Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

I was too young to realize this, but others saw the self-loathing sprouting in me, and they responded to it. At the end of the summer, my mother enrolled us in the unfamiliar local elementary school. I was in the fifth grade. For the first two weeks of the term before my aptitude test scores were processed, I was in a class with a large boy who singled me out for taunting and abuse. Anytime he found me alone in a corner of the library or near the back of our homeroom, he grabbed me by the joints, pinned me to the floor or to my desk or to a wall, and tried to grab my butt. I yanked away from him and did my best to avoid him, but it did no good. I fought like the rabbit I was: timid until grabbed, and then frantic, kicking and twisting. In three weeks, I moved to a more advanced class. But I did not shed my innate sense of worthlessness. I was friends for around a month with the other three Black girls in the class. Then they began bullying me, and my grades dropped. I was miserable, perpetually afraid, and addled on adrenaline, but secretly I was not surprised by it. I thought I deserved it because others were only seeing what I saw, that I was a miserable nothing, and they were acting accordingly. I was depressed at home when I had no idea what depression was, so much so that my mother became concerned enough to pull me out of the school and enroll me in the middle school in Pass Christian during the winter break.

I was excited and anxious at once. I would know some of the other kids. Most students who graduated from DeLisle Elementary were transferred to Pass Christian middle school. But it would be my second school in half a year, and the other experience had been miserable. What if the bullying continued? I knew without knowing that others would see me as a target, and they did. At Pass Middle, I was bullied by three separate groups of girls. I spent all my spare time in the underequipped library, which seemed to have fewer books than my elementary school. I made only two friends, a Black girl and a Vietnamese girl, and we spent our time eating crackers we’d stolen out of the cafeteria, talking about boys and books. I felt more of a kinship with the Vietnamese girl; she was as much of an outsider as I was. I spent my time with her trying to learn Vietnamese through Vietnamese pop songs she taught me. But I was alone in the locker rooms, in the gym, in most of my classes with all the other groups of bullies, and my grades continued to slide southward.

My mother didn’t know what to do. Her understanding of my hatred for myself was muddied, unclear. Instead of seeing it as directed at myself, she read it as a sullen anger, a prepubescent hatred that was aimed at her for leaving my father and breaking up the family. This made her pull me even closer, demand even more of me as a cleaner and caretaker in the household. She thought she could discipline it out of me, this sulky hatred. When I turned twelve, I began watching my siblings alone while my mother was at work. My mother knew I was still smart even though my grades were plummeting, so when the employer she’d worked for as a housekeeper since leaving my father and moving to Gulfport asked about my grades, she was honest. Her employer was a White lawyer who’d attended Harvard and practiced corporate law in New Orleans, and in her early days of working for the family, he’d heard stories about her oldest, who was smart, who’d excelled in public school and been in gifted programs. My mother told him that my grades were bad. That I was being bullied at all the schools I attended. Perhaps her employer had been bullied as a child, because even though he had the build of a linebacker, he was soft-spoken and gentle, which would be easy for others to read as weakness. Whatever his reasons, it was unusual, but he offered to pay my tuition to attend the private Episcopalian school his children attended. My mother, always loath to accept help after being betrayed by my father (when he left, she had no credit because he’d had all the cars and bills in his name, and she was left with four children to feed and a nonexistent financial history; she still hates to accept help today, for fear that after it’s given it will be taken back), mulled it over for a bit but then accepted the offer. When she asked me if I wanted to switch schools, I gladly accepted. I think my mother would have worked for the family whether or not the husband offered to pay for my schooling, but in accepting his offer, I’d locked her into this employment situation for at least six more years, the time I would need to graduate from high school, regardless of whether she was happy or wanted to work elsewhere. But she saw no other options; this was the job she would work to provide for her children so she could still have enough time out of work to raise them. She would not be an absent mother.

I wasn’t the only one having trouble in school. Joshua was only doing enough work to scrape by in second grade. Nerissa was also having trouble in kindergarten; her teacher sent her to the school counselor, who called my mother in for a conference and told her she thought Nerissa had an attention disorder and should be medicated. My mother refused. Charine was oblivious and swimming through preschool. My mother tried her best to support us academically at home. Homework was always a priority. But all of us felt our father’s loss keenly, and this sense of being lost and unbalanced found its way into our schoolwork. Even though she tried her hardest, our mother could not be there in school with us during the day; there were some ways that our mother could not help us. Every day after school, we sat at the table with our books, all of us desperately trying to do better and all aware, in the bewildered way that children are, that we were failing.

My father had visited once or twice since we’d moved into the house in Gulfport, and when he did, our mother spoke to him briefly and then confined herself to the kitchen or to her room, her door shut. Often she listened to us talking to him, dancing around him, dizzy with longing. It must have been palpable to her, how we changed when we were around him; he had the luxury of being emotionally engaging and attentive while he was with us, while my mother, ever the disciplinarian, felt that she could not. Perhaps she saw in our worshipful faces some of what she’d felt toward her father when she was a child. Perhaps this was why, unbeknownst to us, she began talking to my father about reconciliation.

On his third or so visit, my father sat in the living room, a tray on his lap. My mother had cooked for him, served him food; usually she ignored him. After we’d eaten, we all sat in the living room, watching television, until my mother told us to take baths. We did, and then she sent us to our rooms. Nerissa, Charine, and I lay in the dark, undulating gently on the waterbed. Nerissa and Charine fell asleep, but I was awake, waiting for the side door to open, to close, for my father to catch his ride, or for my mother to take him wherever he was living at the time. He’d been drifting from job to job since leaving my mother, and at the time he was unemployed. He’d wrecked his motorcycle and his car was broken. But the sound of the door didn’t come. I eased off the bed, hoping I wouldn’t wake my sisters, and crawled across the floor to the door of our room. I eased it open. All the lights were off in the house except my mother’s, and her door was closed. I crawled out into the hallway to my brother’s room.

“Josh?”

“Huh?”

“You up?”

Stupid question. I crawled into the room, stopped beside the bottom bunk bed.

“Daddy ain’t left yet.”

“I know,” he said.

I didn’t know what else to say. We sat in the dark for a while, listening to the other rooms, hearing nothing, talking once in a while: Do you hear that? Do you think? We wondered in silence if our father had returned. I sat on Joshua’s floor and lay my head on his bed. Josh’s breathing grew deeper, until I could tell he was asleep. When he snored, I crawled back to our room, afraid to walk, afraid for my mother to find I was out of bed when I shouldn’t be. I climbed into bed with my sisters, pushing Charine over to sleep next to Nerissa, but it was a long time before I fell asleep, my heart beating wildly in my chest with hope and fear.