Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

As they lay on their backs on the bed in Selina’s bedroom, staring at the ceiling, at a sky he couldn’t see, he told Selina: “It’s like my mama pushing me in the streets.”

“Ain’t no way, cuz,” Selina said.

“It feel like they do,” Ronald said.

“They want you to do better for yourself.”

Ronald closed his eyes, tamped something down.

“They want you to get a real job. Do it legally.”

One night Ronald and Selina took a ride through Pass Christian before parking under the wide, reaching oak trees that screened the city park from Scenic Drive, the highway, and beyond that the beach. My father told me he’d been chased out of that park as a child for being Black, called a nigger by the groundskeeper. The beauty of the massive oaks and the water over the southern horizon belied that history as Selina and Ronald sat in the car and talked about Ronald’s demons.

“I was in my sister’s car. I parked it right here,” Ronald said.

The oaks ignored the beach breeze.

“I had the gun under the seat.”

The Spanish moss in the oaks pulled tight as a flag in the wind.

“I pulled it out. I was going to pull the trigger.”

The moss wrapped around the trees’ limbs and caught.

“And then the phone rang. It was my sister.”

“Why?” Selina said.

“I got all these problems.”

“Like what?”

“My girlfriend.”

“What you mean?”

“She be doing shady shit.” He thought she was cheating on him and hiding her infidelities. He channeled all the frustration and darkness of his life into their relationship until their love took on epic proportions.

“They got too many women in the world,” Selina said.

“But I love her,” Ronald breathed. “I love her to death.”

The night before Ronald died, he met up with another cousin in Long Beach. They sat out in a car in the parking lot of an apartment complex, smoking and talking.

“I’m going into the military, cuz.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Been talking to a recruiter. I’m ready,” he said.

His cousin said he seemed optimistic, that the promise represented by the military had given him hope, or so it seemed. He was searching for a way out. But Selina remembers it differently. Her son’s birthday was the day before Ronald died, and she’d thrown a party for him, all balloons and party hats and streamers, all baby-boy blue. Ronald called her every other hour, said: “Cuz, I’m coming.” Said: “Cuz, I ain’t forgot.” Said: “Cuz, I’m on my way.”

But as the day waned and the party ended, she got another call from one of Ronald’s friends, who said: “I saw him at the Shell station. He doesn’t look like himself.” She looked for him and caught a glimpse outside the station, but something was wrong with his face under the fluorescent lights. When she maneuvered her car back around to return for him, he’d disappeared.

I don’t know all Ronald’s demons. I don’t know the specifics of what Ronald ran from, what he felt he was outpacing when he talked about going to rehab or joining the military and if he self-medicated with cocaine so he could feel invincible and believe in a future. I don’t know what that debilitating darkness, that Nothing that pursued him, looked like, what shape his depression took. For me, it was a cellar in the woods, a wide, deep living grave. I know what it feels like. I know that sense of despair. I know that when he looked down at his copper hands and in the mirror, at his dark eyes and his freckles and his even mouth, that he thought it would be better if he were dead, because then all of it, every bit of it, would stop. The endless struggle with his girlfriend, the drugs that lit his darkness, the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South — being stopped and searched by the police, going to a high school where no one really cared if he graduated and went to college, the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it was he wanted, realizing that the promises that had been made to him at All God’s Creatures day camp were empty and he didn’t have a world and a heaven of options — all of these things would cease. And this is what Ronald thought he wanted.

Years later, I searched for and found statistics about mental health and Black people in an effort to understand something about Ronald, about myself, about my community. Racism, poverty, and violence are the primary factors that encourage depression in Black men, and I’d guess that this is true for Black women as well. Seven percent of African American men develop depression during their lifetime, and according to experts, this is probably an underestimate due to lack of screening and treatment services. They will not get care for their mental disorders. The percentage of African Americans, men and women, who do receive care for mental disorders is half that of non-Hispanic Whites. Not treating these mental disorders costs Black men and women dearly, because when mental disorders aren’t treated, Black men are more vulnerable to incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, homicide, and suicide, and all of these, of course, affect not just the Black men who suffer from them but their families and the glue that holds the community together as well. According to “Souls of Black Men: African American Men Discuss Mental Health,” Black men’s death rates from suicide are twice as high as those for Black women. And when Black males ages fifteen to nineteen years old die by suicide, 72 percent of them use guns to do so. 1

These statistics punctuate my experience like an exclamation point. I read these and think about what happened to Ronald and feel he intuitively understood what it took me years of suffering grief, battling my own depression, reading, writing to understand. In the end, I understand his desire, the self’s desire to silence the self, and thus the world. Ronald looked at his Nothing and saw its long history, saw it in all our families and our communities, all the institutions of the South and the nation driving it. He knew it walked with all of us, and he was tired of walking.

Ronald was at his sister’s apartment in a complex in Long Beach. He was there alone. Still, I imagine he went into the bedroom and shut the door when his girlfriend finally answered the phone and they began arguing.

“Why are you acting like this? I love you. Tell me you love me.”

“No.”

“I’m going to kill myself.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes I am.”

“Stop playing.”

“I am.”

“Whatever, Ronald.”

I imagined the apartment had white walls, a dark bedspread on the double bed in the room, the floor bare besides the carpet. He had to have thought about this, planned it, borrowed or traded or bought the gun and bullets for it, been home by himself at a certain time. He had to have felt his Nothing over his shoulder, bearing down on him while spurring him into action. He had to have forgotten what it was like to stand outside under the hot Mississippi sun, to burn gold in it, to feel loved and alive and beautiful. He had to have felt like this was the only thing left for him to do. Ronald hung up the phone, shot himself in the head, and died.

Charine called me at work in New York City and told me. I stared at the gray walls of my cubicle, the gray carpet under my feet, the gray buildings through the window, the gray New York sky bounded by skyscrapers, and thought, Not another death . I hated phones. After I hung up with Charine, I looked at my hands and then walked into my boss’s office after knocking timidly on the door frame.

“Come in,” she said.

How should I tell her? I thought. How do I say my friend, a boy I watched dance in the sun, mud-streaked and happy, killed himself? I think I might have called him my cousin when I told her. I tried not to but began crying, and she frowned with kindness.