Fire Shut Up in My Bones (11 page)

Our pastor, Reverend Brown, was a decent man with a good reputation. Not every congregation was so lucky. Preaching was a profession dotted with the supposedly repentant who touted their checkered pasts as a testimony to God’s grace—“Ef He can save a wratch like me . . . Hallelujah! Thank ya, JEE-suss!”

I, for one, was fascinated by Reverend Brown and his sermons, the way he played on opposites—reward and punishment, angels and demons, a gentle Savior and a vengeful God—flipping back and forth like a cook using a two-page recipe.

At our church, we came late and left early because my mother tired easily of the prolonged orchestration of it all. For her, anything over an hour was too long. “It don’t take the Lord two hours to save
nobody,
” she’d say. We would wait for the ushers to call us forward for the offering, and instead of returning to our seats afterward, we’d break for the door. She dared not leave in the middle of the sermon, lest God take it as disrespect. She reminded us of the story that Mam’ Grace told her about a man who had cursed at a preacher and thrown a Bible. “He shook till the day he died!”

When we got home from church, my mother opened the windows and cleaned the house to done-me-wrong, baby-come-back, ghetto-love anthems from her small collection of scratched records—Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Al Green, Otis Redding, and Johnnie Taylor. This Sunday morning-to-afternoon musical switch would reflect the framework of my faith—an ever-swirling mix of the orthodox and the secular.

Although religion, with all its talk of dying and blood and burning, scared me, I was fascinated by God’s use of fouled-up men and fallen women to extend His message; by His liberation of the poor, the outcast, and the infirm; and by His obsession with improbable transformations and inappropriate ascensions. If ever a body needed a savior, I did.

In the fall after Chester’s betrayal, I walked the aisle to give myself over. But by then Shiloh wasn’t the same Shiloh. The congregation had built itself a new building next door to the old one. It was a handsome brick church on a concrete slab, with crimson-upholstered pews and crimson-carpeted floors. It had a professional sound system, a beautifully lit, glassed-in baptismal pool, and an ornate pulpit. It had high vaulted ceilings and arches, wooden ribs with golden chandeliers hanging from their bosses. It was impressive but hollow—like a vanity. We no longer attended services in the building so full of life that it spoke to people’s eyes, but in a building that sat cold and hushed.

The walk of redemption now felt more theatrical. Still, I was determined to make it. When Reverend Brown finished his sermon, he made his way around to the front of the pulpit, wiped sweat from his brow, and invited the unsaved to come forward.

“Won’t sumbidy come dis moaning? Tamorr’ MIGHT be too late!”

I rose from my seat to an outburst of clapping and an outpouring of amens and thank-you-Jesuses. My mother, surprised and proud, smiled at me as I made my way down the aisle, which that day seemed a mile long. When I reached Reverend Brown, he put his large hand on my small shoulder and turned me around to face the congregation.

“What’s ya name, young man?”

“Charles McRay Blow,” I said into the microphone he’d thrust in my face.

(When I was born, Nathan pleaded with my mother to name me Ray Charles, after the singer. Charles McRay was her compromise. She insisted we have the most traditional first names possible, to balance such an odd last one.)

“Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God?” the preacher continued.

“Yes,” I said, embarrassed and nervous.

“Do you believe that he died fa yo’ sins?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to be baptized?”

I hesitated. Reverend Brown was big and burly and shined with the unctuous look of a man who’d just eaten half a ham. I was afraid of him. The times I’d seen him baptize someone, it had seemed to me a violent affair. And I couldn’t swim. I didn’t want to drown in church to keep from burning in hell.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know ’bout
all that.
”

The congregation burst into laughter as my mother slinked down in the pew. I made my way back to my seat. I was going to have to solve my problems on my own.

The Thursday before the first Sunday in August was Graveyard Working Day at the black cemetery in the historic hamlet of Mount Lebanon, three miles south of town, beyond the sweet potato farms. Mount Lebanon was an all-white community of folks who lived in a small cluster of well-maintained Greek Revival houses that hinted at a proud history. The community had been the center of wealth and scholarship in the region before the Civil War. It was the home of a university founded by an Irishman named Egan, brought to America by Thomas Jefferson. Folks said that Jefferson once called Egan “one of the ripest scholars of his age.”

But during the Civil War the university gave over its buildings to army surgeons, who filled them with Confederate wounded. The school reopened after the war, but now it was gone, all remnants of it wiped clean from that place, folded into the forest.

The one surviving bit of glory was the Baptist church, said to be the oldest continuously operating Baptist church in the state, started by a mulatto preacher who built a balcony to seat the slaves apart from the white folks.

But segregation didn’t end at the church doors; it extended into the cemetery.

Two burial grounds abutted each other—one for blacks, the other for whites. The black cemetery was filled with uneven rows of tiny, tilting gravestones. And those were the lucky folks. Some graves had no marker at all. Depending on how long ago it was dug, a grave was either just a rock-hard mound of dirt or a slight indentation from a casket that had long ago decayed and collapsed. In contrast, the white cemetery had a well-manicured, even lawn with gleaming monuments, perfectly aligned, reaching like giant arms toward heaven, each one seemingly taller than the last.

The two cemeteries were separated by a chainlink fence, lest anyone, living or dead, forget the rules—say, someone like the “white trash woman” who hung around the West End and had a baby by a black man. The way it was told to me, the baby died and the woman wanted to bury it with her family on the white side of the cemetery. When white folks found out that the baby was half black, they refused her, so she buried her baby on the black side as close to the fence as she could.

My mother told me that when she was a girl, every black family came on Graveyard Working Day and groomed their family’s plot. It was like an all-day community picnic with the dead. A minister presided over the activities with a group prayer. People hoed weeds, raked leaves, cleared grass, and replaced sun-bleached plastic flowers. Elders recited family histories, connecting brief biographies and fascinating tales with each headstone as if flipping through the pages of a photo album.

But this year only a few families showed up. Overgrown graves and weed-covered plots were everywhere; it was not uncommon for a grave to get “lost.” Our family brought only water and a few sandwiches and worked quickly and purposefully, leaving as soon as we could.

On a previous trip to the cemetery I’d learned that Chester had been a twin, but that his brother was stillborn. The dead baby had been buried in an unmarked grave in our family’s area, somewhere to the left of Mam’ Grace and Papa Joe, near the trunk of a large tree. But by the time I learned of Chester’s twin, the grave had disappeared.

On this day I walked around that tree, looking for some evidence that the ground had once been turned—a slight indentation, the remains of a tiny mound, anything. I wanted to find that boy. My young mind couldn’t help but imagine that he was dead because of Chester. How could Chester have lived and the other boy died? It was simple: Chester had killed him before they made it out into the world. He was another boy whose life Chester had taken. I figured that if I could find him, he could help me to survive, tell me some secret that he had learned too late to save himself.

I never found the grave. But, standing there under that tree, I imagined that Chester’s twin could hear me, that we understood each other, and that there in that shaded spot we cried together.

His spirit was present there, as were the spirits of Papa Joe and Mam’ Grace. Like the boy’s grave, I was lost too. But there, surrounded by them, I found the remnants of myself. There my soul could again be quiet, still and untroubled.

It was like the way I’d felt at the skating rink before I’d reached for the aspirin, except then it had felt more like surrendering to weakness. This felt more like gathering strength. In that moment in the graveyard I saw my own life and trials through the prism of past lives. In that moment the weight of my shame and separation was lifted.

There, among the sleeping souls of old folks and in the company of a dead boy, I came back to life. But a boy still walking can’t stay in a graveyard, even a boy so recently broken and dead on the inside. I had to find a place to heal myself among the living.

4

I spent much of my third-grade year hanging out with the punk next door.

At least that’s what everyone called him. His real name was Shane. He was a year older than me and lived on the other side of the wooded lot into which my father had disappeared to escape my mother’s gunshots.

If I was now two beats off in the dance that boys did to establish and affirm their masculinity and to find their place in the pack, Shane never even heard the music. But I didn’t mind that about him. After all, I hadn’t been touched by a punk. I’d been touched by a regular boy, a boy’s boy. In fact, with Chester now calling me the same thing—punk—I secretly felt some kinship with Shane.

Still, I hated that word and didn’t want the label to take hold with other folks because of my association with Shane. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to walk into Shane’s world if I had to do so alone. Luckily, another boy my age who’d just moved in down the street—a boy with no stigma other than newness—had also started to play at Shane’s house. The new boy’s presence gave cover for mine.

Everything about Shane said that he was different from other boys. He was not favored by nature. He had curves in places boys shouldn’t have curves—hippy and chesty and none of it muscle, at least not in appearance. Even his face was different, the kind of face that held no tension in the brow or around the mouth. And his eyes were too soft and stretched too wide open, like they wanted to ask a question they didn’t dare ask, a question that needed to be preceded by an apology.

As effete as Shane’s manner was, there was a line he never crossed, as far as I knew, a line only ever crossed by two boys in town, both of whom had stopped pretending not to be punks, both of whom were my second cousins.

Both were starvation-thin. Both had wispy, processed hair grown long enough that it would move with a good snap of the neck. Both wore their pants high and their belts tight. And both walked with their wrists turned out—the kind of walk that tells the world that you prefer being chased to chasing.

They didn’t even sit like other boys—gap-legged and sprawled out, taking up twice as much space as needed. Instead, they sat with knees together, hands pressed palm-to-palm, the way people do when praying, only their fingers weren’t pointing up toward heaven but pushed down between their thighs. And they held their shoulders concave, bodies contracting, purposely making themselves smaller than they were, shrinking from the world. One had a lisp and the other hissed his
s
’s so high that they produced a faint whistle when they trailed off.

Lawrence was the cousin who whistled the
s
’s. His mother, my great-aunt Trudy, was a big-boned wig-splitter whom I once saw come to shoot a woman for sleeping with her husband. It was on a night when we still lived in the House with No Steps and our wringer washer had failed. My mother had taken our clothes to the laundromat, and, as always, she’d brought me with her. The only two people inside doing laundry were my mother and the cheating woman. I played outside, in and around the car.

Aunt Trudy whipped her car into the parking lot and jumped out, waving a pistol and yelling at the woman to come outside. My mother and the woman dropped to the floor. I rose up on the seat of our car to see what would happen. My mother yelled for me to get down; no one came outside. Soon Aunt Trudy got back in her car and drove away. She surely would have shot that woman if she’d been certain she wouldn’t hit my mother and I wouldn’t see.

Aunt Trudy wasn’t a woman given to threats. She was the kind who bit first and barked later. Her idea of childhood stories was talking about the time she jumped from the bushes with a chain and beat a girl who told a lie. If you were on the side of right, you were good with Aunt Trudy. If you were on the side of wrong, God help you.

I often wondered how a boy as soft as Lawrence could come from such a tough woman. Maybe women like that sucked up so much of the strength in a house that not enough was left for all the men. Maybe that had happened to Lawrence. I worried that maybe it would happen to me.

Sometimes at night Lawrence would stop by the tiny upholstery shop kept by another cousin, down at the corner where our street met the highway. They were both related to my family, but not to each other. There Lawrence would talk slick and flirty and say things that he didn’t dare say when the sun was up and staring eyes burned holes into him.

The shopkeeper was a Vietnam veteran who’d come back from the war with a metal plate in his head and something gone from it. He often worked late into the night, partly because he always seemed to be behind and partly because he never seemed to want to go home. He probably preferred his shop full of dead chairs to his house full of live people.

My brother Robert, the one who had walked like a mummy for the glass of water, was his apprentice, so I often went to the shop at night. It was stacked head-high with wooden chair frames, waiting to have a spring fixed or a cushion replaced, waiting to be covered in fake leather or clear plastic. The shop was full of sounds: the tinny music of a small radio, the buzz of a sewing machine, and the thump of a staple gun alongside the large air pump that powered it. The whole space spoke to renewal and transformation.