In the Language of My Captor

by Shane McCrae

  I was afraid of the large, older boy from the moment I met him—I don’t remember much about the moment itself, but I remember the fear, and I remember he threatened to beat me up if I didn’t leave my bedroom window unlocked for him. But I would have left it unlocked even if he hadn’t threatened me. When I was a child, I was willing, even eager, to let anybody do anything they wanted to me, so long as they didn’t hurt me, and so long as what they were doing looked like the things I saw people doing in my grandfather’s magazines, which seemed, especially among the boys I met, common—not my grandfather’s magazines in particular, but most of the neighborhood boys found similar magazines in their own homes—and in which we discovered, not images corresponding to any overwhelming desires we might have felt, but guides to the overwhelming desires encompassing us. What I remember most distinctly is not any single act, but the sensation I felt, both empty and vast, as I watched what people did to me, and what I did to them, reluctantly, but I would if they asked me to, checking to make sure it looked right, familiar. I was comfortable in that vastness, and afraid of it, and I hated it, and yearned toward it, but not toward it, exactly, but toward people I thought might be familiar with it, as my grandfather was, and willing to inflict it.

  JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM LIMBER DREAMS OF AN UNKNOWING LOVE

  She is a slim young Negress but I know

  she is my Varina she is a girl

  I saw only once a few weeks ago

  in town on an errand with her master

  whom she resembled and his wife who did

  not look at her but commanded the air

  immediately before her own face

  and the Negress three steps behind obeyed

  she was nobody she is Varina

  I recognize her as she was and is

  two women in a single body I

  stand hidden in a shadow in the dream

  watching but I stood in the sun when I

  saw her but things are not as they were and

  I stand hidden in a shadow and as

  she passes three steps behind her master

  who had passed half a step behind his wife

  I reach for her and in the way of dreams

  touching her who was the moment before

  a stranger I know her and have known her

  from the moment of her birth and in the

  way of dreams also she is new to me

  as the moon is she is both known and strange

  I pull her into the darkness that hides

  me from her master and his wife and hid

  me from her before and there I desire

  her as a white man desires a Negress

  as two women in a single body

  I draw her close to me and as I reach

  for her face her master’s wife calls her name

  Varina she calls where are you and she

  calls with my Varina’s voice she calls her

  name and mixes it with mine Jefferson

  where are you I have fallen asleep in

  my study my Varina calls for me

  as the moon calls for the light of the sun

  from across an unknowable blackness

  JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS INHERITS THE KINGDOM OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA

  I lived with momma for a nigger’s age

  For seven years since I was seven I

  Ain’t seen her once and now I’m almost eight

  I think she must be free momma Vari-

  na she says it don’t matter who your mom-

  ma was if you’re a man she says Are you

  A man Jim look at Joe I look at him

  But I don’t see me in his eyes but two

  Blue shadows that ain’t black like shadows should be

  I look at him and I don’t see no way

  For me to be a man but I see daddy

  Jeff and my face is shadows in his eyes

  I look at Joe he got daddy Jeff’s face

  My daddy’s white so I don’t get his face

  3

  My grandfather—although I don’t know whether he would have described himself in this way—was a white supremacist. He wouldn’t have been ashamed to admit that he believed white people were superior to black people—especially superior to black people in particular—indeed, he happily—or, really, “gleefully” would probably be a better word, since white supremacists don’t ever seem happy so much as gleeful—admitted to this belief many times when I was a child. But I suspect he might have thought the phrase “white supremacist” was too fancy for him. He had been, as a child, the younger brother of a much larger boy, and, along with his older brother Thomas, and his younger brother, Raymond—who grew up to become a landlord, who would eventually be shot through the neck by a tenant he had evicted a few days before, and would die in a soft-top convertible, blood spraying from his neck, his head rolling slightly from side to side on his shoulder as he pointed toward a narrow gap between two dumpsters, wordlessly urging his wife, who was already crawling away from the car, to safety—as a child, had lived in poverty, in the wake of the Dust Bowl, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Because of and despite this, he hated “white trash” almost as much—although the hate was a different kind of hate, a sad duty—as he hated blacks, my father especially.

  I tracked my father down when I was 16—by then, my grandparents had divorced and I was living with my grandmother in Salem, Oregon, where I had lived with my father when I was a baby—and it was then that I learned my grandparents had taken me from him when I was three, and not, as they had so often told me, when I was 18 months old. And of all the lies I was told as a child, this lie has been the hardest lie to shake—it won’t, in fact, not yet, anyway, be shaken. When I think about it now, which isn’t often, but I do, being taken, I imagine myself as both 18 months and three years old, and the scene in which I am disappeared plays out twice; I see the two versions simultaneously. In one version, I’m naked except for a diaper, splashing in a dirty puddle at the end of my driveway in Round Rock as my grandmother tends to the row of flowers between her new house and her new lawn, her back to her new child; in the other version, I’m fully clothed, wearing a half maroon, half gray T-shirt, the two colors separated by a white stripe about a half-inch thick—maroon above, gray below—and bellbottom jeans, and riding a big wheel my father has just given me, when my grandmother lifts me from the big wheel to put me in the back seat of my grandparents’ big, white Dodge 4-door, and as she carries me to the car I cry out, and reach back for the big wheel. I’m afraid I will lose it forever, but then I lose it forever.

  My grandparents took me to Round Rock. They told my mother she would never see me again if she told my father where I was. The first thing my grandfather did—that was the way my grandmother always told the story—the first thing he did after we moved into our new house was throw me into a wall, the living room wall, the stretch of wall, maybe four feet wide—in a few years he would hang a painting of a Native American crouching to touch the still surface of a lake, which he later replaced with a self-portrait, there—next to the big, sliding glass door that opened to the back yard, which I loved but can’t really remember anymore, not anything good about it, but I remember the time the neighborhood flooded and the septic tank burst or maybe just overflowed, but it seemed like it must have been overflowing for years because the whole yard, and it was a big yard, was covered with about an inch or so of watery sewage, the grass was swimming in it, but also the grass was still, but also the grass was drowned.

  The minnows clustered there, on the left side of the bridge if one were facing the school, if one had stopped on the way to the school. There the creek seemed to slow down a little before it filtered through the three small tunnels underneath the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, the creek emptied into a shallow pond—about a foot to two feet deep, and about 30 feet wide by 80 feet long—but the pond wate
r was too dirty to see anything in it. The minnows might have passed through the tunnels into the dirty, dark pond—every morning, I might have been seeing new minnows swirling in the bright shallows—or they might have known to fight hardest there, at the mouths of the tunnels, where the water was still clear, against the darkness the element they lived in pushed and pulled them toward.

  JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM LIMBER DREAMS THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AS HE DREAMS HE IS ARGUING HIS CAUSE IN WASHINGTON D.C.

  The wheel of history turns in the gut

  of the white man but the Negro is strapped

  to the wheel and broken by the turning

  and nearly liquefied by the turning

  and the white man sickens to him who says

  we do not pay for the life we enjoy

  I say we pay with our sickness I say

  our enjoyment is not what you suppose

  but it is instead a life of worry

  and disappointed love to him I say

  yes we love our Negroes and with a great

  love Yankees cannot know and would not want

  to know if they could and to those who would

  free the Negro I say look to your guts

  you fatten on the people you would free

  JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS ANOTHER CHILD FIRST

  They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph

  Except he wasn’t dead at first they put

  Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s after Joseph

  Died and I used to call him Joe they put

  Me in Joe’s clothes at first before he died

  Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him I

  Was seven I was seven when he died

  Still but a whole year bigger then but I

  Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with

  Momma Varina and with daddy Jeff

  I never lived so good as when I lived with

  Them and especially it was daddy Jeff

  Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes

  Until they fit as tight as bandages

  JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS CANNOT DEPEND UPON POLITICAL OR ECONOMIC POWER TO BE THE WELLSPRING OF HIS FREEDOM

  I ask myself what man would daddy Jeff

  Be if he weren’t the president I ask

  Myself because I do not know myself

  And I can’t ask anyone else I think

  He would be president of something small-

  er than America like Richmond or

  Even just the house I reckon even then all

  The Negroes in the county would admire

  Him and he would be president of the Ne-

  groes I would vote for him sometimes he lets

  Me vote and he says Vote as Joe if he

  Could vote would vote I vote we eat dessert

  First and I run to tell the kitchen like I’m

  A president and since I eat in the kitchen

  4

  The house immediately to the right of my house if one were facing my house, having just walked home, bleeding, from a fight on the playground at the school across the street, was a rental. My grandparents often pointed this out to me as a warning. And I understood they meant that the families who lived in the house, never for longer than a year, had less money than my family did. And I treated the house and its backyard like they were empty even when they weren’t.

  Usually, the families who lived in the house immediately to the right of mine didn’t have pets. But once, a family with a dog lived there, a small dog, it seemed small to me even when I was small, but it was probably about half my size. I used to play with the dog beneath the fence that separated our yards. I had dug a hole between our yards, or the dog had, and I would stick my hand under the fence and throw things for the dog to fetch. This was the first dog I ever tortured, and it might have been the last—I can’t recall torturing another dog after it, but my cats before, and a small bird after—and I stopped harming animals altogether when I was about eight or nine years old, and this, the dog I’m remembering, torturing it, must have happened when I was six or seven. One day, for no reason, I don’t think I had a reason, the dog had never hurt me, I grabbed a length of lead pipe, and called the dog to the hole, and when it stuck its nose into the hole, I smashed the end of it with the pipe. This is what I remember most clearly about the dog, this and not the dog and I playing—smashing the dog’s nose again and again with the pipe, eventually the end of the pipe, which was about two inches in diameter, jamming it at the dog’s nose, and the blood, the dog snarling, its teeth bared, biting the hole.

  JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS CANNOT AFFORD TO MAKE DEMANDS OF LOVE

  Momma Varina feels for Negroes daddy

  Jeff says she feels for Negroes more than what

  She should but he don’t tell her what she should be

  Feeling for Negroes he’s the president

  And what’s more daddy Jeff and if he want-

  ed to he could instead he talks to me

  A lot of the time he talks to me about

  Things he don’t talk he says to nobody

  About he says it’s something like a Ne-

  gro cannot listen like the folks he owes

  A duty to and that’s a great relief

  I know he’s scared sometimes but he don’t show

  It much to nobody else that’s how I know he

  Loves me because he don’t mind what he shows me

  JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM LIMBER DREAMS THE FREEDOM OF THE NEGRO WILL ONE DAY BE HIS FREEDOM

  I see the declaration passing from

  hand to hand from Washington to Richmond

  from horse to horse from rider to rider

  one galloping furiously until

  his horse falls dead at the hooves of the next

  most trotting some walking one paused and let

  his fat horse nibble at grass for an hour

  while he chatted with a schoolgirl in Maine

  the declaration winds through every state

  and territory answering the cries

  of the soil for the blood of native sons

  now mixed with the soil of distant places

  not with each drop disentangled and brought

  home but with news of my full and uncon-

  ditional pardon which is no answer

  and the soil of every state and every

  territory after it has been kicked

  or scooped into the air it doesn’t fall

  but floats behind the rider and much of

  the soil beneath it rises to meet it

  and it’s a cresting wake of dirt and mud

  follows the instrument of my freedom

  it floats about six feet above the ground

  not as an unbroken stream but instead

  every few yards there is a small gap

  and each segment of dirt slowly resolves

  into a human shape from the head down

  so that at first clumps of dirt seem to be

  falling but as they fall they spread apart

  and branch into arms then a chest then legs

  then feet which finally touch the pitted earth

  and these dark men march behind the pardon

  neither for any reason faster nor

  slower ever but ever marching at

  a mourner’s pace but I see the last rid-

  er is Lincoln and his horse floats and breeds

  no men though they come but they come so slow-

  ly through ruined Virginia the pardon

  reaches me days before the men who will

  kill me and I begin to plan my life

  JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS CONSIDERS HIS PLACE IN H
ISTORY

  Mostly I hear him daddy Jeff before

  I see him he talks to himself real loud when

  He walks I hear him mostly anywhere

  In the house even when I’m in the yard and

  Momma Varina says a gentleman

  Announces his presence with his demeanor

  I don’t know what that means I think it means

  She wants him just to hush sometimes I seen her

  Crying and slap him once and the next day

  The Yankees marched on Petersburg and that

  Was yesterday today he pulls me a-

  side and he says he don’t know where they’ll take me

  That scared me good but he just floats off talking

  Just like a ghost just like I ain’t his ghost

  5

  About a year later—on my birthday, actually, the last day of summer—I rode my bike down the gravel road to the left of my school—a road I had often taken to soccer practice—farther than ever before, thinking it might eventually intersect with the dirt road that led away from the village, all the way until it curved sharply into darkness, where the road met a forest that had risen just past the soccer fields and baseball diamonds, or almost all the way, really, until about 70 feet before the curve, and there, by the side of the road, I laid my bike down and stepped toward the forest.

  The forest was thick, and dark, and mostly, I think, oak, and some cedar trees. I don’t know for sure why I stopped where I stopped, but I think I might have noticed, glancing at the forest as I headed toward the curve I probably wouldn’t have ridden past even if I had reached it, the shadowy, almost overgrown path into the forest, and stopped to investigate it. Back then, the forests near my house were littered with abandoned treehouses—well, most of the treehouses were just boards wedged between branches and trunks so as to create perches, but a few had walls and even roofs, and all were invisible unless one stood fairly close to them. In one of the better treehouses, in a forest not far from the forest I had just entered, I had discovered, just the previous Saturday, half a pack of cigarettes and a few old copies of Hustler. Probably, I entered this forest looking for the same treehouse—or, rather, hoping the treehouse with the walls, and the cigarettes, and the pornography would be repeated in this forest, like an outpost station stocked with standard rations. At first, as I followed the path, I saw nothing but tall trees and thick foliage. But soon I noticed a wroughtiron fence to my right, itself almost disappeared by foliage, and beyond it I saw graves.