Men We Reaped (7 page)

The violence of my sister's birth and the slow unraveling of our family marked my mother when she came home. She was more withdrawn. She turned inward. When her patience waned, she argued with my father over his infidelities, and while my father was dramatic and flamboyant with his anger, flipping mattresses from beds, my mother was curt. I imagine
she wanted to spare us the spectacle of their arguments, the way violence hovered at the edges of their confrontations. They never touched each other in anger, but the small things in that house suffered.

That year, the world outside our house taught me and my brother different lessons about violence. Our play taught us that violence could be sudden, unpredictable, and severe, soon.

My mother's brother took Joshua for a ride on his moped. Uncle Thomas was around nineteen, and his moped was white with a maroon seat. My brother sat on my uncle's lap, and my uncle whooped and hollered as they rode in circles around the yard. My uncle had the kind of face that was so hard when he was serious that I could hardly believe it was the same face when he smiled. I wanted a turn on the moped. Joshua leaned forward and grabbed the handlebars, and pretended to steer. The moped accelerated. My uncle clicked the clutch so he could slow down while my brother pressed the gas, and they surged forward. My uncle cut the wheel to stop and they crashed in the sandy ditch. Joshua screamed. Blood ran steadily from his mouth. My uncle apologized again and again:
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry
, he said. My mother held Josh's mouth wide to look inside and saw that the thin film of flesh that held his tongue to the floor of his mouth had been ripped. They made him suck on ice to dull the pain, to bring the swelling down. His sobs subsided and he went to sleep. They did not take him to the hospital. Perhaps they thought it would heal on its own, or they were afraid of the bill, or
they were distracted by their failing relationship. Regardless, the slice healed.

My own lesson in sudden violence involved pit bulls, of course. My father had just purchased a full-grown white pit bull from another man in DeLisle; the dog's name was Chief. One of my father's dogs, Mr. Cool, the gentle white half-breed pit bull who'd comforted me when I was younger, had recently gotten sick. My cousin Larry had taken him out into the backyard into the deep woods behind the house with a rifle in hand, a job my father didn't have the heart to do himself. My father planned to fight the new dog, Chief, along with Homeboy, whom he'd had since he was a puppy. This new dog was twice Mr. Cool's size and less interested in my father's human brood. Homeboy could be tender like Mr. Cool. He would shield me with his body, while Chief looked at me, unmoved.

On an unexceptional hot and bright day, I met Farrah and her brother Marty in the middle of the gravel driveway. Homeboy was asleep under the house. A stray girl dog trotted around us. Chief wandered over to investigate her. He stood to her side very stiffly, smelled her rear, her tail, her belly. He found something to interest him. Both of them stood still before me, entranced with each other. The sun was high. I was hot and cross, and Chief stood in my way.

“Move,” I said.

Chief's ear twitched.

“Move, Chief!”

Farrah laughed.

“Move!” I said, and I hit Chief on his broad white back.

He growled and leapt at me. I fell, screaming. He bit me,
again and again, on my back, in the back of my head, on my ear; his stomach, white and furry, sinuous and strong, rolled from side to side over me. His growl drowned all sound. I kicked. I punched him with my fists, left and right, over and over again.

Suddenly he was off me, yelping, running away with his back curved. My great-aunt Pernella, who lived in the smallest house in the field, was beating Chief away with a yellow broom. She picked me up off the ground. I wailed.

“Go home,” she told Marty and Farrah.

She placed a palm tenderly where my neck met my back, and she walked me down the long drive to our house. My head and back and arms were burning, red, hotter than the day. Walking was a scream. My mother stood in the doorway of our house. I was barefoot: blood plain on my face and streaming down my body to my feet. The back of my shirt was torn and turning black. Years later, my mother told me, “I saw him attacking you in front of Pernella's house, saw her beating him off. I couldn't move.” She was paralyzed by fear.

“The dog. It bit Jesmyn,” my aunt said.

Her voice freed my mother from her shock. She called my father, who turned on the water in the bathtub. He picked me up, put me in the water. I hollered. The water turned red. My mother pulled off my shirt, took the cup she kept near the tub to rinse us with when she gave us a bath and poured water over my head. The cuts and gashes sizzled. I screamed.

“We have to wash you off, Mimi,” they said. “It's okay.”

My mother bloodied her towels as they dried me off, and when she dressed me, I bled through my T-shirt. My father drove us to the hospital. Joshua sat quietly and solemnly in
the passenger seat. My mother and I sat in the back of the car, and I lay my head on her lap; my mother laid her hands lightly on the cotton towel they'd wrapped around my head, the cotton staining red. At the hospital, a nurse, tall and White, said to me: “Oh, you got bit by a dog, did you?” My wounds throbbed, and I thought she was stupid. What did she think had happened? When the doctors gave me a rabies shot, they called in four men, and each held one of my five-year-old limbs. I bucked against them. Afterward, they sewed me up. I had three deep puncture wounds on my back. I had a three-inch gash running from the top of my left ear, parallel to my collarbone, back to the nape of my skull. They did not sew any of these. These they disinfected and bandaged. What they did sew was the bottom of my left ear, which had been ripped nearly off, and which hung on by a centimeter of flesh and skin.

“A pit bull did this?” the doctor asked.

“Yes,” my father said.

“She fought,” my mother said.

“These dogs go for the neck,” the doctor said. “If she hadn't fought …”

“I know,” my father said.

My parents brought me home and I crept around the house. Cousins and neighbors visited. Marty brought my mother the small gold hoop earring I'd worn in my left ear, which he'd found in the bloody gravel. When my father stood in the middle of a gathering of boys and men in the front yard, some who leaned on the hoods of their cars, some who squatted on the ground, some who stood like my father, some of whom were young as fourteen, some of whom were old as
sixty, my father said that if I had not fought, I would have died. He said the dog had been trying to rip out my throat. He said the girl dog must have been in heat, and Chief must have thought I was a threat. All of the men held rifles, some like babies in the crooks of their elbows, some thrown over their shoulders. My father dispersed the men, and they went off to hunt the dog: he'd been slinking around the neighborhood, trying to find his way back home. My father found him and shot Chief in the head and buried him in a ditch. I did not tell them that I had started the fight. That I had smacked Chief on his back. I felt guilty. Now, the long scar in my head feels like a thin plastic cocktail straw, and like all war wounds, it itches.

My dog bites had healed to pink scars when my mother and father had their last fight in that house, and it must have been spring because the windows were open. We were preparing to move again, this time to the small trailer that we would live in for a year, my parents by degrees driving each other to even more misery, my brother and sister and I the happiest we'd ever been in our young lives, ignorant of their fights because my parents became so adept at hiding their arguments from Nerissa and Joshua and me. But that night in 1984, they broke and could not contain their ire, my father because he felt shackled by the fact that he had a wife and kids who needed loyalty and fortitude, and my mother because my father had told her he could give us those things, and she was realizing he couldn't. By that time, he'd had his first child
out of wedlock. With that, my mother was realizing that soon her mother's story would be hers.

My parents were screaming at each other, their voices loud and carrying out of the windows, but I could not understand what they were saying. I heard one word repeated over and over again:
you. You
and
you
and
you
and
you!
This was punctuated by throwing things. The sun had set, and the evening sky was fading blue to black. Above Joshua's and my head, bats swooped, diving for insects. The windows shone yellow. Nerissa, one year old then, was in the house with our parents, and she was crying. Joshua and I sat on the dark porch, and I held him around his thin shoulders. He was shaking, and I was shaking, but we could not cry. I hugged my brother in the dark. I was his big sister. My mother and father yelled at each other in the house, and as the bats fluttered overhead, dry as paper, I heard the sound of glass shattering, of wood splintering, of things breaking.

Born: May 15, 1972

Died: February 26, 2004

I never knew Demond when he was younger. I came to know him as an adult, when he was old enough to have sharp smile lines and the thin skin at his temples was threaded through with veins. The skull beneath looked hard.

I met Demond when Nerissa lived in a large two-bedroom apartment in Long Beach. Nerissa was the first of the four of us to leave home and rent her own place in Mississippi. I was the eldest and the first to move away a distance, but in some ways Nerissa had been the first to grow up, the first to cut ties with our mother and leave her house. She had little choice. My mother had kicked her out after they'd repeatedly disagreed on Nerissa's mothering of De'Sean, who by then was three years old. De'Sean was a brown boy with a flat nose he inherited from his nineteen-year-old father and a ready smile filled with teeth like candy, small and perfect. Nerissa was the middle girl, taking on the middle child role, and once when we were all younger, Joshua had told her in an argument: “Mama and Daddy love you the least. All of us are special: Mimi's the oldest, Charine's the youngest, and I'm the
only boy—think about it.” And even though this wasn't true, it colored Nerissa's sense of self and made her want to act out, to be special to someone: her parents, the boys drawn to her by her beauty and her funny, casual coolness. We have a tight bond, we three sisters, which meant that both Charine and I spent days at Nerissa's first apartment, sleeping on old couches our cousin Rhett had given her. I was sitting at the glass table my mother'd given Nerissa as a house warming gift, after they'd reconciled, when Demond walked in the front door with Rob, Nerissa's longtime boyfriend.

Demond was around five foot ten, and he had my brother's coloring: tan, light brown hair, but he was shorter-limbed and more compact in the chest. He was mostly muscle, where my brother had been softer, still losing his preteen baby fat. Demond wore his hair in dreads that swung and brushed his shoulders when he spoke.

“What's up, Pooh?” This was Rob's nickname for Nerissa while they were dating. Demond put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lit it, talked around it.

“What's up, Demond?” Nerissa said. Demond smiled at her and put his arm around her. He was yet another of Rob's friends that she was close to: they confided in her because they liked her dimples, her smile, her warmth and openness. They told her their secrets, and she kept them. She embodied femininity in the way she sat, legs crossed, toes painted and polished, a bundle of curves, and then sullied it with the way she cussed easily and made them laugh.

I was drinking a beer. There were many beers in the apartment that year: cold bottles in tight brown sleeves on counters, on tables, leaning in loose hands on laps, on sofa arms. It
was 2003. We'd gone crazy. We'd lost three friends by then, and we were so green we couldn't reconcile our youth with the fact that we were dying, so we drank and smoked and did other things, because these things allowed us the illusion that our youth might save us, that there was someone somewhere who would have mercy on us. We drank Everclear in shots in cars loud with beat under overcast, dark-smothered skies, night after night. My cousins turned the hot tip of blunts to the insides of their mouths, exhaled, pushing smoke out into each other's mouths.
This is what it means to live
, we thought.

“This is my sister Mimi,” Nerissa said. She nodded at me, and I smiled over my bottle.

“Hey.”

I'd let the beer turn flat, warm, but I'd still drink it.
I am happy
, I thought. And then:
This is what it means to be spared
.

Demond had grown up in DeLisle. Not only was he unusual because he was an only child, but he was also unusual among my generation because he had both parents, and both of his parents had solid working-class jobs. His mother spent years at the pharmaceutical bottling company where he would later work. Being an only child and having a two-parent family meant Demond was the kid in the neighborhood who had all the things the other kids wanted: a swimming pool, an adjustable basketball hoop. Even when we were children, Demond's house was the house where all the kids wanted to be. While my brother and sisters and I were too young and lived too far away to enjoy his family's largesse, the older boys in the neighborhood spent hours at Demond's, swimming
away afternoons, wrestling in the water until they smelled strongly of chlorine, their eyes and skin burning. Or sweating for hours in the Mississippi heat, hurling the ball toward Demond's basketball hoop. When Demond graduated from high school, he joined the military. He enlisted in the army for four years, but at some point in his stint he decided that the military was not for him, so he returned home to DeLisle.

Demond was a hustler in the traditional definition of the word, in the way that many, younger and older in DeLisle, were made to be by necessity. He would do what he had to do to support himself and, later, his family. He learned trades as he went. Whatever the project called for, he did: once he worked as a carpenter even though he had few of those skills. For a longer amount of time he worked at a clothing factory; everyone from DeLisle called it the “T-shirt factory.” They didn't only manufacture T-shirts there but also acid-washed jeans that were too big in the crotch and too tight in the legs. It was hot in the building, made hotter by fans circulating the dense air. His last job would be in the pharmaceutical factory his mother worked in. The factory was cavernous: long assembly lines snaked through the space, carrying bottles of Pepto-Bismol and capsules of Alka-Seltzer past the workers, who covered their hair with plastic caps and wore thick plastic glasses and face masks. Their jobs were tedious and repetitive, and consisted of bottling the product, screwing caps on, loading the bottles in boxes and onto pallets. This was one of the last good factory jobs on the coast, since the glass bottling company next door had closed years before. The economy of the Gulf Coast had changed drastically
in the late eighties and early nineties; many factories had closed, and the seafood industry offered fewer opportunities for employment. As the economy ailed, the Mississippi legislature passed gaming laws that introduced casinos on barges. In general, there was a move from manufacturing and making things to service and tourism. And Black people in the region, who historically did not have the resources to attend college and so did not qualify for the administrative positions, were limited to jobs as cocktail waitresses, valet attendants, and food preparers. Demond was lucky to have his job. At the pharmaceutical plant in Gulfport, he worked different shifts: sometimes overnight, sometimes during the morning and into the afternoon, and sometimes during the afternoon and into the early evening. Most of the time when I saw him he was in throwaway tees, work pants, boots, with a bandana tied around his dreads to hold them away from his face, to protect them from whatever machines he worked over in that factory. He wore his work jumpsuits and his boots like a badge of honor, and when I saw him in them, dusted with whatever compound he packaged in that factory, he looked so much like my brother when he'd flitted from factory job to factory job that it was hard to keep my gaze on him.