by Jesmyn Ward
“Shut up,” he said. “That’s my wife. Don’t talk about my wife.”
“Whatever,” one of them laughed.
“I’m not playing,” he said.
They all laughed and parked in a driveway lined with a column of azalea bushes almost tall as a man, and smoked the afternoon away.
After I saw Ronald that day at the park, I thought I knew him. I thought that if I were younger and we were in high school together, Ronald was the sort of boy I’d fall in love with: funny, confident, charming, a bit arrogant. But there was much I didn’t know about Ronald, about his life and how happy or unhappy he was. He was nineteen. When I saw him, he lived with his mother. They argued, so he moved in with his older sister. After some months, he and his sister argued, he moved out of her house and for a stretch of time in the fall, he was homeless. He squatted in an abandoned house until his older cousin Selina, who was in her early twenties, found out, so she tracked him down and told him, “Kinfolk don’t live on the street.” Ronald moved in with her.
Ronald snorted cocaine, and he hustled for money. This is why he fought with his family. They loved him, wanted him to start working and stop using drugs, but he could not. He knew he could not, which is why he told Selina he wanted to go to rehab: he loved his mother and his two sisters, and his estrangement from them pained him. He felt that he couldn’t please any of the women in his life, including his girlfriend. The charm and charisma of his youth were as meaningless as a tonsil or appendix in his adult life. He knew how to navigate the world as a child, but as a young Black man, he was unmoored. The hard facts of being a young Black man in the South, the endemic joblessness and poverty, and the ease of self-medicating with drugs disoriented him.
After Ronald moved in with Selina, she visited his mother to assure her that he was safe. She wanted to let his mother know that Ronald was helping out, was almost a father figure to her son, spending his afternoons taking care of him while Selina worked. She wanted to let his mother know he was okay. Ronald’s mother expressed her frustration and helplessness in the face of Ronald’s addiction. Ronald took this as rejection.
As they lay on their backs on the bed in Selina’s bedroom, staring at the ceiling, at a sky he couldn’t see, he told Selina: “It’s like my mama pushing me in the streets.”
“Ain’t no way, cuz,” Selina said.
“It feel like they do,” Ronald said.
“They want you to do better for yourself.”
Ronald closed his eyes, tamped something down.
“They want you to get a real job. Do it legally.”
One night Ronald and Selina took a ride through Pass Christian before parking under the wide, reaching oak trees that screened the city park from Scenic Drive, the highway, and beyond that the beach. My father told me he’d been chased out of that park as a child for being Black, called a nigger by the groundskeeper. The beauty of the massive oaks and the water over the southern horizon belied that history as Selina and Ronald sat in the car and talked about Ronald’s demons.
“I was in my sister’s car. I parked it right here,” Ronald said.
The oaks ignored the beach breeze.
“I had the gun under the seat.”
The Spanish moss in the oaks pulled tight as a flag in the wind.
“I pulled it out. I was going to pull the trigger.”
The moss wrapped around the trees’ limbs and caught.
“And then the phone rang. It was my sister.”
“Why?” Selina said.
“I got all these problems.”
“Like what?”
“My girlfriend.”
“What you mean?”
“She be doing shady shit.” He thought she was cheating on him and hiding her infidelities. He channeled all the frustration and darkness of his life into their relationship until their love took on epic proportions.
“They got too many women in the world,” Selina said.
“But I love her,” Ronald breathed. “I love her to death.”
The night before Ronald died, he met up with another cousin in Long Beach. They sat out in a car in the parking lot of an apartment complex, smoking and talking.
“I’m going into the military, cuz.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Been talking to a recruiter. I’m ready,” he said.
His cousin said he seemed optimistic, that the promise represented by the military had given him hope, or so it seemed. He was searching for a way out. But Selina remembers it differently. Her son’s birthday was the day before Ronald died, and she’d thrown a party for him, all balloons and party hats and streamers, all baby-boy blue. Ronald called her every other hour, said: “Cuz, I’m coming.” Said: “Cuz, I ain’t forgot.” Said: “Cuz, I’m on my way.”
But as the day waned and the party ended, she got another call from one of Ronald’s friends, who said: “I saw him at the Shell station. He doesn’t look like himself.” She looked for him and caught a glimpse outside the station, but something was wrong with his face under the fluorescent lights. When she maneuvered her car back around to return for him, he’d disappeared.
I don’t know all Ronald’s demons. I don’t know the specifics of what Ronald ran from, what he felt he was outpacing when he talked about going to rehab or joining the military and if he self-medicated with cocaine so he could feel invincible and believe in a future. I don’t know what that debilitating darkness, that Nothing that pursued him, looked like, what shape his depression took. For me, it was a cellar in the woods, a wide, deep living grave. I know what it feels like. I know that sense of despair. I know that when he looked down at his copper hands and in the mirror, at his dark eyes and his freckles and his even mouth, that he thought it would be better if he were dead, because then all of it, every bit of it, would stop. The endless struggle with his girlfriend, the drugs that lit his darkness, the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South—being stopped and searched by the police, going to a high school where no one really cared if he graduated and went to college, the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it was he wanted, realizing that the promises that had been made to him at All God’s Creatures day camp were empty and he didn’t have a world and a heaven of options—all of these things would cease. And this is what Ronald thought he wanted.
Years later, I searched for and found statistics about mental health and Black people in an effort to understand something about Ronald, about myself, about my community. Racism, poverty, and violence are the primary factors that encourage depression in Black men, and I’d guess that this is true for Black women as well. Seven percent of African American men develop depression during their lifetime, and according to experts, this is probably an underestimate due to lack of screening and treatment services. They will not get care for their mental disorders. The percentage of African Americans, men and women, who do receive care for mental disorders is half that of non-Hispanic Whites. Not treating these mental disorders costs Black men and women dearly, because when mental disorders aren’t treated, Black men are more vulnerable to incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, homicide, and suicide, and all of these, of course, affect not just the Black men who suffer from them but their families and the glue that holds the community together as well. According to “Souls of Black Men: African American Men Discuss Mental Health,” Black men’s death rates from suicide are twice as high as those for Black women. And when Black males ages fifteen to nineteen years old die by suicide, 72 percent of them use guns to do so.1
These statistics punctuate my experience like an exclamation point. I read these and think about what happened to Ronald and feel he intuitively understood what it took me years of suffering grief, battling my own depression, reading, writing to understand. In the end, I understand his desire, the self’s desire to silence the self, and thus the world. Ronald looked at his Nothing and saw its long history, saw it in all our families and our
communities, all the institutions of the South and the nation driving it. He knew it walked with all of us, and he was tired of walking.
Ronald was at his sister’s apartment in a complex in Long Beach. He was there alone. Still, I imagine he went into the bedroom and shut the door when his girlfriend finally answered the phone and they began arguing.
“Why are you acting like this? I love you. Tell me you love me.”
“No.”
“I’m going to kill myself.”
“No you’re not.”
“Yes I am.”
“Stop playing.”
“I am.”
“Whatever, Ronald.”
I imagined the apartment had white walls, a dark bedspread on the double bed in the room, the floor bare besides the carpet. He had to have thought about this, planned it, borrowed or traded or bought the gun and bullets for it, been home by himself at a certain time. He had to have felt his Nothing over his shoulder, bearing down on him while spurring him into action. He had to have forgotten what it was like to stand outside under the hot Mississippi sun, to burn gold in it, to feel loved and alive and beautiful. He had to have felt like this was the only thing left for him to do. Ronald hung up the phone, shot himself in the head, and died.
Charine called me at work in New York City and told me. I stared at the gray walls of my cubicle, the gray carpet under my feet, the gray buildings through the window, the gray New York sky bounded by skyscrapers, and thought, Not another death. I hated phones. After I hung up with Charine, I looked at my hands and then walked into my boss’s office after knocking timidly on the door frame.
“Come in,” she said.
How should I tell her? I thought. How do I say my friend, a boy I watched dance in the sun, mud-streaked and happy, killed himself? I think I might have called him my cousin when I told her. I tried not to but began crying, and she frowned with kindness.
“You should go home for the day,” she said. I wiped my face with my hands, embarrassed that I was crying in public, walked out, powered down my computer, and left work. I rode home on the deserted subway in the middle of the day, glaring at every person I saw. I walked through crowds on the street and thought I had never been in so crowded a place, yet had never felt so cold, and I hated every walking, breathing thing for being alive while Ronald and my brother weren’t. I cried.
Days later I was home for Christmas, and they were burying Ronald in the graveyard. What is happening to us? I asked. I went to New Orleans that weekend. Charine and Nerissa, so many of us, piled into one car and parked near the river. We walked toward Bourbon Street and the crowds. As we stopped at an intersection, we heard a gunshot and the crowds surged like water, as if a large hand had dropped a stone in the middle of us all. I grabbed my sisters’ hands and we ran with the panicked crowds, half carried by the mass of bodies. New Orleans police rode on horseback through the streets. The horses were large and red, the color of Mississippi mud, and they boiled toward us, prancing and kicking with menace. Another shot sounded, and we scattered, our grip on each other so tight it was painful, and I wondered at us, running through the streets. Running away from what? I thought. From what? We didn’t go home, and the crowds didn’t disperse. We circled the block and fought our way back to the few open bars. I drank more through the night, drank until I would not remember what I did the next day, blacked out, and peed in alleyways like the homeless people I saw in New York.
Years after Ronald’s death, I learned that his girlfriend did love him, although the night of his death she was too frustrated with him to say so. She was a curvy pale girl with brownish blond hair and light eyes. She’d been adopted and lived out in DeLisle north of the interstate. They’d gotten into a bad fight during the weeks before he died, and she’d felt threatened; at the time he died, she was attempting to distance herself from him. She was trying to avoid his phone calls, and when she did pick up the phone and talk to him, the conversation was strained.
“He called me,” she said. Charine and I were in her car in our mother’s driveway. Her car was green, and so wide across that all of us were sitting in the front seat. We were high. Charine nodded and I stared at the numbers on the digital clock, which were neon blue. It was 3:00 A.M.
“He told me he loved me.”
The numbers glowed so brightly they seemed fuzzy at the edges.
“He said it right before he got off the phone. He said: ‘I love you.’”
The minute changed.
“And I didn’t say it back to him. I didn’t. I was mad at him.”
I bumped Charine’s arm with mine, just so I could feel her next to me.
“But I did love him.”
Charine chewed her gum, looked down at our arms.
“I did.”
Later that night, after she’d left and Charine and I had gone inside to escape the sunrise, Charine told me she often had this conversation with his girlfriend. She said the first time his girlfriend had told the story about what happened before his death, the story about their last conversation, she’d cried. She sobbed at the end of that story, her voice breaking. But I did love him, Charine, she’d said. I did love him. I did I did I did I did. She’d said it over and over again, as if Charine doubted her, as if Charine were someone she had to convince, when Charine knew all too well the regret that comes with a lover’s death, the regret that says: You failed him.
We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine. We dream of speaking when we lack the gift of oratory, when we lack the vision to see the stage, the lights, the audience, the endless rigging and ropes and set pieces behind us, manipulated by many hands. Ronald saw it all, and it buried him.
We Are Learning
1991–1995
I prayed. At night, as the house clicked and ticked around us, I prayed that we would move back to DeLisle. I didn’t want to be afraid to go outside, to be afraid of Thomas, who lurked, to fear what he would see in me and call me, to dread the hole in the woods. My mother heard me. After living in the seedy subdivision where every year the houses seemed smaller and shabbier, crumbling at the corners, ringed by weeds, we left Gulfport. After my mother cleared her narrow bit of land in DeLisle, she set a single-wide trailer on it. The property was on the top of a hill, surrounded on three sides by pines dense with undergrowth, and when we walked out of the front door, we only saw one neighbor’s house. My mother aligned the trailer lengthwise on the property, which meant the left side of the trailer sat atop the hill, on the ground, and the right side of the trailer was elevated, supported on cement bricks, leaving enough room to drag chairs under and sit between the cement pillars. In the evening, little lean brown rabbits fed on the patchy grass that announced the interruption of the yard from the surrounding woods. In the evening, bats fluttered through the narrow gap in the trees above our heads, feeding on the mosquitoes that swarmed there, mosquitoes that bred in a hidden, shallow pond, dry during the winter, tucked away in the pine woods to the near west of our house. We were home, in our community again.
When we moved to DeLisle, my father moved to New Orleans. He thought there would be more job opportunities there, and he wanted to live closer to his brothers. After leaving us in Gulfport, my father lived with his teenage love, then moved out and lived in one small, dark apartment after another, of which there were plenty along the coast, sometimes with roommates, sometimes without. He stopped paying his child support and moved from job to job so quickly there was no way for the authorities to garnish his wages. In New Orleans, he lived in the small yellow ghost-haunted house with barred windows, where the wind echoed through the industrial yard behind it at night, bidding the metal to speak. Then he moved to a small two-story apartment complex with only six one- or two-bedroom apartments. The rent was cheaper there. The building was gray wood and red brick, and my father’s oldest brother, Dwight, lived on the first floor. We would spend our weekend and summer visits there when
I was in high school.
I’d been the only Black girl in the private Episcopalian elementary school during my sixth-grade year, and on my first day at the corresponding high school, I learned that this would be the case for high school, too. What I didn’t know is that I would remain the only Black girl in the school for five years: in my senior year, another Black girl enrolled, but we never spoke. The one other Black kid in the school when I was a seventh grader was a senior, and he acknowledged me sometimes with a nod, but most often ignored me. He was comfortable with the boys in the school, would hang out with them in the hallways looking like a clone of them: polo shirts, khaki shorts, slide-on boat shoes. I heard rumors that they snuck him into the local yacht club to sail with them, because he was unofficially not allowed because he was half Black, which meant that according to the yacht club he was Black. Today, I understand class also complicated my developing a relationship with either of them: both of these Black students came from two-parent, solidly upper-middle- or middle-class families. They lived in exclusive neighborhoods with pools and gyms and golf clubs and yearly homeowners’ association fees, and that culture was totally alien to my own, one of government assistance and poverty and broken homes. We had nothing to talk about. Most of the other Black boys who enrolled in the school later, when I was in ninth grade and until I graduated, were basketball recruits. They all came from backgrounds that were closer to mine, and our relationships were easier. I joked with them in the hallways between classes whenever I had the chance, and during those years those moments of camaraderie gave me some respite, some illusion of community. But it was an illusion: because of my distaste for team sports and my love of books, I was still an outsider. I had friends, friends who were outsiders like me in different ways: kids that were artists or writers or loved pottery or punk music or theater, but they were never my color. Overall, there were never more than eight Black students in the school at one time. During my time there, there were only three other students of color: there was one Chinese American girl, and later two Hispanic students, all three of whom came from moneyed families. At its largest, the high school contained no more than 180 students, and at its smallest, no fewer than 100.
