Men We Reaped (6 page)

My father said that she was shaped like a Coke bottle, and that she was beautiful. I have seen pictures of her from those days, and she
was
beautiful: sharp cheekbones and nose, large eyes, long silky hair that ran over her shoulders and down her back like water, and a tiny mole at the corner of her mouth. When she brought me to the grocery store, people complimented her on her beauty, on me, her adorable baby boy.
She's a girl
, my mother said. Eventually, she heard me called a boy so much that she stopped correcting admiring strangers.

I was walking by then. I was two. I had a fat belly, short legs, large dark eyes. The silken cap of hair. My father and mother had a party, the kind of party one has for no other reason than to share a good time with loved ones. My mother
put me in a green jumper, and I toddled around my father's legs, his cousins' legs, my mother's, my fathers' sisters'. They picked me up, a miracle baby, and kissed me on my cheeks, which were still fat as ripe peaches. I walked to my room, pulled on a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat my mother bought for me.

“What you doing, Mimi?” That was my nickname. The upstairs neighbor in our apartment complex called her daughter that, and my mother liked the name so much she stole it for me. I jumped on my steel rocking horse, set up in the corner, careful to not pinch my legs in the springs, and I began rocking back and forth, squeaking against the chatter of the drinking and smoking adults. They laughed. As the party wore on, I picked up cans when the adults weren't looking, sometimes when they were, and sipped the dregs of their beer before they took the cans from me with a
No, Mimi
. My mother took a picture of me while I held a can to my belly, beer dribbling from my chin, the can half the length of my torso, before taking it away. In the picture, I'm grinning, my feet planted wide, almost proud. I was part of the party.

My father remembers those days better than my mother, or he is more open about them, or he is more nostalgic for them, which is why he talks about them with me and my mother doesn't. Despite his pleasant memories, when we lived in California he missed home, he said. My mother didn't. She wanted to stay in California. She's told me less about that time, but she says she liked the freedom of it, the vista of the
cities rolling themselves out over the hills. There were no vistas in Mississippi, only dense thickets of trees all around. You could only see the closest house, the dog chained to a tree, your brother riding his bike by on the dirt road. At night, perhaps, a snatch of stars: in the day time, the leaden rain-heavy clouds closed in. But in California, my mother could look out over the horizon and watch the sun rise in the east, and then she could watch it set out over the mammoth Pacific in the west. In California, my family sat at the center of those hills, and my mother could tend to her husband and her child only, free of family and the South.

When I attended college in the Bay Area, I missed the Mississippi air. I wonder if my father felt the same, if the steady cold of the bay made him miss the close heat of Mississippi. When my father brought up the idea of moving back home, my mother balked. They argued over it. But eventually my mother relented because she loved my father. She was also pregnant with my brother by then, and perhaps she wanted the support of her family if she was to have a second child. It was 1980. I was three.

My father and mother packed all of their possessions into their cars, a station wagon and a lowrider Riviera, and we made the long drive down California to L.A. on I-5, then crossed the desert Southwest on I-10. Somewhere in Arizona, my mother, big with my brother, walked into a grocery store and fainted. Our cars had no air-conditioning, yet she still drove those twenty-three hundred miles, her mouth set, my brother large and kicking in her stomach, his feet separated from the metal link of the Riviera's chain steering wheel by the thin balloon of her fat and skin, windows down, wind
blowing. I lay curled in the passenger seat in that car. As my mother drove through the burning desert, I slept, dreaming burning dreams. We sped through the long, seemingly endless stretch of Texas to the blooming green of Louisiana, and finally to DeLisle: home.

One day my brother wasn't there, and the next day he was. He was born at Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi. He was yellow and fat, his eyes large and liquid. His mouth gaped with gums. Sometimes my mother let me sit in a chair and hold him, his body stretching from my shoulder down and across my legs. I remember snippets of him as a baby, but not enough to grow him from infant to toddler in the narrative of his life. Joshua was born on time at nine months, but he wasn't an easy delivery. My mother says he was born looking at a sky he could not yet see: sunny-side up, the doctor called it. The doctor turned Joshua facedown in my mother's womb, three times. Every time, my mother said, she felt him turning to face the world again, as if he knew from the first that he wanted to see for himself. He was a beautiful baby: sandy skin, dark brown hair that later fell out and grew in blond. One day he isn't there, and the next day he is. And just like that, I'm his big sister.

Once home, we moved often. We lived in a small white two-bedroom house in Pass Christian, but our life there is fuzzy in my memory. We then moved to a small blue house, this one a three-bedroom, built on my great-grandmother Ellen's land in DeLisle where my father had played as a child and lost his eye. The house was built on cinder blocks, so the
steps seemed impossibly high to me, and it was in a corner of the field. The field seemed immense. Mother Ellen's house, small and faded gray, sat three hundred yards away, and the woods bordering the field clung closely to the back and sides of the house. There was a small chicken coop under the trees behind our house, and my father put two dog houses out on the other side for our dogs: one a black pit bull called Home-boy, and the other a short white pit bull mix called Mr. Cool.

I grew taller. My mother combed my hair up into multiple pigtails, secured them with large plastic bobs we called knockers. When I slept at night, they dug into my scalp. By the time I was five, my brother was three, and he came up to my waist. He wanted us to be a team, but when my mother had somewhere to go and my father stayed home and watched us, I left my brother and walked up the long drive that led to the road and played with my cousin Farrah. We played house and snuck to watch TV under the curtain that her father tacked in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Sometimes we played in the field that separated our houses, and one such day my brother came looking for me. He could walk easily now, and his blond afro bloomed. He wore a diaper and nothing else. He walked from one end of the railless front porch to the other, looking off into the grass. He stopped at the edge of the steps, turned around, angled one leg behind him until he found the top step, and then slid the rest of the way down so he stood on that step before turning in a circle to face the yard again.

“Mimi!” Joshua called.

I ducked lower so that only my eyes showed over the brick. I watched him. I did not want to call back, to have him come
out into the yard, to have to take care of him instead of playing my game.

“Mimi!” Josh yelled.

He was so skinny, only his belly round as a ball. I did not say anything. He looked out in wonder over the yard, which must have seemed even larger to him than it did to me: it was a vast stretch of overgrown grass, and then those silent houses in the murky distance where his sister had disappeared.

My father slammed out of the front door. He was in shorts and nothing else. He had probably been asleep. He grabbed my brother by one arm, yanked him so he dangled in the air, and began whipping him.

“Boy! What I told you about going outside by yourself!”

My brother wailed, turning in circles like a sinker on a fishing line. My father's hand whacked my brother's diaper again and again, and I was afraid. I'd seldom seen my father angry, violent. I could not understand why Daddy was so upset with Joshua, could not understand what lesson my father was trying to teach my brother. I could not understand why Joshua dangled like a baby doll. And even today, that whipping he received feels like my fault. I'm still ashamed that I did not step out of that dense grass, that I did not climb those steps and grab his hand and lead him down them as an elder sister should, that I did not say:
Here I am, brother. I'm here
.

My father was not usually quick-tempered. He dealt with me mostly with forbearance and tenderness; he never whipped me. But he whipped my brother. He was stricter with him. With Joshua, my father's patience was thin. There was no
room for error in disciplining my brother, my father thought, because my brother was a boy. A son. A child who would be harder pressed to be a fighter, even more than the girl who'd been born early with the strong heart. My brother would have to be stronger than that. My brother would have to grow up and be a Black man in the South. My brother would have to fight in ways that I would not. Perhaps my father dreamed about the men in his family who died young in all the wrong ways, and this forced his hand when he woke to my brother standing next to my parents' bed: pink-mouthed and grinning, green to the world, innocent.

When he wasn't disciplining Joshua, my father was playful. When my mother left us home with him one evening, after he'd had a long day of work, my father covered himself with a blanket and crouched in the middle of the mattress. Joshua and I clutched each other. We skittered around the corners of the room as my father scuttled from side to side under the blanket. He circled the bed, following us, making strange guttural noises. Joshua and I laughed. We were breathless. We tiptoed closer to the bed, and my father swiped an arm out, a great knuckle-scarred claw, and we shrieked, the joy and terror rising in our throats, almost choking us. We darted away. My father played with us until we grew frazzled in the hot room. The sweat ran down our small bodies, our hair alive on our heads, standing in dense halos. At the end of the night, my father snatched us both under the covers with him and tickled us. We yelled for mercy.

On weekday mornings before my father went to work at the glass factory in Gulfport, the family would have breakfast together. My father would turn up the radio in the kitchen.
It was 1982 and my mother was pregnant with my sister Nerissa. New Edition crooned; Joshua and I loved New Edition. My father would grab my hand, and then he'd grab Joshua's, and I'd grab Joshua's small moist palm in my own, and we'd dance in a ring in the middle of the kitchen. My mother shook her head at us, smiled, waved my father away when he tried to get her to dance with him. She would have been feeling pressure then as her family grew, as my father continued to cheat and plead his innocence and devotion and cheat more. She was afraid of what she saw on the horizon. She could not dance in the kitchen. She fried our eggs sunny side up, and as a family, we sat at the table and ate.

But my father could be dark, too. He was attracted to violence, to the basic beauty of fighting, the way it turned his body and those he fought into meticulously constructed machines. He taught his purebred pit bull to fight with deflated bike tires. Alternately he coddled his dog, treated it as tenderly as one of his children, but the dog's ability to fight was paramount, and my father had little mercy for him in his quest to make him harder to kill. Like my brother, my father's dog required a hard hand if he would be his toughest.

My father stood in the doorway of the house with a machete in his hand, the blade so dark gray it looked black. He held it lightly, loosely. My mother was in her room watching television, and Joshua and I crowded around my father's legs, looking out at the yard, at Homeboy, squat and as finely muscled as my father. Homeboy gleamed black and panted with his tongue out. He smiled at us.

“Stay inside,” my father said, and he trotted down the steps. Joshua and I dug into the door jamb, waited until Daddy walked around the house, leading Homeboy by his studded collar, to lean far out. We were determined to watch. One of my father's first cousins, also shirtless in white shorts, grabbed Homeboy's tail, held it down still and tight over a pillar of cinder blocks. Homeboy waited patiently, quietly, glanced back over his shoulder, and then snapped at a gnat. He trusted my father. Daddy whipped the machete up and brought it down hard on Homeboy's tail, inches below where the tail merged into his backside. Blood spurted across the gray cinder in a steady gush. Homeboy yelped and jerked. My father dropped the machete and tied a bandage around Homeboy's stump, and then smoothed his sides. Homeboy whimpered and quieted.

“Good boy,” my father said. Homeboy licked my father's hand, butted him with his head.

Later, Joshua and I lay in our room, a room that was still decorated only for me; there were Cinderella curtains at the windows, and a rough Cinderella bedspread on my twin bed. When we moved in, Joshua had had his own room, but when my father decided he wanted a room for his weight bench and his kung-fu weapons, they moved Joshua into my room. This made me angry for a week or so because I felt territorial; this was my space. But that night Joshua and I lay quietly in our small beds, Joshua breathing softly, almost snoring, while I lay awake and listened to my father and his cousin in the other room, listened to them take smoking pipes down off the wall where my father had mounted them for decoration,
listened to the clink of the weights, all this drifting down the hot hallway in the dark. The wind blew my curtains; they wafted out and stilled. The humid air coming into all the open windows of the house drew the smell of weed into my room. I knew this was some sort of smoke, like cigarettes. My father smoked it and my mother didn't. Maybe my father and his cousin talked about their dogs. Maybe they talked about their cars. Maybe they whispered about women.

My mother had given birth to Nerissa by then. She'd also come to realize the hopelessness of her dreams that our growing family would bind my father to her and encourage his loyalty to her. She'd carried Nerissa to term, and my sister had been a hard birth. She'd been the heaviest of all of us, and had refused to descend down the birth canal, so the doctors and nurses had to drive her out of my mother by taking their forearms and sweeping down my mother's stomach from rib cage to hip, and then grabbing Nerissa's head with forceps.
She didn't want to leave me
, my mother says. When Nerissa was born, she looked the most like my father: she had black hair and large, black eyes shaped like quotation marks in her face when she smiled.