Men We Reaped (2 page)

I'm telling you: there's a ghost in here
, Joshua said.

Because this is my story just as it is the story of those lost young men, and because this is my family's story just as it is my community's story, it is not straightforward. To tell it, I must tell the story of my town, and the history of my community. And then I must revisit each of the five young black men who died: follow them backward in time, from Rog's death to Demond's death to C. J.'s death to Ronald's death to my brother's death. At the same time, I must tell this story forward through time, so between those chapters where my friends and my brother live and speak and breathe again for a few paltry pages, I must write about my family and how I grew up. My hope is that learning something about our lives and the lives of the people in my community will mean that when I get to the heart, when my marches forward through the past and backward from the present meet in the middle with my brother's death, I'll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here. Hopefully, I'll understand why my brother died while I live, and why I've been saddled with this rotten fucking story.

Distant Past–1977

In pictures, some of my ancestors on my mother's and my father's sides are so light-skinned as to look white, and some are so dark the lines of the nose, a mouth, look silver in the black and white picture. They wear long-sleeved, full white shirts tucked into dark skirts, and muted cotton shirts tucked into loose pants. Inevitably, they stand outside in these pictures, but the backgrounds are so faded, one can only see trees like smoke behind them. None of them smile. My grandmother Dorothy tells me stories about them, says some of them were Haitian, that others were Choctaw, said they spoke French, that they came from New Orleans or a nebulous elsewhere, searching for land and space, and they stopped here.

Before DeLisle was named DeLisle, after a French settler, the early settlers called it Wolf Town. Pine and oak and sweetgum grow in tangles from the north down to the south of the town, to the DeLisle Bayou. The Wolf River, brown and lazy, snakes its way through DeLisle, fingers the country in creeks, before emptying into the bayou. When people ask me about my hometown, I tell them it was called after a wolf before it was partially tamed and settled. I want to impart something of its wild roots, its early savagery. Calling it Wolf Town hints at the wildness at the heart of it.

I want to tell them, but don't:
I've seen foxes, small and red
and thin-boned, darting along ditches before slipping into woods again. This thing that I saw once was different. It was night, and my friends and I were riding through a part of DeLisle that had been previously untouched, a wild tangle of wood that someone had cut a dead-end road into in hopes of building a subdivision. The creature loped out of the woods before us, and we startled and shouted, and it looked at us and loped back into the darkness, and it was darkness, colored black, and had a long, fine snout, and it was soundless, this wild thing that looked at us like the intruders that we were before we drove away from it to more well-traveled roads, away from that place that was everything but dead end, that place that seemed all beginning, a birthplace: Wolf Town
.

But I am not that eloquent, so I shut my mouth and smile.

Most of the people here are kin. It is something that the “Black” people will talk about among themselves, the way our families intertwine and feed one another, and it is something that “White” people will speak about among themselves, but it is something that we rarely speak to each other about, even when those on both sides of the color divide share the same last name. We are conscious of the way bloodlines are so entangled in our community, so much so that back in the early 1900s, adults in DeLisle would arrange visits with other communites of mixed-race people in Alabama or Louisiana to match children with marriageable mates to vary the gene pool. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't. Sometime the matches the young found were closer to home. Sometimes they were cousins, or in other ways had relationships that were taboo.

My maternal grandmother, Dorothy, remembers when she was very young, before her mother, Mary, and father, Harry, had all of their twelve kids, riding in her father's old car to visit relatives farther up in the country, north of DeLisle. Harry's father was a dark, rich brown, but his mother was, by all accounts, White, and her sister lived in a cluster of White communities farther north. Harry's children ranged from cinammon to nutmeg to vanilla, and on that trip north, the children curled in on themselves in the car's rumble seat and rode through the hot bright Mississippi wilderness under blankets. Harry was light enough to be mistaken for White. While there, the children played inside the house, and when the sun began to set, my great-great-grandmother's sister told her, “Well, it's about time for y'all to be getting down the road.” What she said without saying was:
It's not safe for you here. The Klan are here. You should not be caught out on these roads in the dark
. So my grandmother and her siblings folded their small bodies in two and hid under the suffocating blanket again, and a seemingly White man and his White mother drove south to DeLisle, to the mostly Creole, mixed-race community they called home.

My mother's paternal grandfather Adam Jr.'s family also bears stories like this. My mother has a picture of Adam Jr.'s father, Adam Sr., and he looks White. In fact, he was half White and half Native American. Adam Sr.'s father was Joseph Dedeaux, a White man, in a family of White Dedeauxes that had some money and owned some of the most beautiful land in DeLisle. The land sits in the curve of the bayou and is graced by almost unbearably grand live oaks. The sun sets over the marsh grass and water, turning it into a tableau so
gorgeous it haunts my homesick dreams. This White man fell in love with his Native American housekeeper, and he began a relationship with her. When his family found out, they disowned him. So Joseph married Daisy and bore my great-grandfather. Later, my mother told me that Joseph and Daisy established a general store, where my White great-great-grandfather would die, a victim of a shooting and a botched store robbery. My Native American great-great-grandmother followed him a few years later from illness.

My mother's maternal great-grandfather, Jeremy, also was fairly wealthy. It is rumored that his wife's people came from Haiti but that he was a Native American. When he realized that the White government would do nothing to educate his children and grandchildren, he built a one-room school on the land he owned and hired a teacher. He also spent some of his time out in the woods on his multi-acre property, tending to liquor stills, which was a common pastime in the community during Prohibition. One of those days, he and his son-in-law Harry were working them together, and the Revenues found them. I imagine these White men wearing white shirts and dark pants, their hair lank and sweaty, their guns smooth and cool in their moist hands. Harry ran and escaped, and would later live to hide his children under blankets to take them upcountry to visit their White relatives, but my great-great-grandfather Jeremy was shot and killed. The Revenues left his dead body to grow cold in the green reaching woods among his ruined stills, and once Harry told them what had happened, his family trekked into the forest to retrieve his body.

My father's father was called Big Jerry, and Jerry and his siblings and their mother, Ellen, lived across the street from St. Stephen's Church in a small, square house, painted slate blue. My paternal great-grandparents owned a couple of acres along St. Stephen's Road, and when my father was younger, the fields were planted with corn and crops, and there were horses.

My mother's father, Adam Jr., lived in another small house, but this one at the end of an even narrower road that runs parallel to St. Stephen's on the north. There's a slight hill north of St. Stephen's, the kind of gradual incline that can go unnoticed unless one is hauling a load or riding a bike; the road that leads from St. Stephen's and ascends this hill was aptly named Hill Road, and the small road that branches off Hill Road and runs perpendicular, barely wide enough for one car to drive on, is Alpine. My maternal great-grandparents' long and narrow house is at the end of this road, modest and well-kept and gray. This is where my great-grandmother Maman Vest lived.

Both great-grandmothers were olive-complexioned and had white and black salt-pepper hair. Both had thick Creole French accents. I mostly visited Mother Ellen with my father. I never met her husband, my great-grandfather, but my father says he was shot after some sort of argument and died young. Mother Ellen had a loud, strong voice, and she was funny, like my father. She sat whole afternoons on her porch, watching the comings and goings of the neighborhood, and drove well, but slowly, into her old age. When we visited, she sat on the steps of the front porch and told us stories about her youth, when she and her siblings pulled Spanish moss from the oak
trees to stuff their mattresses. They were hard workers then, accustomed to long hours weeding and planting and harvesting fields, and caring for livestock. Maman Vest would never sit on a stoop with us: she was a bit more proper, a bit more reserved, but we would all sit in the cool shade of her dark porch, where the children ate cake and listened to the grownups gossip. Maman Vest told us stories of her dead husband, Adam Senior, who she said had visited her once after he died as she lay in her bed. He stood, framed in the doorway, and spoke to her. She said she was afraid, that she was paralyzed and could not move. I never met her husband, my great-grandfather Adam Senior, the man or the ghost. Maman often told us stories about him, her dead husband, but never spoke of Aldon, the lost son who died in Vietnam after stepping on a land mine.

Men's bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural. Sometimes, when I think of all the men who've died early in my family over the generations, I think DeLisle is the wolf.

I like to think my parents met somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the wide swath of woods that separated their fathers' houses, or perhaps on St. Stephen's Road, which was then hard-packed red dirt. They would have both been barefoot, I think, and it would have been the late fifties. My father would have seen a thin olive-skinned girl with small bones
and a narrow nose, her dark brown curly hair smoothed to her head. She would have smiled, and her face, beautifully symmetrical, would have blossomed. She would have been happy to be free for a day with her siblings, free to play. Because my grandmother Dorothy worked so much to support her children, my mother tended to household chores and her younger siblings. My father may not have been able to see her strength then, but it was there. My mother would have seen a boy the color of pecans, his hair darkest black and smoothed straight back from his wide, short forehead, his nose wide and prominent, his cheekbones even then like large rocks in his face. He may have been wearing an eye patch. His older cousin shot him in the left eye with a BB gun by accident when he was six, and the eye shriveled in his face and turned gray. It would be some time before it was removed and a false eye put in its place, so my father spent much of his childhood and teenage years wearing a patch. Like all children, they were the children of history and place, of southern Mississippi and Louisiana, both their family lines mixed with African, French, Spanish, and Native ancestry all smoothed to the defining
Black
in the American South, but even though they would have seen that history bearing fruit in each other, they would not have been thinking about that.

My mother would have been looking at the dead eye in my father's face, maybe seeing that the dry gray marble made the rest of him all the more terribly beautiful, and my father would have looked at my mother's small, slender arms and legs and been reminded of a doe. The pines would have reached up and away on both sides of the road, and my parents would not have said hello when they first met each
other. My father would have kicked dirt into the ditch. My mother would have picked up a rock. They knew kids in common, their cousins, and other friends. This was and still is a small town.

In 1969, when my father was thirteen and my mother eleven, Hurricane Camille hit. It flattened everything, wiped away the landscape with an indomitable hand. I imagine everyone in south Mississippi must have thought the world was at an end. Camille was only one in a staccato succession of tragedies in those days. Southern Mississippi boys, Black and White, died in Vietnam, cities all over the United States imploded in riots, and churches were bombed. Crosses burned. Freedom Riders tried to register folks to vote, and in Mississippi, the rivers and bayous were watery graveyards. Locally, Black men and women were demonstrating on public beaches where they were not allowed to sunbathe and swim. In return, they were being attacked by dogs and policemen. They must have thought the end times had come when Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, bore down on them, killing more than 250 people, drowning a family of thirteen who'd searched out shelter in a Catholic church in Pass Christian. The hobbled authorities put families in tent cities. After my grandmother Celestine's house was lifted from its foundation and displaced by the storm surge that leveled Pass Christian, my father and his sisters and mother stayed in one such tent city. My grandmother Dorothy's house was spared, since it sits farther up in DeLisle in a part that we call the Chaneaux, which is distant enough from the DeLisle Bayou to escape
the surge. My mother's family provided water for the entire town when people learned that there was an artesian spring in their yard.