by Jesmyn Ward
Joshua died.
At my brother’s funeral, after the wake, after I walked up to the casket and glimpsed Joshua, who was powdery pale and awfully still (I thought: This isn’t my brother), after I panicked at the lie of him lying dead, and after I sobbed through the service, hugging Charine, our skinny arms around each other, I walked to the podium and read a poem I’d written. I’ve since lost this poem, and I only wrote it because my mother asked me to, as part of the service. “I can’t do it,” I told her, “I can’t write a poem.” My mother asked me to pick out a picture for my funeral T-shirt, and I chose a picture of Josh and me when we were young, five and three, and we are sitting in the back of my father’s black Riviera. I am looking seriously at the camera, and my brother is asleep on my small shoulder, his hair blond in the flash of the camera. We would have taken that photo around the time he and I sat on the front steps of the small, high, boxy house, me hugging him, bats flitting overhead, our parents arguing and breaking things inside. My mother asked me what I wanted my brother’s funeral shirt to say, and I replied: “Nothing.” I did not wear the shirt to the church ceremony, or afterward at the repast at my mother’s house. I would wear it for the first time five years later, after Hurricane Katrina.
I can only remember one line from my elegy. Nothing about the line is original; I have since read it in other books. There is a common truth in its message, a hopeful refrain for those who remain. My voice broke when I read it to my family, to our friends, to the boys who would later lie in caskets, but who stood alive on that day in the back of the church.
He taught me love is stronger than death.
Eight months later, Nerissa called me. I’d been in New York City for five months then, and was living on a sofa in the West Village with wealthy friends I’d made in high school. It was 2001. Winter had broken, and tulips burst through grime-caked ground. It was the spring before the Twin Towers fell. I brought the phone with me into the small half bathroom off the living room, which was lined with ceramic tile. The girls who rented the apartment had begun taking Polaroids of their friends and taping them to the wall of the bathroom, so when I locked myself in it to privately speak with my sister, I had an audience, a sea of pale New York hipsters bearing the bored, poised, often beautiful faces of the rich. They looked at me.
“Mimi?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Mama and Grandmama went to court today. Mama said when they read the verdict, she started crying.”
“What happened?”
“They sentenced the drunk driver who hit him to five years.”
“What?”
“They didn’t charge him with vehicular manslaughter. They charged him with something else. Leaving the scene of an accident.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Mama said the judge called her and Grandmama in there afterward, told them why they couldn’t charge him with manslaughter.”
“But why?”
“Mama said all she could do was cry.”
I began crying. All those faces on the wall were so still, so young. I hung up with Nerissa and called my college boyfriend and told him the verdict. I could hardly speak.
“What do you expect?” he said, impatient to return to work. “It’s Mississippi.”
All those eyes looked at me with such disdain. Here, a young woman with a perfectly symmetrical face and dark eyes, so beautiful it hurt to look at her. There, two boys shoulder to shoulder, each with one arm casually looped over the other’s shoulders, sandy hair, pointy jaws. My conversation with my boyfriend was short, over after he’d asked, “What do you want from me?” and I’d replied, “I want a hug,” and he’d said, “I have work to do,” which meant no. When I hung up the phone, I sat on the floor and hid my face in my hands.
The man had been drunk. The police had found he’d been in several bars, and also been drinking in the casinos. He’d swerved at Ronald’s sister, run her off the road, the night before he killed my brother. He’d hit Joshua from behind and had been going so fast that he’d swerved off Scenic Drive and his car had flown across two lanes of highway to land on the beach. That night, what had caused my brother’s wreck had been a mystery. The police thought he’d simply lost control of the car, but the next day, someone called the Pass Christian police department and reported a car on the beach. The drunk driver had staggered home after he hit my brother. By the time the police tracked the car to the owner’s house, it was the next day, and the driver was no longer drunk, and everything was cold. The drunk driver was in his forties and White. My brother was nineteen and Black. The man was arrested for and ultimately convicted of leaving the scene of an accident, which was a felony. He was sentenced to five years and ordered to pay my mother $14,252.27 in restitution. The man served three years and two months of his sentence before he was released, and he never paid my mother anything. Nerissa attended high school with his nephew, who attempted to apologize to her for his uncle. He always fucking up, she said he told her.
Five fucking years, I thought. This is what my brother’s life is worth in Mississippi. Five years.
We Are Here
In my search for words to tell this story, I found more statistics about what it means to be Black and poor in the South. Thirty-eight percent of Mississippi’s population is Black. It is one of six states where African Americans constitute at least a quarter of the population.2 In 2009, the poverty rate was greatest in the South, and in the South greatest in Mississippi, where 23.1 percent of the population lived below the poverty level.3 In 2001, a report by the United States Census Bureau indicated that Mississippi was the poorest state in the country, in part because there has been little money apportioned for rural development. The state has a median household income of $34,473.4 According to the American Human Development Project, Mississippi ranks dead last in the United States on the UN’s Human Development Index, a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living.5 About 35 percent of Black Mississippians live below the poverty level, compared with 11 percent of Whites, and “about one of every 12 Black Mississippi men in their 20s is an inmate in the Mississippi prison system.”6 Recently, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that poverty, lack of education, and poor social support contribute to as many deaths as heart attack, stroke, and lung cancer in the United States.7 These are the numbers that bear fruit in reality.
By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.
We inherit these things that breed despair and self-hatred, and tragedy multiplies. For years I carried the weight of that despair with me; it was heaviest right after Joshua died, when I lived and worked in New York City. In the morning I fought through crowds of people to get to the subway, to get a standing spot on the train, for my commute. I lived with rich White friends when I first arrived, slept on their antique sofa for five months, cleaned their apartment like a maid because I felt beholden, and walked their dog, which hated me. Next I moved in with my then-boyfriend, who charged me rent to sleep in the bed with him for the three months I stayed there. After that I moved in with an actor for nine months, and then with two girls I met through a friend.
And as I moved from place to place, I was wandering around the city, bewildered and depressed as I tried to find the basics: Laundromat, grocery store, subway station. In the evenings, I commuted home in empty, rattling train cars and daydreamed or fell asleep, missing my stop and getting lost in dirty tiled mazes. I was hurrying past boys bleeding to death on sidewalks from neck stabbings outside movie theaters off Times Square. I was walking past homeless women with knotty dreads, women who held cardboard signs that read: AIDS HOMELESS PLEASE HELP. I was fainting on the F train. I was riding the subway at midnight to nightclubs with my friends, where I drank until I stumbled into taxis at four in the morning: deliriously, wretchedly, wonderfully, blackout drunk. I
was buying liters of Brazilian rum and dumping tablespoons of sugar in glasses and topping with ice and drinking the rum straight, fancying myself a connoisseur of the caipirinha, three nights a week. I was smoking weed with Jamaicans until I was stupid.
And every day I was eyeing the tracks, the coming train, the third rail with its protective wooden shield, and wondering why I was alive and my brother was a year, two years dead. Each day I descended into the belly of the city, eyeing those tracks. And I thought about my family and how they would feel to lose me and Joshua, but they were so far away and my misery and grief and loneliness were so close. It slept with me. It walked with me down the crowded streets. I imagined my brother sometimes, when I was more lonely and desperate, imagined him walking to my right and slightly behind me, throwing an arm across my shoulders, and it would comfort me until I realized I was still alone and he was still dead, that he could not walk with me through those building-shadowed streets, through the garbage-stinking heat and the insidious icy snow, that he could not pull a coat over my head and protect me.
Sometimes I eyed my wrists, thought of how easy it would be to take a razor across the left one by wielding the blade with my right hand, and wondered if I could bleed out from just managing one cut. So I got a tattoo of my brother’s signature on the inside of my left wrist so that it seemed like my brother had signed his name on me before he died, had made his mark across the cutting line. I did it because I knew that I could never make that fatal cut across Joshua’s name. And when I fought through the crowds in Grand Central Station while trying to find a place to eat, a place where I could sit in a corner alone and disappear into the wall behind me, while I walked and fumbled past woman after man, felt all these people touching and crowding me while making me realize that I had never been so lonely, so alone, even though I was surrounded by young men in suits and older women in black woolen coats and sticky-faced children, I fantasized about cutting the right wrist with my left hand, so I got another tattoo in my brother’s handwriting across the other cutting line on the inside of my right wrist. Love brother is how he signed the one letter he wrote me while I was in college. Love brother is what the tattoo says.
After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.
Death spreads, eating away at the root of our community like a fungus. In 2008, a seventeen-year-old girl named Dariane attempted to cross the tracks in Pass Christian and was hit by a train. A few winters ago, Rog’s sister Rhea died of septicemia from pneumonia, seven years after her brother died. A couple of years ago, a boy named Matt, who’d been like a younger brother to C. J., was shot; he crawled into the woods next to the road and died. Less than a year ago, a young woman named Shabree was stabbed to death by her boyfriend and left nude and bloody in the bed they shared; when relatives finally found their way to her house and her six-year-old let them in the door, she told them her mother was asleep and covered in ketchup. This is why I choose the option of a life insurance plan at every job I work. This is why I hate answering my phone. This is why fear roots through me when I think of my nephew, who is funny and even-shouldered and quiet, when I think of what waits for him in the world.
Yet I’ve returned home, to this place that birthed me and kills me at once. I’ve turned down more-lucrative jobs, with more potential for advancement, to move back to Mississippi. I wake up every morning hoping to have dreamed of my brother. I carry the weight of grief even as I struggle to live. I understand what it feels like to be under siege.
It is an awful weight. As the years pass, I find my memory shrinking and adhering to photos. I look at a picture of Joshua on his last birthday with a coconut cake bearing one burning candle and my brother a crooked smile, and I think: I remember that day. I look at another photo of him with his arm in the air, posing for me with all the other boys from the neighborhood in the middle of the street, and I remember the way he complained about my big camera and called me a tourist when I told them to stop for a picture on our walk down to the park. When I see him in profile, his eyes closed, wearing a red shirt, I think of the day I took the photo, how I had to look up to him to take it and the sun shone on him, blurred his edges, and I’d said to him: Look at my brother! He’s so cute. Just look at him!
It is more awful when I see him in motion on old videotapes after not having seen him, except in dreams, for years. My mother found an old VHS tape and called me and Nerissa and Charine to watch it. She popped the video in the machine and sat back, her face impassive. I perched on the front of the bed, closest to the TV, and my sisters scooted behind me. On the screen, my brother walked through the living room of our old trailer, with its maroon carpet and cream walls, wearing light-colored jeans and a gray T-shirt. I had forgotten he was so tall. My nephew is one year old in the video, and he is wearing a diaper and nothing else. My sisters and I are in the corner of the frame. Charine presses play on a radio, and rap music sounds. My nephew throws his head back, bounces, tries to catch the beat. Dance, a voice says. Dance, nephew.
“Who is that?” Charine asked. “Who’s talking?”
Come on, nephew. Dance.
I knew who it was. The voice sounded like mine, but deeper. Harder.
“It’s Josh,” Nerissa said.
I’d forgotten.
Do this, Josh says, and he is bouncing like my nephew, dancing. On the video, we laugh. I leaned forward, my eyes eating up my brother like a great hungry mouth, my body: a starved stomach. I would never be full. I rocked, sobbed.
Look at him, my brother says.
“I just miss him so much,” I said. I could not help saying it: the words came out of me wet and ragged, and I could not stop for the hunger in me.
He’s dancing, Josh says.
Behind me, my mother and sisters’ faces were wet.
Dance, my brother says.
Every year on the day he died, I wake up to the dread of another year passing. I lock myself in my room, wherever I am living, and I cry until my eyes swell shut. And at the edge of the longing, the terror that I will forget who he was and forget our lives together immobilizes me, pulls me down further, until I am like someone in those cartoons from our youth, stuck in a quagmire of quicksand, mired in the cold, liquid crush, and then: drowning. After Joshua died, my father stopped working, lived on Top Ramen and hot dogs by working odd jobs, and watched television on two different sets at the same time for hours a day. My mother cleans my brother’s grave every few weeks, picking stray grass, brushing the sand to an even smoothness. Every death anniversary, she takes to her room, closes her blinds, wraps herself in silence and darkness. Every year on his birthday, she buys mums for his grave and cleans the small ceramic figures of angels and teddy bears she’s placed around it, while Nerissa and Charine attach balloons, one for every birthday year, this year thirty-three, to his headstone. “I only dream of him as a child,” my mother says. “He’s always my little boy.”
This is grief.
But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters. What we carry of Roger and Demond and C. J. and Ronald says that they matter. I have written only the nuggets of my friends’ lives. This story is only a hint of what my brother’s life was worth, more than the nineteen years he lived, more than the thirteen years he’s been dead. It is worth more than I can say. And there’s my dilemma, because all I can do in the end is say.
We were at McCloud State Park once, the only group of Black people there among a crowd of Whites. My aunt had arranged the trip to the park, and we sat in our own little segregated crowd in the shallows, me and Nerissa and Charine and Joshua, our cousins Rufus and Dornell, and a few other boys from the neighborhood, Duc
k and Hilton and Oscar and C. J., and we drank beer, tossing the brown and gold bottles back toward the shore, where we would collect them in a garbage bag. The day was hot, the beach small, Black and White studiously ignoring each other. There were high, fluffy clouds in the sky, and we swam in the amber-dark river, sat on the red clay dirt shore and brushed sand from our shoulders. When a white boat chugged up the river, flat and topless, with a gathering of men and one woman, all White and mottled red from the sun, feathered hair bleached in the light, the other White people on the bank cheered. A Confederate flag flew from a staff at the prow, and one of the men on the bank with us lifted his arms above his head, crossing them at mid-elbow so that they made an X, and howled. He’s making the bars, I thought, and suddenly I wanted to leave these White people to their beach, their stars and bars, their glances, the howl that said what so many of the White politicians in Mississippi have said in coded language, one time or another: You’re nothing.
Josh was standing near the front of his parked Cutlass, which was blue and dull in the heavy light. His girlfriend Tasha stood before him, small and pale. There hadn’t been enough sun that day to tan. His hair snaked over his head and down his forehead, sandy and alive. He tossed his head back so that he could see us all clearly.
“I don’t know what y’all looking so surprised for,” he said. He addressed us all, but he looked at me when he said it. “White people got gangs just like us.”
Joshua made sense of the world in his own way. Or at least he was trying to for the short time that he was here. He was attempting to see the patterns, to find the story behind the statistics that I would write about years later. He wanted meaning. There was an older Black man who set up shop with a card table and a folding chair outside the doors of the local supermarket in Pass Christian, a supermarket that would disappear after Hurricane Katrina, its steel beams bent to look like twisted, spindly trees. The man fashioned crosses from plastic and string, wove intricate designs into the crucifixes, and sold them. Sometimes at night, on one of his rides, Josh would stop and sit with the man, talk to him, ask him questions: What do you know about God? Why are we here? And the man, who had maybe sold one cross earlier in the night for a few dollars, happier at the fact it was bought than by the money it gave him, was pleased at having this tall young olive-skinned man sitting there with him asking him questions instead of swaggering by, pants low on his hips, wife-beater not quite meeting his shorts at the waist, flashing underwear, smelling of smoke and deodorant and salt; this older gentleman would have smiled and said—