by Shane McCrae
I was afraid of the large, older boy from the moment I met him—I don’t remember much about the moment itself, but I remember the fear, and I remember he threatened to beat me up if I didn’t leave my bedroom window unlocked for him. But I would have left it unlocked even if he hadn’t threatened me. When I was a child, I was willing, even eager, to let anybody do anything they wanted to me, so long as they didn’t hurt me, and so long as what they were doing looked like the things I saw people doing in my grandfather’s magazines, which seemed, especially among the boys I met, common—not my grandfather’s magazines in particular, but most of the neighborhood boys found similar magazines in their own homes—and in which we discovered, not images corresponding to any overwhelming desires we might have felt, but guides to the overwhelming desires encompassing us. What I remember most distinctly is not any single act, but the sensation I felt, both empty and vast, as I watched what people did to me, and what I did to them, reluctantly, but I would if they asked me to, checking to make sure it looked right, familiar. I was comfortable in that vastness, and afraid of it, and I hated it, and yearned toward it, but not toward it, exactly, but toward people I thought might be familiar with it, as my grandfather was, and willing to inflict it.
JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM LIMBER DREAMS OF AN UNKNOWING LOVE
She is a slim young Negress but I know
she is my Varina she is a girl
I saw only once a few weeks ago
in town on an errand with her master
whom she resembled and his wife who did
not look at her but commanded the air
immediately before her own face
and the Negress three steps behind obeyed
she was nobody she is Varina
I recognize her as she was and is
two women in a single body I
stand hidden in a shadow in the dream
watching but I stood in the sun when I
saw her but things are not as they were and
I stand hidden in a shadow and as
she passes three steps behind her master
who had passed half a step behind his wife
I reach for her and in the way of dreams
touching her who was the moment before
a stranger I know her and have known her
from the moment of her birth and in the
way of dreams also she is new to me
as the moon is she is both known and strange
I pull her into the darkness that hides
me from her master and his wife and hid
me from her before and there I desire
her as a white man desires a Negress
as two women in a single body
I draw her close to me and as I reach
for her face her master’s wife calls her name
Varina she calls where are you and she
calls with my Varina’s voice she calls her
name and mixes it with mine Jefferson
where are you I have fallen asleep in
my study my Varina calls for me
as the moon calls for the light of the sun
from across an unknowable blackness
JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS INHERITS THE KINGDOM OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA
I lived with momma for a nigger’s age
For seven years since I was seven I
Ain’t seen her once and now I’m almost eight
I think she must be free momma Vari-
na she says it don’t matter who your mom-
ma was if you’re a man she says Are you
A man Jim look at Joe I look at him
But I don’t see me in his eyes but two
Blue shadows that ain’t black like shadows should be
I look at him and I don’t see no way
For me to be a man but I see daddy
Jeff and my face is shadows in his eyes
I look at Joe he got daddy Jeff’s face
My daddy’s white so I don’t get his face
3
My grandfather—although I don’t know whether he would have described himself in this way—was a white supremacist. He wouldn’t have been ashamed to admit that he believed white people were superior to black people—especially superior to black people in particular—indeed, he happily—or, really, “gleefully” would probably be a better word, since white supremacists don’t ever seem happy so much as gleeful—admitted to this belief many times when I was a child. But I suspect he might have thought the phrase “white supremacist” was too fancy for him. He had been, as a child, the younger brother of a much larger boy, and, along with his older brother Thomas, and his younger brother, Raymond—who grew up to become a landlord, who would eventually be shot through the neck by a tenant he had evicted a few days before, and would die in a soft-top convertible, blood spraying from his neck, his head rolling slightly from side to side on his shoulder as he pointed toward a narrow gap between two dumpsters, wordlessly urging his wife, who was already crawling away from the car, to safety—as a child, had lived in poverty, in the wake of the Dust Bowl, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Because of and despite this, he hated “white trash” almost as much—although the hate was a different kind of hate, a sad duty—as he hated blacks, my father especially.
I tracked my father down when I was 16—by then, my grandparents had divorced and I was living with my grandmother in Salem, Oregon, where I had lived with my father when I was a baby—and it was then that I learned my grandparents had taken me from him when I was three, and not, as they had so often told me, when I was 18 months old. And of all the lies I was told as a child, this lie has been the hardest lie to shake—it won’t, in fact, not yet, anyway, be shaken. When I think about it now, which isn’t often, but I do, being taken, I imagine myself as both 18 months and three years old, and the scene in which I am disappeared plays out twice; I see the two versions simultaneously. In one version, I’m naked except for a diaper, splashing in a dirty puddle at the end of my driveway in Round Rock as my grandmother tends to the row of flowers between her new house and her new lawn, her back to her new child; in the other version, I’m fully clothed, wearing a half maroon, half gray T-shirt, the two colors separated by a white stripe about a half-inch thick—maroon above, gray below—and bellbottom jeans, and riding a big wheel my father has just given me, when my grandmother lifts me from the big wheel to put me in the back seat of my grandparents’ big, white Dodge 4-door, and as she carries me to the car I cry out, and reach back for the big wheel. I’m afraid I will lose it forever, but then I lose it forever.
My grandparents took me to Round Rock. They told my mother she would never see me again if she told my father where I was. The first thing my grandfather did—that was the way my grandmother always told the story—the first thing he did after we moved into our new house was throw me into a wall, the living room wall, the stretch of wall, maybe four feet wide—in a few years he would hang a painting of a Native American crouching to touch the still surface of a lake, which he later replaced with a self-portrait, there—next to the big, sliding glass door that opened to the back yard, which I loved but can’t really remember anymore, not anything good about it, but I remember the time the neighborhood flooded and the septic tank burst or maybe just overflowed, but it seemed like it must have been overflowing for years because the whole yard, and it was a big yard, was covered with about an inch or so of watery sewage, the grass was swimming in it, but also the grass was still, but also the grass was drowned.
The minnows clustered there, on the left side of the bridge if one were facing the school, if one had stopped on the way to the school. There the creek seemed to slow down a little before it filtered through the three small tunnels underneath the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, the creek emptied into a shallow pond—about a foot to two feet deep, and about 30 feet wide by 80 feet long—but the pond wate
r was too dirty to see anything in it. The minnows might have passed through the tunnels into the dirty, dark pond—every morning, I might have been seeing new minnows swirling in the bright shallows—or they might have known to fight hardest there, at the mouths of the tunnels, where the water was still clear, against the darkness the element they lived in pushed and pulled them toward.
JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM LIMBER DREAMS THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AS HE DREAMS HE IS ARGUING HIS CAUSE IN WASHINGTON D.C.
The wheel of history turns in the gut
of the white man but the Negro is strapped
to the wheel and broken by the turning
and nearly liquefied by the turning
and the white man sickens to him who says
we do not pay for the life we enjoy
I say we pay with our sickness I say
our enjoyment is not what you suppose
but it is instead a life of worry
and disappointed love to him I say
yes we love our Negroes and with a great
love Yankees cannot know and would not want
to know if they could and to those who would
free the Negro I say look to your guts
you fatten on the people you would free
JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS ANOTHER CHILD FIRST
They put me in a dead boy’s clothes dead Joseph
Except he wasn’t dead at first they put
Me in his clothes dead Joseph’s after Joseph
Died and I used to call him Joe they put
Me in Joe’s clothes at first before he died
Joe wasn’t five yet when I met him I
Was seven I was seven when he died
Still but a whole year bigger then but I
Wore his clothes still and the whole year I lived with
Momma Varina and with daddy Jeff
I never lived so good as when I lived with
Them and especially it was daddy Jeff
Who kept me fed and wearing those nice clothes
Until they fit as tight as bandages
JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS CANNOT DEPEND UPON POLITICAL OR ECONOMIC POWER TO BE THE WELLSPRING OF HIS FREEDOM
I ask myself what man would daddy Jeff
Be if he weren’t the president I ask
Myself because I do not know myself
And I can’t ask anyone else I think
He would be president of something small-
er than America like Richmond or
Even just the house I reckon even then all
The Negroes in the county would admire
Him and he would be president of the Ne-
groes I would vote for him sometimes he lets
Me vote and he says Vote as Joe if he
Could vote would vote I vote we eat dessert
First and I run to tell the kitchen like I’m
A president and since I eat in the kitchen
4
The house immediately to the right of my house if one were facing my house, having just walked home, bleeding, from a fight on the playground at the school across the street, was a rental. My grandparents often pointed this out to me as a warning. And I understood they meant that the families who lived in the house, never for longer than a year, had less money than my family did. And I treated the house and its backyard like they were empty even when they weren’t.
Usually, the families who lived in the house immediately to the right of mine didn’t have pets. But once, a family with a dog lived there, a small dog, it seemed small to me even when I was small, but it was probably about half my size. I used to play with the dog beneath the fence that separated our yards. I had dug a hole between our yards, or the dog had, and I would stick my hand under the fence and throw things for the dog to fetch. This was the first dog I ever tortured, and it might have been the last—I can’t recall torturing another dog after it, but my cats before, and a small bird after—and I stopped harming animals altogether when I was about eight or nine years old, and this, the dog I’m remembering, torturing it, must have happened when I was six or seven. One day, for no reason, I don’t think I had a reason, the dog had never hurt me, I grabbed a length of lead pipe, and called the dog to the hole, and when it stuck its nose into the hole, I smashed the end of it with the pipe. This is what I remember most clearly about the dog, this and not the dog and I playing—smashing the dog’s nose again and again with the pipe, eventually the end of the pipe, which was about two inches in diameter, jamming it at the dog’s nose, and the blood, the dog snarling, its teeth bared, biting the hole.
JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS CANNOT AFFORD TO MAKE DEMANDS OF LOVE
Momma Varina feels for Negroes daddy
Jeff says she feels for Negroes more than what
She should but he don’t tell her what she should be
Feeling for Negroes he’s the president
And what’s more daddy Jeff and if he want-
ed to he could instead he talks to me
A lot of the time he talks to me about
Things he don’t talk he says to nobody
About he says it’s something like a Ne-
gro cannot listen like the folks he owes
A duty to and that’s a great relief
I know he’s scared sometimes but he don’t show
It much to nobody else that’s how I know he
Loves me because he don’t mind what he shows me
JEFFERSON DAVIS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF THE MULATTO JIM LIMBER DREAMS THE FREEDOM OF THE NEGRO WILL ONE DAY BE HIS FREEDOM
I see the declaration passing from
hand to hand from Washington to Richmond
from horse to horse from rider to rider
one galloping furiously until
his horse falls dead at the hooves of the next
most trotting some walking one paused and let
his fat horse nibble at grass for an hour
while he chatted with a schoolgirl in Maine
the declaration winds through every state
and territory answering the cries
of the soil for the blood of native sons
now mixed with the soil of distant places
not with each drop disentangled and brought
home but with news of my full and uncon-
ditional pardon which is no answer
and the soil of every state and every
territory after it has been kicked
or scooped into the air it doesn’t fall
but floats behind the rider and much of
the soil beneath it rises to meet it
and it’s a cresting wake of dirt and mud
follows the instrument of my freedom
it floats about six feet above the ground
not as an unbroken stream but instead
every few yards there is a small gap
and each segment of dirt slowly resolves
into a human shape from the head down
so that at first clumps of dirt seem to be
falling but as they fall they spread apart
and branch into arms then a chest then legs
then feet which finally touch the pitted earth
and these dark men march behind the pardon
neither for any reason faster nor
slower ever but ever marching at
a mourner’s pace but I see the last rid-
er is Lincoln and his horse floats and breeds
no men though they come but they come so slow-
ly through ruined Virginia the pardon
reaches me days before the men who will
kill me and I begin to plan my life
JIM LIMBER THE ADOPTED MULATTO SON OF JEFFERSON DAVIS CONSIDERS HIS PLACE IN H
ISTORY
Mostly I hear him daddy Jeff before
I see him he talks to himself real loud when
He walks I hear him mostly anywhere
In the house even when I’m in the yard and
Momma Varina says a gentleman
Announces his presence with his demeanor
I don’t know what that means I think it means
She wants him just to hush sometimes I seen her
Crying and slap him once and the next day
The Yankees marched on Petersburg and that
Was yesterday today he pulls me a-
side and he says he don’t know where they’ll take me
That scared me good but he just floats off talking
Just like a ghost just like I ain’t his ghost
5
About a year later—on my birthday, actually, the last day of summer—I rode my bike down the gravel road to the left of my school—a road I had often taken to soccer practice—farther than ever before, thinking it might eventually intersect with the dirt road that led away from the village, all the way until it curved sharply into darkness, where the road met a forest that had risen just past the soccer fields and baseball diamonds, or almost all the way, really, until about 70 feet before the curve, and there, by the side of the road, I laid my bike down and stepped toward the forest.
The forest was thick, and dark, and mostly, I think, oak, and some cedar trees. I don’t know for sure why I stopped where I stopped, but I think I might have noticed, glancing at the forest as I headed toward the curve I probably wouldn’t have ridden past even if I had reached it, the shadowy, almost overgrown path into the forest, and stopped to investigate it. Back then, the forests near my house were littered with abandoned treehouses—well, most of the treehouses were just boards wedged between branches and trunks so as to create perches, but a few had walls and even roofs, and all were invisible unless one stood fairly close to them. In one of the better treehouses, in a forest not far from the forest I had just entered, I had discovered, just the previous Saturday, half a pack of cigarettes and a few old copies of Hustler. Probably, I entered this forest looking for the same treehouse—or, rather, hoping the treehouse with the walls, and the cigarettes, and the pornography would be repeated in this forest, like an outpost station stocked with standard rations. At first, as I followed the path, I saw nothing but tall trees and thick foliage. But soon I noticed a wroughtiron fence to my right, itself almost disappeared by foliage, and beyond it I saw graves.