Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

She told me to watch my siblings, and she walked out of the door to get her car. She’d purchased a second car by then, a small blue Toyota Corolla, a stick shift that was new enough to shine a slick blue. She drove to the girl’s house, looked past the girl as she sat in my father’s lap, and told my father to get in the Caprice and drive it home, and once he did that, she said, he could get the fuck out.

My father has always worn his dreams on the outside, so even as a preteen I knew what they were. I’d known for years he’d wanted to have his own school. He had other dreams that I recognized but still can’t articulate, even as I’ve gotten older. His ill-advised motorcycle purchase; his leather suits, studded and fringed, that he wore in ninety-degree weather; the Prince he listened to on his Walkman while he rode: there was something at the heart of my father that felt too big for the life he’d been born into. He was forever in love with the promise of the horizon: the girls he cheated with, fell in love with, one after another, all corporeal telescopes to another reality.

My mother had buried her dreams on that long ride from California to Mississippi. She’d secreted them next to my brother in the womb, convinced as she was, with a sinking dread, that they were futile. She’d tried to escape the role she’d been born to, of women working, of absent fathers, of little education and no opportunity. She’d tried to escape the history of her heritage, just as my father had. Going to California to join my father had been her great bid for freedom. When she returned, she thought it had failed. She’d returned to the rural poverty, the persistent sacrifice that the circumstance of being poor and Black and a woman in the South demanded. But the suggestion of that dream lived on in her conception of my father. It’s part of why she loved him so long and so consistently, and it is part of the reason it hurt her so to meet him at the door with his leather jackets, black sweatpants, and black fringed T-shirts shoved in garbage bags and to tell him: Go .

And just like that, my father left.

With my father gone, I picked up my mantle of responsibility. Perhaps if we’d still been in DeLisle, maintaining our family would have been a little easier, but in Gulfport, my mother couldn’t bear the burden of the entire family by herself. I was learning that. My mother gave me a house key. It was one item in a growing list of responsibilities. In addition to hanging clothes, gathering them, folding them, putting them away, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the bathrooms, babysitting my brother and sisters during the day during the summer while my mother was at work, the key meant that during the school year I should let us in the house if we got home from school before my mother made it home from work. But even as a young teen, I was absentminded, forgetful. In the summer, I often left my key inside and turned the lock on the knob and pulled the door shut behind us, locking us out of the house. After our father left, there was no one to open the door if our mother wasn’t home. During the school year, I didn’t realize I’d left the key at school until I stood before the door with my brothers and sisters.

I patted my short pockets, Josh at my elbow, Charine on my hip.

“I forgot the key.”

“What?” Joshua said.

I fumbled around Charine’s leg, tried to make her slide down my hip to stand, but she wouldn’t.

“I’m so stupid!” I said.

I looked at Josh. He was only a few inches shorter than me, even though he was just nine. He rolled his eyes.

“I have to pee,” Nerissa said.

“Me too. I have to pee too,” said Charine.

“We going to have to go in the woods.”

“I don’t want to go in the woods,” Nerissa said.

“Me neither,” Charine said.

Joshua followed us as I grabbed Nerissa by the hand. I led them around the yard and into the woods we’d walked through with our father to get to the video store; we weren’t allowed to walk all the way to Dedeaux Road without him. Fifteen feet into the woods, next to a trail on the right, was a dense cluster of bushes. Further behind the cluster of bushes was a full-size mattress that someone had dumped, probably the previous tenants who’d lived in our house. This, I thought, would have to do.

“Come on,” I said. I led them behind the screen of bushes. Charine began to cry. She was convinced that when she pulled down her pants something would bite her. A snake, she said. Or ants.

“Ain’t no snakes,” I said, although it was summer and hot, and the underbrush could be teeming with them, reptiles cooling themselves in the hottest part of the day.

She resisted.

“You want to pee on yourself?” I threatened. Sobbing, she squatted. I felt guilty for bullying her. “That wasn’t that bad,” I said. Charine nodded and wiped the snot from her nose with her hand. Josh, who’d watched the path for us, ran past us to the mattress.

“I’m going to do a flip,” he said. He sprinted and leapt on the mattress. I expected to see him spring high into the air, soar into a flip. He bounced about a foot or so. The ground had no spring, and the mattress was a sorry trampoline. Still, he did the front flip and landed on his back. When he stood, he smiled dizzily, swaying, and began to bounce again. Nerissa skipped to join him, and Charine let my hand go and ran for the mattress as well, snakes and ants forgotten.

Even though I felt the weight of responsibility with my father gone, as my mother had felt it when hers left (except in even larger measure), I was still a kid. We were still kids, in love with the mystery and beauty of the woods, deriving a certain pleasure out of our scrappy self-imposed exile from the house. We ran wild in the hours between our dismissal from school and my mother’s return from work.

One day, while I was sitting with Charine and Nerissa and weaving flowers into rings and necklaces, Josh appeared and sat with us. He’d been off exploring.

“I found something,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A secret room,” Josh said. “I’ma show you.”

We followed him further into the woods, along the trail that curved to the right, the trail that would take us through the subdivision and to a corner store on Dedeaux Road if we followed it. We walked in single file because it was so narrow. Underbrush and weeds grew thickly off the dirt path, scratched our calves, our shins. I picked Charine up and carried her. She was four. Joshua led and Nerissa trotted on his heels, proud to be keeping up with him, even at six. Then he led us off the trail, and I hoisted Charine around to my back and bent, all of us burrowing our way through thorny, leaf-drenched bushes, stumbling through blackberry brambles as the pines shivered above our heads. Suddenly the woods opened up into a small clearing. The ground was soft and spongy below our feet, padded with layers of pine straw.

“Watch,” Josh said, and knelt. He felt in the straw along what looked like a shallow ditch, then pushed the earth. There was a scraping sound. The straw moved, and there was a black hole where the ditch had been. “Look,” he said.

We clustered behind him. I grabbed Nerissa’s hand and leaned over Josh’s narrow back before I understood what I was seeing. Someone had dug into the earth, made a cellar, and then covered it over with two-by-fours before strewing pine straw to camouflage it.

“Who made this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Joshua said. He had friends in the neighborhood, too, Black boys and one White boy, all who, like my girlfriend, lived there with their single mothers. Maybe they made it , I thought, but it seemed too large an undertaking for skinny little kids with knees like doorknobs, shirtless boys whose ribs you could count when they rode their bikes through the streets. So much digging , I thought. And planning .