Fire Shut Up in My Bones (15 page)

That didn’t go over well in a room full of black children.

Hearing that word made me reconsider everything I thought I understood about my life. The hills we drove over on our way to church, the hills that hid the oil—maybe these were the hills that would have been ours if white folks hadn’t taken them from one of my great-grandpas. Or the bad white man who’d forced Great-Grandpa Columbus to choose between the land he’d earned and the woman he loved. The white teachers in Ringgold who’d never tried to reach me when I was drifting away, but instead moved me to the slow class at the first sign of trouble, a class filled with other black children, mostly black boys.

I thought about how older black people tried to pass a fear of white men on to us. “If you don’t act right, the police gone git you.” “Police” was just a term of art for white men. Sometimes they dispensed with the euphemisms altogether and just said, “That white man is gone git you,” pointing to any white man in sight. You could see the fear in their eyes, like they were remembering things they weren’t saying. It was real, the fear was. And that is what they hated, being afraid.

I was even afraid of white Santa Claus. My father’s sister, the one prone to wild exaggeration and flat-out lying who had married the almost-white preacher with the almost-white hair, convinced me one Christmas that Santa came in the night and blew black pepper into the eyes of bad little boys. And she said he’d told her that he planned to do that to me. As I started to cry, she started to laugh. From then on, I tensed up whenever I saw the white man in the red suit with the black pepper.

I could easily have followed these racial cues: that white people were to be feared, to be kept at a distance, to be fed with a long-handled spoon. I began to internalize this fear. I sometimes felt like the monkey in the cage at the potato farm—familiar, but strangely different, constrained as a lesser being to a small world within the greater white one. And when white people looked at me, I often felt they were doing so with jack-o’-lantern smiles—frozen and hollow with a dim light behind the eyes. I could have quietly taken my place in the covert racial warfare playing out all around me.

Luckily, I was saved from that fate by Big Mama’s relationship with a white family she worked for in Arkansas—the Beales. Mrs. Sophia and Mr. Beale had a child, a boy named Cody, who had an unruly mane of sun-bleached hair. Big Mama was their housekeeper—the kind of work my mother vowed she’d never do. Big Mama also worked in the Beales’ gas station and convenience store, strategically positioned at the crossroads where the road from the Bend met the highway.

Mr. Beale’s store was the main store in the area, and it provided a comfortable living for his family. To me, it was an air-conditioned paradise of fats, salts, and sugars—Vienna sausages and potted meat, pork rinds and spicy peanuts, pickled cucumbers, pickled pigs’ feet, and pickled eggs.

Mr. Beale was a rugged man and a heavy drinker. Many days he drove me around with him as he attended to his business. He had a beat-up pickup with a cooler full of beer next to him on the seat, from which he’d crack open fresh brews en route. He also cursed a lot. He called everything a “sumbitch.” Dishonorable people, stubborn cattle, mud-stuck tires, whatever: “That sumbitch!” But he was also the kind of man who valued hard work above all else, seeing it as the best judge of character. Maybe that was why he seemed to hold Big Mama—and Jed—in high esteem.

In a way, Big Mama’s relationship to the Beales was one of the most stereotypical of Southern life: a poor black woman keeping house for a well-off white family. But that fact never manifested itself to me in their behavior. I was too young to think more critically about the complexities. To me, the Beales treated our family like their own, and vice versa, so that was how I saw all of us: as one big family. Once a white man came into the store while Big Mama was behind the deli counter. He looked at her and told Mr. Beale, “I don’t want no nigger cuttin’ my meat.” Without missing a beat, Cody, who was just a boy at the time, let the man know in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t want Big Mama to slice his meat, he wasn’t getting any. Cody showed the man the door.

I would be much older before I fully realized that Big Mama worked
for
the Beales and not
with
them. But it wasn’t the working relationship that stood out and made the most difference to me as a young boy. It was what I registered then as their basic goodness to each other, their sense of sameness.

My family’s interactions with the Beales prevented racial fear and mistrust from taking hold. There seemed to be a warmth behind their eyes—just folks like any others. The relationship between our families helped me conceive of the beauty beyond—and the humanity between—black and white. It helped to rescue me from the bitterness—not by some grand act of racial contrition, but simply by acts of human kindness.

5

With another year came another betrayal.

When I was ten years old Nathan graduated from high school and went away to college at Grambling. This left me alone in our shared bedroom for the first time. I couldn’t stand it. There were too many bad memories in that room, crouched in the corners, waiting for night to fall, waiting to get me alone, waiting to pounce. I tried to rearrange the furniture, to point the bed in different directions, to disorient the memories of death—Mam’ Grace’s and my own—and the male apparitions, but it could not be done. They still stirred sometimes when the room fell dark.

I didn’t want to wait for them, so I slipped away to other rooms. Sometimes I lounged in William and Robert’s room to talk and debate and watch television with them, trying desperately to wedge myself into their relationship. At other times I’d gravitate to Uncle Paul’s room, searching for the feeling of the simpler, more innocent times when we roamed the streets like buddies, me skipping beside him, oblivious to life’s land mines.

After I’d started school, Paul no longer had the job of taking care of me, so he made his own. Every day, sunup to sundown, he chopped the thigh-high weeds that grew in the field where Papa Joe had raised his hogs—swinging a sharp blade at the end of a wooden handle back and forth like the pendulum of a clock, ticking away the time, batches of grass taking flight at the top of each motion as the blade slowed and momentarily stopped. When the day was done, he raked his cuttings into a pile and set fire to them, the green grass mixed with the dry to produce great plumes of white smoke that trailed off in the breeze.

So, at the end of the day, after school was over and the weeds were burned, after supper was eaten and baths were taken, I’d go to Uncle Paul’s room and loll about as he reflected on his day of hacking weeds and doing nothing. The room was spartan and ordered, like Aunt Odessa’s house. There was an oak chest of drawers and a matching dresser with a tilting mirror. On the dresser was a pipe stand and ashtray, a boar’s hair shaving brush and matching soap dish, and the hat that Uncle Paul wore every day.

There was an old rocking chair in front of a homemade box that rested on the floor, kept padlocked by day, filled with pouches of tobacco, cans of snuff, bundles of pipe cleaners, and jars of coins. Uncle Paul chewed tobacco or tucked a pinch of snuff between his lip and gum, spitting the black juices into a darkened coffee can. Other times he puffed on one pipe while cleaning another, threading the pipe cleaner through the stem, slow and gentle, the forward end emerging with every thrust like a caterpillar peeking out the end of a hollow stick.

The only things on the wall were two dime-store pictures above the bed—one a print of a white Jesus looking away into nowhere, the way people do when they pretend not to see you even though you know that they do, and the other a print of a kitten with too-big eyes that looked like it was about to cry.

Uncle Paul told me wonderful, simple stories about the boy he’d been before age wrapped an old man around him. He pulled the stories through time and space and out of the side of his mouth not champing down on the bit of the pipe, its bowl bouncing as he formed the words and swinging so low that I could see the yolk-yellow glow of the embers when he drew on it. Ribbons of smoke rose from the corners of his mouth, caressed his face, then found their level in the room.

I lay on the bed, soaking it up, staring into his eyes. They were the same color as Jed’s eyes—brown, a hint of gray around the edges, sunrise yellow where the whites should be. But they were different. Weary, not sweet. The skin above Jed’s eyes fell soft, releasing the worries before they could stick. The skin above Paul’s eyes was held tight. Paul had the kind of eyes that stepped you back rather than drew you in, the kind that belonged to a man you could know your whole life and never wholly know. You could only look a little ways into Uncle Paul’s eyes before you hit a wall, sensing something held apart, locked away, like the box on the floor.

Sometimes, when the evening stretched deep into the night, I’d simply roll over on his bed and fall asleep. I felt safe there.

That is, until the night I was awakened by the feel of his hand moving across my hip, arcing the way a snake moves across a log, slow and deliberate, searching for a soft spot to come down, purposeful, not a mistake. My stomach got knotty and my skin went cold—flesh remembers things. I’d been to this sad place before, only this time it was under the chin of the kitten trying not to cry and under the gaze of look-away white Jesus trying not to see.

Without a word, before the hand found its target, I quietly got up and walked out of Paul’s room and back to mine. I never slept in his room again, and neither of us ever spoke of the hand that had moved across my hip like a snake. Whereas Chester’s betrayal had broken my spirit, Paul’s broke my heart. And yet, I struggled to convince myself that something else had moved that hand. Not Paul. It couldn’t have been him. He wouldn’t have done it. It was that thing without conscience or calculation that took up in the body when the mind went quiet that moved the hand. It was that thing that ran through a sleeping body like bold mice through an empty house—the twitch of a nose, the jolt of a shoulder, the jump of a leg—movements without meaning. That’s what it was. Not Paul.

I had to resort to the most useful and dangerous lesson a damaged child ever learns—how to lie to himself.

I had to make up a reason, an excuse, because there is nowhere to hide in a small house. I had to make room within the rooms, a safe place midway in the mind, behind seeing and before knowing. There I could resurrect memories and bury secrets.

That’s what people in this town and in our family did with secrets. No matter what it was—not a word. No good could come of giving voice to vice. Down the hole. Better there. Pack the dirt, tight, and move on. Otherwise, we might have to deal with the emotions those secrets might stir, and emotions were tricky for us. In our family we pretended we didn’t have a full range. We stuck to jokes and laughter, bravado and theatrical indignation. Have fun often; have a fight occasionally. That was it. No talk of love, or sadness, or longing, or pain. No crying, no hugging, no consoling. No “I love you,” “I’m proud of you,” or “I miss you.” That was soft talk for babies, not boys.

The fact that we loved each other was without question, but the precious few times that I heard those words they were cloaked in a joke. That didn’t satisfy. It never satisfied. I longed to hear the words said somber and straight, delivered naked and fragile.

But if a thing so treasured as love couldn’t be spoken, how could I speak a thing so terrible as what Chester and Paul had done? Besides, my mother was worried enough about how I was turning out. I had learned early to read the worry in her eyes and listen for it in her voice.

One night a few years earlier, at a high school basketball game, after playing with a bunch of other boys in a corner, I’d run during a break in the game from one corner of the court to another to meet my mother, whom I saw at the concession stand. I was full of the frenetic energy that little boys draw from the company of other little boys. But as I ran, a few people snickered, I suppose at something in my gait, at the way I held my head and my hands. I heard it, though I pretended I didn’t. My mother apparently heard it too, because when I reached her, all smiles and open arms, her eyes were oozing dissatisfaction and fear. She laid into me in front of everyone. “Don’t you run like that!” I knew then that it scared and worried her. Knowing that those thoughts were in her head sent pulses of shame through me. I never wanted to see that look in my mother’s eyes again.

Another time, I’d sent a girl a secret-admirer letter and she replied, asking me to describe myself. I wrote a list of things designed to impress, one of which was “good-looking.” I didn’t believe I was good-looking, but I thought it a smart thing to write down. I hid my new letter on top of the hot-water heater in the bathroom, up high, higher than I could see. It didn’t occur to me that higher than I could see was eye level for my mother. So she found the letter and read it. And she laid into me again, this time for describing myself as good-looking. That was a thing girls said, not boys.

It was clear to me that she was worried I wasn’t turning out right, that I was sliding down an unspeakable path to an unspeakable end. She was adopting other people’s doubts. If I had any remaining thought that I might not need to keep my troubles to myself, it dried up like the morning dew. These were things that I had to learn to fold tight so that no one could read them. Even though it now seemed to me that the world was full of boys like Chester and men like Paul—the kind whose sense of right broke down in the dark and still of the night—the ones who looked at me and saw a chance, not a child.

Another such man was a college friend of Nathan’s. One day toward the end of a semester, Nathan let me come to school and spend the day with him. When night fell, he, his friend, and I drove back to Gibsland. When we got back to town, my brother stopped for gas. As soon as he ducked into the store to pay for it, the friend twisted himself around in his seat to make his face square with mine.