Men We Reaped (4 page)

Rog dropped out of school in the tenth grade; it's not uncommon for young Black men to drop out here. Sometimes they are passively forced out by school authorities, branded as misfits or accused of serious offenses like selling drugs or harassing other students: sometimes they are pushed to the back of classrooms and ignored. Rog sat in the back of one such
class and beat-boxed while his cousins sang spirituals that substituted the teacher's name for Jesus'. He left school, worked, and then in 2000 went to Los Angeles to live with his relatives. He loved it. He worked in an auto body shop, made more money than he would have been able to make in Mississippi, and enjoyed the city: theme parks, roller skating rinks, the beach, where the water was blue and rushed the palm-decked shore in waves, so different from our beach, where the dirty gray Gulf lapped desultorily at a man-made beach ringed by concrete and pine trees.

Later, I wondered if it was a kindness to Nerissa, a remembrance of their short middle school romance, that made Rog hang out with us during the 2001 Mardi Gras Pass Christian parade, when he was visiting home. I had been out of college and without a job for almost a year, but I'd booked a ticket and flown home from New York City for Mardi Gras. This added to my considerable credit card debt. I didn't care. I needed to go home, even if only for three days. My brother was newly dead. I expected him to be alive every day when I woke. On that February day, I did not know he was only the first. It was raining and chilly. We were all subdued, except Rog. He swaggered between clusters of friends and cousins from DeLisle and Pass Christian. He stood at the edges of pictures with a haul of big purple and green and gold beads on his neck, the kind that in normal years we'd plead the loudest for the pleasure of wearing them for a day. My sisters and I huddled under umbrellas and watched the press of people, ignoring the beads that pelted our umbrellas. My three-year-old nephew, newly bereft of his uncle and bewildered by the
crowds, hugged my leg. My grief was so great that the sheen of the colorful beads, the music sounding from the floats, the celebration of that day felt like a farce, an insult.

On the day of the first Mardi Gras parade I'd attended after my brother's death, the reality of Joshua's absence was soothed by Rog, his easy smile, his arm casually slung over my or my sisters' shoulders.
Hey
, he said. And then:
What's up
?

I don't know why Rog returned home to Mississippi for good in 2002. I imagine that it was because he was homesick, because he missed the narrow, tree-shaded streets of Pass Christian, the houses scattered here and there and set twelve feet high on stilts to protect them from hurricane storm surges. Maybe he missed Mrs. P., his sisters Rhea and Danielle, his large extended family scattered through Pass Christian and DeLisle, his cousins. Many leave and never come back, lured away by cities where it's easier to find working-class jobs, where opportunity comes easier because those in power are less bound by the culture of the South. But I've heard others who've moved away from Mississippi, worked for five, ten years of their adult lives somewhere else, and then moved back to Mississippi say: “You always come back. You always come back home.”

The first night Charine and I went to Rog's house in that summer of 2004 after Aldon and I had driven home from Michigan, we didn't go inside. Our cars lined the street, bumper to bumper. The night swooped down in great black swaths,
and the streetlights, spaced far apart, shone weakly. Insects swarmed in foggy clouds around the bulbs, dimming them even further so we were dusky shadows, and the stars dozed on the dome of the sky like larger, distant insects.

The boys turned the bass up on their car stereos, and we sat on their trunks and hoods, jiggling to the beat, sweating and sliding down the steel. Rog walked over, his Budweiser in one hand, his other hand waving like a child's slicing through the air out of the passenger window of a car.

“Aaaaawwww,” he said, and hugged all three of us at once: me, Tasha, my brother's last girlfriend, and Charine. He half jumped on us. Threw his leg over the row of our feet.

We laughed. We could laugh when we were drunk, even in the summer of 2004.

“All right, Rog,” Charine said. “You messing up.”

“What you mean?” Rog slid off us.

“I can't feel the trunk with you jumping like that. Do you feel that?” she asked me.

“Like a massage, huh, Charine?” Rog said, and then he passed her a black cigar. “You dead wild.”

He danced around the trunk that night, kept us laughing. His smile never disappeared from his narrow face. While the other boys huddled in their cars, having conversations that we were not privy to, discussing and doing things I had no idea they did, Rog held court with us. He reminded me of Aldon. There was something gentle about him, considerate. Good. The first time he saw one of his younger cousins experimenting with weed in the street in front of his house, he stopped him. He walked up to him in the dark and said, “Aw, man, what you doing? You need to cut that out. You
don't need to be fucking with it like that.” His younger cousin laughed; he was already high.

We partied inside the house only once that summer. We were drinking. We were always drinking. But it was a different kind of drinking from what we'd done the previous summer. That drinking had been insane, ecstatic. We'd taken shots of Everclear that summer, felt that liquor running through us, thrumming: for this moment, you are young and alive. Live, more. The summer of 2004, we were no longer rebel drinkers, imbibing to break rules, to shit on mores. Now, we were subdued drinkers, drinking to forget. By the summer of 2004, we knew we were old: by the end of the summer, we'd know we had one foot in the grave.

On that night at Rog's house, we'd gotten cases of Budweiser, Rog's favorite beer, and we were playing dominoes, smoking, and talking. Charine, who never drank, decided that she was going to drink instead of smoke that night. I stood in the back room, which felt like a screened-in porch, and talked to my younger cousin Dez, who like most of my younger cousins stood taller than me, so he had to bend over when I spoke. He asked me about my writing, what I was working on, and I told him: a book about twin boys, young men, from a place like DeLisle. He made me feel embarrassed when he praised me in the dark room, under the music, for writing about “real shit,” he said. I sipped my beer: I hated the taste of it, but I loved the buzz of it. Charine downed her liquor, drink after drink, until she staggered past me.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

Rog led us down the hallway as I walked Charine through his mother's room to her private bathroom. I turned on the light, and Charine sank to her knees, let her head fall in my lap, and passed out. Unconscious, she threw up. Rog disappeared, then reappeared.

“She all right? She need to drink some water.”

“Yeah, she a lightweight,” I said, stroking her hair, staring blearily at the yellow rug.

For the two hours we sat on the floor of his mother's bathroom, Charine asleep in my lap, me drinking the last of my warm beer, nursing my dark buzz, Rog came with offerings: one glass of water, two glasses of water, potato chips, bread for Charine's stomach. Charine drank the water but refused the bread and chips, so I ate them. When I'd sobered up enough to drive, Rog helped me bring her out to the car and saw us off into the bayou, the night.

The next day Charine and I visited Rog. The day was hot and bright, cumulus clouds like mountains loomed in the sky, but it did not rain. Rog was sitting in a hard plastic chair, and when Charine and I walked up the driveway to the carport, he dragged over two other chairs, metal with plastic weave. We sat. I was hungover. The woven straps dug into my legs, but it felt good to sit, to find a little ease in the shade as Rog and Charine smoked, as the cicadas trilled and ticked. Rog and Charine talked about how things in the hood had changed, how we felt like death was stalking us, driving us from one another, the community falling apart. They talked about how messed up they'd been the night before. They talked about California. They talked about change.

Rog talked about change, about returning to California,
with others, too. It was all he could think of then, and I imagined the pines and the thick air felt like the walls of an invisible room to him, closed on all sides. Perhaps this made him use more, because like many people, Rog medicated with drugs and alcohol. His habit became more evident. He lost weight, became even more wiry, even more lean, his smile, slight when it shone, dimmer in his face. His cousin Bebe said that leaving was all he talked about one summer day, leaving Mississippi to return to California. He missed his job; he missed the freedom of the different, the new. He told her, “Cuz, you know, it's a better place for me out there. I can make a better way.” He turned his bottle up. “I'm ready to change, ready to go,” he said. “I'll be straight out there, but here …” And as he spoke, a boy from the neighborhood who was notorious for using drugs, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, drove up in his Cutlass. Parked. Walked up and said: “What's up?”

Some knew that Rog was snorting cocaine, and others didn't. In Mississippi, cocaine was a party drug in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties. People in my parents' generation snorted it, or they smoked it with weed. They did it secretly, casually. For some the habit stuck, and for others it didn't. And then came crack, a terrible development for those with a coke habit: it was a cheaper, more addictive high. Those who couldn't stop changed from partiers to addicts. They stole from their families, from strangers, to support their habit.

There is a story that I like to tell about the close-knit nature of DeLisle and the Black enclave of Pass Christian. When you wake up and find that, say, your car stereo is missing from your car, you're pissed off about it. You call your cousins and tell them about it, mention it to a few friends. You suspect who may have stolen it. By noon, one of your cousins or friends has called you with news, told you that someone saw someone else walking through the woods or loping along the street with your stuff under their arm. That afternoon, you show up at the thief's house, which is small, a little worn, but neat. You get loud. You demand your radio back. They are shamefaced as you berate them, and they may even curse you back or smile nervously, but they will return what they stole. This is how stealing was handled when I was growing up through the eighties and the beginning of the crack epidemic in the nineties. This is not what happens today. By the time you get to the thief's house in the afternoon, a house that has no electricity and a rotting floor, they will have pawned your radio, and they will have smoked it, and their eyes, jittery in the skull, will slide past you to the red dirt ground, to the sky, to the trees waving overhead, and they will lie until you give up to follow the trail elsewhere, until you leave.

There is a stigma associated with coke among the young in DeLisle and Pass Christian because it is too close a cousin to crack. Kids will take shots of white strong liquor, they will smoke weed wrapped in thick blunts, they will even take Ecstasy or prescription pain pills, but they will not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the table
at a house party. Why? Because the specter of the cousin or the uncle or aunt or the mother or father who couldn't stop partying, whose teeth are burned brown from the pipe, sits next to them at that table. Young people who do coke lie about it, attempt to hide it, and often fight it. Rog hid it and fought it.

Some of my relatives, on my mother's side and my father's, have abused crack, on and off, for years.
I can't fault them for it
, Charine always says when we talk about it,
that's just their high that they like. Fuck it. It helps them cope
. And then:
They're grown
. I understand her now, but I did not understand her point in the summer of 2004. Did not see the way liquor had been my drug for years. Was not connecting the relief I felt when I drank with the drugs others were using, or even thinking that it could be the same for my relatives, the same for my siblings, or the same for Rog. I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.

The last time that I remember seeing Rog in the summer of 2004 was at a gas station. I don't remember whom I was with, but we'd stopped to get gas at the BP on the beach in Pass Christian, the BP that would disappear a year later when Hurricane Katrina swept in and decimated the coastline. The pumps buzzed, and I jumped out of the car when I saw Rog lope by with his beer, his face long, his mouth closed, no teeth this time. He was so skinny. His eyes were closed to slits like he was smiling, but he was not.

“What up, Rog?” I said.

“What's up?”

He hugged me, black T-shirt loose on his frame. His shoulders barely touched mine. He was already pulling away, already out of the polite embrace. He was already back in the car with two men from the hood. He was already swallowed by the black reach of the highway. The wind from the Gulf stuttered in, blew sand lazily across the parking lot, across my feet, and Rog disappeared into the dim, tree-tunneled streets of Pass Christian, like an animal down its secret hole.

Years later, Charine told me she tried to visit Rog after he died but before he was found. In other words, she visited him when she thought he was alive. She and her friends banged on the door of the dark, shuttered house, not knowing that Rog was already dead inside. His sister Rhea would find him two days later. They called his name: “Rog!” They said, “His ass is probably passed out in there. Rog!” Louder. “Come open the door!”

Now, Charine says, knowing how he lay behind that door breaks something inside of her.

Years later, Nerissa told me about Rog's visit with her in February 2004. This would have been when Rog and our cousins were doing too much coke because C. J. had just died. This would have been when they were raw with love, with losing. This would have been when Rog passed out, when our cousin was afraid he wasn't breathing, when he
carried Rog into Nerissa's bathroom and put him in the tub, ran the water cold, hoping for a miracle, for the flame not to go out. My cousin cried. He yelled, “Don't do this to me!” Beat Rog on the chest. “Not you!” Yelled at Rog, “Not again!” And then Rog drew a breath and opened his eyes.