Fire Shut Up in My Bones (8 page)

And that was it. My first father, the one who knew what love was, gone. The ocean had dried up. And that changed Big Mama in ways that I was unable and unwilling to handle.

She hung a plaque with the Serenity Prayer on it next to the front door:

God, grant me the serenity to accept

     the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

But serenity was now the furthest thing from that little yellow house.

Jed had held Big Mama’s heart and seemed to take half of it with him when he crossed over. His death scarred her deeply. Most of the ache she kept in, but some leaked out.

She began to spank us kids more frequently and more severely. Sometimes she used a switch. Other times she used one of Jed’s old belts. Once I saw her beat James with a water hose.

This was an odd and unsettling turn for me.

My mother was not cut from this cloth. As unforgiving as she could be when crossed by grown folks, my mother didn’t take well to the notion of spanking children. She spanked, but rarely. Maybe it was a generational easing. Maybe it was her unending rebellion against Big Mama.

My mother told us that Big Mama had a mean streak, but I had never known it. My mother often recounted a story of a particularly harsh beating she had received. Big Mama had assumed that my mother had done something wrong. When my mother tried to explain, Big Mama told her to shut up and started whipping her. Refusing to be silenced, my mother kept yelling, “Mama, let me tell ya! Mama, let me tell ya!” Infuriated by my mother’s insolence, Big Mama kept beating her. Eventually, Grandpa Bill had to step in and tell Big Mama, “Don’t beat ha no mo’!” Neither one of them was going to give up anytime soon, or ever after.

Even when my mother thought it necessary to spank us she couldn’t always bring herself to do it.

Like the time at the hairdresser’s. Twice a month we boys would go there with my mother. The hairdresser lived in a rundown house at the end of a dead-end road, past a small sugarcane farm with a one-mule press. She had transformed her modest living room, crowded with knickknacks and covered in family pictures, into a makeshift salon. A beautician’s chair sat in the middle of the room, where she used flame-heated irons to fry my mother’s hair into neat rows of tight curls, small clouds of sulfur-scented smoke rising from each ringlet.

There was a lumpy, threadbare sofa facing the chair, and another one in a small alcove off to the right, where we boys sat with the hairdresser’s mother, who never spoke but always chewed gum, amazingly producing several popped bubbles with every chomp.

We sometimes had to wait there for hours, under strict orders from our mother not to cause a commotion or ask for, or accept, any food or drink—it would have been rude.

“You better not go nowhere and act like I ain’t never fed you.”

One day at the hairdresser’s Robert got really thirsty but was afraid to ask for water. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, eyes closed, arms outstretched, with limp wrists like the mummies in the television cartoons, and began to walk slowly, taking goose steps, while dragging out his words: “I . . . want . . . some . . . wa-ter. Give . . . me . . . some . . . wa-ter.” My mother sat straight up in the chair, head half done, fuming. The other women, waiting their turn in the chair, laughed hysterically, urging on my brother’s performance. “He sleepwalkin’, gurl! Don’t wake ’im up! They say it’s dang’ous when you wake ’em up.”

We thought that surely this little act, though hilarious, would get Robert beaten. When we got in the car, my mother chastised him while she fought a smile—“I shoulda to’e yo’ behind up”—but she never spanked him. It was just too funny.

Big Mama didn’t seem to have that lighter side anymore. It seemed to have left with Jed from the room containing the bed that now had no wrinkles. She seemed given to pain and sorrow without him. Ironically, in Big Mama’s job as a housekeeper and babysitter, she was the most gentle, even-tempered, quick-to-laugh person you could imagine—the grandmother I wished I could have back. Maybe this was just a survival skill—though I doubt it, based on the number of wallet-sized pictures of white children tucked into the corners of the frames that held our portraits. I could never reconcile those two sides of her.

I would still go to Kiblah to stay for a couple of weeks in the summers, but things had changed too much and the good feelings were fading. It was no longer the safe, beautiful place it once had been.

That fall I was six years old, on the edge of my seat, clinging to the dashboard of a speeding car. My mother was behind the wheel, cradling her pistol, trying to catch a woman we had never met.

It was Thanksgiving Day, and just hours earlier our home had been filled with the sounds of excitement and the smell of food. Grandpa Bill had come from Houston. He was newly separated from his beautiful young wife. Big Mama had come from Arkansas, newly widowed by Jed. My father was there as well, newly exiled from my mother’s affections.

It was a year that had torn at the fabric of our family, yet there we were, all together, smiling and laughing, resetting our faith, and reaffirming our love.

The air was filled with the smell of celebration—fruit and nuts, cakes and pies, ham and turkey, cornbread dressing and giblet gravy.

As always, Grandpa Bill held forth with his stories. He talked and laughed loudly like a man trying to be heard across a field, happy that the day’s work was done. No one could tell a story like him, the way he locked eyes on you and drew you in. He started slowly, setting the scene with colorful details. Then his voice would begin to swell and his tempo quicken. By the time he reached the climax, he was screaming the words and howling with laughter, as were we.

Between his stories, he’d offer his opinion of me and my brothers. Like my father, he was impressed with my brothers’ resourcefulness and break-it-down-and-fix-it-up nature. But he didn’t know what to make of me, a boy who clung so closely to his mother. He would often say, as if I wasn’t there, “That boy is never going to leave Billie’s side.” He said it not out of malice, but it hurt every time all the same. I knew even then that it meant he thought I would never make much of myself, that I would be stuck under her wing, afraid to spread my own.

I didn’t agree with his assessment, but I didn’t know how to refute it. All I knew was that I was smarter than I was strong. And that I was drawing something special from my mother. I was learning more by following her and watching her than anyone had ever set out to teach me. I just had no idea if it would be enough to help me make it in the world without her.

That Thanksgiving, Big Mama chatted Grandpa Bill up and egged him on. She openly flirted with him. He gently brushed her aside. It was easy to see what had drawn them to each other and what had made their union unsustainable. They amplified each other, but to a dangerous degree. There were no brakes. Neither of them had the will or the power to turn it off, only to turn it up. Besides, the fact that Big Mama was nearly his age made her too old for his current tastes. But that didn’t stop the old girl from trying.

My mother bounced about in the kitchen, clinking pots, occasionally yelling a playful interjection or letting loose a belly laugh. While Big Mama’s presence often irritated my mother, Grandpa Bill’s presence excited her. He was the parent in whom she delighted. She was his namesake. She lit up for him, vying for his attention, bending over backward to make sure that he was comfortable and satisfied, still trying desperately to be daddy’s little girl.

My father sat quietly, occasionally managing a grin or a chuckle, but mostly trying to blend into the background of a family to which he no longer belonged. My mother continued allowing him to visit, particularly on the holidays, for the sake of me and my brothers.

Soon my mother called everyone to the table, my grandfather said a prayer, and we dug in. That was what I loved about Thanksgiving: it was one of the only times that we ate together at the table. Most of the time we ate on the run or in our rooms with plates in our laps.

After dinner, we lounged around, drifting in and out of conversation and in and out of consciousness as my mother and Big Mama put away food and washed dishes. The phone rang. My mother answered it, but there was no response on the other end. After a few seconds, the caller hung up. My mother thought nothing of it. A few minutes later, the same thing—a ring, an answer, but no response. This kept up for more than an hour. My mother grew suspicious and irritated.

Then, on one of her trips from the kitchen to the dining room, she caught sight of a car creeping by outside. The joy drained from her face. Her eyes widened and her lips pursed. It was the car of one of my father’s women—had to be. That was who had been playing on the phone, hoping that eventually he, not my mother, would answer. Now she had shown up. It was an act of disrespect, and disrespect was my mother’s trigger.

Without saying a word, she walked out of the door and got into her car. As usual, I followed, ever the mama’s boy. We quickly looped around the block until we caught sight of the woman’s car again. Now my mother was sure. Her outrage boiled over. The woman had practically come to our front door. She had violated my mother’s zone of dignity. Now she would see how much of a mistake that had been.

When we got all the way around the block, my mother stopped in front of our house and gave me instructions: “Go in there and get my pistol outta my pockabook and don’t let nobody see you.” She wanted to keep her eye on the woman’s car. She was so blinded by rage that she couldn’t see how wrong it was to send a six-year-old child to retrieve a loaded gun.

My mother wasn’t a troublemaker, but if trouble came calling, it would be met with force. That happy Thanksgiving Day—in her mind, pumped up by hours of Grandpa Bill’s stories about gun-pulling and chain-whipping—trouble had come calling. That was what Grandpa Bill did to folks, what must have made him such a great soldier: he made everyone around him feel braver, more reckless, more the defenders of honor than they had been before.

I walked into the house, got the gun, tucked it into my pants, covered it with my shirt, and walked back out to the waiting car. No one suspected a thing. I got in and passed my mother the gun, and we sped off. We soon caught up to the woman, but when she realized we were chasing her, she pushed the pedal to the metal. My mother responded in kind. We raced through the town’s narrow streets, then onto Interstate 20. The woman was weaving through cars, dodging onto the shoulder, and dipping into the median. My mother was right behind her, not giving an inch. I clung to the dashboard, adrenaline pulsing through my body. I was excited and terrified at the same time, repeating in my mind, “Git ha, Mama! Git ha!”

I don’t know what made my mother stop chasing the woman, but I always believed that at least in part it was the image of her little boy awash in her bloodlust, glassy-eyed and salivating for a horrible end to the chase. It was sad and wrong, and she knew it. It was dangerous and futile, and she knew it. So she took her foot off the gas pedal and let it all go. Her indignation was costing her her sanity. The car, and my heartbeat, began to slow. The woman got away and my mother gave up—gave up fighting my father’s women and her ghosts. She set herself free.

There is nothing like the presence of a gun, and an earnest intent to use it, to draw the totality of a life into sharp relief. That was a lesson I would learn early and often. But even more important was the idea that, at any moment, we all had the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past and step beyond it.

We went back home and rejoined the conversation as if nothing had happened.

Later, my mother made plates of the leftovers and delivered them to people in the community who needed a good meal and a little help. That was the way it was with my mother, constantly vacillating between hotheaded vigilante and beneficent exemplar—between the temper she had inherited from Grandpa Bill and the temperance she had absorbed from Mam’ Grace.

Also that afternoon, Grandpa Bill, an avid gun collector, drove me and my brothers to an open spot in the woods and let us take turns firing his .45-caliber pistol. He didn’t know that I’d had enough gunplay for one day.

When it was my turn, I pulled the trigger and the weapon exploded in my hand, jolting my body, the clap leaving me momentarily deaf and securing in me the profound discomfort of how easily and irreversibly its lethal power could be unleashed.

Once that bullet left the chamber there was nothing you could do to bring it back. Once you shot at someone, everything else was up to God. A mistake seemed too easy to make. Something done in a fit anger or after a few swigs of alcohol—the way I had seen and heard of guns being used—could last forever.

I thought to myself that, unlike my grandfather and my mother, I could never shoot at another person. That feeling wouldn’t last always.

3

Summers in north Louisiana in some ways were brutal. The heat was heavy. It pushed back against anything that tried to speed up. The sun cracked the earth, chasing everything that could escape into the shade, sucking the life from everything that couldn’t, like the fried earthworms that littered the streets, the ones that tried to slither across during the cool of the morning but didn’t make it before the sun heated the asphalt like a griddle.

The thick air was a swarming mass of horseflies and houseflies, moths and mosquitoes, wasps, yellow jackets, and bumblebees. Folks sat around smoky fires fanning rags to ward off the bugs and to stay free of stings. To keep the snakes out of the grass we sprinkled lime along the fencerows, which was supposed to burn their bellies as they crossed them. It never seemed to work.

In other ways, the summers were beautiful and sweet. There were magnolia blossoms up high and jonquil flowers down low. Honeysuckle-scented breezes wafted through the long days. Fruit and nuts ripened in the trees that cast cool shade. Clouds of pollen filled the air like flurries of snow.