Jesmyn Ward - Men We Reaped

“Like Scooby Doo?” I said. “Like dogs?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And what did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Sophia said.

Why are you telling me this? I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t ask because I thought I understood from her face some of why she told me. She looked sorry and guilty, her eyebrows drawn together and the ends of her mouth turned down. For the first time I understood that some of my schoolmates felt guilty by complicity, felt bad for keeping their mouths shut, for going along with it. For not taking up for me when I called them my friends.

“Well, thanks,” I said. I squirmed on the dark green bench, looked down at my hands on the table. I didn’t know how to respond to Sophia. I never even imagined confronting Wendy.

Years later, I understood that what Sophia wanted when she told me that story was absolution. But I didn’t understand that when she finished speaking, her upper body leaning forward expectantly over the table. At the time, what she told me didn’t mean much to me. I assumed that, regardless of the friendship we shared, a lot of my White schoolmates were racist: some of them, I thought, just had the balls to come out and say it in front of me. I should have spoken to some of my teachers about how I felt, but I didn’t think to do so at the time. Later, when I was an adult, I told one of my science teachers about what had happened to me and she said, “I wish you would have told me.” But I couldn’t. I was so depressed by the subtext I felt, so depressed I was silenced, because the message was always the same: You’re Black. You’re less than White . And then, at the heart of it: You’re less than human .

Sometimes I wanted to leave that school. But how could I tell my mother that I didn’t want to take advantage of the opportunity she was working herself ragged to provide for me? I broached the subject once, spurred by two of my friends, artists and writers, who were leaving my private school to attend private boarding schools in California. You’d get a scholarship so easily , they’d told me. They’d even invited me on a trip to visit them in school, and though I knew racism was everywhere and the dearth of Black faces at their boarding schools scared me, I wanted to apply, to leave Mississippi, to escape the narrative I encountered in my family, my community, and my school that I was worthless, a sense that was as ever present as the wet, cloying heat. “You can’t leave,” my mother said to me. “You have to help me with your siblings.” When she said that, I felt all the weight of the South pressing down on me, and it was then that I resolved to leave the region for college, but to do it in a way that respected the sacrifices my mother made for me. I studied harder. I read more. How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?

At the end of that school year, Joshua lived with my father in his apartment for the entire two months of summer vacation. He was thirteen. By then he was taller than my mother, and he wasn’t cowed by her in the old ways that I’d been cowed, or in which my sisters were cowed. He was self-assured around her, brutally honest and funny, would say things to her about girls he liked or his friends that I or any of my sisters would never dare to say. He was a boy, and my mother loved him especially for it. But she knew the danger of being a Black man in the South, and she thought my father could teach my brother things, important things, about survival, things she assumed she could not teach him. Even though she could have taught him about what it meant to be strong, to work hard, to love unconditionally, to sacrifice for others, to stand, she sent him to my father.

I missed Joshua but didn’t realize how much until my mother drove us girls over to my father’s and I saw Josh, his hair, the texture of mine, cut short, sitting in the living room, where he slept on the sofa, in a T-shirt and boxers. Nerissa and Charine ran into my father’s room and began arguing over what they would watch on television.

“I hate that damn VCR,” Josh said, shrugging at an old VCR sporting a thin scrim of dust in the corner of the living room.

“Why?”

“There are roaches in it.”

“Living in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Little roaches?”

“No. Big cockroaches.”

“Well, how you know they live in there?”

“Every night I’m laying up in here, trying to go to sleep, I hear them crawling around in there. Then they come out and they fly around the room.”

“What? Roaches fly?” I was aghast. All the reading and studying I’d done had not told me this.

“Yes. They fly in circles around the room, over and over. Like helicopters. Like they’re trying to bomb me.”

I laughed, but I was horrified. Roaches really flew? And then I felt a start, and wondered what else my brother knew that I didn’t, living in New Orleans with my father, expected to be a grown-up in many ways, accountable for himself because my father was so absent, womanizing or socializing. My brother must have been lonely there, accustomed to the confined chaos of living with four women. He must have been as happy to see us as we were to see him.

“They hide in the VCR during the day. And it don’t even work.” Joshua laughed. “I don’t know why Daddy’s keeping it.”

I’m sure my father looked at the VCR, like he looked at most broken things, and thought it could be fixed. He remembered the sixties and seventies, when the Black Panthers fed him and his sisters school lunches: he remembered how embattled Oakland had seemed at the time, and how it was able to come together under the leadership of the Panthers. He listened to Public Enemy and only Public Enemy. He owned all their albums. When we walked across the levee to the neighborhood on the other side, he talked to everyone, people sitting on the front steps outside their shotguns or on their narrow porches, walking in the middle of the street. He believed in the power of community, in the power of conscious political thought to fight racism and transform people who were browbeaten into those who had agency.

Whenever my father had extra change from whatever factory or security job he’d found, he’d walk us over the levee to one of the corner stores there, where he’d treat us to pickled pig’s lips and potato chips and cold drinks. One day an older woman walked up to him, wearing white, her skin dark against the fabric, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. It was hard for me to figure out that she was a woman: she was so skinny she had none of the curves I associated with all of the older women in my family. Her forearms were the same size as her upper arms. She smiled at my father, and I saw that she was missing teeth, and those that were left were black at the gum line. And she was not alone. I looked at most of the people walking the street and saw that half the neighborhood looked as if they were starving. On our way back from the store, I asked my father about it. The sun was setting, and the New Orleans sky was pink through the power lines, which were tangled even here, where the parades did not venture, with Mardi Gras beads.

“Why is everybody so skinny?” I asked.

My father looked at me. He always talked to me like an adult.

“They’re on crack,” he said. “They’re all crackheads.”

Josh walked on his other side, munching on a pig’s lip.

“All of them?” I said.

“All the ones you see that are skinny like that.”

I frowned. The majority of the neighborhood was smoking crack. Skeletal men and women walked with jarring steps every day in an endless roam, it seemed; the only other people in the streets were one or two handsome teenage boys, a few years older than me, wearing wifebeaters and gold. They slouched on metal fences in the shade of spindly oaks, yet they still turned brown in the sun, and the walking dead clustered around them, while kids on bikes and on foot cut through the throng, playing and laughing.