Fire Shut Up in My Bones (16 page)

“So, do you have a girlfriend?”

I knew exactly what he was asking and why he’d waited for my brother to leave to ask it. I knew by the way he hung on the words, by the way his lips pushed back on his teeth, the way a dog looks like it’s smiling when it’s about to bite. I knew by that look in his eyes—those cold, black, devil eyes that catch no spark, like the eyes of the German shepherd when he pinned me down as a child and tried to kill me.

My brother’s friend wasn’t asking “Which girl do you like?” He was asking “You don’t like girls at all, do you?” It wasn’t so much to mock me as to excite himself. I could see that he was stimulated by the idea of what he presumed would be my answer, rolling it around in his mind, savoring it, the way the tongue plays with a piece of butterscotch.

I didn’t answer. Instead, tension drew up my shoulders and arched my back. Anger shot across my face. I started to breathe deeply, loudly, so that he could hear me. I crossed my arms, trying to make myself look bigger than I was, tougher. I summoned the courage of an animal trapped in a corner.

I wasn’t seven anymore. I was eleven. I didn’t just want his eyes off me, I wanted them out of him, clean out of his head, gobs of gooey white stuff in my hands.

He held his gaze, as if saying to me, “I see you.” I held mine, saying back to him, “I see you too.”

When my brother returned to the car, he glanced in the back seat and saw my face. “What’s wrong with him?” His friend turned and laughed it off. “Nothin’. He just mad ’cause he ain’t got no girlfriend.” They both laughed. But that wasn’t it. He and I both knew that he had tried me, probed something he was sure was softer than it seemed, only to find out that it was harder than he thought.

I realized that men like that would always be around, always making that same assumption—that I was in a space where rules didn’t apply, where everything was easy and loose, where my boyhood body was seen as a playground for something inside them that they kept hidden and tied down, predation so shameful that even white Jesus turned away and pretended not to see.

And I was afraid that men like that could see the hole in me, a thing I dared not admit even to myself: that I had an aching need to be chosen, to be seen, even if the eye doing the seeing caught no spark. It was a need beyond sex, unrelated to it. It was the need of a little boy whose light flickered in and out of register, on the verge of being snuffed out.

But being seen was a far cry from sexual submission. Submission—to anyone for any reason—was neither attractive nor acceptable to me. So in that moment I embraced the fire of righteous combat emanating from my mother and absorbed by me over a decade spent at the hem of her skirt. I told myself then that never again would I go without a fight.

I decided to try God again, to give me the strength to fight the fights that I couldn’t.

Luckily, Reverend Brown left Shiloh soon after my botched baptism request. He was replaced by a smaller, less intimidating preacher. So I got up the courage to walk down the aisle again, and this time, when asked if I wanted to be baptized, I said yes.

When the baptismal day, Easter Sunday, rolled around, I focused on the minutiae of the morning, carefully recording the details: The clear sky the color of a Louisiana iris petal—deep blue, a hint of purple, a spot of yellow along the edge as the sun rose. The glow of my bedroom lit through sheer curtains softly rolling in the breeze. The chirping of morning birds outside my window, occasionally interrupted by the hum and beep of passing cars. I was desperate to remember everything about the world before I went under the water, sure that whatever was down there would fundamentally and irreversibly change me.

I put on my only suit and tie and got into the car with my mother and brothers. I pressed my head against the window as the car made its way down winding roads bracketed by lush spring foliage. No one spoke.

We pulled into the church parking lot, the gravel crackling under the weight of the car, and found a space. I got out and was escorted through a back door and into a hallway. One of Grandpa Bill’s brothers, Uncle Lee Arthur, was waiting there, smiling proudly. He led me to the bathroom to change into my baptismal robe—a white bed sheet to be draped over my shoulders and pinned in the front. The preacher’s chatty son went into the bathroom with me and made small talk. I could hear that the service was in full swing, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. It didn’t matter, because I could keep up with the timing by the tone. The services were all the same—the same arc of excitement building to the same-sounding sermons:

“Good moanin’, saints. Can I git a aman?!”

“The spi’it movin’ in heh dis moanin’ . . . Aman?!”

“Dis moanin’, I would like to come to you from the [whatever] chapter of the [whichever] book of [whomever]. And the wird sed . . .”

If God was quoted speaking in the passage, it would have to be repeated at least three times.

“‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

“Y’all didn’t heh me dis moanin’. ‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

“Ha! Ha! We ’bout ta have chuch in heh dis moanin’! What he say?! ‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

If the Word came from one of the more cryptic books of the Bible, a deacon would stand and shout, “Make it plain!”

Then, the same overweight woman, sitting in the same spot, would erupt into pew-tilting, Holy Ghost–inspired convulsions at the same point in the sermon—every week. It often felt like the repeat of a play, folks pretending.

But one of the more authentic people, I felt, was the pastor’s wife. She suffered from vitiligo, giving her a calico complexion with ghostly splotches of pale skin overtaking the dark. “Turning white,” folks called it. She sat in the choir stand, stoic and quiet as if her burdens were heavy. She stood, staring up at spirits in the rafters, spirits only she could see, and sang in a whisper-thin voice, each word laced with a meaning greater than its definition, each note honed sharp and smooth before she pushed it out. The sound was true. Not perfect, but true, the way milk is most true when it’s first squeezed, before they boil out the bits that could make you stronger or kill you.

After I had slipped on the sheet, I walked out of the bathroom and the ushers lined me up behind the other children. The line was arranged from youngest to oldest, shortest to tallest. I was the oldest and tallest. Last. I was visibly nervous, so Uncle Lee Arthur tried to calm me.

“Ain’t nothin’ to be scared of, baby.”

I recalled the story my mother had told me about her own baptism, which took place in a snake-infested creek. When she stepped into the water, shivering from fear and the chill, Uncle Lee Arthur had calmed her fears as well.

“Cain’t nothin’ hurt you in dis water.”

The choir began to sing the old Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water,” with its haunting refrain, “God’s a-going to trouble the water.” It recalled the Bible story of the pool at Bethesda, encircled by the infirm. As it is written: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”

The pastor invited the other children, one after another, into the pool, which was up behind the choir stand and looked like a bathtub three times as deep as it should have been. The pastor stood waist-deep in the pool, draped in a full pastoral robe, which floated beneath the water like fabric that had caught a breeze and got stuck midflutter. He prayed and marked the moment with a proclamation about another soul being delivered to God.

I wanted to be made whole, but I was still afraid of whatever spirit was in that water. I didn’t want to be seized by something that would take me over, something that, holy or not, I couldn’t control.

The pastor prayed and proclaimed over the boy in front of me. He put one hand on the small of the boy’s back and the other on his forehead and swiftly dunked him backward into the water and brought him back up. The boy wiped the water away from his eyes and climbed out of the pool and into the arms of ushers standing with towels at the ready.

I was next. The pastor beckoned me with an outstretched hand. I slowly stepped in, trembling as I descended, the cold water rising to my chest.

I turned to see the choir and the congregation staring back at me. The pastor began to talk, but I paid no mind to what he was saying. The panic started to set in. I couldn’t swim. I didn’t know how to hold my breath. Was the old me really going to be washed away? And if so, who would emerge from the pool?

I felt the pastor place his hand on the small of my back. My body tensed up. He put his other hand on my forehead and, without warning, splash! I’d closed my eyes, but I could hear the pastor’s murmurs through the water. It was getting in my nose! I started to kick and flail and claw at his hand. He wasn’t going to drown me. Not today. He tried to hold me down, but I wouldn’t be held.

I came up out of the water to see that I’d soaked the pastor head to toe and splashed nearly half the water out of the pool and into the choir stand. The choir members had scurried to opposite sides of the stand to keep from getting wet. The congregation was rolling with laughter, and my mother had hung her head.

I stared up at the pastor, and he back at me. He was not pleased. I’m not sure whether he thought I was being insolent or was possessed, but he grabbed me and dunked me again, for good measure.

Now it was done. I moved toward the steps on the other side of the pool so that I could climb out. I’d expected a spiritual transformation, a rebirth, but—nothing. I’d been under twice and I hadn’t had any revelations—there was nothing down there. Maybe God had forgotten to send the angel to trouble the water. Or maybe, as with the Bible story, the first child had felt all the healing, leaving none for the rest of us. All I felt was wet and embarrassed.

I stepped out. An usher wrapped me in a towel and put his hand on my shoulder. He couldn’t stop laughing.

In the silent space where I waited to hear from God, my body began to whisper, then to shout, and eventually to drown out all else.

I was eleven years old the first time I had sex with a girl, if you could call it that. Roseanne was the younger sister of a stocky boy in my class named Arthur. She was a bit taller than me, and I was going steady with her. Our relationship had come out of nowhere—the result of eyes winked, notes passed, and urges obeyed. She was very fair and a little plump and known to be sexually active—“fast,” folks called it—which was a large part of my attraction to her. Roseanne was a bit dispassionate, even cold, unplugged to protect her most basic self from the poor choices she was making. I didn’t mind, though. In fact, I preferred it. I, too, knew what it meant to unplug. I needed just what she was offering—the primal comfort of physical closeness without the emotional complexity of true connection. Her coldness gave me succor, the way pressing a cheek to a cold window can draw down a headache or relieve anxiety.

Her scent was an intriguing blend of hormones, sweat, and cheap perfume, and her forwardness was like a beacon. She had full lips, the color of Ruby Red grapefruit, with which she taught me to French kiss without ever taking the gum out of her mouth. It was my first real kiss. It made something explode inside me, every nerve going tingly, like being tickled and fed ice cream and having the back of your neck rubbed where the head meets the muscle, all at the same time—the manifestation of “more!”

On bus rides home from school, Roseanne and I sat together like the other couples who “went together,” kissing and groping, while other kids joked and laughed, teased and harassed, tried to nail the lines to “Rapper’s Delight,” and sung their own wry rhymes.

What’s da matta wit yo’ Afro, niggero?

Dat stuff will neva grow.

Look at mine, it’s so fine,

I comb it all the time.

Afro sheen and Vaseline

Dat stuff won’t do a thing.

Gitta rake, gitta rake,

Gitta rake, gitta rake.

I got off the bus at Roseanne’s house. Her parents never seemed to be home, which gave her and Arthur time and space to experiment. Arthur was often in the company of a small girl with a toothy grin and a glint of devilment who seemed incessantly entertained by her own promiscuity, much like Arthur himself. The girl bragged and laughed about her many sex acts, but each explicit tale and each cackle seemed to me laced with sadness, the kind that haunts you when night falls and you are alone with yourself.

Roseanne and Arthur’s lack of supervision was more the rule than the exception. Since there were few jobs in Gibsland, most parents worked in neighboring towns and most kids had no parents at home after school. Which meant that in the afternoons Gibsland was almost entirely populated by handfuls of old people and hordes of restless young ones.

Little boys with bare feet and scraped knees scooped crawdads from the red-silt bottoms of tiny streams, the same streams that crawled over their banks and into the streets when a thunderstorm came calling, dropping rain faster than the earth could drink it. Other boys zipped through the streets on pieced-together bicycles, drawing adrenaline from fear in order to outrun vicious dogs that sprang from beneath rotting steps. Sandlot basketball games stretched from afternoon into night, played by glistening boys in grass-worn yards, clouds of orange dust at their feet, shots falling through warped bicycle rims nailed to leaning trees.

Pretty girls, precisely groomed in short-shorts and tight shirts, posed in cool places, showcasing an awareness, but not a command, of budding sexuality. They had just begun to use makeup—“painting,” folks called it—so they still applied it with a heavy hand: too much blue on the lids, too much pink in the cheeks.

Young men perched over oily motors under open hoods, trying to resuscitate hot rods, with the ghosts of skid marks, speeding tickets, and back-seat romps still exciting the imagination. Silky young women floated about in cotton dresses that caught the sun but released the heat.