by Jesmyn Ward
When C. J. was seventeen, he dropped out of high school. School had bored and frustrated him simultaneously, and he left after ninth grade. I do not know exactly why, but I can imagine that he felt ignored and unremarkable in the classroom, yet another body crowding the school. He was not an academic standout, and he didn’t like playing organized sports, even though he had the physical talent for it. The fact that he was a Black male barely scraping by in his classes meant he was seen as a problem. And the school administration at the time solved the problem of the Black male by practicing a kind of benign neglect. Years later, that benign neglect would turn malignant and would involve illegal strip searches of middle schoolers accused of drug dealing, typing these same students as troublemakers, laying a thick paper trail of imagined or real discipline offenses, and once the paper trail grew thick enough, kicking out the students who endangered the blue-ribbon rating with lackluster grades and test scores.
Sometimes C. J. followed Charine to Gulfport and stayed with her at my father’s rented house in Gaston Point. C. J. and Charine wandered the streets of Gaston Point wearing basketball shorts and white wifebeaters under long white T-shirts. Both of them dressed like boys. They walked to the stores for bread, for milk, for lunch meat before returning to my father’s house. They ate, watching movies and hiding from the heat. Sometimes in the cooler evening, C. J. would lift weights on the rickety weight bench my father had erected in the front yard.
On one particular hot summer day, one in a seemingly endless procession, C. J. and Charine and our cousin walked to the store for ice and Popsicles. On their way back, they heard a bark: breathy, tiny.
“You heard that?” Charine said.
“There,” C. J. said, and pointed at the porch of a house they were passing, which was bordered by an aluminum fence.
“Y’all want it?” our cousin asked.
On the narrow, open porch of the house, a pit bull puppy sat, ears wide and soft as houseplant leaves, her feet the biggest thing on her. She scooted across the porch toward them, barking again, throwing her head up in the air with each sound, as if she had to use her full weight to toss it out. She was feisty. They liked her.
“Come on,” C. J. said, and he vaulted over the low fence, scooped up the puppy, and carried her back to Charine, who opened her neon orange book bag and let them slide the puppy inside next to the Popsicles. They ran back to my father’s rental house and unpacked the dog instead of groceries.
“It was ours,” Charine said later. “It was like our baby.”
When I came home from Michigan during summers and winter breaks, I corralled Charine into spending time with me. Charine was the last of my mother’s children who still lived in her house, so even though she was eight years younger than me, I made her my best friend. She usually invited C. J. along, and then we usually picked up two or three people from the neighborhood. I dragged them to the movies, paid their way, made them watch things like Lord of the Rings, and then afterward we’d all sneak into another movie, leaving the theater four hours after we entered it, queasy with buttered popcorn. On Fridays and Saturdays, we went out to Illusions.
In summer 2003, we piled into my car, Charine and Nerissa and C. J. and me, and met up with Nerissa’s friend at a hotel on the beach near Illusions. He’d been renting a suite for a week. We had no idea why he’d been renting such an expensive suite for so long, since he had a house: I assumed he rented it because he could, because he wanted to brag about his wealth, which he’d gained by selling dope. It was an unspoken display of his status. Once there, we sat in my car and got high. The Gulf water, black in the night, rolled inexorably in. We felt good. We watched the parking lot of the nightclub, the cars moving like a current past one another, people swarming, preening. The bass from the club called out, and the bass from the cars answered. When we went into the hotel room, C. J. sat on the sofa. Charine sat on one of C. J.’s legs, and I sat on his other leg. I’d never sat on C. J.’s lap before: even in rest, his muscles were hard, and suddenly I felt bad for sitting on him, for bearing down on his small frame with my weight, so I stood.
“You ain’t got to move,” C. J. said. I sat back down. We were quiet. We watched the TV without any sound and watched Nerissa’s friend, who’d been a top college football draft pick but never gone to university. He walked to the bathroom, where he stayed for a few minutes, and eventually he emerged. He sniffed and sucked snot from his nasal cavity. After swallowing, he’d laugh and talk with us. His sniffing was staccato and annoying. He stays with a sinus infection, I thought naively. He was restless, walking back and forth, again and again.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
There were cigarette butts in the sink and in the toilet. There was no toilet paper. There was no soap, and there was only one towel in the room; it lay on the floor, rumpled and dirtied. I decided I didn’t need to pee, and went back to the sofa and sat next to C. J. and Charine.
“That bathroom is awful,” I said, suddenly depressed.
“Come on,” C. J. said, and we left the hotel room, darting between the cars speeding past on Highway 90 to the beach. The moon shone like a bleached oyster shell, and we spent the rest of the night until just before dawn drinking beer on the boardwalk. On the drive home, C. J., who was the only sober one, said, “They was doing coke in the bathroom.”
“What?” I said.
“That’s what they look like when people do coke in them. All them cigarette butts and shit.”
I laid my head down on the seat, stared out at the thin white line of the beach, the trees, the water, all of it lightening from black to gray to blue. Eventually I fell asleep, thinking about what he’d said. Had C. J. been in another bathroom like that? How did he know? If C. J. said anything else, I didn’t hear it.
Weeks later, one night when my mother wasn’t home, Nerissa and Charine and I sat at my mom’s house, watching movies. The front door was open: the light was on. Charine left us to use the phone, and a few minutes later we heard a dragging noise scratching its way up through the darkness near the road and bordering woods, past the front yard.
“What the hell is that?” Nerissa said.
Charine ran out the front door, down the concrete front steps, and out to the road, where the dragging continued between pauses. Nerissa and I stood on the steps and saw C. J. and Duck standing at the edge of the pebbled drive. We walked down the driveway into the night to greet them. A blue ice chest with a long white handle sat between the boys, and C. J. sat down on it and turned up a can of beer. He offered us some. I took one and drank in sips, the beer bitter. Duck told jokes but didn’t laugh at them. Duck didn’t stay long. He left C. J. and us to the cooler. C. J. knew my mother disliked him, so he often kept some distance from my mother’s house. For Charine and him, knowing that their relationship was opposed by so many lent it a romantic air, made them feel like star-crossed lovers. Even though Charine had told C. J. my mother was gone, we sat on the ground at the edge of the yard, slapping at mosquitoes and gnats, talking.
“Y’all can have this.” Tipsy, I stood up. I was tired of the sharp bite and the itchy burn of the mosquitoes. “I’m going inside.”
“Me too,” Nerissa said. She followed me into the house. Charine remained outside with C. J. Twenty minutes later, the house phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Man, y’all come outside.”
“Who this?”
“Your sister is upset. She think y’all mad at her. You need to come talk to her.”
“Oh Lord.”
Nerissa shrugged and kept watching TV. I walked outside, wondering what had gone wrong in the twenty minutes we’d been watching TV. C. J. pocketed his cell phone when I walked up. Charine was sitting on one of the wooden railroad ties my mother had used to landscape the yard. She was slumped over, and her face was in her hands.
“Your sister’s crying,” C. J. said.
“What for?” I said.
“She thinks y’all are disappoin
ted in her.”
“Where did this come from?”
“For real man, y’all sister love y’all.”
I paused and scratched at my leg. I had no idea why Charine was so emotional, but I mistakenly understood it as hormonal histrionics: a teenage temper tantrum. She and C. J. must have gotten into a fight and she was funneling it into her relationship with me and Nerissa. The last place I wanted to be was outside in the yard with my needy sister. Regardless of how drunk or high he was, C. J. would choose to be no other place.
“I don’t know what to say to her,” I said. C. J. looked at me, his eyes wide and brown in the near darkness.
“Just talk to her,” he said.
Charine wouldn’t uncover her face.
“Charine.” Her shoulders shuddered. “What’s wrong?”
“Talk to her,” C. J. said.
“I be fucking up,” Charine said through her fingers.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “Calm down.”
“Tell her you love her,” C. J. said. He bent to the cooler, grabbed another beer, popped the top.
“What?” I said. “I’m talking to her.”
“Tell her.”
“Charine,” I said. “I love you.”
She cried harder. C. J. grabbed my arm and walked me off into the darkness, to the pebbled edge of the road. He leaned in to whisper, and his face was the brightest thing, made even harder than it already was by the night, which whittled his nose to nothing, his cheekbones to peach pits, his forehead, a sliver of light. He took a sip of his beer.
“For real, y’all don’t understand. You need to talk to your sister.”
He was insistent. I leaned away from the feeling that he held me by the back of my neck, like my mother had when I was a child and she led me through crowds by grabbing hard and bearing down.
“I’m going inside,” I said.
“You should talk to her,” C. J. said.
“All right,” I said as I turned and glanced at Charine. She still sat on the crosstie, still hid her face, crying.
“I’ll be inside,” I told her, and then I turned my back on both of them and walked up the driveway. The woods were riotous with night bugs. C. J. tossed a can into the street. It clinked, then went silent. The rocks dug into my bare feet, but once I was a few feet up the driveway, I ran on my toes to lessen the bruise. What the hell is wrong with them? I thought. Charine’s behavior I accredited to grief: Joshua had died three days before her birthday, and as the summer burned itself away to autumn, our loss made us act out in strange ways. I wondered to myself, Is C. J. on something? In the house, Nerissa was asleep; the TV turned her face blue. I heard shouting and the sound of the cooler being dragged, stopped, then dragged again, so I knelt on the rough green trailer carpet and raised the blinds so I could look out the window. In the pale reach of the one streetlight, C. J. tugged the cooler a few feet, drank his beer, raised it to the sky, and yelled at the woods. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He flung beer after beer into the ditch, into the trees, kicked the cooler. Charine followed him, sitting on the ground or the plastic top of the cooler, or standing at his side. I could tell by the way he slung the cans, which must have been half full because they flew far and fell quickly and didn’t float like empty aluminum, that he was cursing. I sank into the carpet, watched Nerissa sleep, and wondered why I felt afraid.
“Call everybody,” I said. “We’re going to New Orleans.”
We left around 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. in a caravan, at least fifteen of us piled into a Suburban. None of us wore seatbelts. I was stupid and didn’t care. Ever since I’d left home, I’d learned that life for me in the wide curious world was a constant struggle against empty rooms, against the grief at my brother’s death and at Ronald’s death that followed me always, that made itself most felt in those quiet spaces. When I was in DeLisle, I liked to get as many of us as I could together, cousins and hood, and organize trips to New Orleans, twenty of us roaming Bourbon Street with Styrofoam cups. We parked on Decatur Street and walked into the quarter. A limousine with spinning rims was parked at the edge of the lot; we noticed because these types of rims were new and we’d only seen them on television. C. J. knelt next to the tire.
“Watch this shit,” he said. He spun the wheel and the metal caught the light like a knife flipping through the air. “It’s spinning!” he called. We laughed at the boldness of it, the silliness of it, the feeling that we were doing something stupid that we probably shouldn’t be doing. We spent the night getting drunker and drunker, walking, eyeing the doors of strip clubs that only a few of us were old enough to enter. C. J. shepherded Charine through the drunk crowd the entire night, her protector; he was only an inch or two taller than she was, and just as lean, but when he walked next to her he seemed larger, bolstered by attitude, possessiveness, loyalty.
The next morning, I woke up on the daybed in the second bedroom in Nerissa’s apartment. I stood up and walked toward the door, but my legs crumpled under me. I fell to the floor. I’d had fun the night before, and figured the only reason I felt so weak and had almost fainted was because of the migraine medicine I was taking to treat the headaches I’d suffered from since I was fifteen. C. J. and Charine and Nerissa and Hilton walked into the bedroom, and C. J. sat in a toddler’s chair on the floor, a white T-shirt wrapped around his head, and looked at me.
“You ready to go at it again?” he said.
I smiled.
“Yep.”
It was 8:00 A.M. We drank. We got high. C. J. plugged a small portable radio into the wall in the room with the daybed and the bunk bed, and he popped in a new Lil Boosie CD. He played the same song repeatedly; he rewound it over and over again and sang along. I’d never heard him sing before. His solid voice was clear through the T-shirt. He made me laugh with silly, unselfconscious jokes. He surprised me: I’d never known he could be so funny, so kind. And then, suddenly, the conversations shifted. We were talking about cocaine.
“You ever did it?” C. J. said.
“No,” I said.
“You know anybody who did it? In college?”
“Yeah, a few people. But we weren’t close.”
“Don’t never do it.”
C. J. shifted in the toddler’s chair he’d folded himself into, readjusted the T-shirt across his face, but it was too bulky and slid down. He was half smiling, half not.
“I tried it once,” he said. “I did it again.” C. J. rubbed his head. “I wish I’d never did it the first time.”
I nodded and understood why he’d known the bathroom at the hotel was so disgusting, why he was so insistent and erratic that night he dragged the cooler up the road, why one day he’d scare me, and the next, he could be another person, kind and funny, painfully honest, telling me things he was somewhat ashamed to tell me while wearing a T-shirt like a veil across his face.
I got a feeling I ain’t going to be here long, C. J. said. He told Charine this. He told his close cousins this. Not here, he said. He lived as if he believed it. He never talked like the rest of us, never laid claim to a dream job. He never said: I want to be a firefighter. Never: I want to be a welder. Neither: Work offshore. The only person he ever spoke to about his future was Charine; once every so often, he’d tell her he wanted her to have his children. We can hustle, he’d say, make money. Live good, he said. Live. But even after dropping out, he never got a legitimate job, perhaps dissuaded by the experiences of the young men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked until they were fired or quit because minimum wage came too slowly and disappeared too quickly. They sold dope between jobs until they could find more work as a convenience store clerk or a janitor or a landscaper. This was like walking into a storm surge: a cycle of futility. Maybe he looked at those who still lived and those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. Maybe in his low moments, when he was coming down off the coke, he saw no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, n
o hope. Maybe in his high moments, he didn’t either. Don’t say that shit, Charine would tell C. J. when he spoke of dying young. You ain’t going nowhere.
Years later, Nerissa told me a story she heard from one of C. J.’s friends in Pass Christian. They were walking along the train tracks, Nerissa said, because it was the fastest way to get around town. C. J. would have been surefooted, stepped easily over the hunks of granite that shifted while he skimmed from wooden crosstie to wooden crosstie. Over years, these had been burned black by the Mississippi sun and the heat of the trains. On either side of the tracks, ditches ran deep with water. Cattails grew tall. C. J. would have heard it first, the way the train whistled in the distance behind him. His friend loped on for a few steps and then crossed over the steel rails before wondering why C. J. kept walking, a small smile on his face, but even that was like a slide of rocks down a hill: all hard. Or perhaps C. J. glared at the ground when he walked. Either way, he ignored the blasting train advancing toward him. He ignored his friend, who flinched at the train’s blast. I ain’t, C. J. told people, I ain’t long for this world. He waited until he felt the train cleave the air at his back, until the horn made his eardrums pulse, until he was sure the conductor was panicking, and then he called on his lean golden body to do what it would, and he jumped from the tracks, out of the way, alive another day.