Fire Shut Up in My Bones

by Charles M. Blow

  I got roped into the performance by Grambling’s dance troupe instructor, a nice woman who was an alumna of the Alvin Ailey dance company. She asked me for a favor: the Dance Theater of Harlem wanted her to provide four soldiers for their Shreveport production, and she thought of me. It was nothing, really, she said: just march onto the stage at the end of the show and wave some flags. It seemed simple enough, and I wanted to help her out, so I agreed.

  I thought that the dancers would all be women, but about a third of them were men—the kind of men whose company I had spent years trying not to keep. Different. Apart. But these men didn’t look like the men I knew—either strong and stiff or thin and wispy. Their legs were thick like those of horses, but moved lightly like those of deer.

  The night the Brothers rounded up the pledges was the night of the show. The contrast between what I was doing on that stage and what I was supposed to be doing back at school could not have been more stark. While I was in Shreveport lining up with preternaturally sculpted male dancers, the other pledges were being lined up behind a Grambling church among yelling Brothers.

  When I made it back to campus late that night, someone told me in a solemn voice that I had made line and that we were to meet the next day at the apartment of the dean of pledges. I was both excited and petrified. I told no one where I’d been the night before, knowing my participation in the dance performance would have been a deal breaker among the Brothers.

  We gathered at the house of Marcus G., our dean of pledges—or DP, as everyone called it—who was also the older brother of one of the boys on the line. His friends called him Kaboom because he said he had once fallen out of bed and, because he was so big, made that sound when he hit the floor: Kaboom!

  He looked slightly agitated that night our pledge group first met at his house. He was eager to introduce us to our new reality as pledges, but also was clearly in control. He arranged us in a line from shortest to tallest and assigned us corresponding line numbers. Mine was 13, the unluckiest one. We stood in that line, wrapping around the tiny living room, wide-eyed, like the deer in the House of the Drowned Children, silent and pensive, as Kaboom came and went through the front door. On his second entry we failed to greet him, since we didn’t know we were supposed to every time. It was just the trigger he needed for our first beating.

  One of the Brothers in the room turned up the music to mask the sound of what was to come. Ironically, the song was a single from a collection of rap hits, part of KRS-One’s Stop the Violence movement:

  Self-Destruction, ya headed for Self-Destruction

  Self-Destruction, ya headed for Self-Destruction

  The irony of the song’s message in light of what they were doing was lost on the Brothers, who simply liked repeating the hook.

  One by one they called us to the center of the room.

  “Get in the cut, muthafucka . . . and hold ya nuts!”

  Almost all the other pledges had been paddled before making line, so they knew what this meant. I didn’t. It meant the pledge was to get into a baseball catcher’s position, with his ass held a little higher, clutching his nuts with both hands, presumably for protection against the blow. That position was called “the cut.” Kaboom drew the short wooden paddle back with both hands and swung it with all his might, delivering a nerve-shattering crack to the butt.

  THWOP! The unmistakable sound of wood on jeans on flesh.

  The pledge said what we had been told to say: “Thanks, Big Brother! May I have another?!”

  The other Brothers in the room jumped like excited animals, yelling and screaming, creating a chaotic feedback loop of alcohol and adrenaline.

  “Whew! Damn! That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”

  “Y’all thought this shit was a game. This ain’t no game, muthafuckas! This ain’t no fuckin’ Spike Lee School Daze. This shit is fa real! Somebody gone quit tonight. Somebody gone drop!”

  And on and on it went. THWOP! THWOP! THWOP! “Next!” THWOP! THWOP! THWOP!

  “Come on, muthafucka!”

  I stood there thinking how bizarre and nonsensical it all seemed. Why did they need to hit us? Why were we allowing it? But I knew it was tradition. The Brothers had all been hazed as pledges, as had been the Brothers who hazed them. The logic was simple: the individual had to be broken so that the unit could be built. E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. It was profound but sophistic, wrong all dressed up as right.This had gone on for decades, and the Brothers must have felt they were doing what they were supposed to do, for the better of the bond.

  Fraternal devotion ran deep. Some Brothers even made fraternity symbols out of wire hangers, heated them on a stove, branded them onto each other’s arms, and proudly wore the puffy keloid scars that resulted.

  And, as had already been drilled into us pledges, no one had ever quit—“dropped line,” as it was called—and survived the ridicule of having done so. Line droppers where the lowest of the low, cowards, boys who could never live down the shame of it.

  Soon it was my turn. So I did what was expected of me, against all my better judgment and good sense: I got into the cut. I stared straight ahead. I tried to brace myself for it, but nothing could have prepared me.

  THWOP!

  The force of the impact nearly knocked me over. I rose on my toes to keep from falling forward. The pain of it crackled through my body. My vision blurred. The sound in the room grew muted, like things had sounded underwater in the baptismal pool when I fought against the preacher. My ass and my temples began to throb. My nostrils flared, my body demanding more air than I could give it. I was on fire.

  My nose was about to run, my eyes were watering despite my best efforts to prevent it, and beads of sweat were forming on my forehead. All of my instincts said, “Scream, run, cry.” But I knew I couldn’t. I stood firm.

  “Thanks, Big Brother! May I have another?!”

  There was a strange resonance for me between the hazing and Chester’s betrayal: me again receiving secret abuse because I had been chosen. Only this time it wasn’t sexual, and I wasn’t alone. While pledging I would often recall one of my mother’s sayings: You could stay in hell for a little while if you knew that you were going to get out.

  As I received the blows—“bringing wood”—I focused my thoughts on the woods in the lot beyond the field where I had found silent sanctuary. Like those trees, I would not be moved.

  THWOP! THWOP!

  The next day, we pledges all gathered in a remote corner of the library, doing homework and trying not to draw attention to ourselves. As we sat, some of the Brothers came and went. We had been given pocket-sized notebooks in which we wrote things we needed to learn—Bible verses, pledging songs, the specific greeting for each Brother, fraternity history and protocols—and in which Brothers wrote us personal messages,usually encouragements but sometimes threats. They called the notebooks our “Brains.”

  That day a few of the Brothers took my Brain and wrote similar messages in it: “You surprised a lot of brothers last night. Way to stay strong.”

  I realized that most had expected me to crack, to break, that they had made the same judgment about me that Pookie had: sweet. But they were in for a surprise. I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been. The link between me and my body had long ago been severed. No matter what they did to it, the true me was untouched. In fact, if there was a line between acting and lying, between protecting myself and betraying myself, between crafting a new me and erasing the essential one, I no longer knew where that line was.

  All this was a help in doing what I had to do: get used to the beatings. Physical hazing, brutal and nearly barbaric, was a central part of pledging. Membership came at a price, one to be paid in blood and bruises. If I wanted to be in, I had to be down.

  One day I parked my car on the side of the liberal arts building, trying to avoid running into any Brothers, but there was Kaboom, just inside, beyond a large window, watching me walk towa
rd the door.

  His face shifted. His brow, snarled and heavy like a big-link chain, fell. I had seen this look before. It was the look my mother had when I cut across the basketball court as a little boy, arms stretched wide, folks snickering. When I got to the door, Kaboom said in a hushed but angry tone, “Come here!,” the way a person talks when he wants to yell but has to whisper, pushing out more air than sound. “If I ever catch you walking like that again, I’m gonna fuck you up!”

  Walking like what? I thought. It was that thing that others could see but I couldn’t.

  As best I could tell, my wrists sometimes fell limp, like something wilted, and when I moved, I floated the way a cobweb dances with the air when you sweep half of it away from the wall. I discounted these as traits I must have absorbed from the old folks with whom I spent my preschool days, all crooked hands and elegant gestures. That was the only explanation my mind would accept. But mannerisms that made sense on old folks made none on young men.

  To me, the way I moved was without calculation. To others, the way I moved seemed a conscious thing, a choice, and a bad one. Because of it, they judged me the way I had judged the male dancers in Shreveport: different, apart, athletic but feminine. I hadn’t given thought to floating, but I learned to give thought to stiffness, to limit the range of my motions, to imagine that my joints had bolts in them turned half a round too tight. I learned to be ever vigilant, to the point of exhaustion, monitoring small movements, things other folks never had to think about.

  But the Brothers weren’t the only ones concerned. So were some of my line brothers. Mardi Gras, a campus DJ, made no secret of the fact that he didn’t appreciate my being put on “his line.” He didn’t explicitly say why, but he didn’t have to. The only person who came close to saying it was a boy named Clay, whom we elected the line president. He was a handsome, broad-shouldered ex–football player whose hopes of playing college ball had been dashed in high school by a knee injury that left him with a slight limp.

  One night we were all in the apartment of one of our line brothers, hiding from the Brothers and trying to learn the information in our Brains. Most of the boys were clustered in small groups, helping each other study, but I was sitting alone on the floor with my back against the wall.

  Clay walked over, sat down beside me, and said: “Hey, man, I ain’t gonna lie. The Brothers used to ask us who we didn’t want to make line with us, and you were always on my list, but you are really being tough, and that’s cool.”

  I knew exactly what he was saying. He too had had his suspicions about me, he too saw that thing others did but I didn’t, he too thought I would be soft, only to realize that I was harder than most. Maybe I should have been offended by what he said, but I wasn’t. He was the first person there who had even come close to saying to my face what I was sure many were whispering behind my back—“There’s something wrong with that boy”—and I appreciated his honesty. “Thanks,” I said.

  What no one knew was that I had my own secret worries. I had never felt a physical attraction to my high school friends or teammates, and the idea of physical contact with another boy was still unfathomable. It was a barrier not to be crossed, like the fence at the segregated cemetery back home. Everything would say so, explicitly and not—the Bible, the old men under the shade trees, Lawrence’s lifeless body tied to a strange bed, my mother’s worried look, my own inhibitions. But I worried that, being in close quarters with so many pledges, boys I didn’t know, my body might react against my wishes, against everything I knew and felt. Now that I was older, the male figures that once came only in the night slipped with ease into daytime thinking.

  The figures were still not overtly sexual; physical contact was not the logical conclusion of what I felt, as best I could tell. What I wanted—needed—was to be chosen, constantly. It was in being desired that my own desire abided. And girls performed that function well. That was why I had been so blind to Evelyn’s deception, so enthralled by her enticements: because she had chosen me.

  And girls’ bodies just made sense to me. They were soft, with welcoming spots and curvy places. Other. Feminine. One thing that was always clear, from the moment Chester had pushed up behind me, was that I wasn’t attracted to masculinity in its physicality: muscles and gruffness and aggression. I could admire it, envy it, even want to emulate it, but I didn’t desire it. In fact, being the object of aggression actually raised my ire. This ensured that I would never be attracted to my friends.

  Still, I steered clear of any flirty boys, boys who took on women’s ways, who I thought might be about choosing, so no mistake might be made. That was what worried me: that some smiling boy might slip past the barrier my mind had erected, and my body might react without my permission. I didn’t yet know my body well enough to trust it.

  Whatever I might feel about guys was subordinate and fluctuant, and I wanted to forever keep it bottled up tight, like the cork in a whiskey jug. Not even a word, lest I speak it into existence. I had come to see my silence and self-control as demonstrations of strength, a private pride and, literally, a means of survival.

  In fact, action aside, my silence was giving power to angst and stealing virtue from courage. Fear had become a prison and nearly a coffin.

  It was simple, but complicated.

  I was no longer the child victim. I was eighteen, a young man, and with that came a new responsibility of self-acceptance and full disclosure. But, as it is for so many, that turn was hard for me to make. I didn’t yet accept the fact that you couldn’t be a man and be afraid, that part of growing up was speaking up, that the lamp of honesty actually shines brightest in the darkest places—in the absence of understanding and the presence of hostility.

  I continued to hold out hope that I could rid myself of a thing I found wretched, a thing I still believed was born, in part or in whole, of betrayal.

  But, as it turned out, my fear was unfounded. My mind registered my line brothers the same way it registered my brothers in blood. In fact, the closer I grew to them, the less I worried about the male figures in my mind. The bond that grew between us had the same effect as being in love with a girl or feeling close to God—it pushed the unwanted figures down, but not completely out.

  The same night Clay told me a truth no one else would, I was reminded of a racial truth, one conveyed to me with as much cowardice and cruelty as Clay had shown candor. The apartment where we were studying was in a mostly white section of nearby Ruston. When we were done, we all piled into cars to go back to Grambling. I got into a car with Brandon, Chopper’s little brother, now one of my pledge brothers and the only other freshman.

  On the way, we stopped at a convenience store. I noticed a police cruiser parked out past the gas pumps, but thought nothing of it. We weren’t doing anything wrong. Everyone bought their snacks, got back into their cars, and drove away. Brandon and I were the last to leave. The cruiser pulled out as we did and started to tail us. Brandon noticed and began to drive slowly and deliberately. We said nothing. Our anxiety filled the air.

  Just before we left Ruston’s city limits, the cruiser’s flashing lights came on. We pulled off the highway and into a subdivision. A white police officer got out of the cruiser and approached on the driver’s side. Brandon took his license from his wallet and motioned to me to get the insurance and registration from the glove box. When I opened the box, a plastic switchblade comb fell out. It was like the one the Fonz had on Happy Days, the kind you could win if your hand was steady with the claw-crane fairway game at the parish fair.

  The officer drew his gun. My hands instinctively went up as the rest of my body froze. Then, realizing that it was just a comb, a smile of relief spread across my face. I told him what it was and slowly lowered one hand to push the button to make the comb pop out. I thought it was funny. The officer did not. He was now visibly irritated. He commanded me to “drop the weapon,” although I wasn’t holding it, and it wasn’t a weapon. He told Brandon to exit the car.

  Bra
ndon did as asked, but insisted on knowing why we had been stopped. The officer gave a reason: not signaling before a turn. It wasn’t true. We hadn’t made a turn before his flashing lights came on. Brandon protested, to a point. Then the officer said something I will never forget: that if he wanted to, he could make us lie down in the middle of the road and shoot us in the back of the head and no one would say anything about it. With that, he walked back to his car and drove away.

  By suggesting that he could kill us right then and there, he wanted to impress upon us his power and our worth, or lack thereof. We were shocked, afraid, humiliated, and furious. We were the good guys, we thought—dean’s list students with academic scholarships. I was the freshman class president. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us.

  As a child, I had been taught, in subtle ways, to be leery of the police. It wasn’t that they were all rotten, but you didn’t want to rustle around in that barrel and come upon a bad one. This was the first time I fully understood that message.

  In the weeks before our line actually “came out,” publicly and officially, our hazing went on “underground”—we were cut off from the world. The beatings became more frequent and more severe. Some pledges flinched and cowered, broke and cried. Others stepped up and stood tall, toeing the line for those who couldn’t.

  In response to the paddlings, we each developed the “pledge ass”—inch-thick, saucer-sized pads of damaged tissue and damaged nerves that formed just beneath the skin of each butt cheek, swelling so fast that they produced stretch marks. It was the way our bodies defended themselves—ensuring that we could take more blows without feeling them so intensely—or telling us that they’d had enough.

  We learned to walk in line with military precision. We learned long, complicated greetings—for the Brothers as a whole and each Brother individually. And we learned to sing mournful pledge songs that recalled another time, a time of dread and drudgery, enduring and overcoming, echoing the unbreakable slaves, gandy dancers, and the black church. One of the few songs the Brothers sang to us, “I Got a Feeling,” was set to the tune of “Wade in the Water,” with the refrain “God’s a-gonna trouble the water” replaced with “Somebody’s tryin’ to sneak in my frat.” Every time they sang that line, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it referred to me.