Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

“What’s the word?” somebody calls out from the church.

  The minister smiles. “‘Anger,’” he says. “No, ‘pissed off’ is more like it.” A round of cheering and agreement rises up from the makeshift congregation that has come out to say their piece. “Ain’t nothing wrong with anger,” the minister says. It’s clear that he has a specific destination in mind for where this conversation is allowed to go. And it’s also clear that he’s going to get it there in his own time and by his own means, but he has to make the crowd feel as though they were a part of the journey. It’s not just his trip that he’s on.

  As a writer, I can understand that.

  “I’ve been angry all my life,” the minister continues. “Just bitter and frustrated for as far back as I can remember. Some of y’all out there might know what I’m talking about. Some of y’all might know something about that feeling. You wake up every day and you feel like the whole world is trying to grind you up. Just squeeze you and grind you up over and over and over again. You grow up poor and broke, just like all of us. This town here, Bolton, we love it. I know you love it as much as I do. But all of us here are poor. And to make it worse, we’re poor and Black, and that means the deck’s been stacked against us twice. But we try to get past it. We try to believe that it can change. So we go out there and we do the right things and we try to live right—we try to live the way God wants us to live. But we know that it’s hard. And, even more than just being hard, it’s exhausting. Because to live like that means you’ve got to be able to ignore a lot of things. You’ve got to be able to know that things are broken and beyond your control and still, somehow, you’ve got to be able to look that in the eyes and smile.” The minister shakes his head. The congregation nods in agreement. He knows what they want better than this writer could.

  I envy this minister. I envy the way he’s able to give solace to these people and what they are going through, while I’m only able to come here and watch and worry about the fact that my second book is due soon and I’m still not any closer to getting it written.

  Yes, there are better things in the world to be worried about. Yes, there are tragedies, and shootings, and rapes, and violence, and starvation, and human trafficking, and all those other things and I have found the way to ignore them is simply by thinking about myself.

  I like to think that’s what the minister is talking about when he talks about the ability to look past things and still be happy. The only problem is that I can’t honestly say that I’m happy. For sure, I’m something, but I damn sure wouldn’t call it happy.

  Despondent, maybe. Confused, certainly. Horny, without a doubt.

  But happy? No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.

  But this minister, I feel like maybe for him the world is different. I feel like maybe he sees something very different when he looks in the mirror and I can’t help but be a little bit envious. And the minister, maybe he somehow feels my envy, because he turns his eyes to me.

  “We have tonight among us a special guest, as many of you know.” And then there is more mumbling and there are eyes turned in my direction and I imagine this must be how The Kid felt walking through school with everyone looking at him and casting all sorts of judgments his way.

  “He’s a local-grown boy who is in no way foreign to our type of pain and strife, as many of you know.” He pauses then and aims an outstretched hand in my direction, indicating that I should stand. But I resist that hand. Don’t want no part of it. Not my style. That’s a sucker’s game, public speaking. Everybody looking at you like that. Nope. I don’t want no part of it. I’m just gonna sit right here and let that hand hang in the air like a fart in an elevator.

  “Stand up,” Sharon hisses.

  “Don’t want to,” I hiss back. Everybody in the church can hear me, and I don’t care. Nope. I shall not be moved.

  “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” Sharon says. “These people are looking for somebody to say something that they can’t say. You’re a writer. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

  “You know . . . you’re not the first person to tell me that. And I still don’t believe it.”

  “Okay,” Sharon says, “then how about this: they’re potential book buyers. And you have yet to turn in your second novel. And I’ve got a feeling that you’ve already spent the advance money and so as soon as this tour is over you’re going to be beyond broke and if you don’t have a manuscript, you’re going to owe the publisher a truckload of money that you don’t have. So maybe you should be trying to sell every book you can. So maybe you should stand up and say something. So maybe you should be a good person.” Her hissing has progressed into a dark growl with each word. A sound so deep and venomous that I wouldn’t think a frame as small as hers could have ever produced it. Also: I think the best thing I can do, regardless of why I’m doing it, is stand up and say something.

  But my legs still won’t work. My head hurts. I’m sweating all over. I’m buried under a wall of déjà vu and I don’t know why. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been here before. That I’ve lived all of this before. But how can that be? How many times have I been to a church in the town where a dead boy was killed? Never, that’s how many times.

  So why does this all feel so familiar?

  Somewhere in the distance, far, far outside of the church, I hear a peacock howling into the night and I remember that obsidian peacock that The Kid and I saw on the park bench that day. I remember The Kid’s laughter. I remember his smile.

  The memory of his smile takes away my anxiety, and so I stand up. I say something.

  The first time Soot saw his dead father was the day after his and Paul’s run-in with the officer. He awoke one morning to find his father standing in the doorway, watching him sleep. Soot smiled and sat up and his father smiled back, then turned on his heel and walked off into the house. By the time Soot got out of bed and made it into the kitchen, his father had disappeared. The boy stood for a moment, staring at the familiar surroundings, thinking to himself.

  “Okay,” he said.

  He had expected to see his father eventually. In the weeks after the death of his father, Soot began to see lots of things, so he knew that, in due time, his father would come to him. He saw shadows of animals climbing the sky at sunset. As he stood on the front porch watching the sun drain below the horizon, as the sky danced in opulent hues of gold and crimson, Soot saw shadows climb up out of the horizon and take flight, sailing across the sky like living clouds. Sometimes they were the shapes of animals, sometimes people. But they were always real, real enough for him to reach out and touch.

  The sunset became his favorite part of the day because he never knew what he might see. But then the things he saw broke the bonds of sunset and began to come to him at all hours of the day. And they were no longer just animals but people as well. People from books he had read and stories he’d heard. Once, while sitting in the lunchroom at school, he had seen John Henry come walking out of the lunch line carrying a plate of pizza and a big glass of chocolate milk. Soot knew who the man was because of his impossibly dark skin and the twin hammers that hung from his belt. The story of John Henry had always been one of Soot’s favorites, and the sight of the man—with his mountains for shoulders and tree trunks for arms—made Soot smile with a pride he couldn’t name. It was like seeing a bigger, braver version of himself. He didn’t care that it probably wasn’t real.

  On the best days—the rarest and most beautiful—Soot looked up into the sky and saw the greatest of all t
hese wonders. He saw another Earth. No. Not Earth. Something else. An entire planet, like this one, but different. It hung in the sky like the answer to a question his heart asked him every day of his life. This place, the entirety of it, was the color of onyx. Oceans, mountains, forests, all of them as deep and dark as the skin he hated so much. And yet, there, on that other world, he did not hate what he saw. There, he loved the color of his skin.

  Because this place felt like home, he wanted to name it. If he could name it, then he could call it into being whenever he needed it. He could carry it with him, escape to it. He would never feel alone or afraid or ashamed. He could love himself at any moment. He could love himself always.

  The name was the thing he needed.

  He wanted to call it Africa. That was, after all, where he was descended from. But Africa was not his home. All he knew of Africa was photographs, and such a thing could never be home.

  This place that he saw was not America because America knew the whole of him no better than he knew the Africa of photographs.

  He was the kid that belonged nowhere. And, because of it, most of his life, he felt like nothing.

  But there, on that other planet that only he alone could imagine, that place that he could not name, he was everything.

  It was the place of his father and mother, of their skin and language and jokes. It was the place of his grandparents’ superstitions. The place of backyard barbecues. It was the place that he carried with him, carried it on his back like a city, carried it on his back like an emblem, carried it on his back like a song, and yet he still could not name it.

  It was a place where dope boys and presidents were cut from the same cloth. Where poets and Them Dumb Niggas both doled out wisdom. A place where Yo Mama So Black came out of the same mouths that, at the end of the day, declared, “Still, I rise.” It was a place of slaves, singers, and Oscar winners. A place where Blerd Niggas and Hustle Man argued over 2Pac and Jack Kirby.

  It was a wonderful place. It was somewhere. And for a kid from nowhere, that was everything.

  But it was all a dream, and Soot knew it. He knew that none of it was real and he didn’t care. The things he imagined made his reality less painful, and that was what mattered to him. So when he began to see his father in his waking dreams, he was thankful for it.

  But as time unfolded, stretched out longer and leaner as the months rolled on into almost a year, Soot’s ability to know what was real and what was not began to fade. One Monday morning he came in to school and made the mistake of telling his friends and teachers about the forty-pound catfish he and his father had caught down at the lock and dam over the weekend. His classmates—not even the older kids—didn’t seem to have the energy to tease him the way they used to. Ever since the death of his father, not even Tyrone Greene teased him anymore. Soot was just the kid to be pitied, which was almost worse than being picked on.

  When word got around about him fishing with his dead father, his teacher, Mrs. Brown, took him aside and, with even more of the pity that he had grown tired of, told him that what he was saying wasn’t true and that it wasn’t healthy for him to go around telling these types of lies.

  When he said he wasn’t lying, Mrs. Brown smiled with a tinge of sadness in the corners of her lips and patted him on the head and took his hand and said, in almost a whisper, “I’m sorry this happened to you.” That was the refrain people offered Soot these days. Apologies were as common as hellos and, even though a part of him knew that it would not last forever, he had simply grown bored with it. In fact, boredom was perhaps the best way to describe what he felt toward everything these days.

  He was bored with the condolence letters and gifts. He was bored with the news crews that still came by a few times a week and asked more questions that made his mother break down into tears again and again. “How does it feel to know that your husband died at the hands of a police officer?” they asked. Or maybe they asked, “How does it feel to know that your son watched it happen?” Or maybe they asked, “How does it feel to know that your husband was killed simply for being Black?” Or maybe they asked, “How does it feel to know that your son will never see his father again?”

  They asked the questions over and over again in different ways, and each time, Soot’s mother answered their questions and seemed to promise herself that she would not cry again and, each time, she broke her promise.

  The longer it went on, the more they came and asked their questions and she answered them and wept, the more she seemed to fade away. Each day she grew thinner, harder, more angled. Her softness seemed to be leached away from her bit by bit. She still cared enough to show love to her son, but the way she showed her love was hardened. She showed her love through discipline and structure. She showed her love through spanking and punishments. She showed her love through words of warning. She showed her love by teaching Soot that the world was danger, and, yet, she never told him why. She never said to him why the world was different for him.

  It’s the end of the night and I’m tired. Too much time in front of people isn’t good for me. That’s why I became a writer. Well, that and an imagination I can’t seem to get a grip on.

  I decide to take a walk because that’s the kind of thing you do on nights like this. For me, it’s all about getting away from people. And one thing I always forgot is just how much I love the quiet of small towns and the long roads that seem to lead nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. Only a fistful of buildings to speak of. Houses that pop up like memories along the side of pavement and gravel sometimes. It’s a hell of a splendor.

  The words I said back at the church, I can’t really remember them. But they seemed to do whatever it was that people wanted them to do. They captured something. They were a voice for those who needed one. I just wish I could remember what they were. Sometimes, having the condition that I have, all of the daydreaming, all of the memory loss, all of the muddled thoughts, it makes me wonder what all I’ve forgotten in my life. It makes me wonder if there’s some great and wonderful thing that I once knew that now eludes me.

  But maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t remember everything the right way. I know what happened to my old man. But the old lady . . . something tells me not to think about that. It’s like the thought of having lost them both is too much to fit in my head so it chooses not to know either way. But there’s a catch to convincing yourself that you don’t know a thing: yeah, it keeps your life on track, but for the thing or person you’re choosing not to see or know, you’re taking away their whole entirety. And ain’t that something to do to a person? To a group of people? Ain’t willful ignorance a hell of a thing?

  Being back here in my hometown, I think I can feel that box opening . . . and it terrifies me.

  So I walk the roads from sundown until my feet get tired and I have gone far enough out into the night that there is nothing left to do but come back. But, still, there are people out in their yards. People standing around in the dim glow of porch lights talking to one another about all of the things wrong with the world and all of the ways that things should be different and, more than anything, they talk about their anger and frustration. But the talk of anger and frustration is careful to avoid the conversation having to do with sadness. Because, ultimately, it’s sadness that sits at the bedrock of all of the anger these people feel every day. Sadness at being left behind and left out of so much of what everyone else seems to have in this country, in this world.

  To be these people is to be without a homeland, a lost tribe, a people whose only connection is each other and even that comes and goes. Sometimes all we’re doing is waving at one another in the middle of the night and that’s as close as we get to being together.

  It’s when I am walking back through town, passing beneath the shadow of the churches that stand so tall and silent in the moonlit sky, that I’m stopped by the man that I don’t expect to stop me.

 
“Excuse me,” the man says. His voice is weak and sheepish, as though he’s trying to whisper and yet, at the same time, as though he needs very much to be heard.

  “Good evening,” I say, as brightly as I can manage. In my experience, when you come across a stranger in the later hours of the night on a lonely road the best thing you can do to keep yourself safe is try to be as bright and pleasant as you can be.

  “Are you that writer guy?” the man says. He’s a little over thirty. White. Dirty blonde hair with a vaguely familiar look about him. It’s rare to run into White people in Bolton. For certain, Bolton has a few White residents. But first thought is that he’s one of the news crews that have been hanging around since the shooting. There’s no shortage of reporters floating around town these days. What began as a local and regional event caught wings on the national landscape pretty quickly and even though the news cycle wants desperately to move on to the next person who’s been shot—and we all know that it’s only a matter of time—for now, this little town of Bolton and what happened here is the main focus of the public eye.

  The man looks nervous as he speaks. He fidgets a little and looks around. In the distance there are a few houses and now and again there comes the sound of conversation or the slamming of a pickup truck door followed by the rumble of an engine and tires on pavement. Whenever this happens, the man stands as still as a deer and listens, almost sniffing the air, as if he expects the truck to come for him like Death itself.

  “Are you the writer guy?” he repeats. His tone is a little sharper, a little more hurried.

  “I’m a writer guy,” I say. “And, if I’m honest, I’m probably the writer guy that you’re looking for. There aren’t a whole lot of us around town.”

  “Good,” he says, sighing a heavy sigh of relief. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  I always get nervous when people ask me to go off in private and talk. I’ve seen movies that begin that way and they never end well for characters like me.