Jesmyn Ward: Men We Reaped

Joshua and I met in the hallway. This is my last real memory of him, and I hate it. I cannot remember the last time I actually saw him. I only remember this.

Joshua saw my suitcase on the floor in my room.

“Where you going?” he said.

“To New York to interview for a job,” I said. I looked down and away and back to his face, tilting my head back. I wanted to say: I’m coming back right after or I might not get the job anyway .

“To stay?” he said.

I wanted to say: It’s just a visit . “Yes,” I said.

His face fell. I have read that expression in books before, and it is true: his expression slid from his forehead over his beautiful eyelashes, his brown eyes, to his mouth, where it settled in a frown. My brother did not want me to leave again, to lead. I frowned.

I felt I had no choice: I had graduated in March and it was now September, and I still had no job and had racked up debt. I charged a round-trip plane ticket to New York City and arranged to stay with my boyfriend while I was interviewing. My mother and grandmother took me to the airport, and as we stopped at the end of Hill Road, I sank down into the seat, feeling terrified and cornered.

“I forgot my ring,” I said. My grandmother had gifted me a ring for my tenth birthday, which, on threat of never receiving another gift from her, she warned me against losing. It was gold and white sapphire, she told me, but later I found out the stone was glass. I’d worn it every day since I turned ten, and thirteen years later, in the back of that car, I didn’t have it. “It’s in the bathroom. I took it off before I took a shower. Please get it,” I said.

“Okay,” my mother said over her shoulder. She and my grandmother continued their conversation and I slid down in the backseat so my mother could not see my face in the rear-view mirror as I cried silently, wiping my tears away with the backs of my hands. I didn’t want her to see the irrational fear I felt at taking that trip to New York to interview; I wanted to appear brave and adventurous and smart, be the child she’d always wanted, the kind who took advantage of all the world offered, who journeyed forth from Mississippi with no remorse. I had no idea what I was doing.

When I arrived in New York City, I went directly to my college boyfriend’s apartment, in a brownstone in Cobble Hill, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn. I was in NYC for four days for interviews, from October 1 to October 4, which I’d scheduled so that I could return home for Charine’s fifteenth birthday on October 5. On October 3, I had an interview in the afternoon, with a placement agency in a high-rise somewhere in midtown. The woman who talked to me asked me questions and listened to my answers as if I were some sort of oddity. She smiled to herself at the South still evident in my voice, and perhaps wondered if that was going to be a problem with potential employers. When I exited the building, I looked up at the thin strip of sky between buildings, felt the city like a giant hand closing over me. I felt the energy of the place, the feel of limitless possibility and potential, but I was afraid. So many people, and how could I live without the sky? Without trees? I got lost on the subway, went uptown before realizing I had to head south through the Village to return to my boyfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn, but I was proud of myself for eventually finding my way, alone, when my previous forays into public transportation had been limited to taking the bus from Stanford to San Francisco. In Brooklyn, I rounded the corner that led to my boyfriend’s brownstone, which was on the edge of the neighborhood and next to a highway, and he was at the door. He was a banker, and he worked eighteen-hour days. What was he doing at his door?

“What are you doing here?”

He was tall, slim, movie-star handsome, which made sense to me in some way since he was from L.A. He was from an upper-middle-class African American family, and while I’d been born red, he’d been born golden. His father was a doctor, and his mother’s family had connections in Hollywood. He’d done all the popular, normal things in college: he’d joined a frat, been an RA, played intramural sports. What was not normal about his college experience was dating me. We came from such vastly divergent backgrounds. Every time some ill luck befell my family, some unique confluence of events that bespoke what it meant to be poor and Black and southern, it shocked him. He hadn’t signed up for that. He wanted to be young and moneyed and have fun, and all the messy facts of my life, my history, who I was and where I came from, were anything but fun. He was the first real boyfriend I’d had, possessed of the same preternatural beauty my father had, and in the end he walked away just as my father had.

My boyfriend shook his head, didn’t say anything, but his mouth was tight. He unlocked the front door and I followed him up the stairs, and he turned to me in the hallway and in a weird, slumped-over posture hugged me. He was breathing heavily. He let me go, and there were tears. Now his face was slack.

“You’re scaring me,” I said, but that wasn’t true. I was nervous.

“You need to call your dad,” he said.

“Why?”

He led me to the phone.

“Just call your dad.”

I sat on his bed. Now I was afraid. I’d been sweating during the interview and I began to sweat again. The phone, black and cordless, was slippery in my hands. My boyfriend sat on the bed and watched me dial.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Daddy, it’s Mimi.”

“Hey, Mimi.”

“What’s going on?”

“I have something to tell you.” He breathed, and the breath broke. “Josh was in an accident last night.”

“Is he okay?”

Again that broken breath.

“He didn’t make it.”

The phone came away from my ear and I leaned forward and opened my mouth and sounded — I could call it a keening, a groan, a cry — something inside me, broken. My boyfriend’s arms were around me but I leaned away from him, thought I would vomit on his bed. What am I doing here? I thought. Why am I here and they are there? Where is my brother? Where is he? But my daddy said, my daddy said, he just said he didn’t make it he’s gone he’s gone. He’s dead. What? He’s dead he’s dead he’s dead . And then: My brother is dead .

Joshua’d gone to work on the afternoon of October 2. He hadn’t been scheduled to work, but he went in anyhow to pick up extra hours, to make a little extra money. He’d worked his shift, parked expensive cars and not so expensive cars, left his body’s warmth and indent in their seats. Nerissa and Charine drove to the casino to pick up Nerissa’s check: she worked in a restaurant on the top floor of the casino’s hotel. With check in hand, Nerissa and Charine stood near the main employee entrance, hoping to catch a glimpse of Joshua coming in to work. They’d seen him drive past the entrance of the casino in his gray-blue Cutlass, sitting high in his front seat, looking straight ahead, his face serious, his hair coming out of his messy braids, his profile sharp. They waited around fifteen minutes, and when he didn’t walk through the entrance that was closest to the parking garage, Nerissa and Charine decided to leave, assuming Josh had walked into the casino through another entrance. That is the last memory they have of him. I wish we would have stayed , Nerissa says. Five more minutes , Charine says. We grasp at minutes, seconds, milliseconds. Years later, I would be grateful my family waited until October 3 to tell me Josh died: I’d had seventeen more hours wherein, for me, Joshua was still alive.

The night of October 2, he clocked out, and instead of driving up Highway 49 to take I-10 to the DeLisle exit, to home, he decided to take the beach road. I’d like to think it was a beautiful night, which is why he would have taken Highway 90 home. That the moon was full out over the Gulf, that it shone cool and silver in the clear sky, that the water glittered with its reflection. That the barrier islands were thin eyelashes on the dark horizon. That the air swooped down from the north and was unseasonably cool for October, so when Josh walked out of work and started his car, he rubbed his arms and said, I love this shit , loved the chill air on the down that wouldn’t turn to beard on his cheeks, loved that he could look out of his window and see an open horizon over the water, where the waves from the Gulf quietly lapped the shore, where the oak trees in the median stood witness over centuries to wars, to men enslaving one another, to hurricanes, to Joshua riding along the Coast, blasting some rap, heavy bass, ignorant beats, lyrical poetry to the sky, to the antebellum mansions our mother cleaned and whose beauty we admired and hated. Eventually he split from Highway 90 and turned onto Scenic Drive, a silent, stately road set off from the highway by another median, by million-dollar real estate, when the drunk driver, a White man in his forties, sped up on my brother from behind in a white car he’d borrowed from a friend and hit Joshua’s car at eighty miles per hour. Josh pressed his brakes by instinct, leaving black rubber smeared across the road, but there was so much momentum, so many bodies and cars and histories and pressures moving all at once, that my brother could not stop his car. He skidded sideways on to the front yard of one of those mansions. His car hit a fire hydrant, which came up through the floor, peeled back the metal like the lid of a sardine tin, and smashed into his chest. There was no mercy in this motion: the car plowed along, glancing off an oak tree before rolling and landing upside down on an immaculate lawn.