Men We Reaped (14 page)

We didn't end up going to the movies. I had to pack. I folded clothes and burned CDs for my sisters and my cousins and loaded my car and stood in my yard and listened to the cacophony, even in winter, of insects in the woods surrounding my house. It was a blessed noise to hear the sounds of home even if I couldn't see much of it in the thick fog. While I worked, Charine sat in my car in the driveway with C. J. and smoked for an hour or so. He didn't want to go to whatever
his temporary home for the night was, to walk to Duck's house or Rob's house or Pot's house and sleep on the couch. He wanted to stay in my car with Charine, to talk into the night and through the morning. She was his home. But Charine told him:
I hate the cold
. She came inside around midnight, and he left. He walked down the street to Duck's house, disappearing into the fog. I imagine him standing beneath the big oak tree, waiting for his cousins to appear out of the fog and pick him up. If he couldn't be with Charine, he would avoid sleeping altogether and find other things to do with his night. They were planning to ride upcountry to bring his cousin's infant son home.

Charine had fallen asleep but I was still busy packing when the phone rang at two o'clock in the morning. It was C. J.'s mother.
Why is she calling the house?
I thought.

“Hello?”

“C. J.'s been in an accident—”

I thought:
No
.

“—and he didn't make it. Please tell Charine.”

I thought:
I cannot do this
.

“Okay,” I said.

C. J.'s mother sobbed and hung up the phone. I stared at the living room wall. I slumped over the sofa and tried to breath. The air felt wrong rushing down my throat. I called Hilton.

“Hello?”

I told him what C. J.'s mother had told me. I wiped my nose and said it all in a whisper.

“I cannot do this to her,” I cried. “I cannot tell her this. I cannot wake her up and do this to her.”

“I'm coming,” he said.

Thirty minutes later I let Hilton in the front door. He walked past me through the living room into the kitchen into the den and into Charine's room. He switched on the light and shook her awake. He told her. She walked outside in the fog, and I put on my shoes. We three rode down to the park where I had seen him twelve hours earlier. We parked in the dark and people materialized out of the fog and woods and gathered with us until the sun rose, brought together again by a third tragedy, by another death and more loss and grief. They passed around blunts like napkins. My sister smoked until her eyes closed from the tears.

C. J. had ridden upcountry with his cousins: after they dropped the baby off, they hit a train. There was no reflective gate arm at the railroad crossing. There were flashing lights and bells that should have warned of the passing train, but they didn't consistently work, and because it was located at a crossing out in the county in a mainly Black area, no one really cared about fixing them or installing a reflective gate arm. On that night, even if the warning system had been working, that errant mechanical sentry at that lonely Mississippi county crossing, it was no match for that blinding winter fog. C. J. was in the passenger's seat. Our cousin swerved and slammed into the train with the right side of the car, which was crushed by the impact of the train car. C. J. was stuck in the automobile. The cousins tried to pull him out but he was sandwiched there. The car caught on fire and he burned while they stood by helpless, hollering for help into the cold white night, their cries swallowed by the Mississippi fog.

I cannot ask Charine about the facts of C. J.'s death. There are things that I don't want her to think about, so I don't ask her if he was still alive after the car hit the train. I don't ask her if he spoke to his cousins when they tried to pull him from the car. I don't ask her if he was still conscious when the fire sparked. I cannot ask if that's what killed him, the fire. But I have heard stories from others, and they say he was alive. Some stories even say that he told them to leave him in the car while they were trying to pull him out; when I hear this, I think that he must have been in so much pain, his legs crushed by the metal, that he saw how futile their effort was. Some stories even say that the car burned and he was alive, and what is unspoken is that C. J. added his cries to his cousins' hollering for help and they all screamed there besides those faulty lights and the train track that cut through the woods. But I do not tell Charine these stories; I would not add to her burden of loss, especially when she already carries blame. Often she says that if she had sat a while longer in my car, if only, he would have stayed at our house with her instead of leaving and riding with his cousins upcountry.
If I would have stayed in the car
, she says,
he'd still be alive
. The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.

The day after C. J. died, we drove to our friend's house down the street, where we found him and four other boys from the hood sitting in a running car parked in his dirt driveway, beers in hand. They stared forward as if any minute they might hit the gas, drive north straight through the
house, and leave this place. They cried with set faces. Charine climbed into the car, sandwiched in, and hugged one of them. I turned my back to the humming vehicle and covered my face. I saw everything. I understood nothing.

The night after C. J.'s death, I drove my sister around DeLisle while she smoked the rest of that batch of weed she had given C. J. We drove my tank dry into the morning as she rolled blunts, and I wondered if we were courting death: If we weren't, why did he keep following us, insistently, persistently, pulling us to him one by one? She smoked that bag, and after she finished it, she smoked through other bags. She told me they calmed her like cigarettes. She smoked every day, and for years after that night, she wept abruptly in the car without warning. When she did I turned the music up, and I let her cry, able only to say: “I know, I know.”

I pride myself on knowing words, on figuring out how to use them so they work for me. But years later, my sister digs up C. J.'s funeral announcements, a pamphlet and a bookmark, after I ask her to do so. She begins crying, talks of regret and loss, grief constant as a twin, of how she dreams of C. J., and in every dream she is always chasing him. In those dreams, he is agile and golden as he flips and flies and leaps, and he will not allow himself to be caught.

The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we
bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C. J. knew this. I have no words.

1987–1991

After my father left, we headed to Orange Grove, a neighborhood in Gulfport, Mississippi, a small city a few towns over from DeLisle. Even though Gulfport was within spitting distance of DeLisle, it afforded my mother a certain sense of freedom. She felt smothered in DeLisle, where she knew everyone, and everyone knew her; worse, they were witness to my father's faithlessness. She thought the women of the community gloried in her misfortune, delighted in the way the dissolution of her family became grist for gossip, and judged her for having four children with a fickle man. Gulfport offered anonymity: especially in the many newer subdivisions in the north of the city that were developed in the spare space between new strip malls and grocery stores, neighbors were transient strangers. I was ten, Joshua was seven, Nerissa was five, and Charine was three when we packed our things, boxes of kitchen utensils, our clothes, a few books, and toys, and moved from the home of our extended family into the new house we would live in with our mother, without our father.

Gulfport was not the wilderness we'd been born to in DeLisle. The suburb was off the main highway running north and south through Gulfport. A big wooden sign at the corner
of the neighborhood read BEL-AIR. To the west, and closer to the highway, was one of only two undeveloped areas in that section of the city. It was wooded and bordered by baseball fields, cut with a creek, and there were rough trails through it where families sometimes walked on weekends. My mother never allowed us to walk to that park alone for fear that some deranged person would kidnap us. The other undeveloped tract in the area was directly behind our house, which was on the northern edge of the subdivision. It was a rough rectangle, probably a square mile in size, and bordered on all sides by subdivisions filled with small two- and three-bedroom ranch-style houses built in the seventies, all variations on the same three prototypes.

Our house was chocolate-brown brick. There was an anemic tree in the front yard, and a tall deciduous tree in the back that fluttered purple and gray in the light of the city night sky. The backyard was small and surrounded by a metal chain-link fence, like most of the rest in the neighborhood. The houses were so close together we found shade on hot days by sitting in the grassy spots between them.

Moving into the new house that day felt alien and strange. I would be switching schools, and the community of extended family that I knew in DeLisle felt distant in Gulfport. For the first time, we would be a nuclear family, and we would be a nuclear family without a father. The world seemed new and dangerous; I was an animal seeking shelter away from its burrow.

Both my parents had been raised without fathers in their homes, and neither of them wanted that for their children. But as children and as adults, a two-parent family eluded them. This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn't, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery. Like for many of the young Black men in my community across generations, the role of being a father and a husband was difficult for my father to assume. He saw a world of possibility outside the confines of the family, and he could not resist the romance of that. But like many of the young Black women in her generation, my mother understood that she had to forget the meaning of possibility, the tender heat of romance, the lure of the vistas of the world. My mother understood that her vistas were the walls of her home, her children's bony backs, their open mouths. Like the women in my family before her, my mother knew the family was her burden to bear. She could not leave. So she did what her mother did before her, what her sisters did, what her aunts did: she worked and set about the business of raising her children. She did not know it then, but she would be the sole financial provider for us until we reached adulthood.

My mother didn't have many options regarding work: she had a high school diploma, but she had to find jobs that would allow her to be home with her children in the afternoon to ensure we did our homework, took baths, went to bed on time, and got back out the door for school in the morning. If
she could have done shift work at one of the vanishing factories, she'd have had access to jobs that paid better, but she couldn't. She had family who would help, but she felt the responsibility of her and my father's choice to have four children keenly; she wouldn't foist the burden of raising us on her extended family, and she wouldn't depend on institutional child care even if she could afford it. She was our mother. So she found jobs that would allow her to raise us. Just before my father left, she worked as a laundress at a hotel in Diamondhead. She carpooled with her cousins to work because she didn't own a car; my father had taken his car and his motorcycle. Before we moved to Gulfport, my mother saved and bought a blue Caprice from the seventies, so old the paint was matte and closing the doors took both hands. This is how she commuted to work at her next job, which was as a housekeeper for a rich White family who lived in an antebellum house on the beach in Pass Christian.

When I was older, she would tell me stories about how she raised her brothers and sisters. She would tell me her father left her family, too, and that she and my father had promised each other when I was born that they would raise their children with both parents. My grandmother worked hard to support her seven children, so it was my mother, the eldest of seven, who rose early in the morning, woke her siblings before school, and made sure they were dressed. She wrangled her sisters' hair into precise pigtails, and when they grew older, she disciplined her brothers and sisters like a mother.

When my parents were together, I thought they were both disciplinarians. My father disciplined my brother, while my mother disciplined all of us. When we moved to Gulfport, I
realized that my mother had actually been the disciplinarian all along. Before he left, my father posed us in silly pictures while we held his kung fu weapons and wore bandanas with cryptic kanji characters tied around our skulls. He was the one for riding his bike to the elementary school, parking it out front, and wowing our classmates when we climbed on the back to ride home. My mother cooked the meals, cleaned the house, set us to small chores like emptying the litter box when we had a cat, making our beds, cleaning our rooms, and vacuuming. My father brought in the income, and my mother worked low-paying jobs and kept the household together.

When we moved to Gulfport that summer, my mother taught me that I had a new responsibility in the family: I was the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and I had to do as she had done and help keep the household together. Mama bought home a spool of green plastic cording. She dug a hole at the opposite end of the backyard from the tree and slid a wooden cross into the ground. She unspooled the cord and tied it tightly around one side of the cross, and then stretched the cord across the yard and knotted it where a low branch met the trunk of the lone tree. Then she tied another cord to another low branch, and stretched it across the yard to the other side of the cross. She had hung two clotheslines. She unloaded a fresh basket of clothes from the washing machine, walked through the kitchen, and said, “Mimi, come here.”