Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

“You should get on it,” Ronald said. He spat away a piece of green that had slid to his lip.

“Naw, I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“Get on in your clothes.”

“Then I’ll be walking around with wet clothes all day.”

“Come on,” he said.

“I can’t.”

I brushed another sliver of grass from his face, and he shivered and smiled. Boys ran by him in pairs. “You’re cute,” I said. I figured there was no harm in telling Ronald something he already knew.

“One day I’m going to marry you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yep.” He nodded, smiling his charming smile.

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

I laughed and brushed away another blade. Ronald ran to the slide and Tony followed and they threw themselves at it, both of them burning darker in the heavy sun. I rolled the sleeves of my T-shirt up so they bunched under my armpits and let my shoulders warm. When I told the boys their session was done, the others ran inside, but Tony and Ronald lagged behind.

“Help me pick up these hoses,” I told them. A few clouds scudded across the sky, shadowing them, and when they cleared, Tony and Ronald were carrying empty bottles of dishwashing liquid and dragging hoses, mud and grass smeared across their bellies. The boys saw me watching and stopped to dance in the field, popping while holding the hoses and bottles up. They looked like drunk adults on the edge of a parade, dancing as Mardi Gras floats passed. I laughed. The sun caught them, and they were beautiful.

As Ronald aged, he got taller: the planes of his face spread and sharpened, his shoulders broadened and his waist slimmed, but when his face dimpled, he was still that nine-year-old boy in the field, shining copper in the sun. Ronald didn’t lose his charm and charisma, or his handsomeness, as he grew older. If anything, he was more confident, especially with women. I saw him sometimes around DeLisle or Pass Christian. Sometimes I even saw him around my mother’s house when I was home visiting from NYC, since he and Charine were good friends; when he walked through the living room to Charine’s room, he always seemed to be smiling, to be leaning forward as he walked, all the angles of his body harmonious like a song. I never imagined that he carried something darker in him, never saw him when his mood was cloudy and he turned furious or depressed. I was too immature to imagine at the time that the darkness that I carried from my prepubescent years, that conviction of worthlessness and self-loathing, could have touched others in my community.

What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.

But I did not know this in the spring of 2002, which is why I thought Ronald was happy when I saw him at the park. Nerissa was off sitting in what I later would find out was Demond’s car, which was pulled onto the side of the court and parked in the weak seasonal sun, and I was sitting on the bleachers with Hilton watching Ronald play basketball with a girl. I was home, visiting, and it was a relief to sit in the park again, be still under the trees and the great heavy sky.

Ronald was laughing and copping feels on the court. He pulled his sleeves back over his elbows and threw his hands in the air and shoved his crotch into the girl’s ass like he was guarding her. She dribbled the ball, bent over, smiled before glancing behind at him. He smiled encouragingly at the stands. This was Ronald’s flirting all grown up: knowing and corporeal. Hilton sat beside me, and we laughed at the joke. The girl was coy, noticing what Ronald was doing but not discouraging him. She was a teenager, exuding her budding sexuality with every smile, every jut of her hips as she dribbled, with every giggle. At the opposite end of the court, Charine and C. J. threw the ball to each other, playing a game of twenty-one. After his game with the girl, Ronald climbed the bleachers and sat next to us. Hilton passed him a cigar.

“We still getting married?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ronald said. Hilton snorted. Something about Ronald’s face was surprised, pleased. “Hell yeah,” he said. The girl wandered off to the cars. After drawing on the cigar, Ronald followed her.

Charine said when they rode around DeLisle later that day, smoking and listening to music and talking shit, I came up in the conversation. Her friends talked about the way I jogged down the street for exercise in sports bra and shorts, hair a rough curly tangle escaping the bun at the back of my head, my right leg kicking out to my side in a circle, my arms hanging low with my hands open. What are you doing , one of them had once asked, running or swimming? Another would ride behind me on his bike, talking constantly about the neighborhood, about the weather, about the day, about the way the crackheads walked the block, all the while singing lines from the latest songs. Once I told him to get away from me through labored, wet breaths. That hurts my feelings , he said. And then: You still run funny . Charine and C. J. and their friends talked about me in that car and Ronald stopped them. He passed one of them the blunt.

“Shut up,” he said. “That’s my wife. Don’t talk about my wife.”

“Whatever,” one of them laughed.

“I’m not playing,” he said.

They all laughed and parked in a driveway lined with a column of azalea bushes almost tall as a man, and smoked the afternoon away.

After I saw Ronald that day at the park, I thought I knew him. I thought that if I were younger and we were in high school together, Ronald was the sort of boy I’d fall in love with: funny, confident, charming, a bit arrogant. But there was much I didn’t know about Ronald, about his life and how happy or unhappy he was. He was nineteen. When I saw him, he lived with his mother. They argued, so he moved in with his older sister. After some months, he and his sister argued, he moved out of her house and for a stretch of time in the fall, he was homeless. He squatted in an abandoned house until his older cousin Selina, who was in her early twenties, found out, so she tracked him down and told him, “Kinfolk don’t live on the street.” Ronald moved in with her.

Ronald snorted cocaine, and he hustled for money. This is why he fought with his family. They loved him, wanted him to start working and stop using drugs, but he could not. He knew he could not, which is why he told Selina he wanted to go to rehab: he loved his mother and his two sisters, and his estrangement from them pained him. He felt that he couldn’t please any of the women in his life, including his girlfriend. The charm and charisma of his youth were as meaningless as a tonsil or appendix in his adult life. He knew how to navigate the world as a child, but as a young Black man, he was unmoored. The hard facts of being a young Black man in the South, the endemic joblessness and poverty, and the ease of self-medicating with drugs disoriented him.

After Ronald moved in with Selina, she visited his mother to assure her that he was safe. She wanted to let his mother know that Ronald was helping out, was almost a father figure to her son, spending his afternoons taking care of him while Selina worked. She wanted to let his mother know he was okay. Ronald’s mother expressed her frustration and helplessness in the face of Ronald’s addiction. Ronald took this as rejection.