by Casey Gerald
I could have stopped at his first message months earlier—Don’t let these bitches say nothing ’bout your pictures—but I felt the paralyzing joy of having been figured out. I had invited “the ladies” to tell me what they thought about the pictures on my BlackPlanet page, but this strangely pretty boy or man, posed in his digital portrait with a basketball in one hand, gym shorts running down to his shins, and no shirt whatever, had been brave enough to call my bluff in the most interesting way. So I responded.
I could have stopped when he asked for my number—the number to the cordless phone that I snuck into my room each night, picking up before it rang a full time, and the number to the tiny mobile Shon bought me, where his name was listed only as R just in case somebody found my phone and wondered who was calling me baby all the time like I was grown. Late in the night, I’d cradle the phone between my ear and the pillow to listen to him talk until I fell asleep. When I woke, his texts read I listened to you breathe in your sleep. That seemed maniacally romantic. On game days, in the lull between the time you mummify your ankles with tape and finally walk out for the coin toss, the empty gap that’s typically filled with the same song you listen to each week and the same cheerleader you meet behind the gym before boarding the bus, I tucked the mobile phone between my hip pad and my jockstrap and waited for him to wish me luck. He filled my lulls just fine.
I could have stopped him when he said, a few months after that first message, that he was coming to see me in June. He did not have a car to drive all the way from Shreveport, where he lived with his mother and father, who pastored a Pentecostal church, so he would catch a ride with a friend who was headed to Dallas for the Juneteenth celebrations and didn’t want to drive alone. I actually did try to stop him then, but he said that he was my boyfriend and that this was what boyfriends were supposed to do. That was news to me—instruction, too—so I just said Oh, well all right.
And as the days of May crept by, I thought he might forget or that I could stop him at the last minute, even if he was already on his way to town. Maybe I’d explain My sister won’t let me take her car, or remember Oh dang I gotta go to the family cookout, or warn We’ll get in trouble if we’re caught, no matter whether it was true. But I knew that he liked trouble—that he took great pride in the fight that broke his nose, that he was as ready to curse at his father’s parishioners as to electrify them with his singing voice which was, like Prince’s, much higher than his speaking one. There’s no stopping a man like that.
The appointed day came and a text appeared on my phone: I’m here. The apartment was empty and the car was outside—not his friend’s car, as I would never have given him my address, but my sister’s Mitsubishi. I climbed in, ignited the engine, steered three exits down the highway—holding the seat belt away from my freshly ironed shirt—to the parking lot of the only and last Walmart non-Supercenter. Saw his friend’s metallic gold Ford Mustang in a near-empty section of the lot . . . saw him, in the passenger seat. I parked across from them, stayed in the car, did a decent job playing it cool until he stepped out and walked over and opened my sister’s car door without knocking and sat down.
I could have run away and left him in that car or insulted him or suggested we go to the movies or cried and cried or smelled bad instead of bathing twice—I could have done something other than what I wanted to do with such a marrow yearning that it took the shape of a command, but I did nothing to stop myself. And in that nothing there appeared a space for a something, a space for him to stand here, before me, in this small dim hotel room, held up by the sink, my lungs stuck like a man so full he can’t get up from the table. I could hear the thumping in my ear and the low hum of the hotel air conditioner. Could almost hear the glow of the one lamp that was still on, its light confirming that he was lifting my shirt, paid for with my dead mother’s money. I asked him not to wrinkle it, not leave any marks on my neck, now exposed. He said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
Nowhere else to run, either, and only him to watch, which I did so long and with such intensity that he finally switched off the lamp and told me to lie down. I could not see a thing now and did not want to, so rested one side of my face on the floral quilt and closed my eyes and held my body still and kept quiet. I was so still and so quiet that he made me promise that I’d never done this before, so quiet that his soft kiss on my forehead may have been heard down in the lobby, so quiet that the silence sounded like awe and the pain felt like freedom. It was Juneteenth, after all.
One hundred and thirty-three years had passed since Major General Gordon Granger stepped out on a balcony in Galveston and announced to the crowd below:
The people of Texas are informed . . . that all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.
If it was comical to tell these white Texans and their black property—which was still being bought and sold months after this balcony decree—that they were now absolutely equal, then it was perverse to tell them this news so late: almost three years after President Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, two and a half years after he issued it on 1 January 1863, and two months after his army finally had killed enough Confederates to make Robert E. Lee surrender at Appomattox on 9 April 1865, which was less than a week before Lincoln himself was killed on April 15. When Gordon Granger showed up on June 19, the war was over, its champion was dead, millions of formerly enslaved people across the South were getting on with their lives, and 250,000 black Texans were just finding out that they had been party to the worst overtime fraud in the history of the world.
And there was yet more time to wait, for the news of emancipation took a while to snake up from Galveston and through the Neches River Valley and on down the little roads that led to the remote hamlets that had been too far even for Abraham Lincoln’s long arm of death to reach. The news finally found them, as did the violence, for the war may not have brought a great deal of bloodshed to Texas, but the peace certainly did. I have read of the lynchings and the vigilantes, believe almost every word, but I sure wish I could sit and talk with Clarice’s grandfather, one of the 250,000 who received the news on that day—though he must have been quite young or else Clarice must have been telling a story about this man having been born a slave. I don’t believe she was, though, because I’ve been to Pelham, where she was born, where she took me and my cousins to pick cotton, and where, in 1866, a group of former slaves founded Forks of the Creek, Texas. She spoke of her people’s days there like Old Blues speak of the 29–29 loss to Harvard in 1968, like some pre-Stonewall gays speak of the nights they were ambushed out of the clubs—nostalgia, memory, belonging, compelling lies.
Gahlee, Granny, how did they even survive?
Clarice never failed to refuse my sympathies.
Chile, don’t be believing what folks say about how bad slavery was. Everybody had a job, and a place to stay, and something to eat. Now if somebody came and paid your rent, you wouldn’t be sitting up talking about you wanna leave, would you? Master don’t mean owner. Master mean provider.
There’s little question that some of this is the rambling of a woman who has spent many years turning ideas and questions over in her head, so that some things that don’t make sense to anybody else seem perfectly reasonable to her. Some of it must be the residue of all the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the local newspapers and regional Klansmen and Woodrow Wilson to convince her that the natural place for a black person in this country was one of submission. But aside from her husband I have never seen nor heard my grandmother submit to anybody, so some part of her second look at slavery had to be worth at least trying to consider—a near-impossible task until I got home from that hotel, looked into the mirror after checking for blood, and wondered what I
was supposed to do, now that there was no going back.
I understood Clarice, then. I could slip at least my pinky toe in the raggedy sandal of her grandfather, who woke up on June 20 or some morning not long after with a serious problem on his hands: he had to choose for himself the means by which he would live in the world, having been tossed out of the only one he’d ever known. The story of that terror, of that confusion, of that blind grasp for the solidity of liberation is what informed my grandmother’s view of history—a glance not toward the virtue of bondage, but rather toward the incredible price that must be paid to be free. And now I saw it, too.
When my mother disappeared and my father grew too hard to carry, there was one verse from the Psalms that I wrote over and over in my spiral notebook during class, and repeated while I warmed up for the mile relay during track meets, and remembered when I could feel tears trying to sneak out of my eyes: When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up. And in the moments when I felt like the last boy in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way, the void too large, the air too thin, I would close my eyes and sing—
Walk with me, Lord
Walk with me
Walk with me, Lord
Walk with me
While I’m on this tedious journey
I want Jesus to walk with me
And the second verse, my favorite—
Hold my hand, Lord
Hold my hand
Hold my hand, Lord
Hold my hand
While I’m on this tedious journey
I want Jesus to hold my hand
I can’t explain it in scientific terms, but I felt something there, walking with me, holding my hand. Maybe it was just my imagination, I don’t know. But when you seem to have lost everything else that matters, the imagination is not a bad thing to have left. I’m sure some of these rituals were just that—ways of being that I learned from folks around me, whom I had watched from the day I was born and who, even before then, had worked to increase the odds that I would come into a personal understanding of the Christian God. If this had not been so, I might very well have been an atheist, or a Shintoist, or a Hare Krishna; might be waging holy war somewhere today. But I wasn’t and I’m not. I can no more escape the particular cosmology of my inheritance than I can turn my brown eyes deep blue.
Yet my rabid search for the person of Jesus, for the path to Him and, through Him, to the next life, was also shaped in those years by a desperate need for something not to fail me. Give me a place to stand, Archimedes says, and I will move the earth. Well the preacher always shouted On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, and this made sense to me. The Psalms had sent those tears back down and the hymn had held my hand on many days, but now that I had crossed the threshold from a boy with sinful thoughts to a boy living in sin, the world which held at least some promise of comfort was thrown into a battle between wicked freedom and repressed safety—between love and ruin. At least that’s how I saw the choice at that time. Red knew as much, or so he said. And though I did not care to realize then, he was either awfully brave or crazy as hell, for choosing to love me, anyhow.
To be sure, I was a terrible lover for many reasons which cannot be blamed on God—a sneaky whore, prone to paranoid rages over missed calls and new friends, demanding on the most arbitrary points: Wish me happy birthday at the time I was born, not just on the day. Never call me out of my name. And so on. But aside from these abuses, which I mostly outgrew, Red had to endure being the symbol of my eternal damnation. For every time I chose him—not in the act of sex, which might simply be a temporary victory of the flesh, but in the more dangerous choice to see him as a legitimate human being whose heart meant something to mine, as much as that is possible at seventeen—I chose death.
Many nights we’d hang up the phone and I would turn the small television in my room to TBN, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, to watch the services of E. V. Hill, who reminded me of my Papa, or John Hagee, who reminded me of the Old Testament God. Pastor Hagee’s Cornerstone Church was based in San Antonio, and this large man with his milk-white jowls and thick Elvis hairdo seemed obsessed with two things more than all else: prophesying the end of days and saving America from spiritual corruption—most of which the “homosexual movement” had caused. One of his classic sermons was called Homosexuality: Alternative or Abomination. He opened with a reading from Romans 1:27.
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet.
Hagee repeated for emphasis: Receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. Certainly that would include AIDS.
He followed with the greatest hits—a stroll through Leviticus and on to Genesis for the long story of the men of Sodom, who sounded to him a lot like the homosexuals in the streets demanding to be recognized as a persecuted minority, when they truly were perverts who made a choice to live in conflict with the laws of God, just as America was doing this very day, for which President Clinton and anyone who supported him would be held accountable at the Judgment. Even then, I was never afraid that my sister would kick me out of her house—when we finally had an explicit conversation years later, she said I was waiting for you to tell me. You’re my baby, I don’t care how wrong you are. And even though this confirmed that she believed I was wrong, it still meant a great deal in practical terms that she could accept my sinfulness enough to care and provide for me. Jesus, according to John Hagee and most every other pastor I’d heard, would not be so understanding. Abomination, he said, means the ultimate, worst kind of sin—punishable by death and separation from Christ. I could not afford to lose Jesus, or did not want to at that time, even if I could.
Over the nearly two years that we were more or less together, Red and I separated—that word makes it sound so serious!—at least three times. I told him that I simply could not do this anymore (either because it was true or because it was the easiest way to end things). He was always understanding, even said he’d pray for me. But his prayers were not enough, so I decided one night to dial the toll-free number that always scrolled across the bottom of the screen as I watched TBN. The host had been saying all night that God’s warriors were waiting by the phone to pray for anybody who needed it. I figured he was talking about me.
The voice of what sounded like a young man came through from the other side. He was either nice enough or I felt guilty enough to tell him my name and age, and to admit that I had been sleeping with a man and needed to be delivered.
Now you and this man, Casey, were you always safe?
No, not always.
God, that’s dangerous, Casey, you know?
Mmhmm. I know.
But I’m so glad you called. I want to pray with you, okay? Close your eyes and repeat after me.
I can’t remember what exactly he said, but the prayer was a mix of the standard prayer of salvation, along with specific amendments for my health and my deliverance. It was all rather soothing, actually. When he finished, I felt much lighter and a bit sleepy. Even shed a few tears for good measure. Before we got off the line, the young man told me that my walk was just beginning but that he would be there for me—I want you to call me every evening so we can pray and check in, okay?
I told him I would call the next day, but I never spoke to him again, or anybody else at the Trinity Broadcasting Network. My walk was interrupted almost as soon as it started, by a new Musiq Soulchild song that asked in the chorus: If you can’t have the one you love, then where are you going in your life? I thought this was a great question and didn’t know the answer, so I asked Red, who knew so much and whom I had not spoken to in weeks. All I know of his response is that it was good enough to convince me that he should visit, which he did one weekend when my s
ister was out of town. He even brought me his favorite dog tag, which had U Aint Gotta Lie to Kick It punched into thin gray aluminum. All this felt a lot better than listening to John Hagee, though I kept doing that as well.
For a stretch of junior year—it must have been spring because I didn’t take on extra projects during football season—I decided that I would not only cut Red out of my life; I would quit sin altogether. I went to sleep to John Hagee, woke up to Joyce Meyer, stopped cursing, and refused to laugh at dirty jokes, which was even more difficult than not being a homosexual because all my friends were in the same first period US history class, where we had staged a mutiny against the teacher, who finally surrendered when we decided to break into spontaneous rounds of the wave instead of learning the Constitution. It was so hard to resist, but I had to. Could have kept resisting all of it had I not become so sad and tired, had I not started having trouble paying attention in class or to what anybody was saying. Most days I’d just sit at my desk in the back row, the glaze of redemption over my eyes, and watch the clock until 3:45 p.m. came around. A week or so into my sin fast, I went to Luke’s after school and logged into Yahoo Chat to see if Red was online so that I could tell him how miserable I was. This was the dumbest thing I could possibly do in the midst of renouncing sin, because he made me feel better, which made me feel much worse, and the next thing I knew he was on his way back to Dallas. By seventeen, I could tolerably manage a double life. This triple life was too exhausting. His next visit needed to be his last.