Men We Reaped (10 page)

I wanted to be my own heroine. Behind the houses in a row along Route 357, a forest stretched. I'd followed my older cousin Eddie back through those woods once to a barbed wire fence with signs posted intermittently along its length that read: DELISLE FOREST, PROPERTY OF DUPONT, NO TRESPASSING. This fenced property stretched from the Bay up behind our house, and then down all the way to my elementary school. Du Pont had put in a bid to build a factory in DeLisle in the seventies, promised lots of jobs to the community, and when approved, leased enough land for a plant but also enough to provide a buffer of woods between them and us. When I followed my cousin Eddie, who must have been twelve at the time, back to that fence, I watched him jump over it, a rifle in hand, and disappear into the dark. He was hunting rabbits, squirrel, anything wild and gamey that would yield a little meat after it fell to his bullet. Part of me wanted to go with him, the other was afraid. Those woods were lovely and menacing, all at once. And access to them was forbidden.

When I played with Joshua and Aldon, I wanted to lead them back into those woods, to explore them like the characters in
Bridge to Terabithia
did their forest, but I did not. Instead, Josh and Aldon and I wandered around the shed in the backyard, leapfrogging over the septic tank, sliding along the slippery slope where what had been an artesian well slowed to a slick trickle to create a bog in the middle of the yard. We explored behind my great-aunt's house. She lived next door. There we found a good plot of pines. Hidden beneath their shade was straw-strewn earth, and sticky stumps and trunks, brown and flaky, felled by hurricanes.

“We are going to have our own place,” I said. “We need to come up with a name for it.”

“What we going to name it?” Aldon asked.

I looked down at them both. They were five, three years younger, and shorter than me. Their big heads seemed too big for their shoulders, their hair was a fine dusting, and their eyes were wide. Joshua was bright-skinned and Aldon was darker, but both wore cropped satin and net shirts that looked like football jerseys and khaki shorts with nasty metal zippers that hurt my fingers whenever I helped one of them get dressed. They were depending on me. Where one went, the other followed, and right now they were both following me. We'd find our place, our own little world.

“Kidsland,” I said. “We'll call it Kidsland.”

“Kidsland?” Joshua asked. When he said it, it sounded like
kizzland
.

“Yeah, Kidsland, like
kid's
…
land
. Because it's our land. Our kingdom.”

“Yeah, that's good,” said Aldon.

“I like that,” said Josh.

I led them out into the trees. Downed trunks became horses and castles. Branches became swords and enemies. We battled. We ran. Joshua collided with a tree and scraped himself purple. I clucked over it, wiped it clean with my shirt, blew on it.

“It hurts,” he said.

“It's going to be okay,” I told him.

Joshua trusted me. His eyes, which had glazed wet, dried. He shrugged, hopped a little on his good leg, ready for more serious play. I was proud of him.

I was still dissatisfied with the name.
It sounds so plain
, I thought,
not magical like Terabithia
. But I was happy with Kidsland, our home, with Aldon, with Josh.
Two good warriors
, I thought. I was a little satisfied, as if I'd taken the first step to doing something momentous, to becoming one of those girls in the books I read.

In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren't at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be. Even then I dimly knew there was some gendered difference between my brother and me, knew that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ. But for me, the reality of those differences was reduced to one tangible symbol: cigarettes.

I could read the packages, knew that my uncles smoked Kools. To me, they embodied just that, the leisure and cool that were the specific privilege of men. When Joshua and Aldon and my cousin Rhett and I collected enough loose change from the grown-ups, we'd jump on our bikes and ride them down the street, a mile or so, to a store built in a shed in a yard. The owners were White. I often felt like they were staring at us as we carefully picked our pack of gum, our potato chips,
our one drink, our candy. Two dollars could buy us this, but if we had less, if we had only a dollar, our options were narrower. Joshua and Aldon would choose all candy, penny candy and Now and Laters, Rhett chips and drinks, and I'd buy candy and gum. My favorite candy was candy cigarettes. I'd smoke my candy cigarettes during the bike ride back to the house: my favorite brand had some sort of fine powder on the tip, so when I put my lips to the gummy candy filter and blew, a light smoke flew like sea spray.

One day, one of my uncles puffed his cigarette, sucked it down quickly, threw it down in the dirt with a quarter of it remaining, and then walked down the street. The porch was empty, my aunts in the house were quiet, and we were alone in the dirt yard. I slid under his car, plucked the cigarette from where he'd flicked it. It was still warm. I held it by the filter, the tip pointed to the ground, and walked over to Josh and Aldon.

“Come on, y'all,” I said.

They stood and followed me around the back of the house. I stopped between the back wall of the house and the concrete slab of the septic tank.

“We're going to smoke this cigarette,” I said. I wanted some of my uncle's autonomy, some of his freedom.

They nodded sagely, as only five-year-olds can do. I tried to puff the cigarette and got nothing. Before I could hand it to Aldon, Aldon's mother heard us from the bathroom window, which I'd parked us right beneath.

“Mimi, Aldon, Josh: get in here!” she yelled.

We dropped the cigarette and filed into the house. Both of my aunts sat at the kitchen table.

“What were y'all doing?”

I didn't say anything.

“Y'all were smoking a cigarette?”

“No,” I said, suddenly panicky, my chest flushed hot.

“Don't lie,” my other aunt said. “Was y'all trying to smoke a cigarette?”

“Yes,” I said, miserable.

“I heard everything from the bathroom window,” Aldon's mother said. “Why did y'all do it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I saw it and I picked it up.”

“Well, don't ever do it again,” she said. “Y'all don't need to smoke.”

“If y'all promise not to ever do it again, we won't tell your mama.”

“Okay.” We all nodded.

They sent us back out to play. I was relieved, knowing that we'd escaped a terrible punishment. Later that night, as Mama was drying Joshua off after giving him a bath, he told her, “Mimi and Aldon were smoking a cigarette.” My mother called me into the bathroom and confronted me. I told her what my aunts had said. She was angry they hadn't told her about our escapade. I wished my father were there, but he was out. My aunts told my mother the truth. My mother's work was never done. She whipped Joshua and me and punished us by confining us to our bunk beds in the back bedroom, dark as a cave in the middle of the summer, for a weekend. We came out to eat and use the bathroom. We slept and whispered to each other: I read, sometimes to him. While we suffered, Aldon giggled and played outside: our aunt was
more lenient with him. Joshua and I watched his shadow waver across the screen, behind the curtains, with the pecan and pine trees. I was bitter: even in punishment, some boys had it easier.

But on most Saturday mornings, we were free from adult worries. The house was ours, since we woke at 6:00 A.M. to sneak to the living room, where we turned on the TV for Saturday morning cartoons. We lay for hours on the living room floor, recently carpeted in dark blue, to watch the Smurfs, the Snorks, Tom and Jerry, the Ewoks, the Looney Tunes. Our favorite show was
Popeye
. They broadcast the show out of a studio in New Orleans: the Popeye's fast-food chain invited White kids to the studio to sit in bleachers to balance small, greasy cartons of fried chicken and biscuits on their laps while a host introduced all the cartoons. I was so hungry then my stomach burned and hurt in sharp, little pains.

“I'm going to make us something to eat,” I said. Every Saturday, I scaled counters to reach in cabinets, took out the WIC-issued cornflakes and powdered milk. I mixed the powdered milk by the instructions in a half-gallon pitcher, fixed us all bowls of cereals that we ate standing in the doorway so we could watch cartoons and eat. We would be whipped if we ate and spilled anything in the living room. The cereal—no, the milk—didn't taste right. It didn't taste like the store-bought milk I remembered having before we moved to my grandmother's, when my father had a good job
and could afford milk that came wet and cold in gallons. He'd lost his job at the glass plant after he mislabeled boxes, and was moving from job to job. Some Saturdays I added cups of sugar to the powdered milk because I thought it would make it taste like the real thing. It didn't, but at least it was sweet. Joshua and Aldon and Nerissa and I ate the clumpy, watery mess over our cornflakes, and we were still hungry. Every Saturday we stared at those fair-haired children on
Popeye
, healthy and plump and pink, who got to cup their hands to their eyes like binoculars and screech “Roll 'em!” before each cartoon while their laps turned splotchy from the grease leaking from their chicken boxes. We ate everything in our bowls, scraped the bottoms with our spoons, drank the last milky sugar from the bowl, and I, with the cereal disintegrating to silt in my spiteful stomach, hated them.

Between jobs, my father spent some time with us.
The Last Dragon
was my father's favorite movie, so we watched it over and over until we knew all the words. We acted it out in the dining room turned bedroom; he was Sho'nuff, Josh was Leroy Green, and I was Laura Charles. When my father was home, it seemed that my mother wasn't: I never saw them in the same room together. I knew something was wrong, but I could not articulate what it was. Sometimes my father strapped us to the back of his motorcycle, where my brother or I clung to his back like monkeys, and he rode us around DeLisle or Pass Christian, headphones smashed into our soft heads under the weight of the helmet. Prince's “Purple
Rain” blasted from the cassette player my father had strapped to his waist. Sometimes I think I should have known he was trying to tell me something, something like
I am a man, I am young and handsome and alive, and I want to be free
, but I did not. After a few weeks, my father got a job at an oyster factory in Pass Christian, which paid much less than the glass plant. On his hours off, he dressed in expensive leather riding suits he'd bought when he worked at the plant, combed his long black hair back into a braid, and rode the coast. What I did not know at the time was that he was riding to see his girlfriends, of which there were many, to strap them to the back of his motorcycle. I don't think he told them that he was married or had a family, and I don't know if he was thinking about them or us when he brought home five-gallon buckets of fresh oysters from his job still in the shell and stood out in the backyard shucking them. He still wore his long black rubber boots and work overalls, and ate the oysters raw while the sun set. Sheets, fresh on the line, billowed behind him.

“Can I have one?” I asked him.

“You're not going to like it,” he said.

“I just want to try it.”

“They're alive,” he said, “when they go down.”

“They see all the way down your throat?”

He nodded.

“You still want to try one?”

I wanted to do it because he said I couldn't. I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted it to be the two of us standing in the yard, eating oysters in the dusk, always.

“Yeah.”

He skewered the shell, popped it open with a flip of his wrist. The oyster meat was gray, streaked with silver, a purple trill at the center where my father cut it from the shell.

“Here,” he said, holding the oyster out to me flat on the blade, as if it were a spoon. “Open your mouth.”

I opened my mouth, sucked the oyster in. It was warm and salty and wet: I imagined it smothering in the pink insides of my mouth, staring at the dark tunnel of my throat in despair. I held it there, considering.

“Don't spit it out,” my father said, and the burlap sack of oysters at his feet shifted, clinked. “Do not spit it out.”

It was too warm. It was alive.

“Swallow.”

I consigned the oyster to death and swallowed. My father looked pleased.

“You like it?”

I'd hated it. I shook my head. My father laughed, and his teeth were very white in his face, which became duskier and darker as the sun set. He stuck the knife in the seam of the oyster again, shucked again. He balanced the oyster delicately on the knife, brought the knife to his mouth, and sucked the oyster inside. I switched from foot to foot, scratching the inside of my calf with the thick skin on the bottom of my feet. I wondered how he never cut himself, how he could be so beautiful, so tall, so impressive.

On my eighth birthday, I didn't have a party. The year before, my parents had thrown me an extravagant party at my
grandmother's house, where all my cousins came to sing “Happy Birthday” to me over a large pastel sheet cake, and I'd worn a fancy purple and white dress, and been given a brand-new bicycle with a lavender banana seat. The following year, money was tight. On this birthday, my parents walked me out the door off the kitchen of my grandmother's house and unspooled a white and blue rope, thick as my neck, from the trunk of the family car. I was puzzled. My father laughed. The rope was long, twice as long as the driveway.