by Jesmyn Ward
At the end of that school year, Joshua lived with my father in his apartment for the entire two months of summer vacation. He was thirteen. By then he was taller than my mother, and he wasn’t cowed by her in the old ways that I’d been cowed, or in which my sisters were cowed. He was self-assured around her, brutally honest and funny, would say things to her about girls he liked or his friends that I or any of my sisters would never dare to say. He was a boy, and my mother loved him especially for it. But she knew the danger of being a Black man in the South, and she thought my father could teach my brother things, important things, about survival, things she assumed she could not teach him. Even though she could have taught him about what it meant to be strong, to work hard, to love unconditionally, to sacrifice for others, to stand, she sent him to my father.
I missed Joshua but didn’t realize how much until my mother drove us girls over to my father’s and I saw Josh, his hair, the texture of mine, cut short, sitting in the living room, where he slept on the sofa, in a T-shirt and boxers. Nerissa and Charine ran into my father’s room and began arguing over what they would watch on television.
“I hate that damn VCR,” Josh said, shrugging at an old VCR sporting a thin scrim of dust in the corner of the living room.
“Why?”
“There are roaches in it.”
“Living in it?”
“Yeah.”
“Little roaches?”
“No. Big cockroaches.”
“Well, how you know they live in there?”
“Every night I’m laying up in here, trying to go to sleep, I hear them crawling around in there. Then they come out and they fly around the room.”
“What? Roaches fly?” I was aghast. All the reading and studying I’d done had not told me this.
“Yes. They fly in circles around the room, over and over. Like helicopters. Like they’re trying to bomb me.”
I laughed, but I was horrified. Roaches really flew? And then I felt a start, and wondered what else my brother knew that I didn’t, living in New Orleans with my father, expected to be a grown-up in many ways, accountable for himself because my father was so absent, womanizing or socializing. My brother must have been lonely there, accustomed to the confined chaos of living with four women. He must have been as happy to see us as we were to see him.
“They hide in the VCR during the day. And it don’t even work.” Joshua laughed. “I don’t know why Daddy’s keeping it.”
I’m sure my father looked at the VCR, like he looked at most broken things, and thought it could be fixed. He remembered the sixties and seventies, when the Black Panthers fed him and his sisters school lunches: he remembered how embattled Oakland had seemed at the time, and how it was able to come together under the leadership of the Panthers. He listened to Public Enemy and only Public Enemy. He owned all their albums. When we walked across the levee to the neighborhood on the other side, he talked to everyone, people sitting on the front steps outside their shotguns or on their narrow porches, walking in the middle of the street. He believed in the power of community, in the power of conscious political thought to fight racism and transform people who were browbeaten into those who had agency.
Whenever my father had extra change from whatever factory or security job he’d found, he’d walk us over the levee to one of the corner stores there, where he’d treat us to pickled pig’s lips and potato chips and cold drinks. One day an older woman walked up to him, wearing white, her skin dark against the fabric, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. It was hard for me to figure out that she was a woman: she was so skinny she had none of the curves I associated with all of the older women in my family. Her forearms were the same size as her upper arms. She smiled at my father, and I saw that she was missing teeth, and those that were left were black at the gum line. And she was not alone. I looked at most of the people walking the street and saw that half the neighborhood looked as if they were starving. On our way back from the store, I asked my father about it. The sun was setting, and the New Orleans sky was pink through the power lines, which were tangled even here, where the parades did not venture, with Mardi Gras beads.
“Why is everybody so skinny?” I asked.
My father looked at me. He always talked to me like an adult.
“They’re on crack,” he said. “They’re all crackheads.”
Josh walked on his other side, munching on a pig’s lip.
“All of them?” I said.
“All the ones you see that are skinny like that.”
I frowned. The majority of the neighborhood was smoking crack. Skeletal men and women walked with jarring steps every day in an endless roam, it seemed; the only other people in the streets were one or two handsome teenage boys, a few years older than me, wearing wifebeaters and gold. They slouched on metal fences in the shade of spindly oaks, yet they still turned brown in the sun, and the walking dead clustered around them, while kids on bikes and on foot cut through the throng, playing and laughing.
But I wondered if my father’s philosophies could ever make any sort of difference in New Orleans. My father’s revelation about addicts and dealers made me see the neighborhood clearly, see the way the narrow streets were all pothole-ridden and mostly empty, where families seemed empty of everyone but the very old and the very young, the old driven to infirmity by crack, the young either ignorant or profiting from it. The air was redolent with the scent of marsh mud, burnt coffee, and something that smelled like raw sewage, but I sensed something else: violence driven by desperation and despair. Crack, with its low prices and quick, searing high, was eating away at the soul of neighborhoods and communities all over the United States in the late eighties and early nineties, its consumption driven by those desperate for escape, release. I was scared to walk through the neighborhood, and never did so without my father and my siblings. Joshua, however, was braver, perhaps because he had to be. He would have recognized the danger in that place long before I did, and would have known that he could do nothing but navigate it without flinching, smartly, or else be unable to walk down the street as a man. To be a man was to posture strength and capability; for my brother, this meant he had to be unafraid. He had to show a strength he may not have felt, had to evince a ruthlessness in his swagger that was not in him. The next weekend, when my mother brought us girls back, my father told me that my brother had been walking to the store during the week and two kids on a bike had ridden by and punched him in the back of the head. “Because he wasn’t from their hood,” my father said they told him.
“What did you do to them?” I asked.
“I talked to them,” my father said, “and told them it was wrong.” This approach, coming from my black-belt martial-artist father, disappointed me, but I didn’t understand that this was exactly what his martial arts training had taught him. Violence should be the last resort. The music my father listened to reinforced that; there were other ways to resolve conflict. And in handling the situation the way he did, my father was trying to teach my brother to avoid the violence that plagued the Black community he lived in. Perhaps he thought he could raise a different young man, one resolute against the deluge of racism and socioeconomic inequality and history, and the self-loathing and destructive behavior that engendered. Maybe he wanted a son who could foment change like a Panther. At the time, I didn’t see this, and all I knew was that I wanted to find the boys who had hit Joshua and fight them. I wanted to take up for my brother in the way I almost never took up for myself at school. He doesn’t need your hood, I would have told them. When I saw Josh, he told me that the roaches were still on patrol, and he was still terrified of them. He made me laugh. Even though we were living in different households, we were still as close as ever. I wanted him to tell me about the boys, the bike, the blow, hoped that he would come to me the way a little brother would to an older sister. And even though we talked about mostly everything, he never did. He knew there was nothing I could do for him.
At the end of our last weekend
of the summer, we returned to Mississippi and the beginning of another school year. On occasion, if my mother was not yet done with her duties for the day, she would pick me up at the end of the school day before returning with me in tow, while Josh watched Nerissa and Charine at home. The family my mother worked for lived in a large old mansion on the beach, which was painted dark blue and had a two-story guest cottage that had been servants’ quarters in the near past. On days like these, I sat off the kitchen with the wife, and as the children of the family, who were several years younger than me, watched television, we talked. I watched my mother clean; she was such a formidable presence at home that I couldn’t stop looking at her, and this meant I had trouble paying attention to the wife. Why was my mother so silent? Why did she seem so meek? I’d never seen any of that in her. My attention was split between two worlds.
“What language are you taking in school?” the wife asked. She was tall and healthy and blond, robust and gregarious.
“French,” I said. I watched my mother shoo the cat from the counter and spray the tile with Lysol before wiping it down.
“It’s a hard language to learn.”
I nodded. My mother rinsed dishes, began loading the dishwasher.
“It’s difficult to hear the words, to tell where one ends and the next starts.”
I nodded again. My hands felt wrong in my lap. I felt I should be at the counter, helping my mother, handing her dishes.
“Spanish is much easier,” the wife said.
My mother bent, poured powder into the dishwasher. When she closed the machine’s door and stood, she straightened like it hurt her. My mother grabbed a broom and began sweeping.
“Well, our family used to speak French,” I said. “Creole French. So that’s why I want to learn it.” My voice sounded strange. My mother continued to sweep the kitchen, worked her way around the counter. The entire house had wooden floors, upstairs and down, and my mother cleaned all of them by hand.
“The best way to learn is to travel. Immerse yourself,” the wife said. The family’s parrot, which was as large as their cat and kept in a four-foot-high cage in a corner of the sitting room, squawked and spread its wings. Birdseed littered the floor. My mother patiently worked her way around the cage and continued sweeping. The parrot stretched its wings wide again, raising its beak to the air, stretching as if it would fly, but it settled. My mother pushed and the broom shushed its way around the cage. I nodded.
Years later, in college, I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother’s employer’s family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home. I thought of how it felt to witness my mother at work, of how I saw her in a broader context, as a Black cleaning woman, almost cowed, and of how I was very conscious in that moment of my dark skin, my overbite, my irascible hair, the way my hands itched to help my mother. How my legs tingled as I sat and looked at my mother as she worked, and how I was aware that the wife was talking to me like an intellectual equal, engaging me, asking me about my college plans. How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.
When my father moved back to Mississippi from New Orleans, my mother decided my brother should live with him full-time. My brother was still struggling in school, and my mother thought perhaps he’d do better with my father. My father moved into a long, low one-story redbrick house in Gulfport. The house was in a historically Black neighborhood, Turkey Creek, which was a community that had been established by freed slaves after the Civil War in 1866 and was still a mostly Black neighborhood of narrow streets, modest wooden-sided houses, and small, neat yards with immaculate grass, surrounded by woods on all sides. In some ways, it felt like DeLisle, except it was encircled by Gulfport’s sprawling development. The creek they named the neighborhood after was notable mostly because it cut a large ditch and warranted a small bridge, and sometimes swelled when it rained. The woman my father’d had an affair with while he was living with us in the seedy subdivision had had a child for him by that time, so she and her child moved in, as did my brother. My brother wanted to live with my father, even though it was hard for him to change schools, make new friends, and leave DeLisle. When Joshua moved in with Daddy, he had his own room again, which he decorated with movies and kung fu weapons he took from my father, or things that he stole.
When Joshua was fourteen, he was a good thief. This was something that he’d never done when he was living with us, and it marked a new turn in him, one of the first that I saw in an ascent to manhood. To be a man meant one should be self-sufficient; he had to provide for himself. He was the same height as my father, and he’d lost his fat-boy belly, but the meat on his bones was evenly centered, proportioned in his long arms and legs, and would solidify to even leaner muscle. He wore big clothes that he didn’t fill, and when he walked to the local Walmart with his new friends he’d met in the neighborhood, their large shirts and their oversize jean shorts were what they stuffed their booty in. They stole stupid things like boxers, candy, and Dickies pants, which he told me about when Nerissa, Charine, and I visited one weekend.
“I’m banned from Walmart,” Josh said. I sat on his bed, which was made. His room was bare and neat. He’d been drawing pictures, and these he’d tacked to the wall, pictures of cars alongside pages ripped out of my father’s lowrider magazines, which featured pretty Hispanic girls bending suggestively over elaborately painted Chevys.
“How you get banned from Walmart?” I said.
“We was stealing,” he said.
“Josh!”
“It was just little stuff. Candy and boxers.”
“What would have happened if they would’ve called the cops?”
“They didn’t. They just took us back in the back and took all our names and told us that we was banned.”
“You could’ve went to juvie.”
“We done stole out there before and ain’t got caught. The time before last they hollered at us when we walked out the door but we started running and they couldn’t catch us.”
I laughed at the image and felt like I was encouraging him, so I stopped. I’d meant to chastise him, be the big sister who reminded him of larger consequences. I was worried for him, worried at what the world demanded of him as a young man, and of what he would do to satisfy it, to stand. Yet I admired his recklessness at the same time. He was still struggling in junior high: then, I did not understand why he was having such a hard time in classes. He was smart, witty, adept at solving problems quickly and efficiently. Now, I assume he learned and tested differently from other kids, and the public school system didn’t recognize that. Even though he stole stupid things from stores, he was still a tame kid: I knew he’d experimented with weed, but it wasn’t something he smoked all the time. I also knew he’d gotten drunk for the first time with Aldon, and our older cousin had then loaded him and Aldon into the backseat of his Cutlass and spun do-nuts in the middle of the road, causing them to throw up all over his car. I’m assuming he was trying to teach them a lesson, and as far as I knew, it had worked, since Josh really didn’t drink much after that.
“So I guess we can’t walk over there and get something to eat, huh?”
“Naw,” Josh said. He laughed. “Come on.”
We left the house, which had the sort of low ceilings that feel oppressive even to me, a short person, and walked out into the street, where we stood for a minute before seeing one of his new friends, skinny and dark in the distance, his shadow trailing him like a tail, and we set off walking toward him. I missed my brother.
When I was in school during the week, I wondered about Joshua, running through the hallways of a new school, being collared by new teachers, navigating the world without the luxury of having known all his classmates since elementary school. He was alone. Like me.
As I grew older, I became a part of my priv
ate school’s community, sort of. I was a cheerleader and in the drama club, served in student government, and briefly revived the student literary magazine, but I was still other, racially and socio-economically. My mother forbade me to date anyone (in or out of the school). Like most mothers in the Black South, she was terrified that I would become pregnant as a teenager. She didn’t allow me to go to any of the school dances until my senior year, when I was allowed to attend my senior prom, alone. I hated all of the music. One or two of the White boys I attended school with were attracted to me, and I heard rumors that others were as well, but they wouldn’t act on it because I was Black. They feared the judgment of their families and community. I found out how dangerous this intersection was when I was heavily petted by a boy one night during my senior year, and the next day, in conversation with another one of my classmates, another White boy, he said: I don’t believe in the mixing of the races. Years later, I recalled that he’d touched me, but he’d refused to kiss my mouth or my face. My otherness was physically tangible. At least, I thought, my brother doesn’t have to deal with this in his school.