Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I wish you would have finished school first,” Mama said. Another piece of lint, this time on my hair at the crown of my head. “But this is now, and we do what we do.” She smiled then: a thin line, no teeth, and I leaned forward and put my head in her lap again, and she ran her hands up and down my spine, over my shoulder blades, pressed in on the base of my neck. All the while shushing like a stream, like she’d taken all the water pouring on the outside world into her, and she was sending it out in a trickle to soothe me. Je suis la fille de l’océan, la fille des ondes, la fille de l’écume , Mama muttered, and I knew. I knew she was calling on Our Lady of Regla. On the Star of the Sea. That she was invoking Yemayá, the goddess of the ocean and salt water, with her shushing and her words, and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.

I’m asleep and I don’t know it until Michael is shaking me awake, his fingers digging into my shoulder. My mouth is so dry, my lips are sealed shut.

“The police,” Michael says. The road behind us is empty, but the tension in his hand and the way his eyes widen and roll make me know this is serious. Even though I can’t see them and don’t hear any sirens, they are there.

“You don’t have a license,” I say.

“We have to switch,” he says. “Grab the wheel.”

I grab it and push my feet into the floorboard and raise my rear off the seat so he can put a leg over in the passenger seat and begin sliding over. He takes his foot off the gas, and the car begins to slow. I put my left foot over near the pedal, and I am sitting in his lap in the middle of the car for one awful, hilarious moment.

“Shit shit shit.” He laughs. It’s what he does when he’s frightened. When I went into labor, my water breaking in the snack aisle of a convenience store in St. Germaine, he scooped me up in his arms and carried me to his truck, laughing while cussing. He told me that once, when he was a boy, a cow kicked one of his friends in the middle of the night when they were out cow-tipping with flashlights: his friend, a redhead with pencil arms and a mouthful of rotten teeth from years of not brushing and chewing dip, braced himself as he fell, and his arm snapped like a tree limb. The elbow bent wrong, a piece of bone sticking out of his upper arm, pearly as a jagged oyster shell. Michael said his laughter scared even him, then: high and breathless as a young girl’s. Michael lifts me off his lap, slides into the passenger seat, and I am behind the wheel when I see the lights behind me coming up fast on this two-lane highway, flashing blue, siren stuttering.

“You got it?” I ask.

“What?”

“The shit. You know, the stuff from Al.”

“Fuck!” Michael fumbles in his pockets.

“What?” Misty wakes up in the backseat, twisting to look back. I begin slowing down. “Oh shit,” she says when she sees the lights.

I look in the rearview and Jojo is looking straight at me. He’s all Pop: upside-down mouth, hawk nose, steady eyes, the set of his shoulders as Michaela wakes up crying.

“I don’t have time,” Michael says. He’s fumbling for the carpet, about to shove the plastic baggie out of the little door in the floor of the car, but there’s too much in the way with a balled-up shirt I bought for him in a convenience store when we stopped to get gas, with plastic bags of potato chips and Dr Pepper and candy we bought with the money Al gave us. “And it got a fucking hole in it.” The bottom of the plastic baggie is scored and jagged, the white and yellow crystal dry and crumbly at the corners.

I snatch the small white baggie. I shove it in my mouth. I work up some spit, and I swallow.

The officer is young, young as me, young as Michael. He’s skinny and his hat seems too big for him, and when he leans into the car, I can see where his gel has dried and started flaking up along his hairline. He speaks, and his breath smells like cinnamon mints.

“Did you know you were swerving, ma’am?” he asks.

“No, sir, officer.” The baggie is thick as a wad of cotton balls in my throat. I can hardly breathe.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, sir.” Michael speaks for me. “We been on the road for a few hours. She tired is all.”

“Sir.” The officer shakes his head. “Can you step out of the car, ma’am, with your license and insurance?” I catch another whiff of him: sweat and spice.

“Yes,” I say. The glove compartment is a mess of napkins and ketchup packets and baby wipes. As the officer walks away to talk with a static-garbled voice on his walkie-talkie, Michael leans in, puts a hand on the small ribs of my back.

“You all right?”

“It’s dry.” I cough, and pull out the insurance paper. I snatch up my whole wallet and get out the car and wait for the officer to return, everybody but Michaela frozen in the backseat. Michaela flails and wails. It’s midafternoon, and the trees list back and forth at the side of the road. The newly hatched spring bugs hiss and tick. At the bottom of the shoulder, there is a ditch filled with standing water and a multitude of tadpoles, all wriggling and swimming.

“Why isn’t the baby in her car seat?”

“She been sick,” I say. “My son had to take her out.”

“Who is the man and the other woman in the car?”

My husband , I want to say, as if that would validate us. Even: My fiancé . But it’s hard enough to choke out the truth, and I know with this ball in my throat, I will surely choke on a lie.

“My boyfriend. And my friend I work with.”

“Where y’all going?” the officer asks. He doesn’t have his ticket book in his hand, and I feel the fear, which has been roiling in my belly, rise in my throat and burn hot like acid, push against the baggie on its slow descent down to my stomach.

“Home,” I say. “To the coast.”

“Where y’all coming from?”

“Parchman.”

I know it’s a mistake soon as I say it. I should have said something else, anything else: Greenwood or Ittabena or Natchez, but Parchman is all that comes.

The handcuffs are on me before the n is quiet.

“Sit down.”

I sit. The ball in my throat is wet cotton, growing denser and denser as it descends. The officer walks back to the car, makes Michael get out, puts him in handcuffs, and marches him back to sit next to me.

“Baby?” Michael says. I shake my head no, the air another kind of cotton, humid with spring rain, all of it making me feel as if I am suffocating. Jojo climbs out of the car, Michaela hanging on to him, squeezing him with her legs: she has her arms wrapped tightly around his neck. Misty climbs out the backseat, her hands palms forward and her mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything she’s saying. The officer looks between the two and makes his decision and walks toward Jojo, his third pair of handcuffs out. Michaela wails. The officer gestures for Misty to take Michaela, and Michaela buries her face in Jojo’s neck and kicks when Misty pulls her from Jojo. She’s never liked Misty: I brought her with me to Misty’s one day after a run to the convenience store by the interstate for cigarettes, and when Misty leaned into the car to say hello to Michaela, Michaela turned her face, ignored Misty, and asked a question: Jojo? “Just breathe,” Michael says.

It’s easy to forget how young Jojo is until I see him standing next to the police officer. It’s easy to look at him, his weedy height, the thick spread of his belly, and think he’s grown. But he’s just a baby. And when he starts reaching in his pocket and the officer draws his gun on him, points it at his face, Jojo ain’t nothing but a fat-kneed, bowlegged toddler. I should scream, but I can’t.