by Kei Miller
I realise now that when my grandmother, in her late thirties and early forties, began to gain sons and daughters-in-law and told each one of them that they should do away with titles—told them that she would have nothing to do with “in-laws”—told them that they were simply her sons and daughters, full stop—that this was a habit she had learned before. She had learned that there were other ways of becoming a mother. One did not always need to carry a thing inside for nine months and then give it birth. She insisted that she had no step-children. She told her children that they had no half-sisters or half-brothers. Either this girl is my child or she is not. Either this boy is your brother, or he is not. She allowed nothing in between. I think what an excellent woman she was to have done this. But I also think of what was in between—the things that she would not allow. There was a story there, of course. And a woman.
One need not carry a thing inside for nine months and then give birth in order to be a mother, but I imagine it is a hell of a thing to carry something for nine months, to give birth and to not have that child call you “mother”! I wonder how did Miss Henny, over the years, manage to lose four of her children? Did she lose them the way one loses a five-dollar bill, which is to say, carelessly? Or did she lose them the way so many black women over the years have lost their own children—because of their own poverty, because of all that she could not give them? Did she trade them for a lifetime of anguish and regret? Did she trade them for that same shawl of evening that my grandmother had once wrapped around her own shoulders?
It is true that they were not lost all at once. And not under the same circumstances. After all my grandmother’s tears, and after her own mother had failed to console her, saying only, “Well look at that! Look what you done get youself involved in!” my grandmother squared her shoulders. It is what it is. She told her husband, “You have children—well then, I must meet them.” And so it was that the little girl that was my Aunt B came to spend a day with her father’s wife. When Miss Henny came to collect her, Aunt B started to bawl. It was no regular bawl. The child cried as if she were being killed. My grandmother tried to pry her hands from the door. Miss Henny tried to hold her feet. The neighbours started to open their windows and their doors. What the hell is going on there?! The two women were embarrassed. They decided to wait until the child’s father came home. It made no difference. Aunt B kicked and scraped and screamed. She had only come to spend a day with her father’s wife—but she would never leave, not until she was a big woman ready to migrate to Europe. My grandmother even had to sign official adoption papers. B became her first daughter.
The two older boys came next. I am not certain that they were even living with Miss Henny at the time. But there was something about them being boys and running rampant, something about them going out of the house with stained collars and dirt under their fingernails, something about them needing the firm disciplining hand of a father, something about them needing the kind of man who would require them to go to church and to recite whole passages of Shakespeare back to him at night. They were boys and they needed a father.
Aunt C continued to live with Miss Henny until she—Miss Henny—got involved with a man who they say was violent. He made things difficult. He would not allow my grandfather to come and visit his own daughter. So C was taken from that household but she would not go to live with her father right away. Instead, she was placed with her father’s mother—an old woman who would not see the little girl as her own granddaughter, but rather as the daughter of the woman who did a day’s work for her. My great-grandmother saw Aunt C as the servant’s child destined to be a servant herself. She was determined to prepare the child for her destiny. My grandmother tells me no details. She says only, “Your great-grandmother was a cruel woman.”
One day C arrives at the house where many of her siblings now live—where her father and her father’s wife also live. She arrives like a beggar. She has been sent to ask for money from her father but he is not at home. My grandmother is surprised by the fragility of the child, the way she looks constantly over her shoulders, the way she carries herself like a nervous dog that expects to be stoned, and the completely unconscious way in which she often reaches a hand around to her own back as if to feel the shape of something.
“Child,” my grandmother says. “Could you take off your shirt?”
C takes off her shirt.
My grandmother observes C’s back. She closes her eyes to hide the tears. She swallows. “C, tonight you will sleep here, with us,” my grandmother says. And then every night after that.
Thinking about it now, I realise that there would have been many evenings when they were all in the same room—my grandfather and his large family that included my grandmother and her grandchildren, and also Miss Henny and her grandchildren, except that Miss Henny’s grandchildren did not know she was their grandmother—did not know to call her Grandma or Nana, or how to sit in her lap and play with her false teeth. I try hard to remember these evenings, to remember some small sign of something that I would not have known how to look for at the time—something which only now I could interpret. I wonder what Miss Henny felt. I wonder what was stored in her heart. She is present, and yet she is the silence of my family. I am drawn to her because of something that vibrates in the space that she has left, even after dying. I suspect she might be the story of my entire island—a story of love and of pain, of men and their mothers, of women who were loved but were never married, of children who were lost and some who were found and some who were beaten because the colour of their skin reminded an old woman of the same skin she wanted to escape, a story of class and race and all its curious intersections.
There she sits—the old black woman in the corner—but no one says a thing. To speak of these things would be to create half-sisters and half-brothers and half-aunts and half-uncles and step-children, and perhaps my family believes that such language would be the end of us as a family. It would be our breaking. So maybe that’s all family really is—the handful of stories we dare not tell.
4
THE CRIMES THAT HAUNT THE BODY
There are crimes that haunt the body, and specific crimes that haunt specific bodies. This haunting is not a memory. It hardly matters if the crime has happened or not—just the fear of it, the knowledge of its possibility causes us to walk the long way home, an extra mile, to avoid the dark corners.
I did not understand this then, when my sister asked me to drop her at the neighbour’s house. It was only a street away—barely a ten-minute walk—and so it seemed like sheer laziness that my sister should want me to get into the car and take her. I refused; she called me an asshole; I said she was spoilt, which is strange when I think about it now, me acting as if I was the older sibling. My sister is a few years older but somehow, I had got my license first and so the car and the offering of rides were suddenly within my largesse. But we were never the kind of siblings who fought, so I remember asking—and it was a genuine question—but why? Why can’t you just walk there? I don’t understand. I had become the kind of teenage boy for whom things needed to make sense, things needed to fit into some carefully constructed logic. My sister would not answer the question. She said, But you’re a man. You can’t! You cannot understand.
I remember that fight all these years later because of how much I resented that statement. If my sister’s refusal to walk seemed lazy, then this seemed even lazier, this idea that there were things in this world that I could never fully understand because of my body. My sister was telling me a truth I was too young to understand. She could not walk those ten minutes because of a crime that haunted her body in a way that it would never haunt mine.
We lived in a good neighbourhood as neighbourhoods go in Jamaica. The houses were big and gated and the streets were well lit. But there were three empty lots on that road—parcels of land still waiting on their houses. These lots were like tiny forests—a density of trees and vines and gr
ass as tall as fences. Even I held my breath a little whenever I had to walk by these lots at night, wondering what lurked behind the leaves. Whenever there was a crime on the road—a house broken into—we could not help but look at those empty lots and shudder, as if we knew that some evil had escaped from it but had gone back, and that it was still there, observing us, waiting, biding its time.
My sister wanted a ride because we lived in a cul-de-sac. There was no long way round—no extra mile that she could have walked around to avoid the dark corners. She was a young woman. Her friends were young women. They spoke about things—scary things—that some men only know when they read the statistics. My sister understood the likeliness of a particular crime that could be committed on her body. She wanted to make sure such a thing never happened. She knew that the crimes that haunt our bodies do not haunt like ghosts—as something spectral, as something whose only mischief is to rearrange the table. The crime that haunted her body would also have its own body. It would have its own overwhelming smell. Given the chance, it would pull her into the empty lot, into the grass as tall as fences; it would put a hand over her mouth and spread her legs even while she was crying, trying to say stop. Stop. Please stop.
There are crimes that haunt the body—specific crimes that our specific bodies are more vulnerable to. I began to understand this when I came off a train in Exeter and a dishevelled man walked up to me. At first, I thought he was a beggar asking for money, but he opened his wallet so I could see the silver flash of a police badge. I need to ask you some questions. He was polite. I give thanks for that. He was polite. He apologised that he had to do this, but it just so happened that I fit the description of someone he had been told to look out for—someone coming to Exeter on the London train. And what is that description, I asked him. He looked at his notes as if he needed to. A black man, he said, and closed his book. Only that. A black man. No height, no weight, nothing about hair or eyes or identifying marks. Just a black man. And I turned to look at all the men who were walking right by us then—men with blue eyes and green eyes and grey eyes—men with blond hair and red hair—but all of them comfortably white and therefore unaccused of whatever crime I was supposed guilty of.
I understood the crime that haunts my own body after Liam Neeson’s now infamous interview in which he admitted that he wanted to kill me. He wanted to kill a black man after his sister’s rape, and any black man would do. He only needed it to be a man, and for the man to be black, maybe stepping off a train from Exeter on his way to give a lecture about the First World War and the epistolary exchanges that it prompted. Neeson says, I did it for maybe a week, hoping some “black bastard” would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could . . . kill him. And so many people were angry, and so many people were confused that people were angry. And the second group said, But he didn’t actually do anything. He didn’t kill a black bastard. And in any case, it was years ago, and he’s confessing, and isn’t that kind of honesty worth something? Isn’t it worth something that he’s owning up to it? I thought they could not know about the crime that haunts my body—a crime that is not spectral, nor hypothetical, because it has happened already. It has happened so many times to bodies like my own, and it can happen again because my body is vulnerable.
I thought about Frank Embree, a nineteen-year-old boy on the train from Mexico and how he was pulled off that train by a mob of a thousand Liam Neesons. I thought about the stories in the papers that described him as a “black brute” and a “negro ravisher”. I thought about how they pulled him to the site where they insisted he had raped a fourteen-year-old white girl—Willie Dougherty. I thought about how they made him take off all his clothes so that he could stand before one thousand Liam Neesons, his blackness and his maleness accusing him, and how they gave him 103 lashes, telling him to confess. Confess! Confess! But he would not because he could not. I thought about his ruined skin, torn to pieces as if it were as soft as paper, and the oak tree to which they finally led him, and the rope that was placed around his neck.
And then I thought about Louis Till, the twenty-three-year old American soldier accused of raping a white woman in Italy—Till who had shared a jail cell with Ezra Pound—Ezra Pound, who would immortalise the black soldier in two lines, “Till was hung yesterday / for murder and rape with trimmings”. And what about Till’s four-year-old son, Emmett, who would only grow to be a fourteen-year-old boy before he became acquainted with the sins of the father, a father he hardly knew but whose blackness and maleness he had inherited. Fourteen years was old enough to make him a black bastard. Fourteen years was old enough that he should be punished for the crime of grabbing and whistling at a white woman. Fourteen years was old enough for him to be dragged out of his great-uncle’s house, to have his body mutilated, to have half his head disappeared by a gunshot, and to then have his dead body sunk into a river.
It was only in 2017 that Carolyn Bryant broke the silence she had kept for over sixty years. It turns out she may have exaggerated. Emmett Till had not grabbed her. Emmett Till had not whistled at her. Emmett Till had not made rude sexual remarks to her. But even if he had done those things, would the crime against his body have been justified? I think about that crime, and the men who committed it and who were acquitted of it. I think about the entire life that those murderers lived, and the entire life that Carolyn Bryant lived, and the entire life that was denied a fourteen-year-old boy.
There are crimes that haunt the body, and I wish I had understood that before I broke up with a man whose anger had almost broken me. Though I had tried to end it many times before—to leave—there was something about this moment that made us both know it really was the last time. No apology or promise of therapy was going to change things. He was angry. Predictably so. I thought that was OK because I only needed to survive one last bout of rage then, afterwards, I would be free. But because he knew it was the last time—really the last time—he did not need feel the need to rein in the anger. He could let it become its biggest and most explosive self. This time he could send me eighty-seven texts in one hour, each one nastier than the last. This time he could stand at the top of the stairs and shout down at me, Oh you just watch! You watch! I can get you deported! You just watch!
In that moment (I am sorry, but this is true) I thought I would never date a white man again. I would never date someone who, when our love had corroded, could use his whiteness against me as a weapon. I knew that what he said was true—that any story he chose to tell would be believed. It would be believed because of our different bodies, and the different meanings that our bodies produce. Too often the meaning that my black, male body produces is “guilty” and “predator” and “worthy of death”.
I watch the news where William Henry Cosby Jr. is being led to prison and I think, thank fuck for that! Three to ten years seems hardly enough for a lifetime drugging and raping women. I watch him being led from the courthouse, a shadow of the affable black father who we allowed into our homes in the 80s. An octogenarian now, he is blind and shuffles with the aid of a stick. This body that has been so broken by age bears no resemblance, for me, to the bodies of Emmett Till or Frank Embree. I am staggered by attempts to place him in that genealogy of unfairly accused black men. I am staggered by the wilful denial of evidence that is so overwhelming.
I can find in my heart no sympathy for Bill Cosby, and yet I can find so much sympathy for the heated conversations sparked by his conviction. I find so much sympathy that it renders me silent. I do not participate in the discussions. I do not intervene. I think I understand both sides, and above the shouting and the protestations and the exasperated sighs, it seems that no one is really talking about Bill Cosby and everyone is talking about their own bodies. My friend, R, has finally had it with a man who has come out in defence of Cosby and whose every word sounds like an apology for rape, who says he is worried about what could befall even him. R says, You know, it’s really not so
hard. If you don’t want a woman to accuse you of rape, why don’t you try this: try not raping women!
The man recoils at this, and of course I understand why he would do so—why it seems unfair that we should accept responsibility for crimes that our specific bodies did not commit, but that our bodies seem to represent all the same. I know that things are not as simple as R suggests. R knows that things are not as simple as she suggests. We know about Frank Embree. We know about Emmett Till. History tells us that nothing is simple; the present tells us that history has gone nowhere; the present is always tense with the past. I listen to this man fumbling with his words, each one more careless than the last, each one digging a deeper hole. But I do not have better words to offer him and am suddenly overcome by the sadness of this—that our feelings are always so much bigger and more complex than language. Most days we cannot find the words to say precisely the things we would like to say. I listen to him fumbling and wonder if sometimes, like me, he feels himself being led towards an oak tree. I wonder if sometimes, like me, he can almost feel the cool river water closing over his dead body.
In a car in Miami, I am with three black women whose minds I have long been in love with—the driver is a cultural critic, as is the woman sitting beside me in the back. The woman riding shotgun is a poet and essayist whose work has always opened up new spaces in my mind. It occurs to me how safe I feel in the company of their bodies and their intellect, so safe that I can risk asking a question that has been bothering me.