Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

“You should go home for the day,” she said. I wiped my face with my hands, embarrassed that I was crying in public, walked out, powered down my computer, and left work. I rode home on the deserted subway in the middle of the day, glaring at every person I saw. I walked through crowds on the street and thought I had never been in so crowded a place, yet had never felt so cold, and I hated every walking, breathing thing for being alive while Ronald and my brother weren’t. I cried.

Days later I was home for Christmas, and they were burying Ronald in the graveyard. What is happening to us? I asked. I went to New Orleans that weekend. Charine and Nerissa, so many of us, piled into one car and parked near the river. We walked toward Bourbon Street and the crowds. As we stopped at an intersection, we heard a gunshot and the crowds surged like water, as if a large hand had dropped a stone in the middle of us all. I grabbed my sisters’ hands and we ran with the panicked crowds, half carried by the mass of bodies. New Orleans police rode on horseback through the streets. The horses were large and red, the color of Mississippi mud, and they boiled toward us, prancing and kicking with menace. Another shot sounded, and we scattered, our grip on each other so tight it was painful, and I wondered at us, running through the streets. Running away from what? I thought. From what? We didn’t go home, and the crowds didn’t disperse. We circled the block and fought our way back to the few open bars. I drank more through the night, drank until I would not remember what I did the next day, blacked out, and peed in alleyways like the homeless people I saw in New York.

Years after Ronald’s death, I learned that his girlfriend did love him, although the night of his death she was too frustrated with him to say so. She was a curvy pale girl with brownish blond hair and light eyes. She’d been adopted and lived out in DeLisle north of the interstate. They’d gotten into a bad fight during the weeks before he died, and she’d felt threatened; at the time he died, she was attempting to distance herself from him. She was trying to avoid his phone calls, and when she did pick up the phone and talk to him, the conversation was strained.

“He called me,” she said. Charine and I were in her car in our mother’s driveway. Her car was green, and so wide across that all of us were sitting in the front seat. We were high. Charine nodded and I stared at the numbers on the digital clock, which were neon blue. It was 3:00 A.M.

“He told me he loved me.”

The numbers glowed so brightly they seemed fuzzy at the edges.

“He said it right before he got off the phone. He said: ‘I love you.’”

The minute changed.

“And I didn’t say it back to him. I didn’t. I was mad at him.”

I bumped Charine’s arm with mine, just so I could feel her next to me.

“But I did love him.”

Charine chewed her gum, looked down at our arms.

“I did.”

Later that night, after she’d left and Charine and I had gone inside to escape the sunrise, Charine told me she often had this conversation with his girlfriend. She said the first time his girlfriend had told the story about what happened before his death, the story about their last conversation, she’d cried. She sobbed at the end of that story, her voice breaking. But I did love him, Charine , she’d said. I did love him. I did I did I did I did . She’d said it over and over again, as if Charine doubted her, as if Charine were someone she had to convince, when Charine knew all too well the regret that comes with a lover’s death, the regret that says: You failed him .

We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine . We dream of speaking when we lack the gift of oratory, when we lack the vision to see the stage, the lights, the audience, the endless rigging and ropes and set pieces behind us, manipulated by many hands. Ronald saw it all, and it buried him.

I prayed. At night, as the house clicked and ticked around us, I prayed that we would move back to DeLisle. I didn’t want to be afraid to go outside, to be afraid of Thomas, who lurked, to fear what he would see in me and call me, to dread the hole in the woods. My mother heard me. After living in the seedy subdivision where every year the houses seemed smaller and shabbier, crumbling at the corners, ringed by weeds, we left Gulfport. After my mother cleared her narrow bit of land in DeLisle, she set a single-wide trailer on it. The property was on the top of a hill, surrounded on three sides by pines dense with undergrowth, and when we walked out of the front door, we only saw one neighbor’s house. My mother aligned the trailer lengthwise on the property, which meant the left side of the trailer sat atop the hill, on the ground, and the right side of the trailer was elevated, supported on cement bricks, leaving enough room to drag chairs under and sit between the cement pillars. In the evening, little lean brown rabbits fed on the patchy grass that announced the interruption of the yard from the surrounding woods. In the evening, bats fluttered through the narrow gap in the trees above our heads, feeding on the mosquitoes that swarmed there, mosquitoes that bred in a hidden, shallow pond, dry during the winter, tucked away in the pine woods to the near west of our house. We were home, in our community again.

When we moved to DeLisle, my father moved to New Orleans. He thought there would be more job opportunities there, and he wanted to live closer to his brothers. After leaving us in Gulfport, my father lived with his teenage love, then moved out and lived in one small, dark apartment after another, of which there were plenty along the coast, sometimes with roommates, sometimes without. He stopped paying his child support and moved from job to job so quickly there was no way for the authorities to garnish his wages. In New Orleans, he lived in the small yellow ghost-haunted house with barred windows, where the wind echoed through the industrial yard behind it at night, bidding the metal to speak. Then he moved to a small two-story apartment complex with only six one- or two-bedroom apartments. The rent was cheaper there. The building was gray wood and red brick, and my father’s oldest brother, Dwight, lived on the first floor. We would spend our weekend and summer visits there when I was in high school.

I’d been the only Black girl in the private Episcopalian elementary school during my sixth-grade year, and on my first day at the corresponding high school, I learned that this would be the case for high school, too. What I didn’t know is that I would remain the only Black girl in the school for five years: in my senior year, another Black girl enrolled, but we never spoke. The one other Black kid in the school when I was a seventh grader was a senior, and he acknowledged me sometimes with a nod, but most often ignored me. He was comfortable with the boys in the school, would hang out with them in the hallways looking like a clone of them: polo shirts, khaki shorts, slide-on boat shoes. I heard rumors that they snuck him into the local yacht club to sail with them, because he was unofficially not allowed because he was half Black, which meant that according to the yacht club he was Black. Today, I understand class also complicated my developing a relationship with either of them: both of these Black students came from two-parent, solidly upper-middle- or middle-class families. They lived in exclusive neighborhoods with pools and gyms and golf clubs and yearly homeowners’ association fees, and that culture was totally alien to my own, one of government assistance and poverty and broken homes. We had nothing to talk about. Most of the other Black boys who enrolled in the school later, when I was in ninth grade and until I graduated, were basketball recruits. They all came from backgrounds that were closer to mine, and our relationships were easier. I joked with them in the hallways between classes whenever I had the chance, and during those years those moments of camaraderie gave me some respite, some illusion of community. But it was an illusion: because of my distaste for team sports and my love of books, I was still an outsider. I had friends, friends who were outsiders like me in different ways: kids that were artists or writers or loved pottery or punk music or theater, but they were never my color. Overall, there were never more than eight Black students in the school at one time. During my time there, there were only three other students of color: there was one Chinese American girl, and later two Hispanic students, all three of whom came from moneyed families. At its largest, the high school contained no more than 180 students, and at its smallest, no fewer than 100.