Men We Reaped (15 page)

“Yes ma'am.”

Joshua and Nerissa and Charine were watching TV. Nerissa followed us out into the yard, while Charine sat in Joshua's lap on the floor in front of the couch.

“Hang up these clothes,” she said. She pulled a wet shirt, wrinkled and heavy, from the hamper, and then a clothespin from a bag she'd pinned to the line. She then took a pin from the bag, looped the shirt over the line by its bottom hem, and clipped it to the line.

“This is how you hang shirts. Upside down.”

I nodded.

“Pants by the waist.”

She handed me a shirt.

“Yes ma'am,” I said.

I knew how to do some of it from watching her for years at my grandmother's, where she and her sister washed clothes and sheets for thirteen people and hung them out to dry on lines that stretched the length of the yard. I began hanging on the opposite line: pants crooked, towels like big triangles. Hanging the shirts bothered me. I wanted to hang them from their shoulders because our shirts were constantly stretched out at the hem and hung on our bony frames like A-line skirts, but I did not.

This is how things were done in my mother's house.

My father's leaving affected me. I locked myself in the bathroom sometimes, which was the only room in our new house where I could claim some privacy, and I looked at myself. I could not see my father in my facial features. He figured prominently in my siblings' large, dark, heavily lashed eyes, but my own seemed small. Too light brown in color. Too sparsely fringed. The rest of my body was also a disappointment: my birth scars mottled and angry and red, my frame
weakly muscled, pale. My hair was the opposite of my father's: while his was silky and black, mine was dirty brown and prone to matting. This disappointed me the most. It seemed I had been able to keep nothing of my father. His leaving felt like a repudiation of the child I was and the young woman I was growing into. I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman. Undervalued by her family, a perpetual workhorse. Undervalued by society regarding her labor and her beauty. This seed buried itself in my stomach and bore fruit. I hated myself. That seed bloomed in the way I walked, slumped over, eyes on the floor, in the way I didn't even attempt to dress well, in the way I avoided the world, when I could, through reading, and in the way I took up as little space as possible and tried to attract as little notice as I could, because why should I? I was something to be left.

I was too young to realize this, but others saw the self-loathing sprouting in me, and they responded to it. At the end of the summer, my mother enrolled us in the unfamiliar local elementary school. I was in the fifth grade. For the first two weeks of the term before my aptitude test scores were processed, I was in a class with a large boy who singled me out for taunting and abuse. Anytime he found me alone in a corner of the library or near the back of our homeroom, he grabbed me by the joints, pinned me to the floor or to my desk or to a wall, and tried to grab my butt. I yanked away from him and did my best to avoid him, but it did no good. I fought like the rabbit I was: timid until grabbed, and then frantic, kicking and twisting. In three weeks, I moved to a
more advanced class. But I did not shed my innate sense of worthlessness. I was friends for around a month with the other three Black girls in the class. Then they began bullying me, and my grades dropped. I was miserable, perpetually afraid, and addled on adrenaline, but secretly I was not surprised by it. I thought I deserved it because others were only seeing what I saw, that I was a miserable nothing, and they were acting accordingly. I was depressed at home when I had no idea what depression was, so much so that my mother became concerned enough to pull me out of the school and enroll me in the middle school in Pass Christian during the winter break.

I was excited and anxious at once. I would know some of the other kids. Most students who graduated from DeLisle Elementary were transferred to Pass Christian middle school. But it would be my second school in half a year, and the other experience had been miserable. What if the bullying continued? I knew without knowing that others would see me as a target, and they did. At Pass Middle, I was bullied by three separate groups of girls. I spent all my spare time in the underequipped library, which seemed to have fewer books than my elementary school. I made only two friends, a Black girl and a Vietnamese girl, and we spent our time eating crackers we'd stolen out of the cafeteria, talking about boys and books. I felt more of a kinship with the Vietnamese girl; she was as much of an outsider as I was. I spent my time with her trying to learn Vietnamese through Vietnamese pop songs she taught me. But I was alone in the locker rooms, in the gym, in most of my classes with all the other groups of bullies, and my grades continued to slide southward.

My mother didn't know what to do. Her understanding of my hatred for myself was muddied, unclear. Instead of seeing it as directed at myself, she read it as a sullen anger, a prepubescent hatred that was aimed at her for leaving my father and breaking up the family. This made her pull me even closer, demand even more of me as a cleaner and caretaker in the household. She thought she could discipline it out of me, this sulky hatred. When I turned twelve, I began watching my siblings alone while my mother was at work. My mother knew I was still smart even though my grades were plummeting, so when the employer she'd worked for as a housekeeper since leaving my father and moving to Gulfport asked about my grades, she was honest. Her employer was a White lawyer who'd attended Harvard and practiced corporate law in New Orleans, and in her early days of working for the family, he'd heard stories about her oldest, who was smart, who'd excelled in public school and been in gifted programs. My mother told him that my grades were bad. That I was being bullied at all the schools I attended. Perhaps her employer had been bullied as a child, because even though he had the build of a linebacker, he was soft-spoken and gentle, which would be easy for others to read as weakness. Whatever his reasons, it was unusual, but he offered to pay my tuition to attend the private Episcopalian school his children attended. My mother, always loath to accept help after being betrayed by my father (when he left, she had no credit because he'd had all the cars and bills in his name, and she was left with four children to feed and a nonexistent financial history; she still hates to accept help today, for fear that after it's given it will be taken back), mulled it over for a bit but then accepted
the offer. When she asked me if I wanted to switch schools, I gladly accepted. I think my mother would have worked for the family whether or not the husband offered to pay for my schooling, but in accepting his offer, I'd locked her into this employment situation for at least six more years, the time I would need to graduate from high school, regardless of whether she was happy or wanted to work elsewhere. But she saw no other options; this was the job she would work to provide for her children so she could still have enough time out of work to raise them. She would not be an absent mother.

I wasn't the only one having trouble in school. Joshua was only doing enough work to scrape by in second grade. Nerissa was also having trouble in kindergarten; her teacher sent her to the school counselor, who called my mother in for a conference and told her she thought Nerissa had an attention disorder and should be medicated. My mother refused. Charine was oblivious and swimming through preschool. My mother tried her best to support us academically at home. Homework was always a priority. But all of us felt our father's loss keenly, and this sense of being lost and unbalanced found its way into our schoolwork. Even though she tried her hardest, our mother could not be there in school with us during the day; there were some ways that our mother could not help us. Every day after school, we sat at the table with our books, all of us desperately trying to do better and all aware, in the bewildered way that children are, that we were failing.

My father had visited once or twice since we'd moved into the house in Gulfport, and when he did, our mother spoke to him briefly and then confined herself to the kitchen or to her room, her door shut. Often she listened to us talking to him, dancing around him, dizzy with longing. It must have been palpable to her, how we changed when we were around him; he had the luxury of being emotionally engaging and attentive while he was with us, while my mother, ever the disciplinarian, felt that she could not. Perhaps she saw in our worshipful faces some of what she'd felt toward her father when she was a child. Perhaps this was why, unbeknownst to us, she began talking to my father about reconciliation.

On his third or so visit, my father sat in the living room, a tray on his lap. My mother had cooked for him, served him food; usually she ignored him. After we'd eaten, we all sat in the living room, watching television, until my mother told us to take baths. We did, and then she sent us to our rooms. Nerissa, Charine, and I lay in the dark, undulating gently on the waterbed. Nerissa and Charine fell asleep, but I was awake, waiting for the side door to open, to close, for my father to catch his ride, or for my mother to take him wherever he was living at the time. He'd been drifting from job to job since leaving my mother, and at the time he was unemployed. He'd wrecked his motorcycle and his car was broken. But the sound of the door didn't come. I eased off the bed, hoping I wouldn't wake my sisters, and crawled across the floor to the door of our room. I eased it open. All the lights were off in the house except my mother's, and her door was closed. I crawled out into the hallway to my brother's room.

“Josh?”

“Huh?”

“You up?”

Stupid question. I crawled into the room, stopped beside the bottom bunk bed.

“Daddy ain't left yet.”

“I know,” he said.

I didn't know what else to say. We sat in the dark for a while, listening to the other rooms, hearing nothing, talking once in a while:
Do you hear that? Do you think?
We wondered in silence if our father had returned. I sat on Joshua's floor and lay my head on his bed. Josh's breathing grew deeper, until I could tell he was asleep. When he snored, I crawled back to our room, afraid to walk, afraid for my mother to find I was out of bed when I shouldn't be. I climbed into bed with my sisters, pushing Charine over to sleep next to Nerissa, but it was a long time before I fell asleep, my heart beating wildly in my chest with hope and fear.

This is how my father came back.

After my father moved his clothing and his kung fu knickknacks in with us, his dream, he told my mother, was to open a kung fu school. Perhaps having my father vocalize his dreams made her realize how strongly my father yearned for them. My mother acquiesced:
You can do it
, she said. He would take his children on as his first students, recruit others, find a space.
Okay
, my mother said. What my mother left unsaid:
I'll keep working, supporting us all, while you try to live your dream
. Her sacrifice remained unacknowledged.
One day
, my father
said,
the school will support the family
. I think a part of my mother wanted to believe that this was the truth, so she agreed.

First, my father arranged to teach classes in an after-school program in Biloxi, and then he arranged to teach a class at a dance studio in Pass Christian, and another in Gulf-port. He recruited students. The Biloxi program never had more than two, so he cancelled those classes and concentrated on the others, which had more, around ten in Pass Christian and fifteen in Gulfport. He carted us around with him to classes four out of five nights of the week, classes that lasted three hours at a time. We were decent students; he'd taught us forms and one-step sparring since we'd lived in my grandmother's house in DeLisle. We learned the Eight Elbow form out on the patchy, sandy front yard. In our classes in Gulf-port and Pass Christian, my father made us do endless sets of sit-ups, push-ups on our knuckles, forms, and sparring. While this was a great start for his business, there still wasn't enough money coming in from students to cover expenses. Once he paid to rent the spaces, there was barely enough money to put gas in the car. This became apparent to me one night after our kung fu class. We were all in the car, including my cousin Aldon, leaving Pass Christian and returning to Gulfport. I noticed the car was gradually slowing.

“We ran out of gas,” my father said. I thought he was playing a joke on us. I started laughing.

“No, really,” he said.

“We're running out of gas?” Josh asked. Aldon sat up straighter beside him and leaned forward. The car rolled to a stop. The road was dark.

“We have to push,” my father said. “Everybody but Nerissa and Charine out of the car.” This meant me, Josh, and Aldon. I was twelve, and they were both nine. We were all sore from our workout, still in our uniforms.

“Out,” my father said.

We got out.

“Come on, it'll be fun,” he said, his teeth white in the dark. There were streetlights every quarter mile or so, but no traffic on this lonely country road, and my father didn't want to leave us alone with the car. “There's a gas station up at the corner. We need to make it to the pay phone.” We nodded. “Now, I'm going to steer and push from the front, while y'all three get in the back. Grab the bumper…. Yeah, that's it.” My father walked around to the front of the car, leaned into the driver's-side door, and grunted, straining.

“Now push!” he said.

We leaned against the car. It rocked but did not move.

“Come on. You have to push harder!”

We dug the toes of our tennis shoes into the rutted asphalt and pushed with our legs, our backs, our arms. We grunted like our father, straining, and the car rolled forward so slowly I could hardly believe it budged.

“Keep going!” Daddy said. “It's right up the road.”