Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I was feeling it,” I said.

“You know how I know you lie?”

“How?”

“You get dead still. People is always moving, all the time, when they speak, when they’re quiet, even when they sleep. Looking off, looking at you, smiling, frowning, all of that. When you lie, you get dead still: blank face, arms limp. Like a fucking corpse. I ain’t never seen nothing like it.”

I shrugged. Given-not-Given shrugs. She ain’t lying , he mouths.

“You ever see things?” I say. It’s out my mouth before I have a chance to think it. But at that moment, she’s my best friend. She’s my only friend.

“What you mean?”

“When you on?” I waved my hand like she’d waved hers moments before. At the coke, which was now just a little sorry pile of dust on the table. Enough for two or three lines more.

“That’s what it is? You seeing shit?”

“Just lines. Like neon lights or something. In the air.”

“Nice try. You tried to twitch your hands and everything. Now, what you really seeing?”

I wanted to punch her in her face.

“I told you.”

“Yeah, you lied again.”

But I knew this was her cottage, and when it all came down to it, I’m Black and she’s White, and if someone heard us tussling and decided to call the cops, I’d be the one going to jail. Not her. Best friend and all.

“Given,” I said. More like a whisper than anything, and Given leaned forward to hear me. Slid his hand across the table, his big-knuckled, slim-boned hand, toward mine. Like he wanted to support me. Like he could be flesh and blood. Like he could grab my hand and lead me out of there. Like we could go home.

Misty looked like she ate something sour. She leaned forward and sniffed another line.

“I ain’t a expert or nothing, but I’m pretty sure you ain’t supposed to be seeing nothing on this shit.”

She leaned back in her chair, grabbed her hair in a great sheaf, and tossed it over her back. Bishop loves it , she’d said of her boyfriend once. Can’t keep his hands out of it . It was one of the things she did that she was never conscious of, playing with her hair, always unaware of the ease of it. The way it caught all the light. The self-satisfied beauty of it. I hated her hair.

“Acid, yeah,” she continued. “Maybe even meth. But this? No.”

Given-not-Given frowned, mimicked her girly hair flip, and mouthed: What the fuck does she know? His left hand was still on the table. I could not reach out to it, even though everything in me wanted to do so, to feel his skin, his flesh, his dry, hard hands. When we were coming up, I couldn’t count how many times he fought for us on the bus, in school, in the neighborhood when kids taunted me about how Pop looked like a scarecrow, how Mama was a witch. How I looked just like Pop: like a burnt stick, raggedly clothed. My stomach turned like an animal in its burrow, again and again, seeking comfort and warmth before sleep. I lit a cigarette.

“No shit,” I said.

Jojo’s birthday cake doesn’t keep well: the next day, it tastes five days old instead of one. It tastes like paper paste, but I keep eating. I can’t help it. My teeth chomp and grind, even though I don’t have enough spit and my throat don’t want to swallow. The coke done had me chewing like this since last night. Pop’s talking to me, but all I can think about is my jaw.

“You don’t have to take them kids nowhere,” Pop says.

Most days, Pop is a younger man. Same way, most days, Jojo is stuck for me at five. I don’t look at Pop and see the years bending and creasing him: I see him with white teeth and a straight back and eyes as black and bright as his hair. I told Mama that I thought Pop dyed it once, and she rolled her eyes at me and laughed, back when she could laugh. That’s just him , she’d said. The cake is so sweet it’s almost bitter.

“I do,” I say.

I could just take Michaela, I know. It would be easier, but I know that once we get to the jail and Michael walks out, something in him would be disappointed if Jojo wasn’t there. Already Jojo looks too much like me and Pop, with his brown skin and black eyes, with the way he walks, bouncing on the balls of his feet, everything about him upright. If Jojo weren’t standing there with us, waiting for Michael, well, it wouldn’t be right.

“What about school?”

“It’s just two days, Daddy.”

“It’s important, Leonie. Boy need his learning.”

“He smart enough to miss two days.”

Pop grimaces, and for the length of it I see the age in his face. The lines of it leading him inexorably down, like Mama. To infirmity, to bed, to the ground and the grave. This is coming down.

“I don’t like the idea of you with them two kids by y’all self out on the road, Leonie.”

“It’s going to be a straight trip, Daddy. North and back.”

“You never know.”

I clench my mouth, speak through my teeth. My jaw aches.

“We’ll be fine.”

Michael’s been in jail three years now. Three years, two months. And ten days. They gave him five with the possibility of early release. The possibility’s real, now. Present. My insides are shaking.

“You all right?” Pop asks. He’s looking at me like he looks at one of his animals when something’s wrong with them, the way he looks like when his horse limps and needs to be reshoed, or when one of his chickens starts acting funny and feral. He sees the error, and he’s dead committed to fixing it. Armor the horse’s tender hooves. Isolate the chicken. Wring its neck.

“Yeah,” I say. My head feels filled with exhaust fumes: light and hot. “Fine.”

Sometimes I think I know why I see Given-not-Given whenever I’m high. When I had my first period, Mama sat me down at the kitchen table while Pop was at work and she said: I got something to tell you .

“What?” I said. Mama looked at me sharp. “Yes, ma’am,” I said instead, swallowing my earlier words.

“When I was twelve, the midwife Marie-Therese came to the house to deliver my youngest sister. She was sitting a moment in the kitchen, directing me to boil water and unpacking her herbs, when she start pointing and asking me what I thought each of the bundles of dried plants did. And I looked at them, and knew, so I told her: This one for helping the afterbirth come, this one for slowing the bleeding, this one for helping the pain, this one for bringing the milk down . It was like someone was humming in my ear, telling me they purpose. Right there, she told me I had the seed of a gift. With my mama panting through her pain in the other room, Marie-Therese took her time, put her hand on my heart, and prayed to the Mothers, to Mami Wata and to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, that I would live long enough to see whatever it was I was meant to see.”

Mama put her hand over her mouth like she’d told me something she shouldn’t have, like she could cup her words and scoop them back inside, back down her throat to sink to nothing in her stomach.

“Do you?” I asked.

“See?”

I nodded.

“Yes,” Mama said.

I wanted to ask her: What you see? But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to talk. I might have been scared of what she would tell me if I asked her what she saw when she looked at me. Dying young? Never finding love? Or if I lived, bent by hard work and hard living? Growing old with my mouth twisted bitter at the taste of what I’d been accorded in the feast of life: mustard greens and raw persimmons, sharp with unfulfilled promise and loss?

“You might have it,” Mama said.

“Really?” I asked.

“I think it runs in the blood, like silt in river water. Builds up in bends and turns, over sunk trees.” She waved her fingers. “Rises up over the water in generations. My mama ain’t have it, but heard her talk one time that her sister, Tante Rosalie, did. That it skips from sister to child to cousin. To be seen. And used. Usually come around full blown when you bleed for the first time.”