He was five when he asked his mother for the first time why he was light and Richard was brown. When she caressed Carson with her eyes, she took refuge in his face, and in his skin, as she stared at him and hugged him in response. The embrace, Carson learned over the years as he asked the question repeatedly, was meant to stifle his stubborn, famished curiosity. When Alma did answer, she said, “God gives families a rainbow of ways to be. We’ve got all the colors in us.” But it wasn’t just Carson’s color. Richard was taller than he was, long-limbed like Jimmy Blake. Carson was built thick and compact, like the squat remains of a once-majestic oak. With Richard he shared his mother’s wide, heart-shaped face. He resembled his mother but looked nothing at all like Jimmy Blake.
That was why, Carson was sure, Jimmy never touched him. Why he denied Carson even the brusque, roughhousing, affectionate wrestling matches he clearly relished with Richard. Richard pummeled and punched Jimmy Blake as Jimmy squealed in fake agony, begged breathlessly for a time-out, then surprised Richard with a slam onto the carpeted floor that he cushioned with his own body, on Sundays when he and Richard and Jimmy watched football in the living room and Alma was in the kitchen frying chicken, baking biscuits, and cooking greens. Richard climbed onto Jimmy’s lap and settled there. Carson would climb into that space too, but Jimmy Blake barked, “Git offa me, boy. I can’t hold both of you at the same time.” Carson’s tears only hardened Jimmy’s gaze (he did not think that possible), and so he wordlessly slid back onto the carpeted floor to play with Roscoe, the family cocker spaniel, grateful for the musty, slathering wetness of his tongue on his cheek, his back turned in self-defense against his father and brother.
On Saturday nights when Jimmy Blake came home late from evenings spent without Alma, he noisily entered the bedroom Carson and Richard shared. His entrance always woke Carson, but he pretended to be asleep. There was Jimmy Blake’s shadow on the wall, his weary grunting as he sat on the edge of Richard’s bed and straightened the rumpled blankets. Peeking over his shoulder, stealthily holding his breath, Carson watched Jimmy lift Richard from the edge of the mattress and gently place him in the middle of the bed and tuck him beneath the comforter. He saw Jimmy Blake kiss Richard on the cheek. Carson quickly turned his face to the wall as his father stepped away from Richard’s bed. With just a few steps he stood over Carson, the smell of the liquor a stink in the small room, watching Carson sleep for what were some of the longest minutes of the boy’s life. In the darkness Jimmy Blake’s gaze was a scalpel slicing into unanesthetized flesh.
Cousins at family picnics, at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when no adults were around, teased Carson, telling him he was adopted. Richard took his brother’s side, attacked the offenders, twisting their arms behind them, forcing them to recant. As Carson grew older he stopped asking his mother to tell him who his father was. His parents’ arguments about him, about the absent touch, the lingering awful gaze, seeped under his bedroom door at night. Alma asking Jimmy to let Carson know he cared, Jimmy in his blustery, hostile, defensive voice yelling, “I ain’t got to do nuthin’, woman, but die and pay taxes.” Arguments that earned Carson no reprieve from his exclusion. Yet, unwittingly, over the years he became Jimmy Blake’s son, matching his hardness with a steely indifference. He had lived so long without the man’s touch that if he were to find himself within its confines, Carson was sure that he would break.
By high school, Carson figured school was just a place to kill time while waiting to be old enough to actually have a life. He didn’t drop out, because he’d seen what happened to friends who did—congregating like homesteaders on the neighborhood basketball court all day, sipping forties, talking trash, scaring the little kids for no reason, holing up in their mama’s house sleeping till two in the afternoon, watching game shows and soaps till they hit the streets after dark, cruising with their boys, looking for easy money, a high, a little trouble, a girl for the night, a quick fix to erase how stupid they felt for dropping out. Black and no diploma. No, he wasn’t a genius, but he wasn’t that dumb. Because Jimmy Blake had so convinced him that he was nothing, Carson desperately wanted to be somebody one day. But he wasn’t smart like straight-A honor roll Richard, for whom everything, everything, seemed so easy. Their father’s love. Good grades. Getting accepted at Stanford.
One evening at dinner, Jimmy told Richard, “Boy, if I’d had your opportunities back in the day, you better believe I wouldna been no meat cutter. Your generation, y’all got the breaks. And I want you to take advantage. Take advantage of everything. The world done split wide open for y’all.”
Richard was talking about being a doctor, a goal that Jimmy had adopted as his own, vicariously, bragging to friends as if Richard had already opened his practice.
“So what you got planned?” Jimmy asked, throwing the question at Carson the way he haphazardly tossed Roscoe the bones he brought home from work.
“I don’t know.” Carson shrugged. He was sixteen but felt in the rumbling onerous wake of the question like a three-year-old asked to explain the theory of relativity.
“Don’t know,” Jimmy grunted. “That’s just the kind a niggah the White man likes, one that don’t know.”
“Jimmy, come on, please don’t use that kind of language,” Alma said, coming to Carson’s defense.
“Naw, Alma, you always saying I don’t give him enough attention. Well, I’m giving him attention. That’s the problem. Y’all Black women don’t want a Black man to tell it like it is. To tell a Black boy, or anybody for that matter, what he needs to hear.” He turned back to Carson. “So you ain’t thought about nothing you wanna be, nothing you wanna do?”
Carson had thought about lots of things, astronaut, engineer, fireman, policeman, but he would never tell Jimmy Blake what he had dreamed. Alma’s hand gently rubbed Carson’s back. He wanted to push her hand away. Richard sat slowly chewing his roast beef behind a smirk as he looked from Carson to Jimmy.
“No, Dad.” Carson emphasized the word with a bitter, ruthless sarcasm. “I ain’t figured out yet what I want to do.”
Jimmy Blake’s eyes traveled, slow and thoughtful, around the table, the disgusted twist of his lips confirming Carson’s exquisite isolation.
“Well, you better think of something fast. Or else you gonna be playing catch-up all your life.”
The house became a place for him to sleep and eat. If school weighed on him like prison, the house repelled Carson. He actually preferred school, and hanging out at the mall, or on the court, or at the rec center (places where he had come to spend most of his waking hours), anywhere but in that house. One night he came home late. It was a school night, and he had gone straight from school to the rec center with his boys Damion and Keith, and they played pool and then Carson hung out at Keith’s, listening to tapes and shooting the breeze and talking to girls on the phone. He didn’t call home to let anyone know where he was; he didn’t want anyone to know.
On the streets, that was where Carson felt like himself. Although he was dreadfully unsure who that was, at least on the streets he escaped the wanton disregard of Jimmy and what he felt was the nagging incompetence of his mother’s love, the inability of that love to neutralize what Jimmy Blake inflicted. Jimmy Blake had once threatened to throw him out of the house if he kept breaking curfew. Carson just laughed at the threat. What difference would it make?
When Keith dropped him off at home, the light was on in the kitchen. Jimmy Blake was up waiting for him, he knew. Keith, skinny, so dark-skinned that he was almost blue-black, sat in the car with Carson outside the house for several minutes and asked skeptically, “You sure you wanna go inside?”
“Hell, that’s my house too. I live there.”
Jimmy was waiting to argue, to badger. That in fact was the only time that they talked. The only reason that they talked was to initiate warfare, to skirmish, to confirm the distance between them. Getting out of the car, Carson whispered, “Fuck it,” his all-purpose curse, the phrase that was mantra and talis
man. He entered the house through the back door, which would mean he would have to pass Jimmy. Carson wanted to fuck with him, to walk right past him. To let him know that he didn’t care.
Carson casually strode into the house like it was six o’clock instead of almost midnight. The medicinal, bracing smell of liquor hung like humidity in the kitchen. When Carson closed the door, he turned and looked at Jimmy sitting at the kitchen table. Clutching the doorknob, his body was braced for battle. A slight adrenaline surge tingled in his muscles. The arguments had become almost intimate, almost a show of affection. They were the way the man and the boy loved each other, for the conflicts were regular, passionate, and deeply felt.
Jimmy sat at the kitchen table, staring at a bottle of scotch and a shot glass. His alcoholism was the family secret. No binges or falling out for Jimmy Blake. He could sleep it off and get to work on time. But the house was filled with his liquor bottles underneath the sink, in the unofficial liquor cabinet.
“Sit down,” he said, extending his arm, pointing with his missing fingertip to a chair across from him. Carson didn’t move, wondering, What kind of trick is this? I don’t have to do what you say. I can just walk past you. Go to the fridge and get the plate I know Mom has left for me, he thought.
Jimmy Blake’s face was ravaged. Mostly Carson looked at him in passing, on the sly, rarely face-to-face, afraid Jimmy could read his mind, intuit his despair and mistrust and resentment. The broad nose and cheeks and small eyes had contracted and sat in the middle of his face like a fist. Wrinkles as thick as veins huddled around the brown eyes staring at Carson.
“Since you so much of a grown-up, staying out all hours, maybe I ought to offer you a drink.” Jimmy saluted Carson with the bottle.
In response to his silence Jimmy filled his glass and then leaned over the kitchen counter and reached for a juice glass, set it on the table, filled it halfway, and pushed it toward Carson.
One night Carson and Keith had gotten older dudes to buy scotch and Boone’s Farm and forties for them. He had tasted Keith’s dad’s Wild Turkey when the old man wasn’t around, and he and Keith and Damion had Keith’s house to themselves. Carson had been drunk. Pissing-sick-throwing-up drunk. Head-tight-hangover drunk. And he couldn’t see what the big deal was. He didn’t feel braver, just stupid. Out of control. And growing up in that house taught Carson that if he could help it, he never wanted to feel out of control. But because he’d been drunk, he knew that much at least about Jimmy Blake. And what he knew gave him no comfort at all.
Carson pushed the glass back toward Jimmy, saying, “No thanks.”
“Oh, go on,” he said, sliding it back across the Formica tabletop. Jimmy Blake had never offered Carson anything this insistently before. Carson sat staring at the glass of scotch, the clear brownish tint, which he knew had a bitter, almost astringent taste. Like some liquid designed to scourge or heal. He’d heard alcohol called liquid courage. But Jimmy battered him emotionally even when he was sober. Drunk, he was bitter, morose, mostly silent. Surprising himself, Carson reached for the glass and swallowed the liquid in a gulp. Slamming the glass on the table and pushing it back toward Jimmy Blake, he asked:
“Why you hate me?”
Carson had not planned to ask the question. Had not planned to say anything at all. But he felt so assaulted that he thought, Fuck it, I can say anything. Ask anything.
Jimmy drained his glass and stared at Carson through eyes that were cloudy, screened by a milky film. Eyes off-kilter and trembling. But Carson sensed that through that haze he was in focus, and that Jimmy Blake had never before seen him so clearly.
“Boy, if you only knew,” he said with a shake of his head, the words thick, heavy.
“Knew what?”
“How little I hate you. How your being in this house proves that whatever I feel for you, it sure ain’t hate.” His drunken gaze probed Carson unsteadily.
“You’re not my father, are you?” Carson had not planned this question either, and he was stunned by how it fell through his lips so slow and easy, after all the years it had bubbled, undigested and acidic, inside him. He knew the answer. But how would he survive if he heard Jimmy Blake say it out loud?
“Your mama wanted to protect you. All these years. But I’ve thought for a long time now you been old enough to know the truth.” He shifted in the chair, turned his body and crossed his legs, hunched his shoulders, pushed the liquor away from him, to the center of the table. Jimmy Blake was stalling. Carson couldn’t believe it. Did he fear what he was about to say as much as Carson did?
In those drunken eyes he saw sadness, sympathy, pity. It wasn’t all for him.
“Naw, I ain’t your daddy.”
The words, finally, released and relieved him. He owed Jimmy Blake nothing. No respect. No love. He was free. But whose child am I? Carson wondered. He always thought that once he knew the truth that he would want to know who his father was. But Jimmy Blake was more father than he could stand.
“Naw, you ain’t mine,” he said again, this time shivering mightily, almost as if he could not believe it himself. “For me, there wadn’t never nobody else. But your mama, she went off an…” he began. Who? Carson wondered, blotting out the accusation. The question was as natural as breathing. But he didn’t want to know the answer. And, silently, he prayed, Don’t tell me. If he was a father worth having, Carson reasoned, he’d know who he was. But he could not help but wonder, Who?
Behind the storm of these thoughts he vaguely heard Jimmy Blake talking about Alma and the man who was Carson’s father. But what Carson heard over and over, what became the only sound in the world, were the words “Naw, you ain’t mine.” Words that crashed like a ceiling onto his shoulders. He’d thought the truth was a lifeboat. Now he knew it was a sinking ship.
He couldn’t tell anyone what he suspected. How could he tell anyone what he now knew?
Alma’s love was a shield protecting Carson from the father who seemed not to love him at all. Memory, Carson had concluded even on that night in the kitchen, is the place where nothing good ever happens.
Carson left Jimmy Blake sitting at the kitchen table, babbling family secrets in a hushed whisper. In the room Carson shared with Richard, he undressed in the dark and then, beneath the covers all that night long, wondered why he was crying. Were the tears for Jimmy Blake’s wounded pride or his own sense of betrayal? On no other night had he felt himself so completely Jimmy Blake’s son.
Two days after that night, when Alma came to Carson, found him cleaning out the garage, she slumped down on the steps leading into the house, hugged her body and rocked herself gently, her eyes closed.
“What is it?” Carson asked, knowing why she sought him out.
“Jimmy told me about the other night,” she said, her eyes shuttered and downcast.
“I always knew. It’s no big deal.”
“Carson…”
“He told me everything. Now what do you want to say?”
“I’m ashamed. I have been for years.”
“So what else is new?”
His bitterness raised her eyes, and she reminded Carson, “I gave you life.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
Alma marshaled the marrow of what was required to walk over to Carson and calmly, quickly slap him. As fast as it came, he could have grabbed her arm. Ducked. Run. But he didn’t.
“You think because Jimmy told you he’s not your father he told you everything. He told you who you’re not. I’m the one who can tell you who you are.” She shuffled back to the stairs and sat down. She sat in silence so long, Carson turned his back and began going through the boxes as Jimmy had told him to do, searching for rusted tools and junk he planned to throw away. Carson had almost forgotten she was there when her words summoned and startled him. “Some men love you like a hurricane. What they give you sinks down below the root of all your feelings. Your father, Eli Bailey, loved me like that.” Carson turned to look at his mother, her eyes wide, bright with the
heat of remembrance.
“I’d been married to Jimmy a year and a half and thought all the life of feelings and passion was gone. Dead and buried. Something I’d never have again. Jimmy’s love brought me to shore and kept me tied there. Eli released me, took me out in the deepest water. We almost made it to the horizon. Nobody tells you how long it takes to learn to love somebody, that you got to give up almost everything you want, every dream you ever had, to be married, to stay married, to make a marriage. How humble and grateful you’ve got to be for love plainspoken and honest. How it doesn’t come to you wrapped in shiny paper and ribbons that take your breath away. I did a terrible thing to Jimmy Blake when I fell in love with Eli. But back then I thought because Jimmy had made me feel like my life was over, that was a crime I had the right to avenge.”
The words came like a blast, rooting Carson where he stood surrounded by the lawn mower, several sawhorses, the barbecue grill, and water hoses. He wanted her to stop. It was too much. Too soon. Too late. Alma stood up wearily, as though her words, her confession, aged rather than freed her. But she was not finished. She had just started, and the words that she would speak, the promise and the threat of them, plunged Carson into obedient, breathless silence.
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