Men We Reaped

by Jesmyn Ward

  My mother’s paternal grandfather Adam Jr.’s family also bears stories like this. My mother has a picture of Adam Jr.’s father, Adam Sr., and he looks White. In fact, he was half White and half Native American. Adam Sr.’s father was Joseph Dedeaux, a White man, in a family of White Dedeauxes that had some money and owned some of the most beautiful land in DeLisle. The land sits in the curve of the bayou and is graced by almost unbearably grand live oaks. The sun sets over the marsh grass and water, turning it into a tableau so gorgeous it haunts my homesick dreams. This White man fell in love with his Native American housekeeper, and he began a relationship with her. When his family found out, they disowned him. So Joseph married Daisy and bore my great-grandfather. Later, my mother told me that Joseph and Daisy established a general store, where my White great-great-grandfather would die, a victim of a shooting and a botched store robbery. My Native American great-great-grandmother followed him a few years later from illness.

  My mother’s maternal great-grandfather, Jeremy, also was fairly wealthy. It is rumored that his wife’s people came from Haiti but that he was a Native American. When he realized that the White government would do nothing to educate his children and grandchildren, he built a one-room school on the land he owned and hired a teacher. He also spent some of his time out in the woods on his multi-acre property, tending to liquor stills, which was a common pastime in the community during Prohibition. One of those days, he and his son-in-law Harry were working them together, and the Revenues found them. I imagine these White men wearing white shirts and dark pants, their hair lank and sweaty, their guns smooth and cool in their moist hands. Harry ran and escaped, and would later live to hide his children under blankets to take them upcountry to visit their White relatives, but my great-great-grandfather Jeremy was shot and killed. The Revenues left his dead body to grow cold in the green reaching woods among his ruined stills, and once Harry told them what had happened, his family trekked into the forest to retrieve his body.

  My father’s father was called Big Jerry, and Jerry and his siblings and their mother, Ellen, lived across the street from St. Stephen’s Church in a small, square house, painted slate blue. My paternal great-grandparents owned a couple of acres along St. Stephen’s Road, and when my father was younger, the fields were planted with corn and crops, and there were horses.

  My mother’s father, Adam Jr., lived in another small house, but this one at the end of an even narrower road that runs parallel to St. Stephen’s on the north. There’s a slight hill north of St. Stephen’s, the kind of gradual incline that can go unnoticed unless one is hauling a load or riding a bike; the road that leads from St. Stephen’s and ascends this hill was aptly named Hill Road, and the small road that branches off Hill Road and runs perpendicular, barely wide enough for one car to drive on, is Alpine. My maternal great-grandparents’ long and narrow house is at the end of this road, modest and well-kept and gray. This is where my great-grandmother Maman Vest lived.

  Both great-grandmothers were olive-complexioned and had white and black salt-pepper hair. Both had thick Creole French accents. I mostly visited Mother Ellen with my father. I never met her husband, my great-grandfather, but my father says he was shot after some sort of argument and died young. Mother Ellen had a loud, strong voice, and she was funny, like my father. She sat whole afternoons on her porch, watching the comings and goings of the neighborhood, and drove well, but slowly, into her old age. When we visited, she sat on the steps of the front porch and told us stories about her youth, when she and her siblings pulled Spanish moss from the oak trees to stuff their mattresses. They were hard workers then, accustomed to long hours weeding and planting and harvesting fields, and caring for livestock. Maman Vest would never sit on a stoop with us: she was a bit more proper, a bit more reserved, but we would all sit in the cool shade of her dark porch, where the children ate cake and listened to the grownups gossip. Maman Vest told us stories of her dead husband, Adam Senior, who she said had visited her once after he died as she lay in her bed. He stood, framed in the doorway, and spoke to her. She said she was afraid, that she was paralyzed and could not move. I never met her husband, my great-grandfather Adam Senior, the man or the ghost. Maman often told us stories about him, her dead husband, but never spoke of Aldon, the lost son who died in Vietnam after stepping on a land mine.

  Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural. Sometimes, when I think of all the men who’ve died early in my family over the generations, I think DeLisle is the wolf.

  I like to think my parents met somewhere in the middle, somewhere in the wide swath of woods that separated their fathers’ houses, or perhaps on St. Stephen’s Road, which was then hard-packed red dirt. They would have both been barefoot, I think, and it would have been the late fifties. My father would have seen a thin olive-skinned girl with small bones and a narrow nose, her dark brown curly hair smoothed to her head. She would have smiled, and her face, beautifully symmetrical, would have blossomed. She would have been happy to be free for a day with her siblings, free to play. Because my grandmother Dorothy worked so much to support her children, my mother tended to household chores and her younger siblings. My father may not have been able to see her strength then, but it was there. My mother would have seen a boy the color of pecans, his hair darkest black and smoothed straight back from his wide, short forehead, his nose wide and prominent, his cheekbones even then like large rocks in his face. He may have been wearing an eye patch. His older cousin shot him in the left eye with a BB gun by accident when he was six, and the eye shriveled in his face and turned gray. It would be some time before it was removed and a false eye put in its place, so my father spent much of his childhood and teenage years wearing a patch. Like all children, they were the children of history and place, of southern Mississippi and Louisiana, both their family lines mixed with African, French, Spanish, and Native ancestry all smoothed to the defining Black in the American South, but even though they would have seen that history bearing fruit in each other, they would not have been thinking about that.

  My mother would have been looking at the dead eye in my father’s face, maybe seeing that the dry gray marble made the rest of him all the more terribly beautiful, and my father would have looked at my mother’s small, slender arms and legs and been reminded of a doe. The pines would have reached up and away on both sides of the road, and my parents would not have said hello when they first met each other. My father would have kicked dirt into the ditch. My mother would have picked up a rock. They knew kids in common, their cousins, and other friends. This was and still is a small town.

  In 1969, when my father was thirteen and my mother eleven, Hurricane Camille hit. It flattened everything, wiped away the landscape with an indomitable hand. I imagine everyone in south Mississippi must have thought the world was at an end. Camille was only one in a staccato succession of tragedies in those days. Southern Mississippi boys, Black and White, died in Vietnam, cities all over the United States imploded in riots, and churches were bombed. Crosses burned. Freedom Riders tried to register folks to vote, and in Mississippi, the rivers and bayous were watery graveyards. Locally, Black men and women were demonstrating on public beaches where they were not allowed to sunbathe and swim. In return, they were being attacked by dogs and policemen. They must have thought the end times had come when Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, bore down on them, killing more than 250 people, drowning a family of thirteen who’d searched out shelter in a Catholic church in Pass Christian. The hobbled authorities put families in tent cities. After my grandmother Celestine’s house was lifted from its foundation and displaced by the storm surge that leveled Pass Christian, my father and his sisters and mother stayed in one such tent city. My grandmother Dorothy’s house was spared, since it sits farther up in DeLisle in a part that we call the Chane
aux, which is distant enough from the DeLisle Bayou to escape the surge. My mother’s family provided water for the entire town when people learned that there was an artesian spring in their yard.

  After Hurricane Camille hit, the government also offered hurricane survivors the chance to relocate elsewhere. My father’s family was given the option of moving from Pass Christian to Oakland, California, so they left. This same trend of relocating those affected by major hurricanes would occur decades later, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and instead of being given the tools they needed to help rebuild home, families were offered one option: relocation. Escape. My father and his mother and siblings fled from the memory of their house rocking off its foundation while they swam to say alive in the attic. In Oakland, the Black Panthers fed him breakfast before school, and during the summers his family drove to Mississippi for visits. For all of us, the pull home is an inexorable thing. During his Mississippi summers, my father hung out with his cousins and extended family, and sometimes, I’m sure, with my mother.

  My father grew solid and his pectorals were so well muscled they looked striated like clam shells. In the Bay Area, he took kung fu, and his first master taught him how to fight honestly, mean: First, punch them in the nose. Daddy was a natural; when jumped by three hustlers after a three-card monte game gone wrong on a city bus, he beat them all. He joined a gang. He dated plenty of girls: he was handsome and charming and funny, muscular and artistic.

  In some ways, both of my parents were given adult responsibility too early, a necessity of growing up in fatherless households. Those shy children they’d been on St. Stephen’s when they met had grown and changed in their teenage years. My grandmother Celestine treated my father as the man of the house and the family, as an adult equal, since she’d married and divorced his father, my grandfather Jerry, and was raising her children on her own. For years, my father was the only boy in the house, and he was the second-eldest child. He called my grandmother Celestine “Mama” sometimes, and other times he called her “Lady,” and from him it sounded like an endearment, an address of devotion from an equal. This meant he had the freedom to explore Oakland and the Bay Area, to experiment with drugs, to do some petty hustling.

  Just as my father was the father figure in his family, the older boy of two and the second-oldest child, my mother was the mother figure in her own family. My mother wasn’t accorded the kind of freedom my father was granted because of his gender. Instead, since my grandmother Dorothy worked two or three jobs to support her seven children on her own, since she spent her days working as hard, physically, as any man, the role of mothering the seven children fell to my mother. After several years of marriage, my grandfather Adam divorced my grandmother to marry her friend. So my mother learned to cook before she turned ten, and spent the rest of her preteen and teenage years preparing large breakfasts of oatmeal and biscuits, and larger dinners of red beans and rice. When my four uncles, the youngest of the seven children, broke my grandmother’s rules my mother whipped them with switches peeled from trees in the yard. She and her two sisters washed loads of laundry and hung them out to dry on lines stretched across the length of the swampy backyard.

  This set my mother apart from her siblings: she was one of them, and not. The role she assumed made her lonely and isolated her, and her natural shyness complicated this. She resented the strength she had to cultivate, the endurance demanded of women in the rural South. She recognized its injustice, even as a child. This made her quiet and withdrawn. By the time she was a teenager and her siblings old enough to not need her constant supervision, my mother was able to act her age, and she dated, frequented the hole-in-the-wall club her godfather owned, and threw a few house parties that her peers still talk about today.

  Still, she felt the confines of gender and the rural South and the seventies stalking her, felt that specter of DeLisle out in the darkness, the wolf cornering her in her mother’s house, which had no heat in the winter, no air in the summer. She was relieved when she graduated from high school and traveled to Los Angeles to live with relatives on her father’s side to go to school. This was a rare opportunity for her, and even though she was aware of how rare it was, how tenuous, the dream of my father called to her in Oakland. After a semester of study, she headed north to the Bay Area to join my father. He had courted her with letters and pictures sent from Oakland and with charm and muscled beauty when he saw her during the summers he visited Mississippi. This is how they began their lives together.

  Roger Eric Daniels III

  Born: March 5, 1981

  Died: June 3, 2004

  Ann Arbor was gray. The sky was always overcast, blanched sooty and cold, even though it was spring and the trees had bloomed bright green. I was miserable with allergies. I’d just finished the first year of my two-year graduate program, and my nose was running so badly I could only breathe out of my mouth. I’d never had allergies like that before my time in Michigan, and having them then made me feel as if the very landscape in Michigan hated me, as if I were a foreign body it was attempting to eject.

  My cousin Aldon flew into Detroit to help me drive from Michigan to Mississippi for the summer of 2004. Joshua was a month older than Aldon, and we’d grown up as close as siblings. As I was twenty-seven, he had grown into my big cousin at twenty-four, dwarfing me by seven inches. He had a gold tooth, braids cornrowed thickly to his head, and everything about him was capable and kind, so when he took the driver’s seat for the first leg of the fifteen-hour drive, I hunched over in the passenger seat, glared at the miles of highway, fields, and billboards before us, and was grateful and apprehensive. I would like to breathe again, I thought, but I was going home. My homesickness always meant that the thought of going home was exhilarating and comforting, but over the past four years, that sense of promise had turned to dread. When my brother died in October 2000, it was as if all the tragedy that had haunted my family’s life took shape in that great wolf of DeLisle, a wolf of darkness and grief, and that great thing was bent on beating us. By the summer of 2004, three of my friends had died as well: Ronald in the winter of 2002, C. J. in January 2004, and Demond a month later, in February. Each friend’s subsequent death was a hard blow, as that wolf hunted us. But I didn’t say this to Aldon. Instead, I said: “I can’t breathe, cuz. It’s the air.”

  Aldon turned up the music: rap. It beat us down those highways, over the miles. By the time we stopped in the middle of the plain farmland of Ohio for Coke, for bathroom breaks, for snacks, I didn’t have to plug my nose with tissue. By the time we crossed the Ohio River over to Kentucky’s rolling green hills, I could inhale and exhale through my nose. Aldon drove with his left hand on the wheel, his right on the armrest, centered.

  I hope nobody dies this summer, I thought.

  While my classmates remained in Ann Arbor or worked on fishing boats in Alaska or visited family in Cape Cod during their summer breaks, I always went home to Mississippi. I had done the same every winter break, every spring break, and every summer break while I was an undergrad at Stanford University from 1995 to 2000, and I continued the tradition in the summer of 2004. Homesickness had troubled me ever since I’d left for Stanford in 1995. I would hide weird crying jags from my then-boyfriend when I saw down-on-their-luck men who reminded me of my father. I would beg long conversations on the phone with my friends at home so I could listen to the sounds in the background, wishing I were there. I dreamed of the woods surrounding my mother’s house, that they were being razed and burned. I knew there was much to hate about home, the racism and inequality and poverty, which is why I’d left, yet I loved it.

  During visits, I lived in my mother’s house, a white double-wide trailer, set on the back of an acre, away from the road. Spanish oaks and small garden plots filled with azaleas and bulbs dotted the front yard. My mother was proud of her yard and worked hard at cultivating it, even though we lived at the top of a hill, which meant that when the heavy rains came during the spring and t
he summer, the earth washed down the hill into the street, and the front part of the yard remained sandy. Joshua was four years dead that summer, so my mother had converted his room into a bedroom for my seven year-old nephew, De’Sean. My middle sister, De’Sean’s mother, Nerissa, twenty-one, lived in a duplex apartment in Long Beach, Mississippi, at the time. She’d given birth to De’Sean when she was thirteen, and hadn’t had the opportunity or the maturity to be a mother to him, so De’Sean lived with my mother, and Nerissa had learned to mother him on weekends. My youngest sister, Charine, eighteen, still lived in my mom’s house. She graduated from high school days after I made it home from Michigan.

  When Aldon and I arrived from our long drive, I let myself in the back door, tiptoed into Charine’s room, and climbed into bed with her. She didn’t turn me away, even though I was sweating Coke and Corn Nuts with concentration thinned to its most desperate. I threw an arm around her, faced her back. We were the same height, nearly the same weight, had the same long-limbed petite frame, except her hips were slimmer than mine, her eyelashes thick as Joshua’s and Nerissa’s. When I first went away to college, she was eleven years old, and she saved my fingernail clippings and the glass Coke bottles I drank out of. She was my baby sister. I let myself be weak for a moment. Either she was asleep or she had the grace to pretend that she was asleep, because when I lay behind her and cried, my unsteady breathing the only clue I wept, from dread or relief, she let me. That is how we began our summer.

  When we woke, she didn’t mention my crying. Instead, we went for a ride in the car. Charine suffered from motion sickness, and air-conditioning made it worse. I wanted to soak in all the heat I could, since my first Michigan winter had stunned me with relentless snow and unyielding cold, so we rode with the windows down in hundred-degree Mississippi heat. We had nothing to do. We rode down to the county park, the swings hanging limp and smelling like singed rubber in the sun, the nets on the basketball hoops still, the bleachers empty. The landscape echoed with loss and grief. We were lonely.