Men We Reaped (20 page)

I bumped Charine's arm with mine, just so I could feel her next to me.

“But I did love him.”

Charine chewed her gum, looked down at our arms.

“I did.”

Later that night, after she'd left and Charine and I had gone inside to escape the sunrise, Charine told me she often had this conversation with his girlfriend. She said the first time his girlfriend had told the story about what happened before his death, the story about their last conversation, she'd cried. She sobbed at the end of that story, her voice breaking.
But I did love him, Charine
, she'd said.
I did love him. I did I did I did I did
. She'd said it over and over again, as if Charine doubted her, as if Charine were someone she had to convince, when Charine knew all too well the regret that comes with a lover's death, the regret that says:
You failed him
.

We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death's maw, to have said:
I love you. You are mine
. We dream of speaking when we lack the gift of oratory, when we lack the vision to see the stage, the lights, the audience, the endless rigging and ropes and set pieces behind us, manipulated by many hands. Ronald saw it all, and it buried him.

1991–1995

I prayed. At night, as the house clicked and ticked around us, I prayed that we would move back to DeLisle. I didn't want to be afraid to go outside, to be afraid of Thomas, who lurked, to fear what he would see in me and call me, to dread the hole in the woods. My mother heard me. After living in the seedy subdivision where every year the houses seemed smaller and shabbier, crumbling at the corners, ringed by weeds, we left Gulfport. After my mother cleared her narrow bit of land in DeLisle, she set a single-wide trailer on it. The property was on the top of a hill, surrounded on three sides by pines dense with undergrowth, and when we walked out of the front door, we only saw one neighbor's house. My mother aligned the trailer lengthwise on the property, which meant the left side of the trailer sat atop the hill, on the ground, and the right side of the trailer was elevated, supported on cement bricks, leaving enough room to drag chairs under and sit between the cement pillars. In the evening, little lean brown rabbits fed on the patchy grass that announced the interruption of the yard from the surrounding woods. In the evening, bats fluttered through the narrow gap in the trees above our heads, feeding on the mosquitoes that swarmed there, mosquitoes that bred in a hidden, shallow pond, dry during the winter, tucked away in the pine woods
to the near west of our house. We were home, in our community again.

When we moved to DeLisle, my father moved to New Orleans. He thought there would be more job opportunities there, and he wanted to live closer to his brothers. After leaving us in Gulfport, my father lived with his teenage love, then moved out and lived in one small, dark apartment after another, of which there were plenty along the coast, sometimes with roommates, sometimes without. He stopped paying his child support and moved from job to job so quickly there was no way for the authorities to garnish his wages. In New Orleans, he lived in the small yellow ghost-haunted house with barred windows, where the wind echoed through the industrial yard behind it at night, bidding the metal to speak. Then he moved to a small two-story apartment complex with only six one- or two-bedroom apartments. The rent was cheaper there. The building was gray wood and red brick, and my father's oldest brother, Dwight, lived on the first floor. We would spend our weekend and summer visits there when I was in high school.

I'd been the only Black girl in the private Episcopalian elementary school during my sixth-grade year, and on my first day at the corresponding high school, I learned that this would be the case for high school, too. What I didn't know is that I would remain the only Black girl in the school for five years: in my senior year, another Black girl enrolled, but we never spoke. The one other Black kid in the school when I was a
seventh grader was a senior, and he acknowledged me sometimes with a nod, but most often ignored me. He was comfortable with the boys in the school, would hang out with them in the hallways looking like a clone of them: polo shirts, khaki shorts, slide-on boat shoes. I heard rumors that they snuck him into the local yacht club to sail with them, because he was unofficially not allowed because he was half Black, which meant that according to the yacht club he was Black. Today, I understand class also complicated my developing a relationship with either of them: both of these Black students came from two-parent, solidly upper-middle- or middle-class families. They lived in exclusive neighborhoods with pools and gyms and golf clubs and yearly homeowners' association fees, and that culture was totally alien to my own, one of government assistance and poverty and broken homes. We had nothing to talk about. Most of the other Black boys who enrolled in the school later, when I was in ninth grade and until I graduated, were basketball recruits. They all came from backgrounds that were closer to mine, and our relationships were easier. I joked with them in the hallways between classes whenever I had the chance, and during those years those moments of camaraderie gave me some respite, some illusion of community. But it was an illusion: because of my distaste for team sports and my love of books, I was still an outsider. I had friends, friends who were outsiders like me in different ways: kids that were artists or writers or loved pottery or punk music or theater, but they were never my color. Overall, there were never more than eight Black students in the school at one time. During my time there,
there were only three other students of color: there was one Chinese American girl, and later two Hispanic students, all three of whom came from moneyed families. At its largest, the high school contained no more than 180 students, and at its smallest, no fewer than 100.

Most of the students who attended the school were middle- to upper-class. Even though the school was flush with moneyed students, this was not reflected in the buildings. While the private elementary Episcopalian school I'd attended as a scholarship student in sixth grade was in a building much like the public schools I attended, redbrick with open airy rooms, the corresponding Episcopalian high school was nothing like this. Before 1969, the board of directors had purchased a mansion on the beach in Pass Christian to house the school, but Hurricane Camille hit and swept away the building. So the board built a big warehouse further north in Pass Christian, divided it into classrooms using thin walls and partitions, installed lockers in the hallways, and eventually built another, taller warehouse behind the school with spray-on yellow insulation that resembled dried snot. It was disconcerting to walk into the building, as industrial as it looked from the outside, and see all the students, who bore all the hallmarks of wealth and good health: braces, shiny thick hair, tans, and collared shirts. Some of the students were so rich they drove luxury cars especially tailored to their whims: Lexuses and BMWs outfitted for racing. Some of them slept on plantation-era beds that required small ladders to ascend at night. None of them lived in trailers. And throughout my school years, my mother cleaned for them. Sometimes she brought home huge garbage bags of their
hand-me-down clothes after cleaning their houses. Joshua, Nerissa, and Charine refused their castoffs. I sifted through them, picking out what would fit, what I thought was reasonably fashionable, and prayed that when I wore it to school, whoever had owned it first would not see me in it. I assembled a ragtag wardrobe gleaned from my schoolmates in the hope that when worn together, my clothes would function as a camouflage, would allow me to be one of the group. I joined their religious youth groups too, became adept in the lexicon of organized religion, all in the hopes of being considered a little less of a perpetual other. But for some students, I could not escape our differences.

One day, a few months into my seventh-grade year, I walked into the gym and sat at the top of a small cluster of my classmates in the bleachers. There were four girls, all sitting with their knees together, all wearing khaki shorts and loose pastel shirts. I watched the other kids playing dodgeball on the court, hurling balls, intending to hurt. Barbara was idly twisting her blond hair: her roots were black. She turned in her seat to look at me.

“Why don't you put some nigger braids in my hair?”

“Excuse me?” I said. “What did you say?”

“Nigger braids. Why don't you put my hair in nigger braids?”

I hadn't misheard her. Barbara smiled, satisfied as an animal that's eaten its fill, and turned back to watch the games on the court. The heat in the gym was unbearable. I stood up and descended the bleachers, hoping I wouldn't trip. I couldn't believe she'd said the word, used it so casually, so denigratingly, and then been so proud of what she'd done. Casual
racism was so prevalent in my school, yet encountering it often didn't make it any easier to understand. It was incomprehensible to me. I didn't know how to react to it. There were so many Black kids in public school that I could always rely on someone else to fight, to yell out
honky
and beat the shit out of the offending party. A few years later, my brother and his cohort would sneak knives and brass knuckles into school to fight White kids who wore rebel flag T-shirts, who initiated confrontations informed by race, by the word
nigger
hurled like a large rock. But at Coast Episcopal, I was alone. And the torments I'd suffered in Gulfport and public school continued, except at my private school, my brown skin was an actual physical indicator of my otherness. There was no need for me to justify my misery by imagining that others saw my sense of inner weakness, saw it as other, and picked on me for it; at my private school, the color of my skin was enough of a signal for some of my schoolmates to see inferiority, weakness.

I was alone later in the year when I stopped in the hallway during a break. A group of White boys, all juniors and seniors, stood in the foyer opposite me, loitering. They were uniformed in khaki and polos, and they were all at least a foot taller than I was. They were also laughing at a joke one of them must have told when I walked by. I stopped to look at them, me with my thin shins, unmuscled calves, a collarbone like a crowbar, my serious dusky face marked by a down-turned mouth that didn't like to smile since my protruding front teeth marked me as different in yet another way. My mother could not afford braces for me.

“What did you say?” I asked them. They chuckled.

“You heard,” one of them said. His name was Phillip, and my mother cleaned for his family once a month. They always sent us the largest garbage bags of clothing.

“No, I didn't.”

“You know what we do to your kind,” another laughed.

“No, I don't.”

They laughed again, each of them elbowing the other, and then I knew. Whatever the joke, it involved a Black person, hands bound, and a choking rope at the neck, a picnic. Lynching. They were joking about lynching.

“You ain't going to do shit to me,” I said. I said it before I could think that I was one and they were many, and there was no one to help me fight my battle.

Phillip and his friends changed then. They shifted and stopped laughing. One of them crossed his arms, and then another, and they looked as if they could move like a herd.

Even though my heart felt as if it would beat its way out of my chest, I stood. I was sweating and my face burned, but I stood.

“You ain't going to do nothing,” I said.

They saw I would not move. They watched my eyes, perhaps wanting me to cry. I didn't. The moment passed. They shrugged, walked past me down to the senior lockers. I watched them go. After they disappeared, I watched my classmates in the student lounge, sliding drinks across the table to one another, eating pizza, chewing and talking. I felt victorious for one moment, proud that I'd stood up for myself. But as I watched my schoolmates, their shining faces
and white, wide smiles, separated by the glass between us, I realized I'd achieved nothing. I was still myself. I was still alone.

My mother drove us to visit our father in New Orleans on weekends in her small, rattling Toyota Corolla. Charine invariably sat in the front seat while the rest of us sat in the back. Sometimes we sang along to the radio, and when we did, my mother told us to shut up and let the radio sing. She had no patience, and I imagine it was because she drove and her children sang and all she could think about was our father and the fact that she had never wanted to be a mother in this situation. By this time Joshua was taller than me by at least two inches, and wider. Nerissa was a premature beauty. Charine was small, skinny, and funny. In the backseat, Josh and I would tussle with our elbows, each of us fighting for room by leaning forward and smashing the other person's arm into the seat. I usually lost because he was bigger and stronger than me; at the time, I was beginning to realize that all the dominance I'd exercised over him while we were growing up was fading. The trunk was even more crowded with paper bags filled with groceries; even when we weren't with her, my mother took responsibility for feeding us. She knew my father's refrigerator held only condiments. She packed easy things to cook, things she thought we could handle: Top Ramen noodles, tuna fish, eggs, boxes of Tuna Helper, sandwich bread, peanut butter and jelly, cereal, and gallons of milk. During the summer, when we stayed with my father for a week at time, we'd run through the food, so at the end we
were eating dry cereal out of the box for breakfast and lunch, and inventing things for dinner.

“I'm hungry,” Nerissa said.

“Are you hungry too?” I asked Charine.

Charine nodded, hopping in front of a large mirror my father'd set against a wall in the living room. She was preening. My father, as usual, wasn't home. He wasn't next door at his fourth baby mama's apartment, either. We didn't know where he'd gone. He did that often, leaving us alone in the apartment while he disappeared. I worried about him, but I knew that eventually, sometime later that night, he'd be back. I was accustomed to being in charge when my mother was gone or working, so I took it as my obligation. Of course I had to feed us.