Men We Reaped (11 page)

My father wrapped the rope around his shoulders and under his arms until he wore it like a great, thick coat, and then he climbed the live oak tree that shaded the side of the house and reached out its dark limbs over the roof. Once he reached the branch that overhung the roof, he inched his way along the limb until he was near the middle. He un-spooled the rope and tied one end of it in a massive knot, which he tugged and tested until he was sure it wouldn't give. He tied the other end of the rope, tested that knot as well, before sliding down what was now a tall swing, at least thirty feet long, made of rope so thick a grown-up could sit on it and swing without a wooden seat and would still be comfortable.

“Happy birthday,” my mother said. She put one hand on the back of my neck; her hand was rough from constant rubbing against sheets and bedspreads and towels and from the industrial-grade cleansers that the hotel housekeepers used. Years later, she would tell me that she was miserable at that job, that the work was hard and endless, that the women that she worked with gossiped about her and my father's relationship and were overtly mean and catty to her.

“Do you like it?” my mother said. Even at eight I knew she felt bad for not being able to give me more, for giving me, in its basic incarnation, a piece of rope for my birthday.

“I love it,” I said, and I meant it. I sat in the seat and my father pushed me for a few minutes before going inside. Then I grabbed it in both hands and pulled my way up it, holding tight with my legs, struggling with my whole body, until I got to the top, where I touched the underside of the branch my father had straddled minutes before. I was high, at least thirty feet in the air, and my heart tripped. I looked out over the roof of the house, the yard, the next door neighbors' small maroon trailer, the street, the mysterious woods. I felt proud of myself for being able to climb, for being not afraid, so unafraid that I would spend hours during the summer and winter climbing the rope, gripping it with my thighs, and perching high on the swing, watching the world. And something about clinging to the top of that rope made me feel closer to my mother and father, even though, physically, I was as far away from my parents as I could get. Sometimes if I begged persistently and sweetly enough one of my uncles would pull the seat of the swing back, hold me above their heads, and let me go, and I would fly across the yard, white-knuckled as I gripped the swing, ecstatic.

My parents were trying to salvage their marriage. Sometimes on the weekends, my father and mother would make time for each other, and they'd leave us with one of their friends who lived in a cluster of apartment houses in the next
town over. This friend babysat my brother and me often. From listening to adult conversation, I knew her husband beat her, and I knew that this was wrong. That was clearly delineated at least, and I knew this because once my mother's entire family rode to Pass Christian with shotguns when my aunt's boyfriend beat her: they stood out in the street in front of his house and told him if he ever touched her again, they would kill him, and he did not beat my aunt again.

Once, when I was nine and Joshua was six, my parents' friend dared Joshua to drink from a bottle of hot sauce, and my brother, who always had a stomach of iron and had eaten dog food once when I dared him, drank it.

“Your booty going to be burning when you doo-doo,” she said.

He looked at her and smiled. His teeth were red. His breath was hot with Tabasco.

“No it's not,” he piped up.

I was impressed. She tried to pass the bottle to me but I demurred. Sometimes he led and I followed. I realized that this time belonged to him. She made grilled cheese sandwiches for us and gave us small plastic cups of red Kool-Aid. My brother and I ate the sandwiches in big, breathless bites. Josh and I ran around barefoot in and out of the apartments, leaping from stairs, playing with stray cats, giving the Dumpsters in the parking lot a wide berth. They stank, and people sometimes missed the Dumpsters and left the garbage to rot next to them.

One day my parents' friend left us downstairs, watching TV, while she visited her upstairs neighbors.

I was distracted. Maybe I wanted another grilled cheese sandwich, so I ascended the stairs to find the door to their apartment open. Their apartment was mostly dark, and pieces of art made of stretched velvet and glass etched with colored veins that made the glass look marbled hung from the walls. The couple was a white couple, and my parents' friend and the man and woman sat in chairs around a smallish kitchen table. In the middle of the table, a mirror lay face up. The man was sliding a razor along the surface of the mirror, separating white powder into lines. He bent over and sniffed like he was sucking up his snot, like he was clearing his nose. His hair fell forward across his face. My parents' friend looked up and saw me standing in the doorway and said, “Mimi, go downstairs.” I went. I did not know what it was. I did not know that I'd seen some of what grown-ups who were poor and felt cornered and at their wits' end did to feel less like themselves for a time. I did not know this need would follow my generation to adulthood too.

Somehow my mother and father still scraped together enough for our Christmases. For days beforehand, my grandmother cooked, made big pots of seafood gumbo and homemade biscuits, pecan and sweet potato pies. The fire in the wood-burning stove in the living room ran so hot, the grownups went outside to feel the cool air and take turns pushing each other on my rope swing. My brother and I slept uneasily on Christmas Eve, Joshua because he was giddy about the prospect of presents, and me because I was nine and wanted
a ten-speed with everything in me, and I was wondering if all the begging I'd done for one would pay off. If there would be a miracle. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed the county police had come to the house to take all my uncles and my father away to jail. In my dream, I cried, and when I woke up, my face was wet. I do not know why I had that dream that night; I wasn't aware that my father or uncles were hustling or involved in criminal activities. Now, as an adult, I do not think they were. As an adult, I know they were men, rascals who loved to drink and smoke and raise hell on the weekends. But as a child, I listened to my grandmother when she worried about her sons, about them being stopped by the police and searched for no other reasons than they were Black and male, about them getting into fights with White men at bars and being arrested for assault while the White men they fought went free. And I saw the tight line of my mother's mouth when my father was absent and couldn't be accounted for, and heard her worry about him riding his motorcycle and getting into an accident and being taken to jail for it. To an impressionable nine-year-old, trouble for the Black men of my family meant police. It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom. But after I woke from that dream and woke Joshua, we crept into my parents' room to wake them and beg them to let us open presents, and a red ten-speed was propped in the corner of the living room for me, and I nearly forgot that dream.

My mother must have sat Joshua and me down and told us, perhaps in the living room on the same sofa where five years earlier my father had asked for my mother's hand in marriage. After having two children, my parents married; after having two more, they'd decided to divorce.

“Your daddy's not coming home. He's going away.”

She didn't say
divorce
. We wouldn't have understood that word. But the next day, our father still had not come home from leaving for work the day before, and Joshua and I understood in our narrow, bony chests. Daddy was not coming home. He was going away. No more trailing around after him in the yard asking to hold nails or pieces of wood as he built rabbit hutches, no more fighting my way to the top of the rope swing, touching the branch, yelling “See!” to him, trying to make him proud.

Later, I would learn that my mother had said he should leave after she found out about his latest girlfriend, his youngest, the daughter of a coworker from the glass plant, who was fourteen when they met. She had worked a summer job at the plant the year that my father was fired. After my father lost his job and began working at the oyster plant and my mother found out about this latest infidelity, my mother realized my father would never change and their love was doomed. When my mother found out, she was pregnant with my fourth and last full sibling, Charine, but Joshua and I didn't know it yet.

After my mother told us this, I took to the room we shared with our aunts and curled in the bottom bunk, Joshua's bed, and alternately cried and read the latest book I'd
checked out from the school library, shocked by the rejection of my father's leaving, which felt like a rejection not of his wife or his domestic life but of me. Children often blame themselves when a parent leaves, and I was no exception.

Joshua took to the yard. It was summer, and it was hot. He ran around the house, lap after lap, round after round, wailing, crying for Daddy. The uncles and aunts ran after him, caught him, held him squirming to them, told him to stop, but he sobbed louder and fought and squirmed in their arms. He was six now, longer, his once blond afro shaved short, and he was strong. They let him go and he hit the ground running and crying. He circled the house for hours, and he only stopped when he fell to his knees, his sobbing dying to hiccups and moans. He fell asleep like that, his head bowed, outside in the dirt. One of the uncles carried him inside, and I made room for him in his bed.

Soon after, my mother filed for Section 8, a government subsidy for housing, and found a house two towns over in Orange Grove, Mississippi, in a suburb going to seed, and told my grandmother we would be moving that summer. I turned ten. Before we left to set out on our own, and even though I suspected I was too old for it, I wandered around Kidsland again, tried to conjure some of the old magic, the belief, and could not.

That summer before we moved, I hustled Aldon and Joshua and now Nerissa, old enough to sit still and pay attention, to the swing on the long concrete porch facing the road, and
we played our favorite game: That's My Car. The rules were simple: as the oldest, I assigned each of us a number, and afterward, we sat and waited for our corresponding cars to drive by.

“I'm first and you're second.” I put a calming hand on Nerissa, and she nodded.

“You're third.”

“Okay,” Aldon replied.

“And you're fourth,” I told Josh.

The first car that passed the house from the direction of Du Pont, perhaps heading home from shift work, was dark blue, fairly new, and boxy.

“That's my car!” I yelled, and the others cheered.

A white two-door with a long, pointy hood zipped by.

“That's your car,” I told Nerissa. We cheered dutifully. It was an okay draw.

We heard the next car before we saw it: a loud, syncopated clunking weighted by an ornery engine.

“Oooooohhhhh,” Josh crowed.

The car, gray and brown in patches, puttered across the street before us. The driver, as if he knew he drove a car he should be ashamed of, did not wave or blow his horn as a neighbor might, but instead looked straight ahead.

“That's your car!” I pointed at Aldon, laughing.

“Hunk of junk!” Josh screamed.

“Why I had to get the junky car?” Aldon said.

We all laughed. Aldon stood and waved his arms at the offending car as it chugged down the street, as if he imagined he could shoo it away as we did raccoons sniffing around the garbage or possums creeping with their pink feet through the fetid swamp of the backyard to disappear in the endless woods.

“Go! Go!” Aldon said, and we laughed harder. Nerissa clapped.

Aldon sat.

“Now it's Josh's turn,” I said, and we faced forward on the swing, packed tightly one next to another, and watched the road. We listened intently for a whoosh, for a loud bang, for a flash of color, for anything that would signal our future.

Born: May 5, 1983

Died: January 5, 2004

The first time C. J., one of my many cousins, moves into sharp relief is when he was around six and I was around twelve. He was fair and had a face full of freckles. As a toddler, he'd been blond like Josh, but as he grew older his hair darkened, grew long and curly, and his mother braided it to his head or cut it low on the top and left a long lock of it to grow down his back in a rattail. He was small and lean, angled all over with muscle. His face was shaped like a triangle, and the only things that were dark about him were his eyes, which were so deep in color they were a surprise.

At family reunions for my father's side, C. J. would be there, small and gold and wiry, his rattail touching him in the middle of his spine. We children ate hot dogs with ketchup and mustard, crunched potato chips, drank cold sodas in big gulps so that the fizzy acid burned our throats, and chased each other in packs around the yard.

“Flip,” someone would say.

“Okay,” C. J. said.

We lined up in a human corridor so he could showcase his skills. He jumped a couple of times and then ran headlong down the strip of grass we'd left. Near the end of the line he punched into a round-off, then a back handspring, and then another handspring, his rattail streaming out behind him. He was a human Slinky. We cheered. I felt hot and weak. Again and again he flipped down our aisle, hurling himself through the air, which was thick with humidity, and each time he cut it cleanly in two. When he landed on his feet, he bounced. When he grew tired, he'd run off to get a soda. The group would dissipate. I wandered off by myself, feeling dissatisfied with how earthbound my body was, how bound by the heat, until I wandered into a playhouse, a square of plywood and two-by-fours. Lying on the floor, sand scratching my back, I watched the other kids. They ran the yard in pairs, yanking at one another in the waning day, fighting for the last cold drinks. I watched C. J. dart between them, trip them, take what he wanted, and run away so quickly they couldn't catch him.