How We Fight for Our Lives

by Saeed Jones

  As the weeks dragged on, I slowly put together that my grandmother and I were the only ones filling the pew, day after day. No uncle, no cousins. The judgment is obvious now. I needed church in a way my cousins did not. I was the blood on their hands.

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT AFTER church, I went for a swim in the community pool across the parking lot from my grandmother’s apartment. It was dark so there weren’t any little kids splashing around. Except for some adults drinking beer over by the patio tables, I had the pool to myself. Mostly, I just held on to the edge of the deep end while stretching out and slowly paddling my legs. It made me feel long. Once the sun set, I turned over onto my back so I could look up at the stars.

  When my grandmother first called my name, I thought it was dinnertime. But when she said my full name—first, middle, and last—I pulled myself out of the water in a single movement. She was marching toward the pool from her apartment.

  “Sedrick Saeed Jones,” she shouted again, stretching the syllables into something that only my ears could possibly recognize as my name. She was panting when she finally reached the fence. “Get out of that pool and in this house. Now.”

  The adults drinking on the patio snickered. As I wrapped the towel around my waist and walked toward the gate, my mind spun like the cogs of a mad clock, trying to figure out what I was in trouble for and what I needed to say to get out of it. When I made it to the gate of the pool area, she turned without another word and started marching back toward home as I followed.

  I stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind me. When I turned back, she was standing in the hallway with a wrinkled magazine clipping in her trembling fist. I couldn’t see it in any detail, but I knew exactly what it was. Before I’d left Lewisville, I had gone through Mom’s pile of Vogue magazines and cut out every image of shirtless men I could find. My favorite clipping was from a retrospective of iconic Calvin Klein ads that featured a huge shot of Mark Wahlberg against a brick wall in nothing but a baseball cap and white CK underwear. I thought I had been clever, tucking the clippings inside my book of Greek mythology.

  “This?” she said, and it was a question I knew better than to answer. “No. No. No.” The words came from a deep part of herself. Each more of a bellow than a word. “No. No. No. No.”

  I watched her ball up the clippings and throw them into the trash. She stomped into the living room, stopped in front of the coffee table, grabbed my hand, and pulled me down to the carpet beside her.

  “Worldly. Not in this house. We are praying now.”

  I knelt beside her, put my wet, wrinkled palms together, and slammed my eyes shut. My head was full of everything but apology.

  * * *

  A COUPLE OF summers earlier, I’d had a run-in with my grandmother. In retrospect, it looked like a warning shot. We were walking out of the Southland Mall when she turned to me and told me to stop holding my books “like a girl.” I can’t remember why I was even carrying a stack of books, but there they were, three slim books pressed against my chest, secured by my crossed arms.

  “Well, tell me how boys carry their books,” I spat back. And, without turning to look at me or pausing in her stride, my grandmother slapped me across the face with the back of her hand. I remember feeling the air whir between us. The automatic doors ahead of us opened, buzzing with the sudden mix of the mall’s air-conditioning and the sticky heat outside. She walked through, then paused on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for me in the withering sunlight.

  I was still standing inside the mall entranceway, my mouth agape, books still pressed against my chest. I’d learned that year how to dip my sentences in sarcasm; I was always talking back. But I had no words at the ready now. I couldn’t even sputter.

  The slap had been so sudden, so unlike my grandmother, who I tended to think of as being too quiet for her own good. Had I been wrong to think I knew her? What else could explain the stinging on the left side of my face?

  I raised a hand, touched my cheek, and smiled faintly—like a lunatic. Realizing that she wasn’t going to apologize, and that we could only stand like this for a few seconds longer before people began to stare, I started walking again. The automatic doors opened and I fell in line beside her out in the heat.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER she pulled me down to my knees to pray beside her, I made a decision. Any minute now, my grandmother would be knocking on the door to tell me it was time to get ready for church. The Wednesday night service started at 6:30 and she would want to avoid getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. That’s why she was about to wake me up from my nap. I was already awake, but I had turned onto my side, away from the door, hoping she’d think I was still asleep and leave me alone.

  A kid at school told me that people breathe slower when they’re asleep so I held my breath, trying to control it. The concentration made blood rush to my ears. I could hear my pulse. I could hear everything: robins in the poplar tree outside my window, kids splashing in the pool, my grandmother washing dishes, my grandmother putting the dishes away, my grandmother turning off the TV, my grandmother walking toward the guest bedroom where I was pretending to be asleep.

  She opened the door without knocking.

  “Saeed, time to get up.” There was a slight song in her words. I could feel her standing in the doorway, watching me. She knew I was pretending.

  “Saeed. Get up.” The song was gone.

  Without turning to face her, without taking my eyes off the window, I said, “I’m not going.” I had thought this through. “I don’t want to go” would sound like whining. “Don’t make me go” would sound like begging. I wanted to be taken seriously, so I said the words as slowly and deeply as possible.

  She shifted from one foot to the other. I couldn’t remember if I had actually spoken out loud or in my head, so I repeated myself. I hoped that for once when I opened my mouth a man’s voice came out: “I’m not going.”

  She walked over to the bed and stood beside me. “Get out of that bed.”

  I tried my best to say it without my voice cracking, without a hint of a whine:

  “No.”

  In one swift motion, my grandmother grabbed the sheets and yanked them off the bed. It was like a magician removing a tablecloth while keeping the dishes on the table. I turned over to look at her. We both had the same glare in our eyes.

  And I knew that it was over. I would go to church. I would sit next to her. We wouldn’t look at each other. I would grind my teeth to the sound of the evangelist’s voice. I would roll my eyes at my grandmother’s prayers.

  She watched me scoot out of bed and walk to the dresser. I put on my clothes in silence. My grandmother didn’t leave the room until I had my shoes on.

  * * *

  AT THE END of the service that night, the preacher stepped out from behind the podium and spread his arms. I didn’t see the preacher’s smile. I saw the oil on his nose and the beads of sweat on his neck. He always did this. He would stand with his arms spread wide open until someone walked to the front of the room, sobbing audibly.

  “Come to the pulpit and let us pray together.”

  He said it with the same tone he had used for the last few weeks, three nights a week. He tried to sound like this was spontaneous, like he had just been standing there and could suddenly feel us asking for prayer.

  I had come to develop an odd fondness for this moment, because it meant that the night was almost over. Soon, my grandmother and I would be driving back home. She caught my eyes. And I noticed that her eyes were shining, like she was about to cry. Her hand was on my hand. She was holding my hand. I thought she was about to lean forward and apologize. I smiled.

  She pulled me to my feet. My body felt hot, then numb. We were moving toward the front of the room. People were craning their necks to watch us as we passed them. People were applauding and saying amen. I tried pulling away, but my grandmother wouldn’t let go of my hand.

  When we got to the pulpit, the preacher was
wiping sweat from his face with a handkerchief. He got on his knees and we did the same, my grandmother pulling me down to the floor. I felt it again then, the same kind of awe that years before made me hold my palm against my stinging cheek. This time, though, it spun itself into a new kind of heat. I could have set that room on fire.

  “This is my grandson Saeed. His mother is Buddhist.”

  The preacher nodded his head like it was all he would ever need to know about me—not that I held my books like a girl, not that I was worldly, not that I collected pictures of naked men the way I used to collect rocks. He started to pray out loud for the entire church to hear. “Dear God, hear me, praying for one of your lambs. His mother has chosen the path of Satan and decided to pull him down too.”

  I was dizzy. It felt like all the lights in the room were on me. I wondered what my back looked like to the people in the pews. My head was bowed. I probably looked like I was crying. I wanted to turn and scream out that I was not my mother’s fault.

  “Fight back, God. Make her suffer.”

  The word “her” hit me. If only I could grab the fire blazing through me and hold on to it long enough to roar back at this man, “Who the fuck are you?! I know you aren’t talking about my mother!” But I couldn’t do it. I kept my head down, stunned and silent. I felt my knees wobble as if I might fall onto my side.

  “Put every ailment, every disease on her until she breaks under the weight of the Holy Spirit.”

  I turned my head slightly and looked at my grandmother. My mother had a heart condition. When I was five, she had been on the list for a heart transplant. My grandmother knew all of this. She knew her daughter’s heart. Her head was bowed and her eyes were closed. She was frowning, but I couldn’t tell if it was because of me or him. This man was cursing her daughter. Her daughter. The body that linked our bodies.

  “Show her your plagues and save this child. Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  The preacher was finished, and my grandmother quietly thanked him. I couldn’t think of anything to say so I just stared at her. My mouth was open and my eyes were wide, bewildered, stinging. She took my hand and patted it, and slowly rose to her feet. She had a bit of trouble standing up—I’ll never forget that tiny stumble—so I helped her regain her footing. For a moment, my grandmother disappeared back into herself; she was just an old black woman again, soft-spoken, meek, even. Then the spell broke. She dug around in her purse, found her keys, and stepped down from the pulpit without looking at me. I watched one person after another pat her back and shake her hand as she made her way down the aisle and out of the room.

  I don’t remember following her. The memory begins to flicker like a broken film reel here. It burns itself blank and then we are in my grandmother’s car.

  The windows were rolled down because her AC had been broken all summer. A breeze drifted into the car, then slipped away as if it knew to leave us alone. I kept my eyes on the road ahead of us, yellow line after yellow line passing while I clung to the only grace I knew that evening: that the summer would end, and I would leave Memphis. That I would never come back, never spend another summer with my grandmother. This fact was as palpable as the silence.

  * * *

  LOOKING BACK NOW, I think she felt it too—the speed with which I was slipping away from her. Perhaps she had felt this all summer long and the church visits had been her last-ditch effort to keep hold of me, her “grandbaby visiting from Texas,” who was “worldly” now. I wish I had known that, really, this was always how it was going to play out for the two of us, one way or another. Precisely because my grandmother loved—loves—me, she tightened her grip until it became so painful that I had no choice but to yank myself free.

  People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.” My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.

  Silent beside my grandmother on the same twenty-minute drive we’d taken so many times that summer, I could feel the distance growing but didn’t understand it yet. Instead, a sense of certainty took root in me.

  I made myself a promise: even if it meant becoming a stranger to my loved ones, even if it meant keeping secrets, I would have a life of my own.

  Maybe she had been right about me after all. Worldly: “concerned with material values or ordinary life rather than a spiritual existence.” Worldly: “experienced and sophisticated.”

  Of course I wanted to see the world, to experience its fullness. I wanted to be a real part of it, rather than the passing shadow I so often felt like. I wanted to devour the world.

  I sat there ablaze, struggling to apprehend a new, darkly radiant sense of self. I felt dangerous, evil even.

  If this feeling was what my grandmother meant, I wasn’t sure I would survive it after all.

  But I couldn’t turn to her now—not anymore—to name whatever was having its way with me. So we drove on, an old woman and her grandson, alone together, making their way through one last gorgeous summer evening in Memphis.

  PART TWO

  Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.

  —MAMIE ELIZABETH TILL-MOBLEY

  5FALL 2001

  LEWISVILLE, TEXAS

  You never really forget your first. Where and when and who you were: sixteen years old at the football game, twenty-six outside the bar, twelve on the playground. Or who they were: all the boys with mouths shaped like knife wounds, the men in scuffed boots, the ones who looked like your father or brother.

  You never forget when the word was first hurled at you, or whether a fist or a baseball bat came swinging right behind it. Whether it was whispered, spat, or graffitied. Whether it was costumed: sissy, punk, queer, pansy. “You like that.” “I’m not that way.” “I bet you like that shit, don’t you?”

  You never forget your first “faggot.” Because the memory, in its way, makes you. It becomes a spine for the body of anxieties and insecurities that will follow, something to hang all that meat on. Before you were just scrawny; now you’re scrawny because you’re a faggot. Before you were just bookish; now you’re bookish because you’re a faggot.

  Soon, bullies won’t even have to say the word. Nor will friends, as they start to sit at different lunch tables without explanation. There will already be a voice in your head whispering “faggot” for them.

  I still dreamed about Cody every so often, even though I hadn’t seen him for two or three years. My dreams usually started with his mouth and the way it must have looked when he said the word. “Faggot” is slick with spit. He’s on the other side of that locked door, saying “faggot” over and over again, taking off an item of clothing each time he says it. Cody in a pit-stained wife beater, cargo shorts unzipped and at his ankles, red plaid boxer shorts sliding down his legs, the faint happy trail revealing more and more of itself, the base of his dick, a pale pink root.

  Cody—in my mind—became the word itself.

  “Faggot” swallowed him whole and spit him back out as a wet dream.

  Before him, the first wet dreams that I remember weren’t about boys or girls so much. It started with amorphous bodies. A pair of beautiful legs, a chest pressed against the small of my back, a cloud of hot breath on my neck, an improbably long tongue tracing my entire silhouette. The dreams weren’t gendered. Shadows would keep the faces out of view. There weren’t breasts, but smooth, perfect curves. There weren’t dicks, but throbbing veins. That feeling knew no gender, until Cody happened. And, in dream after dream, kept happening. By the time I started high school, the bodies of men seemed, suddenly, almost aggressively present. Not just in my dreams, but all day long. Men were everywhere. A plague of miraculous bodies. How had I not noticed before?

  J
ust after I started my sophomore year of high school, a black construction worker spent three days working on the roof of our apartment building. There were other men on the roof each day, but his body is the body I remember: shining with sweat as if he’d been dipped in coconut oil from head to toe, the red tone of his brown skin radiant in the sunlight, muscles straining as he worked on the roof’s tiles. And a smile so bright, it was vulgar. Coming home from school, I’d find reasons to hang around, even going so far as to set out a pitcher of ice water for the workers one day. Once, in passing, he called me “youngblood.” I repeated it to myself under my breath, trying my best not to smile too obviously while he could see me.

  His body became an idea I dragged into bed with me at night. Or I’d pull in the body of my track coach, or one of the football players Mom cheered on while watching Monday Night Football. How did other people concentrate with all these bodies just walking around all the time? So many men and boys, each with bodies to study and memorize.

  Well into high school, in all these dreams I had the body of a girl. The kind of girl I thought these guys would sleep with. The construction worker’s wife, the football player’s girlfriend, the woman framed in the photograph the track coach kept on the wall in his office. Any woman would do. Any body but my own.

  The rough little poems I had started writing by then were usually in the voices of women and usually overly obsessed with Greek mythology. As Medusa, I wrote about refusing to look at myself in the mirror, lest I turn myself to stone. As Penelope, I wrote about dreaming of my husband’s body, years crashing between us like waves. As Eurydice, I wrote a poem in which I mistake the heat of the underworld for the warmth of Orpheus’s body curled around my own in sleep. Always poems from mythic women about the distance between their bodies and the bodies of their beloved.