Jesmyn Ward - Sing, Unburied, Sing

“They beat you in there. Some people look at boys our age and see somebody they can violate. See somebody who got soft pink insides. Riv tried to keep that from me. But he couldn’t keep it all, and I was too small. I couldn’t bear it. Kept thinking about my brothers and sisters, wondering if they was eating. Wanted to know what it would feel like to wake up and not feel like a thicket of thorns was up inside of me.”

This is a brown that skims black.

“I couldn’t live with it. So I decided to run. Did Riv tell you that?”

I nod.

“I guess I didn’t make it.” Richie laughs, and it’s a dragging, limping chuckle. Then he turns serious, his face black in the bright sunlight. “But I don’t know how. I need to know how.” He looks up at the roof of the car. “Riv will know.”

I don’t want to hear no more of the story. I shake my head. I don’t want him talking to Pop, asking him about that time. Pop has never told me the story of what happened to Richie when he ran. Every time I ask about it, he changes the subject or asks me to help him with something in the yard. And I understand the sentiment when he looks away or walks off, expecting me to follow. I know what Pop’s saying: I don’t want to talk about this. It wounds me.

“What’s wrong?” Richie asks. He looks confused.

“Shut up,” I say softly. And then I nod at Kayla, who wiggles her fingers in the air and says, Spider, spider .

“I got to see him again,” he says. “I got to know.”

Michael done picked Leonie up like a baby, one arm under the crook of her knees, the other under her shoulders. Her head flops back. He’s talking into her throat, carrying her to the car. She’s shaking her head. Misty’s wiping her forehead with paper towels. Richie raises up a little, like he has a body, has skin and bones and muscle, needs to stretch before he settles back down into his too-small spot on the floor.

“It’s how I get home.”

It’s afternoon. The clouds are gone, the sky a great wash of blue, soft white light everywhere, turning Kayla gold, turning me red. Everything else eating light while Richie shrugs it off. The trees clatter.

“You ain’t even from Bois.” I say it like it’s a fact, when I know it’s a question.

Richie leans forward, leans so close that if he had breath, it would be hitting me in the face, stinking up my nose. I done seen pictures of toothbrushes from the ’40s. Big as brushes, bristles look metal. I wonder if they even had them up there, in Parchman, or if they gnaw a twig to a brushy softness and rub their teeth with that, the way Pop said he had to do when he was growing up.

“There’s things you think you know that you don’t.”

“Like what?” I spit it out fast because Misty’s opening the front door, and Michael’s laying Leonie in the front seat, and I know the rest of my words have to be quiet.

“Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone. Ain’t nothing but a field and some woods, but even if the house was still there, it ain’t about that.” Richie rubs his knuckles together. “I don’t know.”

I raise my right eyebrow at him. Mam can do it, and I can do it. Pop and Leonie can’t.

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived . . . it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”

“So what?” I whisper.

Michael starts the car and pulls out of the narrow gravel parking lot beside the gas station. Wind kneads my scalp.

“This my way to find that.”

“Find what?”

“A song. The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song.”

“That don’t make no sense.”

Misty glances over at me. I look out the window.

“It will,” Richie says. “It’s why you can hear animals, see things that ain’t there. It’s a piece of you. It’s everything inside of you and outside of you.”

“What else?” I lower my hand and mouth.

“What?”

“What else I don’t know?”

Richie laughs. It’s an old man’s laugh: a wheeze and a croak.

“Too much.”

“The biggest ones,” my lips form.

“Home.”

I roll my eyes.

“Love.”

I point at Kayla. Richie shrugs.

“There’s more,” he says. He wiggles like the floor is too hard, like he doesn’t like talking about love. The way he looks at me then, like the secretary at the school did when I was seven and I had an accident and peed myself and Leonie never showed up with clean clothes, so I sat on a hard orange plastic chair in the office and shivered for an hour until they got in touch with Mam, and she came and walked me out of the AC into the hot day. Like he’s sorry for me, for what I got to learn.

“And time,” he says. “You don’t know shit about time.”

I know Jojo is innocent because I can read it in the unmarked swell of him: his smooth face, ripe with baby fat; his round, full stomach; his hands and feet soft as his younger sister’s. He looks even younger when he falls asleep. His baby sister has flung herself across him, and both of them slumber like young, feral cats: open mouths, splayed arms and legs, exposed throats. When I was thirteen, I knew much more than him. I knew that metal shackles could grow into the skin. I knew that leather could split flesh like butter. I knew that hunger could hurt, could scoop me hollow as a gourd, and that seeing my siblings starving could hollow out a different part of me, too. Could make my heart ricochet through my chest, desperately. I watch Jojo and Kayla’s sprawled sleep and wonder if I ever slept like that when I was young. I wonder if Riv ever looked at me and saw a wild, naïve thing, in the cot next to him. I wonder if he felt pity. Or if there was more love. Jojo snores to a snort and stops, and I feel something in my chest, where my heart would be if I were still alive, soften toward him.

I didn’t understand time either, when I was young. How could I know that after I died, Parchman would pull me from the sky? How could I imagine Parchman would pull me to it and refuse to let go? And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once?

I was trapped, as trapped as I’d been in the room of pines where I woke up. Trapped as I was before the white snake, the black vulture, came for me. Parchman had imprisoned me again. I wandered the new prison, night after night. It was a place bound by cinder blocks and cement. I watched the men fuck and fight in the dark, so twisted up in each other I couldn’t tell where one man ended and another began. I spent so many turns of the earth at the new Parchman. I watched for the dark bird, but he was absent. I despaired, burrowed into the dirt, slept, and rose to witness the newborn Parchman: I watched chained men clear the land and lay the first logs for the first barracks for gunmen and trusty shooters. I thought I was in a bad dream. I thought that if I burrowed and slept and woke again, I would be back in the new Parchman, but instead, when I slept and woke, I was in the Delta before the prison, and Native men were ranging over that rich earth, hunting and taking breaks to play stickball and smoke. Bewildered, I burrowed and slept and woke to the new Parchman again, to men who wore their hair long and braided to their scalps, who sat for hours in small, windowless rooms staring at big black boxes that streamed dreams. Their faces in the blue light were stiff as corpses. I burrowed and slept and woke many times before I realized this was the nature of time.