by Dave Eggers
A few month later, Mama and I sit in President George Harmon’s office. The table is an oblong mix of mahogany and ice water. All the men at the table are smiling, flipping through papers and twirling pens in their hands except for me. I am still 19, two years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he swings back.
President Harmon and his lawyers don’t look me in the eye. They zero in on the eyes of Mama, as Harmon tells her that I am being suspended from Millsaps for at least a year for taking and returning Red Badge of Courage from the library without formally checking it out.
He ain’t lying.
I took the book out of the library for Shonda’s brother without checking it out and returned the book the next day. I looked right at the camera when I did it, too. I did all of this knowing I was on parole, but not believing any college in America, even one in Mississippi, would kick a student out for a year, for taking and returning a library book without properly checking it out.
I should have believed.
George Harmon tells me, while looking at my mother, that I will be allowed to come back to Millsaps College in a year only after having attended therapy sessions for racial insensitivity. We are told he has given my writing to a local psychologist and the shrink believes I need help. Even if I am admitted back as a student, I will remain formally on parole for the rest of my undergrad career, which means that I will be expelled from Millsaps College unless I’m perfect.
19-year-old black boys can not be perfect in America. Neither can 61-year-old white boys named George.
Before going on the ride home with Mama, I go to my room, put the gun in my backpack and get in her car.
On the way home, Mama stops by the zoo to talk about what just happened in George Harmon’s office. She’s crying and asking me over and over again why I took and returned the gotdamn book knowing they were watching me. Like a black mother of a black boy, Mama starts blaming Shonda for asking me to check the book out in the first place. I don’t know what to say other than I know it wasn’t Shonda’s fault and I left my ID and I wanted to swing back, so I keep walking and say nothing. She says that Grandma is going to be so disappointed in me.
“Heartbroken,” is the word she uses. There.
I feel this toxic miasma unlike anything I’ve ever felt not just in my body but in my blood. I remember the wobbly way my Grandma twitches her eyes at my Uncle Jimmy and I imagine being at the end of that twitch for the rest of my life. For the first time in almost two years, I hide my face, grit my crooked teeth and sob.
I don’t stop for weeks.
The NAACP and lawyers get involved in filing a lawsuit against Mill saps on my behalf. Whenever the NAACP folks talk to me or the paper, they talk about how ironic it is that a black boy who is trying to read a book gets kicked out of college. I appreciate their work but I don’t think the irony lies where they think it does. If I’d never read a book in my life, I shouldn’t have been punished for taking and bringing back a library book, not when kids are smoking that good stuff, drinking themselves unconscious and doing some of everything imaginable to nonconsenting bodies.
That’s what I tell all the newspapers and television reporters who ask. To my friends, I say that after stealing all those Lucky Charms, Fun-yons, loaves of light bread and over a hundred cold dranks out of the cafeteria in two years, how in the fuck do I get suspended for taking and returning the gotdamn Red Badge of Courage.
The day that I’m awarded the Benjamin Brown award, named after a 21-year-old truck driver shot in the back by police officers during a student protest near Jackson State in 1967, I take the bullets out of my gun, throw it in the Ross Barnett Reservoir and avoid my Grandma for a long, long time.
I enroll at Jackson State University in the Spring semester, where my mother teaches Political Science. Even though I’m not really living at home, everyday Mama and I fight over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me use the car to get to my second job at an HIV hospice since my license is suspended. Really, we’re fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the king’s English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students and most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, white folks will do anything to get you.
Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom; it’s to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.
One blue night my mother tells me that I need to type the rest of my application to Oberlin College after I’ve already hand-written the personal essay. I tell her that it doesn’t matter whether I type it or not since Millsaps is sending a Dean’s report attached to my transcript. I say some other truthful things I should never say to my mother. Mama goes into her room, lifts up her pillow and comes out with her gun.
It’s raggedy, small, heavy and black. I always imagine the gun as an old dead crow. I’d held it a few times before with Mama hiding behind me.
Mama points the gun at me and tells me to get the fuck out of her house. I look right at the muzzle pointed at my face and smile the same way I did at the library camera at Millsaps. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“You gonna pull a gun on me over some college application?” I ask her.
“You don’t listen until it’s too late,” she tells me. “Get out of my house and don’t ever come back.”
I leave the house, chuckling, shaking my head, cussing under my breath. I go sit in a shallow ditch. Outside, I wander in the topsy turvy understanding that Mama’s life does not revolve around me and I’m not doing anything to make her life more joyful, spacious or happy. I’m an ungrateful burden, an obese weight on her already terrifying life. I sit there in the ditch, knowing that other things are happening in my mother’s life but I also know that Mama never imagined needing to pull a gun on the child she carried on her back as a sophomore at Jackson State University. I’m playing with pine needles, wishing I had headphones—but I’m mostly regretting throwing my gun into the reservoir.
When Mama leaves for work in the morning, I break back in her house, go under her pillow and get her gun. Mama and I haven’t paid the phone or the light bill so it’s dark, hot and lonely in that house, even in the morning. I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I’m so sad and I can’t really see a way out of what I’m feeling but I’m leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.
I start to spend more time at home over the next few weeks since Mama is out of town with her boyfriend. Mama and I still haven’t paid the phone bill so I’m running down to the pay phone everyday, calling one of the admissions counselors at Oberlin College. He won’t tell me whether they’ll accept me or not, but he does say that Oberlin might want me because of, not in spite of, wh
at happened at Millsaps.
A month passes and I haven’t heard from Oberlin. I’m eating too much and dry humping a woman just as desperate as me and lying like its my first job and daring people to fuck with me more than I have in a long time. I’m writing lots of words, too, but I’m not reckoning. I’m wasting ink on bullshit political analysis and short stories and vacant poems that I never imagine being read or felt by anyone like me. I’m a waste of writing’s time.
The only really joyful times in life come from playing basketball and talking shit with O.G. Raymond “Gunn” Murph, my best friend. Gunn is trying to stop himself from slowly killing himself and oth ers, after a smoldering break up with V., his girlfriend of eight years. Some days, Gunn and I save each other’s lives just by telling and listening to each other’s odd-shaped truth.
One black night, Ray is destroying me in Madden and talking all that shit when we hear a woman moaning for help outside of his apartment on Capitol Street. We go downstairs and find a naked woman with open wounds, blood and bruises all over her black body. She can barely walk or talk through shivering teeth but we ask her if she wants to come upstairs while we call the ambulance. Gunn and I have taken no Sexual Assault classes and we listen to way too much The Diary and Ready to Die, but right there, we know not to get too close to the woman and just let her know we’re there to do whatever she needs.
She slowly makes her way into the apartment because she’s afraid the men might come back. Blood is gushing down the back of her thighs and her scalp. She tells us the three men had one gun. When she makes it up to the apartment, we give the woman a towel to sit on and something to wrap herself in. Blood seeps through both and even though she looks so scared and hurt, she also looks so embarrassed. Gunn keeps saying things like, “It’s gonna be okay, sweetheart,” and I just sit there weakly nodding my head, running from her eyes and getting her more glasses of water. When Gunn goes in his room to take his gun in his waistband, I look at her and know that no one man could have done this much damage to another human being. That’s what I need to tell myself.
Eventually, the ambulance and police arrive. They ask her a lot of questions and keep looking at us. She tells them that we helped her after she was beaten and raped by three black men in a Monte Carlo. One of the men, she tells the police, was her boyfriend. She refuses to say his name to the police. Gunn looks at me and drops his head. Without saying anything, we know that whatever is in the boys in that car, has to also be in us. We know that whatever is encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by knowingly mangling the body and spirit of this shivering black girl, is probably the most powerful thing in our lives. We also know that whatever is in us that has been slowly encouraging us to kill ourselves and those around us slowly, is also in the heart and mind of this black girl on the couch.
A few weeks later, I get a letter saying I’ve been accepted to Oberlin College and they’re giving me a boatload of financial aid. Gunn agrees to drive me up to Oberlin and I feel like the luckiest boy on earth, not because I got into Oberlin, but because I survived long enough to remember saying yes to life and “no” or at least “slow down” to a slow death.
My saying yes to life meant accepting the beauty of growing up black, on parole, in Mississippi. It also meant accepting that George Harmon, parts of Millsaps College, parts of my state, much of my country, my heart and mostly my own reflection, had beaten the dog shit out of me. I still don’t know what all this means but I know it’s true.
This isn’t an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.
I want to say and mean that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really ask nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths and the lives and deaths of folks all around us over and over again.
Then I want to say and mean that I am who my Grandma thinks I am.
I am not.
I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I’m a child of this nation.
I know that as I’ve gotten deeper into my late twenties and thirties, I have managed to continue killing myself and other folks who loved me in spite of me. I know that I’ve been slowly killed by folks who were as feverishly in need of life and death as I am. The really confusing part is that a few of those folk who have nudged me closer to slow death have also helped me say yes to life when I most needed it. Usually, I didn’t accept it. Lots of times, we’ve taken turns killing ourselves slowly, before trying to bring each other back to life. Maybe that’s the necessary stank of love, or maybe—like Frank Ocean says—it’s all just bad religion, just tasty watered down cyanide in a Styrofoam cup.
I don’t even know. For real.
I know that by the time I left Mississippi, I was 20 years old, three years older than Trayvon Martin will be when he is murdered for wearing a hoodie and swinging back in the wrong American neighborhood. Four months after I leave Mississippi, San Berry, a 20-year-old partner of mine who went to Millsaps College with Gunn and me, would be convicted for taking Pam McGill, a social worker, in the woods and shooting her in the head.
San confessed to kidnapping Ms. McGill, driving her to some woods, making her fall to her knees and pulling the trigger while a 17-year-old black boy named Azikiwe waited for him in the car. San says Azikiwe encouraged him to do it. Even today, journalists, activists and folks in Mississippi wonder what really happen with San, Azikiwe and Pam McGill that day. Was San trying to swing back? Were there mental health issues left unattended? Had Ms. McGill, San and Azikiwe talked to each other before the day? Why was Azikiwe left in the car when the murder took place?
I can’t front, though. I don’t wonder about any of that shit, not today. I wonder what all three of those children of our nation really remember about how to slowly kill themselves and other folks in America the day before parts of them definitely died under the blue-black sky in Central Mississippi.
ALEXANDER MAKSIK
Snake River Gorge
FROM Tin House
ARE YOU HAPPY?
Henry had been in the green easy chair, but once my parents left the room, he came around the coffee table and sat next to me on the couch.
Theo, he asked, laying his hand on my shoulder. Are you happy?
He was nothing like the skinny LDS kids my mom let in sometimes, who sat in the kitchen in their suits and black ties, drinking our lemonade. Henry wore a yellow tie around his thick, pale neck, and a stiff, blue dress shirt, and a belt with a silver tip. He reminded me of a guy I knew who worked at the Best Buy out on Bridgeview Boulevard.
Theo, man, he said like we were buddies. Brother, are you happy here? I mean, is this the way you imagined it going? Your life, I mean?
He’d taken his hand away and slunk down next to me, mirroring my posture, legs out, feet flat on the floor, like it was just the two of us at home, natural as ever, trying to work out our lives. I was thinking how incredible it was that he was there at all. That you could call a number from the Penny Saver and a few hours later a guy like Henry would be sitting in your living room offering you a job.
If everything’s cool, you wouldn’t have called us. His head was close enough that I could hear the white Life Saver clicking against his teeth. Yo, he whispered. Is he messing with you?
What do you mean?
You know what I mean, man. Your dad. Is he fucking with you? He said it angrily, as if he’d do something about it right then, all I needed was to say the word.
No, I said. No. No one is messing with me. Jesus Christ, I said, sounding just like my dad, who was not messing with me. Who, back then, was doing nothing but going out looking for work and coming home to tell us no one was building anywhere. With his hands on the edge of the bar that separated the kitchen from the little breakfast nook where we ate all our meals and where my mom kept her boxes and mailing labels, he’d tell us how he’d driven all the way to Mountain Home, or Arco, or as far as Elko once. He couldn’t even find work pounding nails. We’d eat whatever my mom had spent the last hour trying to improve—chili, or corned-beef hash, or black beans and rice. Until the spring came, my mom would say. You know it’ll be better in the spring.