole, of the awful future we would bear.
The house was messy. I was grateful that at least Nerissa and Charine hadn’t broken anything. I set Nerissa and Charine to small tasks, picking up their toys in the living room, while I washed dishes. Joshua was outside in the backyard. I walked to the window with wet and soapy hands to talk to him.
“Josh,” I said, “you need to come inside and take out the trash.”
“All right,” he said.
I washed a sinkful of cups and moved on to bowls. He still wasn’t inside. I walked to the window again.
“Josh!” I said. I was frustrated: I felt the weight of being a child with adult responsibilities. I was inadequate. I was failing.
My brother stood out in the yard, peering into the dark of the house. He wasn’t looking up at me, and I realized that he and I were the same height now. His hair was a sandy brown in the sun he squinted against, and his black T-shirt was fitted on his frame, pulled so by the way he was gaining weight at eleven. Joshua looked through the screen and it was as if he saw me clearly with my soapy hands, my wrinkled fingers, my jaw grinding with frustration and self-abasement, and he hated me. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.
Ronald Wayne Lizana
Born: September 20, 1983
Died: December 16, 2002
He’s going to be a heartbreaker when he grows up.
Ronald was nine then, and I was fifteen, but it was still evident even then, in his short, even-limbed frame, that he would grow yet more beautiful when he became older. He was light on his feet, seemed to be perpetually on his tiptoes, ready to prank, run, and disappear down the elementary school hallway. He reminded me of Joshua at that age. Ronald too was an only boy in a family of girls; I’d attended elementary school with his oldest sister. Teachers would stop his sister and me at play and ask if we were related. They’d say: Y’all look alike. Ronald looked even more like Josh standing next to my cousin Tony, who was also nine, but who was around three shades darker than Ronald.
I was a counselor at All God’s Critters day camp. It was sponsored by my high school, Coast Episcopal, and was designed to provide free summer activity for underprivileged kids. As a student, I could volunteer to be a counselor; as underprivileged kids, most of the kids I knew in DeLisle and Pass Christian were eligible to go, but only three of them attended that summer: Antonio, my cousin Rajea, and Ronald. I wrote Tony’s name in the attendance book.
“And who’s this?” I smiled at Ronald. He smiled back slowly: his teeth white, his skin copper, his eyes large and brownish black. He had a smattering of freckles across his nose. He’s going to get all the girls, I thought.
“Ronald Lizana,” he said. I wrote his name in the book.
“You’ll be with the other boys,” I s
aid. “Come on. I’ll take y’all to your station.” I wrote Rajea’s name and grabbed her hand, leading her down the hallway. I looked back to make sure Ronald and Tony were following. Ronald grinned at Tony, and Tony started laughing at a private joke.
I’d volunteered as a counselor for the Christian day camp because I wanted to get out of the house for the two weeks the camp ran. By this time, Josh was old enough to watch Nerissa and Charine during the day while I was at camp and Mama was at work. My brother and sisters hadn’t wanted to go to the camp; they thought it was lame. “All them White people,” they said. “And church.” I shrugged. I was on the tail end of a devout Christian phase, where I spent at least half of every hour thinking about God, praying, and feeling suffused with divine love. When I’d transferred to the Episcopalian school in sixth grade, I’d found irresistible the idea of a God who loved me unfailingly, scars and all. Here was a man who would never leave, I thought. Someone whom I would never disappoint. Later, I would fall away from the church when the rigidity of the doctrine and hypocrisy of some of the most devout Christian students I went to school with became apparent to me. In the end, I realized sometimes some people were forsaken.
I was a cheerleader, which meant that instead of teaching arts and crafts or doing Bible study in the form of singing Christian folk songs with the other high schoolers and two seminary students who ran the camp, I taught dance. My co-counselor and I choreographed and taught the kids routines to “The Humpty Dance” and “I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller,” which they were set to perform for the rest of the camp at the end of the week. On the first day, Ronald was unimpressed.
“You don’t know how to dance,” he said.
“Yes I do,” I said.
“So you can pop?”
“Yeah.”
My co-counselor was teaching the other kids the beginning of the dance and counting: “And one and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight …”
“Do it.”
“I ain’t fixing to pop for you.”
“I can do it.”
“No, you can’t.”
Tony ambled over.
“Watch,” Ronald said. He widened his stance, put his hands palm down in front of him, and began thrusting his hips back and forth. I laughed. He could pop. Tony joined in.
“We’re not putting that in the dance.”
“Why not?” Ronald said.
The corners of his mouth twitched. He was a natural flirt.
“You really think the other boys would do it?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You going to do it, Tony?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Okay then.” I crossed my arms. “We’ll put it in.”
Ronald was charming, a showoff. As I carried large plastic trays of juice and graham crackers down the narrow school hallway for snack in the afternoon, he’d stop in the dim space outside of the bathroom, pat the air in front of himself, and pop. I’d laugh, the crackers in their cups sliding across the tray, the juice sloshing over the side of the waxed paper cups, rolling in thin streams so that when I finally got to the classroom with the snack, all of the cups bottoms’ were soggy.
In dance class, he caught on quickly. He was like C. J., athletic, lean, and short. He was able to pick up movements easily and imbue them with his own character. I thought because Tony and Ronald were such good friends, they’d shrug off my authority, wander off to the back of the classroom to play with the detritus of the school year or disappear into the dim hallways on hourlong bathroom breaks. But they didn’t. When I asked them to listen, they did, and they executed all my awkward dance moves, moving gleefully whenever they looked at each other, or whenever they got to the popping eight count.
Towards the end of the two weeks, we made homemade Slip ’n Slides by rolling out long plastic sheets and coating them with dishwashing detergent and water. The sky was a boundless blue, and the air was clear, free of the usual torrents of summer rain. We set both slides side by side on a slight hill in a field.
One of my co-counselors, who was shirtless, pale, and grinning in the sun, was eager to test the slide. He ran at it, jumped, and flew down the hill on his stomach and off the slide at the end, whizzing across the grass. When he stood, his chest was green and red, and I wondered if it hurt.
“That was awesome,” he said.
Ronald and Tony had the same idea.
“Watch this, Mimi!” Tony said. He ran and hurled himself down the slide. The thump sounded as if it hurt, but he grinned into the soapy water, and he flew off the end of the plastic and plowed to a stop in the dirt. Ronald took Tony’s success as a challenge. He flung himself at the plastic from a run, and zipped down the slide before landing in the grass. Ronald ran up the hill to the beginning of the slide while Tony zipped down again. I added more water and more soap. The other boys followed suit, whooping and crashing into the lawn. Ronald stopped next to me, blades of grass on his face and in his hair. I brushed them away: his face was hot and clammy under my fingers.
“You should get on it,” Ronald said. He spat away a piece of green that had slid to his lip.
“Naw, I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Get on in your clothes.”
“Then I’ll be walking around with wet clothes all day.”
“Come on,” he said.
“I can’t.”
I brushed another sliver of grass from his face, and he shivered and smiled. Boys ran by him in pairs. “You’re cute,” I said. I figured there was no harm in telling Ronald something he already knew.
“One day I’m going to marry you,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yep.” He nodded, smiling his charming smile.
“You promise?”
“Yeah.”
I laughed and brushed away another blade. Ronald ran to the slide and Tony followed and they threw themselves at it, both of them burning darker in the heavy sun. I rolled the sleeves of my T-shirt up so they bunched under my armpits and let my shoulders warm. When I told the boys their session was done, the others ran inside, but Tony and Ronald lagged behind.
“Help me pick up these hoses,” I told them. A few clouds scudded across the sky, shadowing them, and when they cleared, Tony and Ronald were carrying empty bottles of dishwashing liquid and dragging hoses, mud and grass smeared across their bellies. The boys saw me watching and stopped to dance in the field, popping while holding the hoses and bottles up. They looked like drunk adults on the edge of a parade, dancing as Mardi Gras floats passed. I laughed. The sun caught them, and they were beautiful.
As Ronald aged, he got taller: the planes of his face spread and sharpened, his shoulders broadened and his waist slimmed, but when his face dimpled, he was still that nine-year-old boy in the field, shining copper in the sun. Ronald didn’t lose his charm and charisma, or his handsomeness, as he grew older. If anything, he was more confident, especially with women. I saw him sometimes around DeLisle or Pass Christian. Sometimes I even saw him around my mother’s house when I was home visiting from NYC, since he and Charine were good friends; when he walked through the living room to Charine’s room, he always seemed to be smiling, to be leaning forward as he walked, all the angles of his body harmonious like a song. I never imagined that he carried something darker in him, never saw him when his mood was cloudy and he turned furious or depressed. I was too immature to imagine at the time that the darkness that I carried from my prepubescent years, that conviction of worthlessness and self-loathing, could have touched others in my community.
What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because
we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.
But I did not know this in the spring of 2002, which is why I thought Ronald was happy when I saw him at the park. Nerissa was off sitting in what I later would find out was Demond’s car, which was pulled onto the side of the court and parked in the weak seasonal sun, and I was sitting on the bleachers with Hilton watching Ronald play basketball with a girl. I was home, visiting, and it was a relief to sit in the park again, be still under the trees and the great heavy sky.
Ronald was laughing and copping feels on the court. He pulled his sleeves back over his elbows and threw his hands in the air and shoved his crotch into the girl’s ass like he was guarding her. She dribbled the ball, bent over, smiled before glancing behind at him. He smiled encouragingly at the stands. This was Ronald’s flirting all grown up: knowing and corporeal. Hilton sat beside me, and we laughed at the joke. The girl was coy, noticing what Ronald was doing but not discouraging him. She was a teenager, exuding her budding sexuality with every smile, every jut of her hips as she dribbled, with every giggle. At the opposite end of the court, Charine and C. J. threw the ball to each other, playing a game of twenty-one. After his game with the girl, Ronald climbed the bleachers and sat next to us. Hilton passed him a cigar.
“We still getting married?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ronald said. Hilton snorted. Something about Ronald’s face was surprised, pleased. “Hell yeah,” he said. The girl wandered off to the cars. After drawing on the cigar, Ronald followed her.
Charine said when they rode around DeLisle later that day, smoking and listening to music and talking shit, I came up in the conversation. Her friends talked about the way I jogged down the street for exercise in sports bra and shorts, hair a rough curly tangle escaping the bun at the back of my head, my right leg kicking out to my side in a circle, my arms hanging low with my hands open. What are you doing, one of them had once asked, running or swimming? Another would ride behind me on his bike, talking constantly about the neighborhood, about the weather, about the day, about the way the crackheads walked the block, all the while singing lines from the latest songs. Once I told him to get away from me through labored, wet breaths. That hurts my feelings, he said. And then: You still run funny. Charine and C. J. and their friends talked about me in that car and Ronald stopped them. He passed one of them the blunt.
