Men We Reaped (27 page)

“I got something I want to play for you,” Joshua said.

He turned up the music, blasted it. This is for all the families, Ghostface said. This is for yours, I heard. The trunk rattled. Thinking about the past, when he was young, Ghostface said. The bats spastically caught their dinners. They were poor, Ghostface said. Armadillos crept along ditches and froze in the headlights. His father left him at the age of six, and after his mother packed his father's shit and kicked him out, she cried, Ghostface said. The pines waved to the dark. The trees fell away like great waves.
Sometimes I look up at the
stars and analyze the sky, and ask myself was I meant to be here … why?
Ghostface spat, like he could not wait to get it out of him, could not bear keeping it inside any longer.

“This reminds me of us,” Josh said.

We rode away from St. Stephen's, away from the house, away from the cluster of houses of our Black neighborhood, out into the White outskirts of DeLisle, toward the bayou and over the bridges, the water shimmering silver in the night, the grass black. My brother played the song over and over again, and all that we'd been and become sat with us like another sibling in the passenger seat. We rode through Pass Christian, down to the beach, along Scenic Avenue, where he would die months later, so we could see the Gulf stretching out over the horizon, the sands white as tombstones. I looked away from Josh and out of the window so he couldn't see my face, and I cried as we rode, thinking of our mother, our father, Charine and Nerissa and him. I wiped my face and was ashamed, but Josh didn't say anything. He drove us away from the beach and back up through Pass Christian, through the bayou, past St. Stephen's, and up into the country, away from all the houses, all the lights, so we rode alone under the black bowl of the sky, the stars' fire so cold, so far away. Here, a dark horse and a white horse fed on grass at the side of the road, and when we passed them, they were dim and ghostly, hardly there. Vines grew over the limbs of trees and over the power lines, hung down into the street lamps, so the leaves of the vines gleamed like Christmas lights. The wind pushed our chests with a firm hand into the seats of the car. We rode like we could drive far and long enough to out-run
our story, what Ghostface said:
To all the families that went through the struggle
. But in the end, we could not.

I don't ride with anyone like that anymore. When I hang out with my male cousins, with Rufus or Broderick or Donnie or Rhett or Aldon, or with my friend Mark, I do ask them to drive, but it's not the same. When we ride through the roads that cut through the forests of DeLisle, sometimes I close my eyes and take another drink and feel the wind again like a hand on my face, and I think about Joshua, and then the man who drives, who could be my brother, tall and solemn in the driver's seat, right hand looped casually over the steering wheel, becomes him, and for a moment my brother is there next to me, navigating, leading. And then the wind buffets my eyes open, and the trees shiver darkly at both sides of the road and the air smells of burning pine needles, and I open my eyes to what is.

When Joshua died, he took so many of our stories with him. My sisters are too young to remember them. They cannot see the full enormity of what happened because they did not live what we did. I write these words to find Joshua, to assert that what happened
happened
, in a vain attempt to find meaning. And in the end, I know little, some small facts: I love Joshua. He was here. He lived. Something vast and large took him, took all of my friends: Roger, Demond, C. J., and Ronald. Once, they lived. We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said:
You are nothing
. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed:
I am nothing
. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each
other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.

We who still live do what we must. Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.

When I was twelve years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother's faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a loathing of what I saw, which came from others' hatred of me, and all this fostered a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother's legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country's history and identity, enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to its breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the resilience to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother's example teaches me other things: This is how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is
how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human beings sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what is, and to make something of it. As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and having just borne a daughter, I hope to teach my child these lessons, to pass on my mother's gifts.

Without my mother's legacy, I would never have been able to look at this history of loss, this future where I will surely lose more, and write the narrative that remembers, write the narrative that says:
Hello. We are here. Listen
. It is not easy. I continue. Sometimes I am tireless. And sometimes I am weary. And when I am weary, I imagine this: After the moment I die, I will find myself standing on the side of a long, pitted asphalt road flanked on both sides by murmuring pine trees, under a hot, high sun in a blue sky. In the distance, I will hear a rumbling thumping, a bass beat. A dull blue '85 Cutlass will cut the horizon, come growling down the road before stopping in front of me. It will stop so quickly the gravel will crunch, and then my brother will swing the passenger door wide with one long tattooed arm, the other on the wheel. He will look at me with his large dark liquid eyes, his face soft. He will know that I have been waiting. He will say:
Come. Come take a ride with me
. I will, brother. I'm here.

First, of course, I'd like to thank the families of the young men I've written about in this book, who were invaluable resources for me as I attempted to tell some of the stories of our loved ones' lives. I could not have written any of this without you sharing your love and grief with me, so my boundless gratitude goes to the immediate and extended families of Roger Daniels, Demond Cook, Charles Martin, and Ronald Dedeaux. Special gratitude goes to Dwynette, Rob, Cecil, and Selina, who patiently answered question after question about their cousins/loved ones.

I've been blessed with a most excellent writer's group: Sarah Frisch, Stephanie Soileau, Justin St. Germain, Mike McGriff, J. M. Tyree, Ammi Keller, Will Boast, Harriet Clark, Rob Ehle, Raymond McDaniels, and Elizabeth Staudt. Sarah Frisch was especially helpful, talking me through the book, chapter by chapter, when I was still unsure I'd even written a memoir. The wonderful faculty and students I worked with during my Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University also helped me immensely in this project, especially Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Tallent. I wrote the first draft of this book while I was the Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi, so I must thank everyone there and in the surrounding community of Oxford, Mississippi,
who welcomed me into the fold of their literary community and made my time there productive, instructive, and rewarding, especially Ivo Kamp and Richard Howorth. I'd like to thank the University of Michigan for believing in me and teaching me and mentoring me, especially Peter Ho Davies, Laura Kasischke, Eileen Pollack, and Nicholas Delbanco. Special thanks to Thomas Lynch, who taught me so much about creative nonfiction and who was the first person to encourage me to write about my grief, which became the seed of this book in an essay I wrote for his class. He was unfailingly kind and encouraging and read the essay aloud when my voice failed me.

I'd like to thank my agent, Jennifer Lyons, for first suggesting that I had a memoir in me, and for believing and being passionate about my work from the very beginning. My publicist, Michelle Blankenship, for being an amazing publicist and an excellent friend who humors me when I am in New York City and feel like eating Korean BBQ for three hours. I'd like to thank my dear friend and editor, Kathy Belden, who saw this manuscript when it was half-realized and, with careful reading, brilliant feedback, and meticulous prodding, helped me to write the best book I could. I'd be a much worse writer without her.

My mother has been after me for two books to thank the man who provided me with a scholarship to my exceptional high school, so in my third, I'd like to thank Riley Stonecipher for seeing potential in me and generously offering to help me get a better education. The world is a better place with people like him in it, who give and help where help is needed. There were many friends, teachers, and librarians at
my high school who saw potential in me and helped me become the writer I am: especially Mariah Herrin, Kristin Townson, and Nancy Wrightsman.

Finally I'd like to thank the hood in DeLisle, without which I could not have lived this to write it: Blue, Duck, Loc, C-Sam, Scutt, Pot, Fat Pat, Darrell, Darren, Jon-Jon, Ton-Loc, Tasha, Oscar, B. J., Marcus, L. C., Rem, and Moody-Boy (many of whom told me their stories and helped me write this book). I'd like to thank my friends and cousins who comforted me when writing was almost unbearable: Mark Dedeaux, Aldon Dedeaux, and Jillian Dedeaux. There were days where I could not write another word without you telling me:
It will be all right
. B. Miller for knowing exactly when I need to laugh so I won't cry. My father for telling me stories about our family, for stressing the importance of history and memory, and for teaching me to believe in community. My grandmother Dorothy for helping me learn the family's history, for teaching me how to be a strong, beautiful woman, and for cooking me special dishes. My mother for giving me permission to write this book, for clarifying facts about our family heritage, for mothering us when we wandered in the wild, and of course, for making a way out of no way every day. My niece, Kalani, and my nephew, De'Sean, for making me be silly when I need it and hugging me when I need it and giving me hope that tomorrow will have light. My baby, Noemie, for waking me everyday and reminding me to be grateful and amazed that we are here, for teaching me I can do what I previously thought impossible, and for making me happy to be alive. My sister Charine, who insisted that I write this book, who helped me research so much of it,
and who pushed me to tell our story when I didn't want to. And finally my sister Nerissa, who saved my computer during Hurricane Katrina, and who was the first person to tell me that I must tell our story, the first to insist this story was worth reading. My sisters, I am forever in your debt. In closing, I'd like to thank every one of the aforementioned for loving me, for walking with me through this trial, and for giving me a home. Thank you.

¹
See
www.communityvoices.org/uploads/souls_of_Black_Men_00108_00037.pdf
, July 2003.

²
http://newamericandimensions.com/drupal/content
/10-notable-statistics-Black-history-month
.

³
http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm
.

⁴
http://www.census.gov
.

⁵
http://www.measureofamerica.org/maps
/

⁶
Matt Volz, “Male Prison Population Mostly Black,” Associated Press, August 23, 2003.

⁷
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/06/18/Poor-education
-deadly-as-a-heart-attack/UPI-89501308377487/?spt=hs&or=hn
.

Jesmyn Ward
grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Grisham Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of South Alabama. She is the author of the novels
Where the Line Bleeds
and
Salvage the Bones
, for which she won the 2011 National Book Award and the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, as well as a nominee for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Salvage the Bones

Where the Line Bleeds

Praise for
Men We Reaped

“Jesmyn Ward is simply sui generis. I am reminded of Miles Davis's quote: ‘Don't play what's there, play what's not there,' after reading her memoir,
Men We Reaped
. This is one mighty virtuosic, bluesy hymn. Beautiful.”

—Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Mambo
Kings Play Songs of Love
and
Thoughts Without Cigarettes