Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Most of it,” I say.

“She look much better.” Leonie is lying. She don’t look much better. Maybe a little, but not much. “I knew the blackberry would work.”

“Something wrong with her? She sick?” Michael asks. His hand done stop moving, and he turns around to look at us. I stop chewing. In the gray foggy light, and in the close car, his eyes look bright green, green as the trees pushing out new spring leaves. Leonie looks disappointed he’s stopped touching her and leans across the seat toward him.

“Just some kind of stomach virus, I think. Or she was carsick. I gave her one of Mama’s remedies. She better.”

“You sure, baby?” Michael looks closely at Kayla, and I swallow the last of her sandwich. “She still looks a little yellow to me.”

Leonie gives a little half laugh and waves at Kayla.

“Of course she’s yellow. She’s our baby.” And then Leonie laughs, and even though it’s a laugh, it doesn’t sound like one. There’s no happiness in it, just dry air and hard red clay where grass won’t grow. She turns around and ignores all of us and looks out the front windshield, gummy with bug splatter, so she doesn’t even see when Kayla startles, her eyes open wide, and throw-up, brown and yellow and chunky, comes shooting out her mouth and all over the back of the front seat, all over her little legs and her red-and-white Smurfs shirt and me because I’m pulling her up out of her seat and into my lap.

“It’s going to be all right, Kayla, it’s going to be all right,” I say.

“I thought you gave her something for that,” Misty says.

“Baby, I told you she didn’t look good,” Michael says.

“Goddamnit sonofabitch,” Leonie says, and a dark skinny boy with a patchy afro and a long neck is standing on my side of the car, looking at Kayla and then looking at me. Kayla cries and whines.

“The bird, the bird,” she says.

The boy leans into the window and blurs at the edges. He says: “I’m going home.”

The boy is River’s. I know it. I smelled him as soon as he entered the fields, as soon as the little red, dented car swerved into the parking lot. The grass trilling and moaning all around, when I followed the scent to him, the dark, curly-haired boy in the backseat. Even if he didn’t carry the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp, I would still know he is River’s by the look of him. The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River’s: indomitable as cypress. He is River’s child.

When he returns to the car and I announce myself, I know he is Riv’s again. I know it by the way he holds the little sick golden girl: as if he thinks he could curl around her, make his skeleton and flesh into a building to protect her from the adults, from the great reach of the sky, the vast expanse of the grass-ridden earth, shallow with graves. He protects as River protects. I want to tell him this: Boy, you can’t. But I don’t.

Instead, I fold myself and sit on the floor of the car.

In the beginning, I woke in a stand of young pine trees on a cloudy, half-lit day. I could not remember how I came to be crouching in the pine needles, soft and sharp as boar’s hair under my legs. There was no warmth or cold there. Walking was like swimming through tepid gray water. I paced in circles. I don’t know why I stayed in that place, why every time I got to the edge of the young stand, to the place where the pines reached taller, rounded and darkened, draped with a web of green thorny vines, I turned and walked back. In that day that never ended, I watched the tops of the trees toss, and I tried to remember how I got there. Who I was before this place, before this quiet haunt. But I couldn’t. So when I saw a white snake, thick and long as my arm, slither out of the shadows beneath the trees, I knelt before it.

You are here , It said.

The needles dug into my knees.

Do you want to leave? It asked.

I shrugged.

I can take you away , It said. But you have to want it.

“Where?” I asked. The sound of my voice surprised me.

Up and away , It said. And around.

“Why?”

There are things you need to see , It said.

It raised its white head in the air and swayed, and slowly, like paint dissolving in water, its scales turned black, row by row, until it was the color of the space between the stars. Little fingers sprouted from its sides to grow to wings, two perfect black scaly wings. Two clawed feet pierced its bottom to dig into the earth, and its tail shrunk to a fan. It was a bird, but not a bird. No feathers. All black scales. A scaly bird. A horned vulture.

It bounced up to alight on the top of the youngest pine tree, where it bristled and cawed, the sound raw in that silent place.

Come , It said. Rise.

I stood. One of its scales dislodged and floated to the earth, wispy as a feather.

Pick it up. Hold it , It said. And you can fly.

I clenched the scale. It was the size of a penny. It burned my palm, and I rose up on my tiptoes and suddenly I wasn’t on the ground anymore. I flew. I followed the scaly bird. Up and up and out. Into the whitewater torrent of the sky.

Flying was floating on that tumbling river. The bird at my shoulder now, a raucous smudge on the horizon then, sometimes atop my head like a crown. I spread my arms and legs and felt a laugh bubbling up in me, but it died in my throat. Because I remembered. I remembered before. I remembered being spread-eagled in the dirt, surrounded by hunched, milling men, and a teenage boy at my shoulder who stood tall under the long shadows. River. River, who stood as the men flayed my back, as I sobbed and turned the earth to mud. I could feel him there, knew that he would carry me after they let me loose from the earth. My bones felt pin-thin, my lungs useless. The way he carried me to my cot, the way he bent over me made something soft and fluttery as a jellyfish pulse in my chest. That was my heart. Him my big brother, my father.

I dropped from my flight, the memory pulling me to earth. The bird screamed, upset. I landed in a field of endless rows of cotton, saw men bent and scuttling along like hermit crabs, bending and picking. Saw other men walking in circles around them with guns. Saw buildings clustered at the edges of that field, other fields, unto the ends of the earth. The bird swooped down on the men’s heads. They disappeared. This is where I was worked. This is where I was whipped. This is where River protected me. The bird dropped to the ground, dug its beak into the black earth, and I remembered my name: Richie. I remembered the place: Parchman prison. And I remembered the man’s name: River Red. And then I fell, dove into the dirt, and it parted like a wave. I burrowed in tight. Needing to be held by the dark hand of the earth. To be blind to the men above. To memory. It came anyway. I was no more and then I was again. The scale hot in my hand. I slept and woke and rose and picked my way through the prison fields, lurked in the barracks, hovered over the men’s faces. Tried to find River. He wasn’t there. Men left, men returned and left again. New men came. I burrowed and slept and woke in the milky light, my time measured by the passing of all those Black faces and the turning of the earth, until the scaly bird returned and led me to the car, to the boy the same age as me sitting in the back of the car. Jojo.

I want to tell the boy that I know the man who sired him. That I knew him before this boy. That I knew him when he was called River Red. The gunmen called him River because that was the name his mama and daddy give him, and the men say he rolled with everything like a river, over the fell trees and stumps, through storms and sun. But the men added the Red because that was his color: him the color of red clay on the riverbank.