Fire Shut Up in My Bones

by Charles M. Blow

  For more polish, I looked to the images of a man being beamed into our house from across the ocean, to a prince, the one who a few years before had married a bashful-looking woman named Diana. He was my namesake, Charles. Prince Charles—I liked the ring of that. I pictured myself as a prince—not him, but like him. I studied the way he held his head—up, just so, not haughty, but apart—and the way he held his hands, clasped in front of or behind his body, or one in the pocket of a suit jacket, chest always forward. I studied the way he stood—no fidgeting and no slouching, posture like a pine tree, straight up, tall and slim, a certain coolness in the shade he threw. Thereafter, whenever I wanted to be impressive in public, I mimicked the manners of a King and a prince.

  The only place this didn’t work was on the basketball court. There I shed my bent toward coolness, my aversion to fighting, and became prone to aggression, a tendency that spread to my teammates. We became involved in so many fights and near fights in my senior year that the district warned that one more flare-up would get us banned from the state playoffs. Other teams were aware of our warning and would taunt us and pick on me, in particular, because I was proving to be among the most explosive. I barely understood where the anger came from, only that it was there, pouring out with the sweat.

  That year, our school arranged to play the team of the academy where many of the white children from our town went to school. When I walked into the gym that night I knew the game was about more than basketball. The bleachers were completely filled—white people on one side and black people on the other. There was an odd energy in the air that heightened the intensity of both teams. With every blocked shot or three-pointer, the whites or the blacks stood and cheered, each reaction outsized.

  As the game drew to an end, we held a slim lead. Our new coach told my teammates to get the ball to me so that I could run out the clock. But two of the white boys trapped me against the baseline, and another came over and started to slap my arms and shoulders behind the shield of his teammates—not trying to take the ball, but attempting, I was sure, to make me react violently and kill our playoff chances.

  He got his wish. I erupted in anger, lunging for him. My teammates ran to restrain me: “Don’t do it, Blow, you know what they’re tryin’ to do.” I saw that everyone in the gym had risen to their feet, tense and scowling, ready to explode. I realized that if I swung at the boy, not only would our playoff dreams be dashed, but I might destroy the fragile truce black and white folks had maintained in Gibsland for a century. I had to learn to be as controlled on the court as off it.

  My efforts to transform myself in all ways were going well until I fell for a girl in my class named Evelyn. She, her brother, and a girl cousin had moved from Texas the year before to live with their grandmother in Gibsland. This was not uncommon. Hometown folks who’d moved away and had children who got out of control in the cities often sent them home to Gibsland.

  Evelyn had a short, sassy haircut—rows of curls on the sides and back no bigger than the round of a Magic Marker, and a lick of hair pushed up at the forehead. She had a pretty smile with wet, pomegranate-colored lips, and a laugh so light and sweet that it rained down happiness on all of us like a sprinkle of powdered sugar.

  She was a popular girl and a talented basketball player, launching soft, left-handed shots from beyond the three-point line, shots that almost always seemed to fall into the basket. Everything about her said “cool.” Maybe that’s why she walked with her chin held high—not arrogant, but confident. Cool.

  Her boyfriend had been a boy named Baron, who was a year older than us and had been on the basketball team with me. He was being raised by his mother; his father was in jail for beating a man to death. At the start of our senior year, after Baron graduated, he too went to jail for killing a man. Soon after, Evelyn made clear that I was the new target of her affections.

  It seemed odd, but I didn’t question it. Boys hijacked by hormones don’t really think, they chase. They see risk and consequences as if through the wrong end of a telescope: smaller and pushed far away. There was no way for me to resist the lure of pomegranate lips and chocolate thighs, no way to turn back when clumsy advances were met with such warm agreement. This was the kind of feeling that the male figures who came in the night did not bring, the burning beneath the breastbone, the kind of heat that blinds a boy and reduces reason to ashes.

  Evelyn spent many of her afternoons at the house of her aunt, a West End woman not much older than us, who tried too hard to be our friend and not hard enough to be grown. She was the kind of woman who would neither tell her age nor act it. The aunt’s house was near my house, just beyond a bend in the highway from the upholstery shop. Evelyn’s cousin liked Alphonso, my friend who looked at other boys with the kind of look that made them beat themselves up, and whom girls now looked at like they were dreaming. So every afternoon after school, Alphonso and I walked to the aunt’s house to meet the girls.

  The aunt entertained us with profane stories about loose living and ghetto loving, talking more to Evelyn and her cousin than to me and Alphonso, teaching them how to milk the most out of a man, and the limits of such tactics. One day when we were there, she warned the girls, “Don’t neva let yo’ ol’ man buy all yo’ stuff, ’cause when he leave, he gone want it all back. I was messing with this ol’ man one time and we went out to eat. We got ta arg’ing and he said, ‘Gimme back all my shit!’ I got to thanking, ‘Dis his dress, dese his shoes, dese his draws, dis his damned wig.’ Hell, if I had-a gave him back all his shit, I woulda walked outta there butt nekked and ball-headed.”

  One day when the aunt was out, Evelyn led me to a bedroom. No words passed between us, but none were needed. She was inviting me to have sex. She took off her clothes and lay back on the bed. I took off mine and lay on top of her. I didn’t have a condom. I had never needed one. And she didn’t request that I wear one. I didn’t ask if she was on the pill. She didn’t volunteer the information. None of those thoughts ever occurred to me.

  My body entered hers and my senses caught fire. The world slowed down and my mind sped up. My body felt stiff and numb. Her body felt wet and soft and warm, the kind of warmth that piqued the nerves with the crisp of coldness, like summer rain falling on bare shoulders or creek water running over bare feet.

  Soon we melted into each other and collapsed in exhaustion. The deed had been gladly done, the pact of passion sealed. We rose and dressed ourselves in silence the way too-young people do, not having the words to express love or gratitude or concern, unable to find a graceful way to part ways.

  A few weeks later, she told me: “I’m pregnant.” I was stunned. I didn’t ask if I was the father, I simply assumed that I was, and she said nothing to confirm or deny my assumption. In that moment the whole of my life had to be redrawn. “Father” had to be fit into it. I got up the nerve to tell my mother. “Evelyn is pregnant.” She responded with one line: “Is it yours?” “Yes,” I said, although I realized then that I hadn’t actually asked. My mother simply walked to her room and closed the door.

  I don’t remember much about my relationship with Evelyn after that, only that we soon broke up. But I do remember thinking constantly about how best to do right by the baby once it came.

  I remember the day Evelyn’s brother came to my class, asked to see me, and told me that she had had the baby. A little girl, to whom Evelyn gave the name I’d suggested. Happy, I ran to my mother’s classroom to share the news. My mother didn’t have a class that period, so she was tidying up. I swung open the door and said with a smile, “Evelyn had the baby.” My mother responded, without ever stopping her tidying, “You know that’s not your baby, right?” I didn’t respond. I just walked out. My heart wouldn’t let me hear it. I wrote off my mother’s comment as derision born of disappointment.

  The first time I held the baby my heart melted: her writhing and cooing in the cradle of my arms, my knees weak and trembling, my elbows locked for fear that I might drop her. I fell instantly int
o the deepest, most primal kind of love, the kind that makes a man willing to lay down his life or work himself to death. She was tiny and light and precious. Beautiful. And she smelled sweet, intoxicating even. But it was her innocence that moved me most: glassy eyes that had never seen death, soft feet that had never fled from fear, delicate hands that had never thumbed a Bible to hover a finger above the word “abomination.”

  In mid-May, just before graduation, I flew to Knoxville, Tennessee. I had won my way to the international science fair, held there that year. I was trying to keep myself focused on my studies, to find a balance between being a good father and being a good student.

  My science fair project was about why the so-called Star Wars anti–ballistic missile system, proposed by President Reagan, wouldn’t succeed. I built a big wooden board with an inserted section for a diorama of the earth and the sky to illustrate how the system was supposed to work, and made cutouts for a television and a VCR so that I could play a videotape of a documentary I had recorded showing why it wouldn’t work. It looked impressive, but I had violated one of the basic rules of science fair projects: I hadn’t actually done an experiment. My project was basically a research project. Still, I’d won the district fair.

  I wanted to be impressive at the international science fair, so in the weeks leading up to it I went to the parish library and checked out every etiquette book I could find. I read those books front to back. I felt I had uncovered a trove of secrets that had been withheld from me.

  The flight to Knoxville was my first time in an airplane. I saw the world from above, the way God saw it: dotted with ponds and crossed by rivers. In spots it looked to me like the quilts Mama and Big Mama made—parcels of tan, khaki, and ecru; lime, emerald, and kelly green; squares, rectangles, and trapezoids. I drew comfort from that thought as turbulence jostled the plane, and I resisted the urge to throw up.

  I arrived in Knoxville, but my project did not. The airline said they’d lost it. I suspected that, being heavy and wooden as it was, the thing had in fact been mishandled, probably badly damaged, and they were simply covering it up. While all the other students stood proudly before their projects in the large convention hall, I would stand before an empty space where my project should have been, explaining to the baffled judges that it had been “lost” in transit.

  At the first dinner in Knoxville, I sat at a table with some other students. As I silently reveled in the fact that I now knew what all the spoons and forks were for and what to do if food fell on the floor, an older man approached and asked if a vacant seat was taken. It wasn’t, so he sat. He was a distinguished-looking man with kind eyes. He was very polite and engaging, asking each of us about our projects, commenting on each one as if he were truly interested.

  He said that he had been one of the scientists on the Manhattan Project, information he relayed with the kind of pride that’s saddled with sadness. I didn’t know what it was until he explained it, but I knew from the way he had said the words—Manhattan Project—that it weighed on him, and that he was conflicted about his role in it.

  The juxtaposition of this dinner with the rest of my life was striking. Just days before, I had been in our living room with Paul, trying to explain to him that the cartoon characters on television that flummoxed him so were not people dressed up in costumes but thousands of drawings. I had gone from talking to a man who didn’t understand, nor had ever seen, the world, to sitting with a man who had helped make a weapon that could destroy it.

  The next day, I realized that one of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners was around the corner from my position in the exhibition hall. He had also done a project on the Star Wars program, although his seemed to be a rigorous computer simulation of the laser system. I walked past, scoping it out from afar, as if sizing up all the competition on the row. I was in awe, and I shrank with embarrassment, tucking my head into my shoulders the way Uncle Paul often did. The boy’s board was extraordinarily tall and covered in theories and mathematical equations that I couldn’t make heads or tails of—hieroglyphs to me. I stared at the marks the way Uncle Paul stared at the cartoons—flummoxed. The boy stood before the board, modest, bookish, and confident. I knew then that the competition in life was not at home, not in a little segregated town divided by a shallow ditch. This was the competition—the bookish boy and his extra-tall board.

  I told myself that I would never underestimate the competition again, now that I had gotten a gander at it. No one would cut me slack because I was a small-town boy. No one would show pity because I had messed up and made a baby. I would have to rise above.

  I got back to Gibsland on a Saturday. Graduation was that Sunday. I walked across the stage several times, not only accepting my diploma but being honored as valedictorian and receiving several scholarships.

  The week after graduation, I was visiting Evelyn and the baby at her grandmother’s apartment when my cousin Faith, who was a friend of Evelyn’s, came to visit. Papa Joe was also Faith’s great-grandfather, because Papa Joe had stepped out on Mam’ Grace and had a child in sin. Faith and I were not close, but we tolerated each other.

  That day, she walked into the apartment, spoke to us all, and then asked to hold the baby. Then she said the words that snapped the sense back into me: “Charles, she don’t look nothin’ like you.” Maybe she was saying it to be mean, or maybe she was trying to awaken a cousin without losing a friend. Whatever the reason, she was right. The child bore absolutely no resemblance to me and only a passing resemblance to Evelyn. For some reason, I hadn’t allowed myself to notice that before.

  My eyes went glassy like the baby’s, like I was seeing things for the first time.

  Slowly, the uneasy feeling settled over me that I had been holding another boy’s baby. I had quieted the voices in my head that condemned me for my carelessness and resigned myself to fatherhood. A part of me had gotten used to the idea, comfortable with it. Part of me desperately wanted the baby to be mine, but in my heart, in that moment, I no longer believed she was.

  For my science project I had counted the ways the multibillion-dollar Star Wars program wouldn’t work, but I had never allowed myself to count the months of Evelyn’s supposed gestation—six, maybe seven, from that time we’d had sex, not nine. And I had never allowed myself to question why Evelyn had swung so quickly from Baron to me—from a boy who had gone to prison to one who was going to college.

  I could taste the acid on the back of my tongue like I was about to vomit, the lies she had fed me wanting to come back up.

  I don’t know if Evelyn saw the truth settle over me that day Faith made her remark, but the next week she moved away with the baby. No notice. No new address. No phone number. Just gone. I never heard from her again.

  After she left, people talked openly about how it had been Baron’s baby, not mine, and I felt like a fool. I thought I knew the pain of betrayal through and through, but in a way this deception was even more hurtful than the others. How exactly is a boy supposed to fall out of the deepest love he’s ever known with the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen?

  I would never know what caused Evelyn to devise her plan or to abandon it, or even be absolutely sure that I was right and she had done wrong. All I knew was that in my heart, in my bones, I no longer believed. I figured that she had probably placed a safe bet after a bad one, and maybe after the fact she had thought better of it.

  Whatever her reason, and whatever the truth, I now had another hole in my heart.

  8

  The Brothers

  I didn’t go away to college as much as I ran away to it.

  I needed to go somewhere not haunted by memories. I needed to find a place where no one had ever died—no old woman surrendering her life as a last act of beauty; no old man with syrup-colored eyes coughing up lots of blood; no dead children at the bottom of a pond. I needed a place where there had never been a betrayal—no one whispering, “It’s just a game”; no hand moving like a snake; no trapped girl whos
e laugh rained down like sugar and whose lies rose up like bile.

  My dream of escape had centered on up north. Down south was too close for a boy who needed to run away. For no reason in particular, I had set my eyes on William and Mary, although being as it was in Virginia, it was still technically in the South. Maybe I would make it in, and maybe they would give me a basketball scholarship. But I never actually applied. In my heart I was convinced that I had no chance, that I was dreaming beyond my talents. Besides, my mother didn’t want me to go anywhere far, and couldn’t have paid for it if I did. But if I couldn’t escape north, I would escape farther south. I applied to Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. And because I was the valedictorian of my class, I was guaranteed a full scholarship. I decided to take it.

  But from the beginning, my mother raised doubts and built an argument designed to keep me closer. She was scared and nervous for me. She still saw me as her baby, certainly not a man, and couldn’t imagine not being able to get to me if I needed her. But I was determined to go.

  That is, until the recruiter at Grambling called me to his office to review the details of a scholarship his school would offer me.

  Grambling State University was the black school in the region that had supplanted Gibsland’s Coleman College. It was the place where my mother had gone to learn to make things like the stuffed dog with the button eyes and to get her teaching certification; where Nathan had gone and met the roommate who looked at me like he was sucking candy; and where my brothers William and Robert, like most Gibsland students, went by default.

  Still, I had never considered going to college there. In fact, I was hostile to the idea. It was too close for a boy who needed to run away.

  Grambling had its share of smart kids and passionate professors, but with its “Where Everybody Is Somebody” motto and redemption sensibility, it also drew and admitted many otherwise unadmittable students, young people in need of a second chance and a fresh start. Many of them were from rough parts of big cities—refugees from urban warfare and bad schools, in search of a safe place. At Grambling they didn’t have to worry about what color they wore, about whose turf they were on, about catching a stray bullet shot wild and loose from a passing car. They could just breathe—thick, pine-scented air under big empty skies. They could read and learn, party and make friends, grow and become something. “Somebody.”