Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

“I’m hungry,” Nerissa said.

“Are you hungry too?” I asked Charine.

Charine nodded, hopping in front of a large mirror my father’d set against a wall in the living room. She was preening. My father, as usual, wasn’t home. He wasn’t next door at his fourth baby mama’s apartment, either. We didn’t know where he’d gone. He did that often, leaving us alone in the apartment while he disappeared. I worried about him, but I knew that eventually, sometime later that night, he’d be back. I was accustomed to being in charge when my mother was gone or working, so I took it as my obligation. Of course I had to feed us.

Joshua took a pan out. We’d never cooked together before, but I needed help. I had no idea what to do with what little we had left over from the week. I opened a can of tuna, dumped it in.

“What else we’re going to put in it?” I asked Joshua.

“Cheese,” he said.

I dumped leftover rice from some red beans and rice Mama’d packed for us, and Joshua added some peas. Finally I added more cheese. It bubbled.

“What should we call it?” Josh asked.

“It looks like throw-up,” Nerissa said.

Josh tasted a spoonful, then added salt.

“It’s good,” he said.

“Regurgitation,” I said. “We’ll call it regurgitation. We’re chefs!”

We ate most of it. When my father came home, there was only a little left. He tasted it, but much of what we’d saved for him stayed in the pot. Later on, he played music on the big stereo in the living room, and all of us danced in front of the mirror.

The next afternoon and evening, my father was gone again. My little sisters were at my father’s baby mama’s apartment, so our sixteen-year-old cousin Marcus decided he would take Joshua and me to the movies to see Boomerang . Five minutes into the movie, an usher bent over our seats.

“Joshua and Mimi?” We’re too young to be in here , I thought. They’re kicking us out . “Your cousin passed out in the bathroom. We think he’s drunk.”

We followed the usher to the bathroom and saw Marcus facedown on the tile. He’d been drinking before we got on the bus that took us to the Galleria to see the movie, but I hadn’t realized he’d been that drunk. I panicked. Our father didn’t have a house phone, and I didn’t know the numbers for my father’s brothers or his baby mama. We were marooned.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

“Come on,” Josh said.

He walked to the pay phone in the hallway, began flipping through the phone book.

“Uncle Dwight’s number is probably in here,” he said. I hadn’t thought of that, and felt stupid for panicking when my brother, three years younger, was so calm. And practical. Joshua found the number, and I called our uncle. Thirty minutes or so later, our father arrived at the Galleria in a big old Cadillac with white leather seats. Daddy dragged Marcus out of the theater and dumped him in the backseat, and we followed. I asked Daddy whose car we were riding in.

“A friend’s,” he said. I assumed he’d borrowed the car from one of his girlfriends.

“Josh had the idea to call Uncle Dwight. I didn’t know what to do,” I said.

Joshua was disappointed. Our tastes in movies had changed from horror to Arnold Schwarzenegger action films and Eddie Murphy comedies. Our trip to view Boomerang would be the first time either of us had ever seen an Eddie Murphy film in a theater, and he had really looked forward to it. Even though I hadn’t been the one to faint in a pool of vomit in the bathroom, I felt like I’d failed my brother in some way that evening. But he’d shown me that he could be levelheaded and solid when I could not be.

“That was smart,” my father said. “Common sense. What happened to you, Mimi?”

I didn’t reply to my father. It was the first time that someone had told me that I lacked common sense, and it was an odd thing for me to hear, since I’d been praised for my intelligence my entire life. My father probably meant it as a joke, but I couldn’t see it as one; instead, I added it to the long list of reasons that helped me to make sense of why he’d left us, and why he continued to leave us even when my mother brought us to visit.

One day, Topher, a boy two years older than me, walked into the classroom while my classmates and I were taking a history test. My teacher had stepped out of the room to make photocopies, and she’d already been gone for ten minutes when Topher wandered in the room. He smiled at the classroom in general: when he saw me, he stopped for a moment, his face frowned long. Then he smiled and sat on my desk. I looked up and he began telling nigger jokes.

“What do you call a nigger that …?” He said. He was taller than me, wore a dirty blond crewcut, and had a narrow face. He answered himself.

“How many niggers does it take to …?” he said. He looked down at my head, and I looked down at my desk. He answered himself.

“What does one nigger say to another nigger when …?” he said. I told myself: Don’t cry. This asshole wants to see you cry, wants to see you freak out. Take your test. Just take your test .

“A nigger, an oriental, and a Polish man walk into a bar …,” he said. He finished the joke, leaned back and laughed to the fluorescent-lit ceiling. I was hot, sweating. I wrote down a word or two of a sentence, held my pencil poised above my test as if I were on the verge of writing something profound, something worthy of an A. Topher was impatient.

“Come on, Mimi,” he said. “I know you know some good honky jokes. Why don’t you tell them to us?” I stared at him and thought of how good it would feel to lunge at him, to grab his throat, to sink my thumbs into the skin and muscle over his esophagus, to push and see him turning blue. To silence him the way he silenced me just by walking into the classroom, just by being White and blond and treating the world as if it were made for him to walk through it.

“Topher.” My history teacher walked back into the classroom, her blond hair feathered and framing the egg of her face like a nest. “Get out of my classroom.” She didn’t address what he’d said, the jokes. She hadn’t heard. I looked at my classmates, and they looked at their tests. None of them said a word.

Some of them were my friends, and they never took up for me, for Black people, when I was in the room. And according to what some of them told me in private conversation, they didn’t when I wasn’t in the room, either. Perhaps they were just as shocked or uncomfortable. I didn’t know. One day, one of my classmates, Sophia, who was moonfaced with straight brown hair, cornered me in the student lounge during our study break.

“I heard something,” she said.

“What?”

“Well, we were all sitting in Ms. Day’s classroom, and she left, and we started talking about stuff. We started talking about Black people and Molly said she could never kiss one, couldn’t imagine it because their lips are so big. And then Wendy told us this story about how some Black people pulled into her driveway to turn around and her dad started yelling at them to get out. She said he called them scoobies. Scoobies, she said.” Wendy was one of the few other ethnic girls in the school at the time: her family was Chinese American. At the time, this surprised me; I hadn’t expected this from another person of color. Years later in college, I’d read an essay by Toni Morrison that posited that this was normal for newer immigrants to the United States: place oneself in opposition to Black people from the beginning so that the members of that ethnic group would not be aligned with Black people, the lowest of the low, but would instead be aligned with others who disdained us.