I arrived on time for the funeral, which meant that I was late. This was expected to be a spectacle, so people had come early. The ushers sent me through one of the back doors to the choir stand, where there were a few seats still available. As I went up on the stand I stared down at the tiny caskets. Four. Interspersed with flowers. Stretching all the way from one side of the building to the other. I had seen a casket as small as these only once before, when I was a little boy, in the old church in Shiloh, after the death angel had dipped into the crib and taken a baby cousin.
I took a seat facing one of the children’s uncles, who was in the first pew. He was a boxy boy who played on the basketball team with me. I had never seen him cry before, but that day he was bent over with sadness, inconsolable. In fact, there wasn’t a dry eye in the building except mine.
I was embarrassed. The thing that stirred other folks’ souls no longer stirred mine. So I soon got up and left, pretending to be overcome, knowing everyone would understand. I walked around outside among the quiet cars, which were pointing at the building from all directions. I wondered what was wrong with me, wondered what had happened to the heart I once had. Then I thought about the only thing that I was sure would make me cry, the death of the only person in the world who I was sure loved me: my mother. The thought of her dying and leaving me all alone reduced me to tears and reminded me that I was still human, still alive.
The other funeral was for our basketball coach. He had a heart attack and died one night after a parent-teacher conference during which an irate parent yelled at him.
The coach had struggled with us, trying, in the way good coaches do, to make better men as well as better athletes of us. He yelled a lot and often twisted his words: “Dat’s why y’all can’t run no damn where—smokin’ dat wine and drankin’ dat dope!”
He was right, of course, if a little backward in the phrasing. Everyone was drinking and smoking, it seemed, except me. I shared a locker with Russell and Alphonso, regular drinkers who stocked the locker with bags of weed. They smoked, and I didn’t. No pressure, no judgment either way. We had an understanding. But in truth, I could not fully rid of judgment the eye I was turning.
The coach had tried to work with me to improve my passion for the game. I had the talent but not the heart. I was now as tall as my brothers, but as a result of always being the smallest when we played sandlot ball, I’d gotten good at dribbling around outside while they’d post up down low. Playing point guard came naturally now. I was able to see the movements on the floor as if they were being diagrammed on a clipboard, able to handle the ball as if it were a natural outgrowth of my hand, able to thread a pass among a bustle of moving bodies so that it arrived in a spot you didn’t even know a teammate would be.
But I wanted something more from my life than basketball, so I only tried hard enough to be better than my friends, not hard enough to be the best I could be. Still, I was made captain of the team the year the coach died.
The school arranged for the players to ride to the funeral on a bus, the way we went to games. I knew that I would be expected to cry, but I also knew that would be impossible. At the service, big women hung on me, fanning me, waiting for me to fall out like the other boys, yet I couldn’t will it to happen. I was sure that soon their anticipation would turn to suspicion, so I pretended I was overcome, as I had done at the funeral of the murdered children, and walked out of the church.
I knew that there was no way for me to board the bus with dry eyes, so I did again what worked before: I thought about a life without my mother. But I couldn’t keep going to that same well to retrieve my tears. I needed back a bit of the faith I had lost, and with it a bit of my humanity.
I tried desperately to surrender to faith again, but it could not be done. The past year of my life disappeared into the ether as if it had never been real. It was as if it had all been a dream, a trick my mind had played on itself to stop the pain, a luscious, dreamy delusion, the kind people crave, the kind they miss when it is gone.
Just as I was reordering my own faith—falling away from it—I started to see more clearly the ways other people interpreted and interacted with the spirit world all around me—clinging to it.
There was, for instance, the exorcism that took place in the white trailer with the mint-green trim next door to Aunt Odessa’s house.
A classmate of mine—a pretty, gingerbread-colored girl with big, almond-shaped eyes—lived there with her slow-talking, slow-moving grandmother. During the summers the girl’s cousin often came from Dallas to visit. The cousin had short legs, a long torso, and a long face. She looked to me like a Shetland pony standing upright, though I knew that was too cruel a thing ever to say.
Something was wrong with the cousin, a little off, the way she looked at you like she was focusing on something behind you. We all figured that the something wrong was in the girl’s mind, but her grandmother figured that the problem was in her soul. So the grandmother arranged to have the demon drawn out.
One evening, as dusk settled and the air cooled, a group of us teenagers milled around in the street near their trailer, swapping stories and telling jokes. An aging sedan pulled into the drive, and three big, Bible-toting women wearing long dresses and matter-of-fact expressions got out and stepped quickly into the house.
There was a silence, like the quiet before a twister sets down and tears things up. Then the chanting, praying, and singing began. Then came the loud thumps and banging. We stopped talking and started staring, listening closely to the sounds coming from the trailer. The gingerbread-colored girl came outside, embarrassed, and tried to explain what the old ladies were attempting to do. After about half an hour the cousin burst out of the door, stunned and disoriented, clothes disheveled, hair tossed. She paced around the yard like a frightened animal, breathing hard and choking back tears. We asked if she was all right, knowing full well that something was wrong. She didn’t respond. After she calmed down, she went back inside. This cycle repeated itself several times over the next couple of hours. We tried to giggle away our discomfort at this thing that was happening, secretly questioning whether there might be merit in it, openly fretting over our own inaction, knowing that interfering with grandmothers and spirits was out of bounds.
Around the fringes of our tiny society, this kind of pseudo-religious, mystical fanaticism was not uncommon: the desperate and hyper-superstitious visited seers as well as preachers, sprinkled this or that around the house to ward off evil, hid a little bag or small bowls of something under a bed or in a closet to keep a wandering husband home. In their minds, the spirits, both good ones and bad ones, had to be managed. A streak of bad luck was never as simple as it seemed; something was on the move, someone had worked the roots or stirred a “haint.”
Some people were thought to be witches, and others took the craft seriously.
One of our witches lived in a house across the street from the field where Papa Joe had raised the hogs, next door to the trailer where the big women had held down the frightened girl. Her name was Nellie. She was a recluse who lived with her sister in a tiny extension built on her brother’s house. I often went into the main house and stared at the wall that it shared with the extension, trying to measure out Nellie and her sister’s space in my mind—six feet across, I figured, not big enough for two people, not wide enough to swing a cat.
Nellie only left the house to draw water from the outside pipe, slinking around in the shadows of a large tree and darting back inside whenever someone caught sight of her. When the older sister died, Nellie was forced out into the open. She’d be seen shuffling through the streets toward town in multiple layers of moth-eaten, dark-colored clothes and a big-brimmed hat. She held her arm up over her face, the way people do when they first step from the dark into the light.
Nellie was a dark-skinned woman, but her face, at least what we could see of it, was covered in white powder, like a woman just finished making biscuits. There was a space where her eyes must have been,
but the shadow from the hat fell hard there. You dared not look close enough to make out those eyes anyway. Who knew what might happen to a child who stared into the eyes of a witch.
When she passed, some children taunted her, calling her ugly, although no one ever really saw the whole of her face. In response, she hissed like a snake, scattering them like rats. I was convinced that she was a witch, but my mother was quick to set me straight: “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Nellie but crazy.”
Mr. Riley, who lived north of town, was different. Whereas children feared Nellie because she hid in the shadows, grown folks feared Mr. Riley because he seemed to command them. He was the conjure man who, years later, in 1994, spurred a couple of sisters from Arcadia to gouge out the eyes of a third sister, to purge her of a demon.
The woman who lost her eyes, a second-grade schoolteacher, had gone to Mr. Riley complaining of headaches. He told her that she was under attack from a demon. So the woman’s sisters loaded her and their children into a car and headed west on Interstate 20, toward Dallas. The women ditched the car they were in, because they thought it was possessed, and rented a new one. They left their children with strangers at a house with a cross out front. And in a house outside Dallas that doubled as a church they beat the sister and tried to press garlic into her eyes before gouging them out, authorities believed with their bare hands. On national television, on The Phil Donahue Show, the eyeless woman defended her zealous sisters—better to live in darkness than be condemned to hell.
My mother didn’t believe in consulting seers enough to try it, but she wasn’t enough of a doubter to flout it. She constantly reminded us, only half jokingly, not to let anybody “feed us granddaddy legs,” which she thought a common hex. Voodoo was beyond the pale, but superstition was doctrine. My mother held to an elaborate code of superstitions that she had adopted from Mam’ Grace:
If your left hand itched, you were getting a letter. If your right one itched, you were getting money. If someone swept your feet with a broom, you were going to jail. If a dog howled, someone was going to die. If you dreamed of fish, someone was going to have a baby. It was bad luck if you broke a mirror, had a black cat cross in front of you, or traveled with raw peanuts. And if you threw peanut hulls around the back door, your parents were going to argue.
My mother never arched her eyebrows, because Mam’ Grace had told her that a woman once did so and went blind. She never started anything on a Friday that she couldn’t finish in a day, because Mam’ Grace had told her that a lady once started a dress for her little girl on a Friday but didn’t finish. The little girl died that night, and the lady had to bury her in the dress.
Whatever she’d heard Mam’ Grace say was gospel to my mother. I had come to believe that, in many ways, my mother viewed Mam’ Grace as her real mother. That’s why she had run from the house when Mam’ Grace died. That’s why the tears had flowed out of her as they never would again. Mam’ Grace, the woman who had drifted like a raft through the Valley of the Shadow, was more her mother than Big Mama, the woman who had floated from husband to husband until she found the ocean.
Everyone around me seemed to be running scared from a spirit, and it all began to look iffy to me. My faith was slowly eroding. Religion itself increasingly seemed a hollow homage to an eviscerated idea, a thing done out of the momentum of its always having been done.
Finally I fell back on the original God of life, the God that exists apart from books and rules and fear, the God that we first come to know before we know much of anything, God as only children know God.
Children see God every day; they just don’t call it that. It’s the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It’s the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scented breezes. Children feel God stuffed into brown fluffy dogs with stitches strong enough to withstand a good squeeze, and on the lips of round women who can’t get enough sugar from Chocolate.
I began to believe that God is us and nature, beauty and love, mystery and majesty, everything right and good. But I kept my new beliefs to myself, knowing that I had earned myself a new label, one just as bad as the other two, one anathema to all I’d ever known: not only punk and nigger, but now backslider.
That didn’t mean that I wouldn’t spend much of my life chasing the feeling of being “saved” the way it was written and relayed, the way that I had felt it, for the high of it, that feeling of floating through air. I would. I would conscientiously try to trick myself into returning to that place—to relive the remarkable, incomparable peace I had gotten from it. But it was hopeless. It could not be done. Once the curtain has been pulled back, the wizard as you knew him can never be real again.
7
Another Boy’s Baby
“I’m pregnant.” Those are the two words that changed my life, again.
I was a senior in high school. I hadn’t had a real girlfriend since I shared Jesus with the cheerleader. That courtship ended when I moved away from religion and she moved away from town.
With no new girl to fixate on, I turned my attention to maintaining the person I had become while paying respect to the person I used to be, and on pretending to be “the Big Cat” while still looking out for the underdog. I began to negotiate a fine social line, thin as a kite string, between soaring and remaining grounded, between being a popular boy and remembering that I had once felt like an invisible one.
I knew that the most fortunate kids generally steered clear of the least fortunate, but those were the ones I was drawn to.
The least fortunate were kids like the boy at school with a severe mental disability. “Retarded” was the word folks used in those days. He had unkempt hair that rose in stiff peaks like the burrs that fell from the sweet gum trees. He had eyes that looked in two directions at the same time, and he walked bent over, rising up on his toes at the end of every step, like a boy about to run. Folks said that his mother beat him so badly that he hid under the house with the dogs.
He didn’t want much from me: just a high-five and a smile from the boy who played basketball, the one who never laughed at him. Whenever he saw me, he ran to me with the joyful innocence of a child, loose and happy, the way I had run across the basketball court as a small boy. After he’d slapped me high-five, he’d follow me around, a few paces back, there but not, his face looking like he wanted to say something he didn’t have the words for. I knew that feeling. I knew what it felt like to want to say something but not have the words.
So I did a tiny thing by not doing another: I didn’t shoo him away as others did. And I didn’t let my friends make fun of him. I wanted him to know that when he was near me he’d be safe, that no one would laugh, and that he didn’t have to hide with the dogs. It wasn’t real bravery, just humanity.
At home, I became obsessed with the idea of taking care of things. I first tried my hand with pets. My experiences were always unfortunate. There was the black and white billicat that hid each morning beneath my bed and, as my feet searched for the floor, scratched my ankle until the blood came. There was the pink-eyed white rabbit that disappeared after tunneling its way out of the pen I built on the ground. There was the yellow and green parakeet that froze to death the first night I had it because I didn’t know better than to leave its uncovered cage near our drafty window.
But children were different. I had a way with them. So I took a younger boy from down the street under my wing. He was the son of the neighborhood bootlegger, a woman who lived across the street from the wooded lot where I used to lounge on the fallen tree and listen to the standing ones. Every Sunday afternoon, when the liquor stores and juke joints shut down, her house lit up with a raucous bunch of men and a handful of women drinking hooch, playing cards, and dancing dirty.
She was a big, high-yellow woman with long, thin limbs. She had a nasal voice and a shiny pistol that she was quick to pull and willing to use. Like many of the other women in town, she had once shot her hu
sband for cheating. He had jumped out the window, but not before she shot off half his heel. He would have to do the rest of his street running with a limp.
By now the bootlegger had gotten rid of the cheating husband and taken up with a smiling man who had the same complexion as hers but was much younger, full of himself and able to match her temper. She already had a grown daughter, but when she took up with the young man, to everyone’s amazement she had another baby. He was an extremely light-skinned boy with a rakish crown of fine blond hair like a jumble of corn silk, who substituted g’s for d’s when he spoke.
Growing up as he did, he saw more than he should have, and he entertained me and my brothers with the details. He imitated people having sex. He described the way his daddy made hooch: “My gaddy take that wine, and my gaddy cook that wine.” And he cursed with the ease of breathing, but not with malice. He delivered the words with a charming, innocent imprudence, unaware of his sin and therefore not guilty of it.
“Gammit!”
“God gamn!”
“You don’t know me. I’ll cuss yo’ gamn ass out.”
I did my best to be an advocate and a mentor to him, to be the kind of big brother that I wanted, to protect him from trauma as best I could, to compensate for what I had lacked.
Besides my mentoring, I still wanted to be a politician, so I started to look beyond Gibsland for ways of speaking and behaving that would shake loose the obvious signs of my strapped upbringing.
I began to emulate two men. One was the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, a man I looked up to the way most children looked up to athletes and movie stars. I saw in him simple pride and easy grace, a sort of righteous stoicism—stiff-backed and forward-facing, with a quiet resolve born of long suffering.
Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 15
