Men We Reaped (21 page)

Joshua took a pan out. We'd never cooked together before, but I needed help. I had no idea what to do with what little we had left over from the week. I opened a can of tuna, dumped it in.

“What else we're going to put in it?” I asked Joshua.

“Cheese,” he said.

I dumped leftover rice from some red beans and rice Mama'd packed for us, and Joshua added some peas. Finally I added more cheese. It bubbled.

“What should we call it?” Josh asked.

“It looks like throw-up,” Nerissa said.

Josh tasted a spoonful, then added salt.

“It's good,” he said.

“Regurgitation,” I said. “We'll call it regurgitation. We're chefs!”

We ate most of it. When my father came home, there was
only a little left. He tasted it, but much of what we'd saved for him stayed in the pot. Later on, he played music on the big stereo in the living room, and all of us danced in front of the mirror.

The next afternoon and evening, my father was gone again. My little sisters were at my father's baby mama's apartment, so our sixteen-year-old cousin Marcus decided he would take Joshua and me to the movies to see
Boomerang
. Five minutes into the movie, an usher bent over our seats.

“Joshua and Mimi?”
We're too young to be in here
, I thought.
They're kicking us out
. “Your cousin passed out in the bathroom. We think he's drunk.”

We followed the usher to the bathroom and saw Marcus facedown on the tile. He'd been drinking before we got on the bus that took us to the Galleria to see the movie, but I hadn't realized he'd been that drunk. I panicked. Our father didn't have a house phone, and I didn't know the numbers for my father's brothers or his baby mama. We were marooned.

“What are we going to do?” I said.

“Come on,” Josh said.

He walked to the pay phone in the hallway, began flipping through the phone book.

“Uncle Dwight's number is probably in here,” he said. I hadn't thought of that, and felt stupid for panicking when my brother, three years younger, was so calm. And practical. Joshua found the number, and I called our uncle. Thirty minutes or so later, our father arrived at the Galleria in a big old Cadillac with white leather seats. Daddy dragged Marcus out
of the theater and dumped him in the backseat, and we followed. I asked Daddy whose car we were riding in.

“A friend's,” he said. I assumed he'd borrowed the car from one of his girlfriends.

“Josh had the idea to call Uncle Dwight. I didn't know what to do,” I said.

Joshua was disappointed. Our tastes in movies had changed from horror to Arnold Schwarzenegger action films and Eddie Murphy comedies. Our trip to view
Boomerang
would be the first time either of us had ever seen an Eddie Murphy film in a theater, and he had really looked forward to it. Even though I hadn't been the one to faint in a pool of vomit in the bathroom, I felt like I'd failed my brother in some way that evening. But he'd shown me that he could be levelheaded and solid when I could not be.

“That was smart,” my father said. “Common sense. What happened to you, Mimi?”

I didn't reply to my father. It was the first time that someone had told me that I lacked common sense, and it was an odd thing for me to hear, since I'd been praised for my intelligence my entire life. My father probably meant it as a joke, but I couldn't see it as one; instead, I added it to the long list of reasons that helped me to make sense of why he'd left us, and why he continued to leave us even when my mother brought us to visit.

One day, Topher, a boy two years older than me, walked into the classroom while my classmates and I were taking a
history test. My teacher had stepped out of the room to make photocopies, and she'd already been gone for ten minutes when Topher wandered in the room. He smiled at the classroom in general: when he saw me, he stopped for a moment, his face frowned long. Then he smiled and sat on my desk. I looked up and he began telling nigger jokes.

“What do you call a nigger that …?” He said. He was taller than me, wore a dirty blond crewcut, and had a narrow face. He answered himself.

“How many niggers does it take to …?” he said. He looked down at my head, and I looked down at my desk. He answered himself.

“What does one nigger say to another nigger when …?” he said. I told myself:
Don't cry. This asshole wants to see you cry, wants to see you freak out. Take your test. Just take your test
.

“A nigger, an oriental, and a Polish man walk into a bar …,” he said. He finished the joke, leaned back and laughed to the fluorescent-lit ceiling. I was hot, sweating. I wrote down a word or two of a sentence, held my pencil poised above my test as if I were on the verge of writing something profound, something worthy of an A. Topher was impatient.

“Come on, Mimi,” he said. “I know you know some good honky jokes. Why don't you tell them to us?” I stared at him and thought of how good it would feel to lunge at him, to grab his throat, to sink my thumbs into the skin and muscle over his esophagus, to push and see him turning blue. To silence him the way he silenced me just by walking into the classroom, just by being White and blond and treating the world as if it were made for him to walk through it.

“Topher.” My history teacher walked back into the classroom, her blond hair feathered and framing the egg of her face like a nest. “Get out of my classroom.” She didn't address what he'd said, the jokes. She hadn't heard. I looked at my classmates, and they looked at their tests. None of them said a word.

Some of them were my friends, and they never took up for me, for Black people, when I was in the room. And according to what some of them told me in private conversation, they didn't when I wasn't in the room, either. Perhaps they were just as shocked or uncomfortable. I didn't know. One day, one of my classmates, Sophia, who was moonfaced with straight brown hair, cornered me in the student lounge during our study break.

“I heard something,” she said.

“What?”

“Well, we were all sitting in Ms. Day's classroom, and she left, and we started talking about stuff. We started talking about Black people and Molly said she could never kiss one, couldn't imagine it because their lips are so big. And then Wendy told us this story about how some Black people pulled into her driveway to turn around and her dad started yelling at them to get out. She said he called them scoobies. Scoobies, she said.” Wendy was one of the few other ethnic girls in the school at the time: her family was Chinese American. At the time, this surprised me; I hadn't expected this from another person of color. Years later in college, I'd read an essay by Toni Morrison that posited that this was normal for newer immigrants to the United States: place oneself in opposition to Black people from the beginning so that the members of
that ethnic group would not be aligned with Black people, the lowest of the low, but would instead be aligned with others who disdained us.

“Like Scooby Doo?” I said. “Like dogs?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And what did you say?”

“I didn't say anything,” Sophia said.

Why are you telling me this?
I wanted to ask her, but I didn't ask because I thought I understood from her face some of why she told me. She looked sorry and guilty, her eyebrows drawn together and the ends of her mouth turned down. For the first time I understood that some of my schoolmates felt guilty by complicity, felt bad for keeping their mouths shut, for going along with it. For not taking up for me when I called them my friends.

“Well, thanks,” I said. I squirmed on the dark green bench, looked down at my hands on the table. I didn't know how to respond to Sophia. I never even imagined confronting Wendy.

Years later, I understood that what Sophia wanted when she told me that story was absolution. But I didn't understand that when she finished speaking, her upper body leaning forward expectantly over the table. At the time, what she told me didn't mean much to me. I assumed that, regardless of the friendship we shared, a lot of my White schoolmates were racist: some of them, I thought, just had the balls to come out and say it in front of me. I should have spoken to some of my teachers about how I felt, but I didn't think to do so at the time. Later, when I was an adult, I told one of my science
teachers about what had happened to me and she said, “I wish you would have told me.” But I couldn't. I was so depressed by the subtext I felt, so depressed I was silenced, because the message was always the same:
You're Black. You're less than White
. And then, at the heart of it:
You're less than human
.

Sometimes I wanted to leave that school. But how could I tell my mother that I didn't want to take advantage of the opportunity she was working herself ragged to provide for me? I broached the subject once, spurred by two of my friends, artists and writers, who were leaving my private school to attend private boarding schools in California.
You'd get a scholarship so easily
, they'd told me. They'd even invited me on a trip to visit them in school, and though I knew racism was everywhere and the dearth of Black faces at their boarding schools scared me, I wanted to apply, to leave Mississippi, to escape the narrative I encountered in my family, my community, and my school that I was worthless, a sense that was as ever present as the wet, cloying heat. “You can't leave,” my mother said to me. “You have to help me with your siblings.” When she said that, I felt all the weight of the South pressing down on me, and it was then that I resolved to leave the region for college, but to do it in a way that respected the sacrifices my mother made for me. I studied harder. I read more. How could I know then that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?

At the end of that school year, Joshua lived with my father in his apartment for the entire two months of summer vacation. He was thirteen. By then he was taller than my mother, and he wasn't cowed by her in the old ways that I'd been cowed, or in which my sisters were cowed. He was self-assured around her, brutally honest and funny, would say things to her about girls he liked or his friends that I or any of my sisters would never dare to say. He was a boy, and my mother loved him especially for it. But she knew the danger of being a Black man in the South, and she thought my father could teach my brother things, important things, about survival, things she assumed she could not teach him. Even though she could have taught him about what it meant to be strong, to work hard, to love unconditionally, to sacrifice for others, to stand, she sent him to my father.

I missed Joshua but didn't realize how much until my mother drove us girls over to my father's and I saw Josh, his hair, the texture of mine, cut short, sitting in the living room, where he slept on the sofa, in a T-shirt and boxers. Nerissa and Charine ran into my father's room and began arguing over what they would watch on television.

“I hate that damn VCR,” Josh said, shrugging at an old VCR sporting a thin scrim of dust in the corner of the living room.

“Why?”

“There are roaches in it.”

“Living in it?”

“Yeah.”

“Little roaches?”

“No. Big cockroaches.”

“Well, how you know they live in there?”

“Every night I'm laying up in here, trying to go to sleep, I hear them crawling around in there. Then they come out and they fly around the room.”

“What? Roaches fly?” I was aghast. All the reading and studying I'd done had not told me this.

“Yes. They fly in circles around the room, over and over. Like helicopters. Like they're trying to bomb me.”

I laughed, but I was horrified. Roaches really flew? And then I felt a start, and wondered what else my brother knew that I didn't, living in New Orleans with my father, expected to be a grown-up in many ways, accountable for himself because my father was so absent, womanizing or socializing. My brother must have been lonely there, accustomed to the confined chaos of living with four women. He must have been as happy to see us as we were to see him.

“They hide in the VCR during the day. And it don't even work.” Joshua laughed. “I don't know why Daddy's keeping it.”

I'm sure my father looked at the VCR, like he looked at most broken things, and thought it could be fixed. He remembered the sixties and seventies, when the Black Panthers fed him and his sisters school lunches: he remembered how embattled Oakland had seemed at the time, and how it was able to come together under the leadership of the Panthers. He listened to Public Enemy and only Public Enemy. He owned all their albums. When we walked across the levee to the neighborhood on the other side, he talked to everyone, people sitting on the front steps outside their shotguns or on their narrow porches, walking in the middle of the street. He
believed in the power of community, in the power of conscious political thought to fight racism and transform people who were browbeaten into those who had agency.

Whenever my father had extra change from whatever factory or security job he'd found, he'd walk us over the levee to one of the corner stores there, where he'd treat us to pickled pig's lips and potato chips and cold drinks. One day an older woman walked up to him, wearing white, her skin dark against the fabric, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. It was hard for me to figure out that she was a woman: she was so skinny she had none of the curves I associated with all of the older women in my family. Her forearms were the same size as her upper arms. She smiled at my father, and I saw that she was missing teeth, and those that were left were black at the gum line. And she was not alone. I looked at most of the people walking the street and saw that half the neighborhood looked as if they were starving. On our way back from the store, I asked my father about it. The sun was setting, and the New Orleans sky was pink through the power lines, which were tangled even here, where the parades did not venture, with Mardi Gras beads.