Fire Shut Up in My Bones

by Charles M. Blow

  The good part about going alone to school with my mother was that I got to spend more time with her, time that I didn’t have to share with my brothers. The bad part was that it made full friendships with other children difficult. I didn’t see my Gibsland friends in school or my Ringgold friends at home.

  The only friend I had both during school and after was the son of another teacher, but that friendship would end sadly. His mother and mine became friends and often had after-school duty on the same days, which made it easy for the two of us boys to play together. But soon after we became friends he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctors tried to remove the growth, but they were unable to get it all. So they had to operate again. And again. With each operation, more and more of my friend was taken away, until he was completely gone.

  One of the only times I remember feeling alive the year after Chester’s betrayal was the night of the school pageant.

  Ringgold’s school had been integrated, but in some ways it continued to support segregation. Every year the school held a pageant to crown a king and queen of each of the three divisions of the school. Actually, two pageants were held simultaneously, on the same night, on the same stage—one for whites, one for blacks. The year after Chester’s betrayal, I was in the pageant.

  I was just going through the motions until an escort took us one by one into a classroom to be interviewed by the judges. It was the first time I realized I could read people’s faces and become the person they wished to see. The judges wanted three parts charm and one part mischief, a kind of controlled precociousness, so I turned it on, and they lit up.

  It wasn’t real, but I could make them believe that it was. I could graft life onto my dead self. I knew immediately that there was power in that ability. That’s what happens with boys like me: they get good at creating and pretending. It’s how they survive.

  That night I won as king of the black children’s elementary school division. They gave me a crown and a scepter and a little golden trophy inscribed with the title “Little Master,” the black one. This turned out not to be all good, though, because I ran afoul of the school bully, who thought himself handsome and cheated of the win. So now I had a bully in my family and a bully in school.

  But for the rest of the school year I was gone, there in body but not in spirit, drifting deeper into darkness. My work suffered, and the teachers moved me to the slow class because they thought me unable to handle the regular one. My mother protested. Most of the time, no matter how well or poorly her children performed, my mother didn’t make much of it. She exerted only enough pressure to keep us from completely slipping, like the pinch of a clothespin. But this was a step too far. She didn’t know what was wrong with me, but she knew that I wasn’t slow.

  I was moved back to the regular class, but I would never again be a regular boy.

  That was the year I came to believe that my young life was no longer worth living, that ending it was not only possible but preferable, that I should fully commit my body to the fate that my mind had already assigned it. I was eight years old.

  One night someone volunteered to take my brothers and me to the roller-skating rink in Minden. I had a pounding headache, but still I wanted to go. After all, a trip to the rink was rare. I grabbed a bottle of aspirin, tucked it into my pocket with my junkyard talismans, and crawled into the car.

  Inside the rink, the skaters propelled themselves with synchronized lunges, dipping and swaying to the rhythm of disco tracks blaring from giant speakers. They lapped the rink in unison, like a dog chasing its tail and with the same simple-minded delirium—laughing and dancing. Lovers held hands. Learners held on.

  Hundreds of tiny wheels clacked and whizzed, the sound coalescing into a single buzz, and thousands of tiny dots, reflected from a dangling disco ball, sprayed the room with whimsy.

  I left the floor to take some aspirin, and as I looked out on the scene from the railing, all the world went quiet—the only remaining sound was the thump of my heartbeat in my temples. I was having fun, but now even in the happiest of times, sorrow lurked just below the surface.

  I felt my spirit again begin to cleave from my body. I seemed to be watching from beyond my body, and in this place the weariness of pushing back against a wall of sadness melted away. For a moment, I was free again.

  And that was the thing. I felt free only when I could separate myself from myself, when I could imagine that I was distinct from my body and life. There in the ethereal nothingness, in the quiet space of my mind, I found peace.

  I liked it there and didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to return to the world. Life was too hard and treacherous. I was too weak and vulnerable. I couldn’t live in sorrow forever. So, in that instance, with no forethought, I decided that night would be my last.

  I had never thought of suicide before and had never remembered speaking the word, but in a flash the thought fell on me so completely and so agreeably, it was as if I’d planned it.

  I dug the bottle of aspirin from my pocket. I was going to take them all. I had no idea if they would kill me, but I hoped they would. But then the questions came: Would it hurt? How long would it take? Would my mother be sad? Would I go to hell for committing suicide? Heavy questions piling up like boots by a door.

  Before I could form answers, one of my mother’s songs came to save me, one of the songs she sang when we were alone in the car on our drives to and from Ringgold, when I was drifting off to sleep or pretending to, staring out the window, catching fleeting glimpses of green-hooded mallards and white-tailed deer. She often said that she wished she were able to sing, and was disappointed when she realized that she lacked the gift. So she rarely sang.

  But there in the car, out of earshot of everyone except me, she sang. She sang about run-around men and hold-tight women, about sticky-sweet love and salty-dry longing, about rest waiting up in the next life and the weight pressing down on this one—songs like the gospel standard “Please Be Patient with Me,” Mel and Tim’s blues classic “Starting All Over Again,” and Betty Wright’s R&B hit “Clean Up Woman.” They were the kinds of songs that dug down until they hit something soft and raw. They set the story of her life to a melody, and she sang them from an honest place with little regard for talent or judgment. With these songs she tapped into a more tender part of herself, one I rarely saw, one where she didn’t have to be stoic and phlegmatic, where she could release the tension that drew back her shoulders and acknowledge the desire that tickled her flesh, where she could accept the idea of frailty and entertain the possibility of tears. It was a place where she could just be beautifully human—Billie in the whole.

  That was the gift.

  And so there it was, not summoned and without warning, pushing its way through the crowd of questions, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” one of the songs my mother sang hard and true out of her heart and into a steering wheel, coming to save me.

  Precious Lord, take my hand

  Lead me on, let me stand

  I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m lone.

  Through the storm, through the night

  Lead me on to the light

  Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

  I didn’t know why that song, of all things, came into my head, but I took it as a sign. I believed that God was trying to tell me something: that He would somehow make a way for me to survive, that I had to be brave and patient, that this was not my last night.

  I swallowed two aspirin, flung myself back out onto the hardwood to the sound of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star,” and never thought about suicide again.

  I decided that night that I would turn to God. Surely He could fix things.

  My family wasn’t extremely religious, but we were observant and reverent. Every second and fourth Sunday, the preacher we shared with another church came to preach at ours. We sometimes went to church on those Sundays. Our church was Shiloh Baptist. It was my mother’s home church, located in Sparta, the now-defunct town that was o
nce the parish seat, some twenty miles southeast of Gibsland and not far from Bienville, where my father now lived. The remaining community was now called Shiloh, after the church.

  To get there we drove south, between two sweet potato farms set atop a hill, facing each other. They sold most of the roots wholesale, but we bought them retail, for pies, soufflés, chips, and candying. The farm on the west side of the road had a caged monkey at the entrance. I liked that farm. I would stare at the monkey, in awe of how familiar it looked, and yet how foreign it was. I thought about how much I would like to see it outside of its cage, but I was glad that it wasn’t.

  Farther on, we passed over rolling, forested hills. My mother often reminded us that Papa Joe’s father had owned one of those hills, but white folks had found a way to take it from him. She said that another great-grandfather had also owned hundreds of acres in the area, and his property, too, had been taken from him by white folks.

  The sad irony of it all was that some of those hills were now dotted with oil rigs and others covered in farmed trees, reaping wealth for their owners, and we had to drive through them on our way to church so that we could pray that we would have enough to eat and make do.

  Soon we were pulling into the church parking lot. Shiloh Baptist stood at a fork in the road. It was a humble, wood-framed building elevated on brick pedestals, and the earth had settled and shifted beneath it in a way that left the church slightly warped.

  It was a bit tattered, but exactly right: an imperfect outside made perfect by virtue of what was happening inside. It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.

  Ushers with taut faces and white gloves held the doors like angels at heaven’s gate, directing us at the proper time—and only then—to an open pew, the ends of which had been polished to a shine by generations of hands using them for support.

  The deacon board was arrayed to the right of the simple wooden pulpit, and the mother board was to the left. These places were reserved for the church elders—men with flour-sack bellies lapping straining belts, women with chestnut-colored stockings rolling down pecan-colored shins—most well past their allotted three score and ten. They were our counsels and conscience, having seen the world in all its majesty and cruelty.

  The creaky center aisle was where bodies moved forward to be transformed. It’s where fathers gave away young brides, where caskets gave cover for the dead, and where sinners gave over weary souls.

  Women in long dresses and big hats waved paper fans that looked like a rabble of butterflies set down on a patch of flowers. Little boys scratched at itchy suits. Little girls dug hard candy from their mothers’ purses. A small table rested in front of the pulpit, where members handed over their meager offerings and the deacons opened the service with prayer and song.

  The deacons shouted those songs and sang the prayers, all with the cadence and volume of field workers—kneeling on one knee, eyes closed, heads bowing, swaying, craning, punctuating the words as they erupted from their bodies.

  The song was always the same:

  Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!

  Pilgrim through this barren land!

  The congregation trailed with the same verse, only in a protracted fusion of singing and moaning, dripping slow and thick like syrup.

  The sound vibrated in the mouth and stirred the soul. It was a purging—burdens flowing out of us and into Him. The song proclaimed that the time had come for all who heard it to be still so that the spirit could move.

  This was a time before men wore crayon-colored suits, when choirs focused more on dirges than dancing, and sermons were more about piety than earthly increase.

  Our pastor, Reverend Brown, was a decent man with a good reputation. Not every congregation was so lucky. Preaching was a profession dotted with the supposedly repentant who touted their checkered pasts as a testimony to God’s grace—“Ef He can save a wratch like me . . . Hallelujah! Thank ya, JEE-suss!”

  I, for one, was fascinated by Reverend Brown and his sermons, the way he played on opposites—reward and punishment, angels and demons, a gentle Savior and a vengeful God—flipping back and forth like a cook using a two-page recipe.

  At our church, we came late and left early because my mother tired easily of the prolonged orchestration of it all. For her, anything over an hour was too long. “It don’t take the Lord two hours to save nobody,” she’d say. We would wait for the ushers to call us forward for the offering, and instead of returning to our seats afterward, we’d break for the door. She dared not leave in the middle of the sermon, lest God take it as disrespect. She reminded us of the story that Mam’ Grace told her about a man who had cursed at a preacher and thrown a Bible. “He shook till the day he died!”

  When we got home from church, my mother opened the windows and cleaned the house to done-me-wrong, baby-come-back, ghetto-love anthems from her small collection of scratched records—Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Al Green, Otis Redding, and Johnnie Taylor. This Sunday morning-to-afternoon musical switch would reflect the framework of my faith—an ever-swirling mix of the orthodox and the secular.

  Although religion, with all its talk of dying and blood and burning, scared me, I was fascinated by God’s use of fouled-up men and fallen women to extend His message; by His liberation of the poor, the outcast, and the infirm; and by His obsession with improbable transformations and inappropriate ascensions. If ever a body needed a savior, I did.

  In the fall after Chester’s betrayal, I walked the aisle to give myself over. But by then Shiloh wasn’t the same Shiloh. The congregation had built itself a new building next door to the old one. It was a handsome brick church on a concrete slab, with crimson-upholstered pews and crimson-carpeted floors. It had a professional sound system, a beautifully lit, glassed-in baptismal pool, and an ornate pulpit. It had high vaulted ceilings and arches, wooden ribs with golden chandeliers hanging from their bosses. It was impressive but hollow—like a vanity. We no longer attended services in the building so full of life that it spoke to people’s eyes, but in a building that sat cold and hushed.

  The walk of redemption now felt more theatrical. Still, I was determined to make it. When Reverend Brown finished his sermon, he made his way around to the front of the pulpit, wiped sweat from his brow, and invited the unsaved to come forward.

  “Won’t sumbidy come dis moaning? Tamorr’ MIGHT be too late!”

  I rose from my seat to an outburst of clapping and an outpouring of amens and thank-you-Jesuses. My mother, surprised and proud, smiled at me as I made my way down the aisle, which that day seemed a mile long. When I reached Reverend Brown, he put his large hand on my small shoulder and turned me around to face the congregation.

  “What’s ya name, young man?”

  “Charles McRay Blow,” I said into the microphone he’d thrust in my face.

  (When I was born, Nathan pleaded with my mother to name me Ray Charles, after the singer. Charles McRay was her compromise. She insisted we have the most traditional first names possible, to balance such an odd last one.)

  “Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?” the preacher continued.

  “Yes,” I said, embarrassed and nervous.

  “Do you believe that he died fa yo’ sins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to be baptized?”

  I hesitated. Reverend Brown was big and burly and shined with the unctuous look of a man who’d just eaten half a ham. I was afraid of him. The times I’d seen him baptize someone, it had seemed to me a violent affair. And I couldn’t swim. I didn’t want to drown in church to keep from burning in hell.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t know ’bout all that.”

  The congregation burst into laughter as my mother slinked down in the pew. I made my way back to my seat. I was going to have to solve my problems on my own.

  The Thursday before
the first Sunday in August was Graveyard Working Day at the black cemetery in the historic hamlet of Mount Lebanon, three miles south of town, beyond the sweet potato farms. Mount Lebanon was an all-white community of folks who lived in a small cluster of well-maintained Greek Revival houses that hinted at a proud history. The community had been the center of wealth and scholarship in the region before the Civil War. It was the home of a university founded by an Irishman named Egan, brought to America by Thomas Jefferson. Folks said that Jefferson once called Egan “one of the ripest scholars of his age.”

  But during the Civil War the university gave over its buildings to army surgeons, who filled them with Confederate wounded. The school reopened after the war, but now it was gone, all remnants of it wiped clean from that place, folded into the forest.

  The one surviving bit of glory was the Baptist church, said to be the oldest continuously operating Baptist church in the state, started by a mulatto preacher who built a balcony to seat the slaves apart from the white folks.

  But segregation didn’t end at the church doors; it extended into the cemetery.

  Two burial grounds abutted each other—one for blacks, the other for whites. The black cemetery was filled with uneven rows of tiny, tilting gravestones. And those were the lucky folks. Some graves had no marker at all. Depending on how long ago it was dug, a grave was either just a rock-hard mound of dirt or a slight indentation from a casket that had long ago decayed and collapsed. In contrast, the white cemetery had a well-manicured, even lawn with gleaming monuments, perfectly aligned, reaching like giant arms toward heaven, each one seemingly taller than the last.