Fire Shut Up in My Bones

by Charles M. Blow

  Big Mama was a big woman with a big laugh. Everything about her seemed to be outsized—big hips, big bosom, big heart, big voice. Everything big. But she was aging. Her top molars were missing and her short hair was thinning.

  Jed was a chain smoker with a strong back and soft eyes. It was those eyes that struck you—brown, maple-syrup sweet, a hint of gray around the edges, sunrise yellow where the whites should be; deep enough to get lost in, bottomless like Martin’s Pond; damp like the beginning of a good cry or the end of a good laugh. They were the kind of eyes that saw down into the dark of you and drew up the light; the kind that melted worry like a stick of butter near a warm stove; the kind that forgave secret shame before it scarred the throat on the way out.

  It would take a man with eyes like that to make Big Mama move to the middle of nowhere and bathe outside.

  In fact, this was my grandmother’s second stint in Arkansas. She had moved there once before, to marry another man after she and my grandfather, her first husband, broke up. My mother didn’t follow. She stayed behind in Louisiana with Mam’ Grace. But soon the man died and Big Mama was back in Louisiana, living with my mother and my great-uncle Paul at Mam’ Grace and Papa Joe’s house.

  Then she married for a third time. Again, it didn’t last long. He left her one day after realizing that she’d been spending the car-note money on clothes and shoes. He only became aware of the deceit when a man came to repossess the car. He was outraged. There must be some misunderstanding, he said to the man; his wife had paid the bill every month, on time. He had the receipts to prove it. Unfortunately, he could only find one—an old one.

  Big Mama had been giving her husband the same receipt every month, claiming it was evidence of a new payment and stealing it back from him when he put it away. He was illiterate, and he trusted her. Now he was furious, and done. He grabbed two bags of stuff he had been storing in the smokehouse, “rats and all” was the family joke, and that was the end.

  But that woman existed a world away from the grandmother I knew, the one now married to Jed.

  The only remnant of Big Mama’s past was a water-damaged, hand-tinted portrait of her and a man I didn’t recognize, both sugar-sharp, sitting on a bench in front of a painted backdrop. He was sitting up tall and strong. She was laughing, legs crossed, her head resting delicately on his shoulder. There was a power in his pose, but there was more in hers, a feminine power, the kind that lights a room and buckles a knee, the kind that makes men do things they know they shouldn’t—sneak in through open windows, lie to loved ones, give more than they have.

  I often stared at that picture, trying to connect that woman—young, thin, radiant, dangerously alluring—with the woman I knew now as Big Mama. I couldn’t do it.

  She was different now. Jed had made her different because he was more powerful than she was. He drew his power from a different source—not from hollowness but from wholeness. It was a grand, simple kind of power. It came from the knowing and accepting and loving of self that made the knowing and accepting and loving of everything else possible. It didn’t crush, but accommodated. He hadn’t taken away Big Mama’s power but given her a peaceful place to harness and transform it, to calm down and grow up, to move out of the woman she had been and into the woman she could be.

  She was like a river—always running, never still, wanting to be somewhere other than where it was—that had finally reached the ocean—vast and deep and exactly where it was always meant to be.

  He did the same for all of us—made us feel that we had finally made it to where we were always meant to be, the place where we could stop running and just relax. He made us all better than we had been, not so much by any one thing I remember him doing, but by the gentle, calming spirit that seemed to emanate from his being. That was the kind of father I wished I had.

  And James was the brother I felt closest to, even though he lived far away. Maybe it was because we had been raised together, just the two of us, when I was a baby. Maybe it was because he too was now a bit of a loner, being raised as an only child in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe it was because I thought him the smartest of my brothers. Whatever it was, he seemed to me special and different.

  He was lighter-skinned that the rest of us, the recipient of a recessive gene, I suppose, and he had his own room and more toys than us, new toys bought from a store, not come across at a rummage sale. And most of all he had Jed, all the time.

  But in the summer of 1974 Jed built the house that he would die in—a death that would drain away the specialness from my special place, a death that would leave a crater in the part of my life where a father should be.

  The new house was built from lumber recovered from a partially burned house nearby. It was a modest ranch-style house with a covered carport. Jed painted it buttercup yellow with brown shutters, and my grandmother decorated the yard by stabbing synthetic flowers into the soil among real ones in the centers of discarded tires repurposed as flower beds.

  The house was a stone’s throw from Jed and Big Mama’s other house, down a dirt road on the other side of the highway, set on a small parcel notched out of a white farmer’s field. It was directly across the road from a kind old widow who had a sprawling yard with a pomegranate tree on one side, its branches straining from the weight of the fruit, and a field on the other side, where Jed and Big Mama grew cucumbers to be sold at the market. There was a butane tank in the yard for fuel, and pungent, metallic-tasting water was drawn from the well in the yard of the widow woman across the street.

  The dirt road led into the Bend, a backwater of black families sandwiched between the highway and a bend in the Red River. The Bend had been homesteaded by ex-slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation. When the man who had enslaved them died, his son deeded the ex-slaves that part of the plantation, about a hundred acres.

  The families who lived there, many of them direct descendants of those slaves, were tightly bonded but widely scattered—connected by the meandering dirt road and a stubborn devotion to the land that flanked it. We drove into the Bend almost every time we visited—through lush valleys and across wooden bridges spanning rippling brooks, some full of fallen branches, some teeming with cottonmouth snakes. In other spots, the road formed a virtual tunnel through the overgrown leafy canopy. Traffic was so rare in these parts that whenever we came upon a house, which could be miles from its neighbor, everyone in the yard would stop, stand, and wave.

  We sometimes drove to the Red River, where we took the ferry to the other side and back again for the sheer slow-motion thrill of it. We stopped at roadside tangles of blackberry bushes or thickets of wild plum trees and gorged ourselves to the point of sickness.

  We visited good-natured boys with the quiet charm of people shielded from the world. We visited pretty girls with pretty skin, made so by yard play, homegrown food, and constant sweating. Everywhere we stopped, people came out smiling, genuinely happy to see us, particularly James, whose name they always said in whole, as if it were one word—Jame’Blow—without the s, the way folks in Gibsland said Char’esBaby without the l, all stretched out like the first notes of a favorite song.

  Everyone took to James that way.

  In fact, when we visited I didn’t get much time with James because everyone else was doting on him. My two oldest brothers seemed to idolize him even though he was younger. William clung to him like a treasured thing once lost but now found. They had been born only nine months apart—Irish twins.

  So in Kiblah I often played alone, which I enjoyed, lining up the menagerie of finger-length ceramic animals my grandmother collected on a bric-a-brac shelf, talking to the animals and pretending they talked back to me. The moment that would slice my life into two parts—before and after—was still several years away, but already I was slipping into the isolation that would prime me for it.

  About twice a year we’d visit my mother’s father, Grandpa Bill, in Houston. He was a handsome, gregarious man—showy but genial—with a broad, toothy smile
that forever pinched a half-smoked cigar.

  Grandpa Bill was Big Mama’s first husband. They had married on Valentine’s Day in 1942, a month and a half after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Big Mama got pregnant with my mother right away, but before she was born Grandpa Bill joined the army, serving in the 92nd Infantry Division, the so-called Buffalo Soldiers. His division was eventually whisked off to Italy, becoming the only all-black division to see combat on the ground in Europe. Grandpa Bill never spoke of his service, but Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II recounts Grandpa Bill’s valor:

  On 16 November, while proceeding towards the front at night, Sergeant Rhodes’s motorized patrol was advanced upon near a village by a lone enemy soldier. Sergeant Rhodes jumped from the truck and as a group of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared, intent upon capturing the truck and patrol intact, he opened fire from his exposed position on the road. His fire forced the enemy to scatter while the patrol dismounted and took cover with light casualties. Sergeant Rhodes then moved toward a nearby building where, still exposed, his fire on the enemy was responsible for the successful evacuation of the wounded patrol members by newly arrived medical personnel. Sergeant Rhodes was then hit by enemy shell fragments, but in spite of his wounds he exhausted his own supply of ammunition then obtaining an enemy automatic weapon, exhausted its supply inflicting three certain casualties on the enemy. He spent the rest of the night in a nearby field and returned, unaided, to his unit the next afternoon.

  Rhodes was Grandpa Bill’s family name.

  He was the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. That recommendation was declined, like all the recommendations for the Buffalo Soldiers. But his bravery and his injury did earn him a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, an honorable discharge, and a lifelong limp.

  When he came home from the war, he and Big Mama made a go of it for a while, first in Louisiana, then in Houston. But after they broke up and got a divorce, Grandpa Bill stayed on in Houston. He married a strikingly beautiful woman only a few years older than my mother who was a bit rough around the edges. They had two daughters, about the ages of my oldest brothers, daughters that my mother could never quite bring herself to call her sisters.

  When I was growing up, Grandpa Bill’s family lived in a small brick house on a cul-de-sac in a working-class neighborhood in northeast Houston. A large black velvet painting of a curvaceous woman, kneeling with her hands in her hair, breasts exposed, nipples erect, hung in their living room. It looked to me like a painting of Grandpa Bill’s young wife, but I dared not ask.

  The entire house seemed to be charged with eroticism and wantonness. Grandpa Bill and his pretty young bride openly gambled and drank. Handguns were on display. Porn magazines and condoms were hidden under my grandfather’s bed. It was as far from Gibsland—in every way—as I had ever been.

  One day when we were visiting, Grandpa Bill was playing a small-money card game in the open garage with a neighbor from across the street. My brothers, our young aunts, and I were playing in the driveway. My grandfather accused the man of cheating. The minor disagreement quickly escalated, fueled by alcohol and my grandfather’s sense of honor. My grandfather disappeared into the house and returned with his pistol cocked and aimed. My mother, hysterical, wrestled it away. I was shocked and frightened by how a good time had gone so quickly and badly wrong. Grandpa Bill would surely have killed the man that day, us children watching or no.

  Grandpa Bill was quick to violence and unafraid of it. He knew the feel of cold steel in his hand and hot lead in his body. He had been shot twice since the war, for playing around with women who didn’t belong to him. Still, he survived. He seemed indestructible, but in need of defense. So his pearl-handled pistol was always nearby.

  The feeling I got in Houston was the opposite of the feeling I got in Kiblah. The air in Houston was always charged, and an explosion seemed always imminent. In Houston, even when having fun, I was a ball of nerves.

  After her pregnancy with me, and the sickness it brought, my mother got back on her feet, and a neighbor got her a job at the poultry plant in the town of Arcadia, eight miles east of Gibsland, where she stood on her feet on a production line all day cutting chickens for next to nothing: seventy-five cents an hour. She put in two years in that pit before getting a secretarial job at the high school in Gibsland.

  All my other brothers were already in school, but I was not. So my mother had my great-uncle Paul keep me during the day so that she could work and then go to school in the afternoon.

  Uncle Paul was Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace’s youngest son, a quiet man unable to read or write his own name. He was dark like a wad of half-chewed tobacco, had wide shoulders into which he diffidently tucked his head like a box turtle, and had a large nose, spread wide and pointed down like a raven’s tail. Uncle Paul was now near fifty and had failed to leave the nest. He had lived with Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace his whole life.

  Every morning I’d stand on the car seat, my small arm tenderly draped around my mother’s neck as she drove me to Papa Joe’s house. Uncle Paul was my babysitter, but he was also my best friend—I was growing into childhood, and he had never truly left it.

  Papa Joe’s house was dimly lit and filled with old furniture, dark and heavy, collected over a long life, imbued with memories but devoid of value. Papa Joe was a former moonshine runner, an enterprise that had earned him a stint in prison. Now older, wiser, and more settled, he farmed hogs and chickens. I followed him around as he did his chores—fixing things, slopping hogs, collecting eggs. Now that Mam’ Grace was gone, he barely spoke.

  One day Papa Joe went out back to get a chicken from the coop for supper, and I blithely followed. He grabbed one by the neck, walked it over to the well-scarred chopping block, pinned its head down, and chopped it off—one swing of an ax, swift and strong. The headless bird sprang from the block and ran around in a spiral, blood spurting from its neck, until it fell lifelessly to the ground. I was horrified. I passed on chicken for a while.

  By late morning, Uncle Paul and I began our long walk back to the House with No Steps. Along the way we passed layabout men leaning against muddy trucks parked under favorite shade trees. They checked in every day like it was a job, swigging cheap liquor from twisted paper bags, entertaining themselves with profane ruminations on the world as it passed them by. They cracked wise about other people’s problems, even as they secretly wallowed in regret, lying about wrung-out lives they wished they had lived better, saying things like:

  “Dat boy thank he somethin’.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Thank he shittin’ in high cotton.”

  “Sho nuff.”

  “And look at dat gal.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fuckin’ everythang walkin’, and half of what’s standin’ still.”

  “Sho nuff?”

  And we passed old women who sat whiling away the days in sagging chairs on rickety porches, thinking backward, looking out through eyes grown wise from bodies grown frail.

  We stopped to visit with some of Uncle Paul’s friends and a few of our relatives. One of Paul’s favorites was Sun Buddy, an imposing hermit with a long beard that tangled beneath his chin like the roots of a prairie grass. He drew his name from his habit of sitting quietly in the sun, sucking it up, in much the same way a frog basks on a river rock. He lived in a rundown house behind a yard filled with chest-high weeds, a narrow trail winding through them to a front door that was barely visible from the street. I never went past the weeds or into the house, and never heard Sun Buddy speak. I played near the street until Paul came out.

  One of my favorites was a distant cousin named Sarah, one of the only people I knew in town who was my age. She was being raised by her grandmother, a kindly old woman whom I couldn’t imagine raising her voice, even to call for help. Sarah was nice with me, but with her grandmother she released sprays of venom, her irritation in direct propo
rtion to her grandmother’s docility. She seemed subconsciously to blame her grandmother for the absence of her real mother.

  A favorite of both of ours was Aunt Odessa, a small, loquacious woman with deeply wrinkled skin and sprigs of gray hair jutting out every which way. She lived at the crest of a hill around the corner from Papa Joe’s place, in a small three-room house, unpainted, its wooden planks weathered silver and warped with decay. Her house had no bathroom, no plumbing, and no gas heating. She retrieved water from an outside pipe, and bathed in a washtub. She went to the bathroom in a slop jar and ferried its contents to a spot out back.

  Like the houses of many older people in the area, Aunt Odessa’s didn’t have a living room. Every room served as a bedroom, a dining room, and a bathroom. The front door opened onto the largest room, which contained two beds, a couple of straight-backed chairs, a large wooden trunk, and a wood-burning heater, the only heater in the house. There was another room that I never entered, and a small kitchen. The kitchen, which opened onto the back porch, contained a decades-old refrigerator, her only electrical appliance, and a massive wood-burning stove that she used to cook simple dishes like cornbread and collard greens.

  The house was dark and smelled of mothballs and medicine. But it was always clean and orderly—the product of a simple, utilitarian life that produced little clutter. The only oddity was her collection of Wonder Bread bags, knotted into balls and scattered around the kitchen.

  Aunt Odessa came to stay with us one winter because she refused to pay to have a blockage cleared from the flue of her heater. Her stay was supposed to be a few days. It turned into a few months. By the end of the stint, her endless, idiosyncratic babblings, which I usually found both fascinating and hysterically funny, had begun to wear on my mother. When she left, my mother vowed that Aunt Odessa would never come back. “That woman’ll worry the horns off a goat.”