Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Kayla’s standing on the sofa, walking from one end of it to another, yelling. Sleep-matted hair, sleep-swollen face. Her little legs clumsy with waking, she trips and falls face-first and mouths the cushion.

“The boy, the black bird,” she sobs.

I kneel next to the sofa, pat her hot little back.

“What boy, Kayla?”

“The black bird. The Black boy.”

She stands, runs to the arm of the sofa farthest from me, straddles, and slides off.

“He flies!”

She wakes up like that all the time, trailing the blankets of her dreams behind her. She’s still sleepy. I catch her under one armpit, swing her up, put her head down on my shoulder.

“Go back to sleep,” I say.

When Kayla kicks, her toes are little shovels digging into my belly, trying to break the dirt of the softest part of me. It used to be my walk rocked her to sleep. She dreamed in my womb with sightless blue eyes. Now she flails, smashes my mouth with her hand, and will not let me hold her.

“He want Mam!” she screams, and at that my arms go dead, and Kayla slides down my front, noodle limp. She lands running straight to Mama’s door and knocks at it with her little fists. Each little thud married to a breathy whine. Her eyes rolling like a panicked colt’s.

“Kayla.” I kneel. “Ain’t no man trying to take Mama nowhere.” Her little knobby knees brush the wood as she hangs from the doorknob, trying to turn with her weight. What I say is mangled truth: no man wants to take Mama, but what she’s tasked me to do will usher her away. I move to Kayla on my knees, floorboards grinding my bones, and I wonder at the fear spilling through my chest, scalding-hot grits. I wonder at my short, round toddler with her toes grazing the door, at the future and what it will demand of me. Of her. Kayla’s fingers lose their grip on the knob, and I turn it, open it, point at Mama with an upturned palm. “See?”

I am not prepared to see.

Mama hangs half off the bed, half on, her toes on the floor, her legs bound up in sheets, twisted around her, stretched tensile and thin as rope here, wide and voluminous there: Mama caught like a prized sailfish. The one who sails through the air, silver and white, still with the silky feel of the salt water on her: the one who shivers in the sun and fights. It is colder than a spring morning warrants in the room, cold as a November morning, and yet Mama sweats and moans and kicks. Kayla hops into the room, sniffs the air, takes hesitant steps, and reaches to the ceiling. She breathes one little word, again and again.

“Bird,” she says.

The room smells like Mama has been turned inside out. Like piss and shit and blood. Like intestines, a heartbeat away from rot. Her eyes are wild. Her arms are pinned in the sheets. Mama struggles to shrug them off.

“Mama?” I say, and my voice seems high and small as Kayla’s. “Let me help.”

“Too late,” Mama says. “Too late, Leonie.”

I have to grab her arm hard to free it. My fingers leave shallow ditches in a row in her flesh, my handprint visible on her with every touch. Mama moans. I try to touch lighter, to hurt less, but I can’t.

“What you mean?” I say.

Mama is bleeding under the skin. Everywhere my hands touch, there is blood. Trenches in the sand filling with seawater. Underneath: doom.

Mama looks beyond me, to the corner where Kayla has seated herself, still except for the song she is singing as she squints and then glares at Mama. Mama’s eyes skitter to my face, up to the ceiling, down at her ruined body. Away, away.

“I heard him,” she whispers. “Thought it was a . . .” She pants. “Cat.”

“Who, Mama?”

“Ain’t never seen them. Sometimes heard them.”

“What?”

“Like somebody talking three doors down. In another room.”

I free one hand, balled to a fist.

“Said he’d come for me.”

All these petals of blood.

“Ain’t lè mistè.” No spirit. No God. No mystery.

On her wrist.

“He lè mò.” The dead.

Her forearm.

“Young. Full of piss and vinegar.”

Rotting flowers.

“Vengeful as a beat dog.”

Fruitfulness gone to seed.

“Pulling all the weight of history behind him.”

Her breath whines.

“Like a cotton sack full of lead.”

She’s right.

“But still a boy.”

I’m too late.

“Hungry for love.”

The cancer done broke her.

“Says he want me to be his mama.”

Broke her clean through.

“I always thought—”

Mama claws at my arm as I free her other hand.

“It would be your brother.”

I stop.

“The first dead I see . . .”

I can’t breathe.

“Would be him.”

Given is in the corner of the room, stretched along the seam where the walls join. He looms over Kayla, rigid and fierce as Pop, and for the first time, I am afraid. In life, there was a joke in every line of him, humor that ran along the bones of him, that everyone read in the hang of his shoulders, the shake of his head, his smile. There is none now. The weight of time he never bore in life holds him rigid now, cloaks him somber, whittles him sharp as Pop. He shakes his head, and speaks.

“Not.”

Kayla’s little song sinks.

“Your.”

Mama begins to fight me.

“Mother.”

Mama looks beyond me, up to the cracked ceiling, pocked with thousands of little stalactites like the roof of a cave. Pop spent hours dipping a broom in paint and then stabbing the ceiling with the bristles, making circles and loops and swirls, shaping the paint into stars and comets. Mama opens and closes her mouth but makes no sound. I follow her gaze but don’t see nothing but the ceiling, that sorry drywall, turning gray from humidity. But Kayla, who whispers her song and waggles her fingers like she does when she sings twinkle twinkle little star , does.

“Not.” And Given, who speaks, the planes of his face converging and turning sharp as knives, does.

“Your.”

And Mama does. She rolls her eyes to the corner of the room where Given looms. She bares her teeth in something like a smile, something like a rictus.

“Mother,” Given finishes.

Mama slaps me. Where her hand hit burns. She cuffs me with an open palm on the other side, and my ear throbs with blood. Her right fingers grab my cheek, dig into my eyebrow ridge, and she’s holding my face straight, whispering against whatever is above us, at my back, whatever awful thing that’s come for her. I hear a whisper above me.

Come with me, Mama , he says. Come on.

“No,” she says.

Her fingers pull my eyelids up, up, painfully.

“Not my boy,” she says.

Feel like she’s peeling the skin.

“Given,” she breathes.

I yank my head away.

“Baby. Please.”

It’s the word baby that makes me jump off the bed. Because I hear her say it now and I’m her baby again, soft-gummed and wet-eyed and fat, and she is whole and sweet-milked. Her hands fall away from me like husks from corncobs, land just as brittle and dry on the bed before she whips them up, faces them out palms up.

“No, boy. No,” Given says.

I sweep the cemetery rocks from the floor where they’ve fallen, dumping them on the altar to join the rest of it I’ve already gathered. From the bathroom: cotton balls. From the cupboard: cornmeal. From my trip to the liquor store yesterday: rum.

“Say it,” Mama says. She’s let her hands fall. “The litany,” she says again, and her breath rattles in her throat. She doesn’t turn her head to the side, to look at the wall beyond me where Given stands, thrashing against some invisible thing that holds him there. Her mouth opens: a silent wail. Kayla is crying in a way I’ve never seen her before: mouth working, but no sound. There’s no time. This moment done ate it all up: the past, the future. Do I say the words? I blink, and up on the ceiling there is a boy, a boy with the face of a toddler. I blink again, sand scouring my eye, and there is nothing.