Men We Reaped

We Are Learning, 1991–1995

I prayed. At night, as the house clicked and ticked around us, I prayed that we would move back to DeLisle. I didn’t want to be afraid to go outside, to be afraid of Thomas, who lurked, to fear what he would see in me and call me, to dread the hole in the woods. My mother heard me. After living in the seedy subdivision where every year the houses seemed smaller and shabbier, crumbling at the corners, ringed by weeds, we left Gulfport. After my mother cleared her narrow bit of land in DeLisle, she set a single-wide trailer on it. The property was on the top of a hill, surrounded on three sides by pines dense with undergrowth, and when we walked out of the front door, we only saw one neighbor’s house. My mother aligned the trailer lengthwise on the property, which meant the left side of the trailer sat atop the hill, on the ground, and the right side of the trailer was elevated, supported on cement bricks, leaving enough room to drag chairs under and sit between the cement pillars. In the evening, little lean brown rabbits fed on the patchy grass that announced the interruption of the yard from the surrounding woods. In the evening, bats fluttered through the narrow gap in the trees above our heads, feeding on the mosquitoes that swarmed there, mosquitoes that bred in a hidden, shallow pond, dry during the winter, tucked away in the pine woods to the near west of our house. We were home, in our community again.

When we moved to DeLisle, my father moved to New Orleans. He thought there would be more job opportunities there, and he wanted to live closer to his brothers. After leaving us in Gulfport, my father lived with his teenage love, then moved out and lived in one small, dark apartment after another, of which there were plenty along the coast, sometimes with roommates, sometimes without. He stopped paying his child support and moved from job to job so quickly there was no way for the authorities to garnish his wages. In New Orleans, he lived in the small yellow ghost-haunted house with barred windows, where the wind echoed through the industrial yard behind it at night, bidding the metal to speak. Then he moved to a small two-story apartment complex with only six one- or two-bedroom apartments. The rent was cheaper there. The building was gray wood and red brick, and my father’s oldest brother, Dwight, lived on the first floor. We would spend our weekend and summer visits there when I was in high school.

I’d been the only Black girl in the private Episcopalian elementary school during my sixth-grade year, and on my first day at the corresponding high school, I learned that this would be the case for high school, too. What I didn’t know is that I would remain the only Black girl in the school for five years: in my senior year, another Black girl enrolled, but we never spoke. The one other Black kid in the school when I was a seventh grader was a senior, and he acknowledged me sometimes with a nod, but most often ignored me. He was comfortable with the boys in the school, would hang out with them in the hallways looking like a clone of them: polo shirts, khaki shorts, slide-on boat shoes. I heard rumors that they snuck him into the local yacht club to sail with them, because he was unofficially not allowed because he was half Black, which meant that according to the yacht club he was Black. Today, I understand class also complicated my developing a relationship with either of them: both of these Black students came from two-parent, solidly upper-middle- or middle-class families. They lived in exclusive neighborhoods with pools and gyms and golf clubs and yearly homeowners’ association fees, and that culture was totally alien to my own, one of government assistance and poverty and broken homes. We had nothing to talk about. Most of the other Black boys who enrolled in the school later, when I was in ninth grade and until I graduated, were basketball recruits. They all came from backgrounds that were closer to mine, and our relationships were easier. I joked with them in the hallways between classes whenever I had the chance, and during those years those moments of camaraderie gave me some respite, some illusion of community. But it was an illusion: because of my distaste for team sports and my love of books, I was still an outsider. I had friends, friends who were outsiders like me in different ways: kids that were artists or writers or loved pottery or punk music or theater, but they were never my color. Overall, there were never more than eight Black students in the school at one time. During my time there, there were only three other students of color: there was one Chinese American girl, and later two Hispanic students, all three of whom came from moneyed families. At its largest, the high school contained no more than 180 students, and at its smallest, no fewer than 100.

Most of the students who attended the school were middle- to upper-class. Even though the school was flush with moneyed students, this was not reflected in the buildings. While the private elementary Episcopalian school I’d attended as a scholarship student in sixth grade was in a building much like the public schools I attended, redbrick with open airy rooms, the corresponding Episcopalian high school was nothing like this. Before 1969, the board of directors had purchased a mansion on the beach in Pass Christian to house the school, but Hurricane Camille hit and swept away the building. So the board built a big warehouse further north in Pass Christian, divided it into classrooms using thin walls and partitions, installed lockers in the hallways, and eventually built another, taller warehouse behind the school with spray-on yellow insulation that resembled dried snot. It was disconcerting to walk into the building, as industrial as it looked from the outside, and see all the students, who bore all the hallmarks of wealth and good health: braces, shiny thick hair, tans, and collared shirts. Some of the students were so rich they drove luxury cars especially tailored to their whims: Lexuses and BMWs outfitted for racing. Some of them slept on plantation-era beds that required small ladders to ascend at night. None of them lived in trailers. And throughout my school years, my mother cleaned for them. Sometimes she brought home huge garbage bags of their hand-me-down clothes after cleaning their houses. Joshua, Nerissa, and Charine refused their castoffs. I sifted through them, picking out what would fit, what I thought was reasonably fashionable, and prayed that when I wore it to school, whoever had owned it first would not see me in it. I assembled a ragtag wardrobe gleaned from my schoolmates in the hope that when worn together, my clothes would function as a camouflage, would allow me to be one of the group. I joined their religious youth groups too, became adept in the lexicon of organized religion, all in the hopes of being considered a little less of a perpetual other. But for some students, I could not escape our differences.

One day, a few months into my seventh-grade year, I walked into the gym and sat at the top of a small cluster of my classmates in the bleachers. There were four girls, all sitting with their knees together, all wearing khaki shorts and loose pastel shirts. I watched the other kids playing dodgeball on the court, hurling balls, intending to hurt. Barbara was idly twisting her blond hair: her roots were black. She turned in her seat to look at me.

“Why don’t you put some nigger braids in my hair?”

“Excuse me?” I said. “What did you say?”

“Nigger braids. Why don’t you put my hair in nigger braids?”

I hadn’t misheard her. Barbara smiled, satisfied as an animal that’s eaten its fill, and turned back to watch the games on the court. The heat in the gym was unbearable. I stood up and descended the bleachers, hoping I wouldn’t trip. I couldn’t believe she’d said the word, used it so casually, so denigratingly, and then been so proud of what she’d done. Casual racism was so prevalent in my school, yet encountering it often didn’t make it any easier to understand. It was incomprehensible to me. I didn’t know how to react to it. There were so many Black kids in public school that I could always rely on someone else to fight, to yell out honky and beat the shit out of the offending party. A few years later, my brother and his cohort would sneak knives and brass knuckles into school to fight White kids who wore rebel flag T-shirts, who initiated confrontations informed by race, by the word nigger hurled like a large rock. But at Coast Episcopal, I was alone. And the torments I’d suffered in Gulfport and public school continued, except at my private school, my brown skin was an actual physical indicator of my otherness. There was no need for me to justify my misery by imagining that others saw my sense of inner weakness, saw it as other, and picked on me for it; at my private school, the color of my skin was enough of a signal for some of my schoolmates to see inferiority, weakness.

I was alone later in the year when I stopped in the hallway during a break. A group of White boys, all juniors and seniors, stood in the foyer opposite me, loitering. They were uniformed in khaki and polos, and they were all at least a foot taller than I was. They were also laughing at a joke one of them must have told when I walked by. I stopped to look at them, me with my thin shins, unmuscled calves, a collarbone like a crowbar, my serious dusky face marked by a down-turned mouth that didn’t like to smile since my protruding front teeth marked me as different in yet another way. My mother could not afford braces for me.

“What did you say?” I asked them. They chuckled.

“You heard,” one of them said. His name was Phillip, and my mother cleaned for his family once a month. They always sent us the largest garbage bags of clothing.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You know what we do to your kind,” another laughed.

“No, I don’t.”

They laughed again, each of them elbowing the other, and then I knew. Whatever the joke, it involved a Black person, hands bound, and a choking rope at the neck, a picnic. Lynching. They were joking about lynching.

“You ain’t going to do shit to me,” I said. I said it before I could think that I was one and they were many, and there was no one to help me fight my battle.

Phillip and his friends changed then. They shifted and stopped laughing. One of them crossed his arms, and then another, and they looked as if they could move like a herd.

Even though my heart felt as if it would beat its way out of my chest, I stood. I was sweating and my face burned, but I stood.

“You ain’t going to do nothing,” I said.

They saw I would not move. They watched my eyes, perhaps wanting me to cry. I didn’t. The moment passed. They shrugged, walked past me down to the senior lockers. I watched them go. After they disappeared, I watched my classmates in the student lounge, sliding drinks across the table to one another, eating pizza, chewing and talking. I felt victorious for one moment, proud that I’d stood up for myself. But as I watched my schoolmates, their shining faces and white, wide smiles, separated by the glass between us, I realized I’d achieved nothing. I was still myself. I was still alone.

My mother drove us to visit our father in New Orleans on weekends in her small, rattling Toyota Corolla. Charine invariably sat in the front seat while the rest of us sat in the back. Sometimes we sang along to the radio, and when we did, my mother told us to shut up and let the radio sing. She had no patience, and I imagine it was because she drove and her children sang and all she could think about was our father and the fact that she had never wanted to be a mother in this situation. By this time Joshua was taller than me by at least two inches, and wider. Nerissa was a premature beauty. Charine was small, skinny, and funny. In the backseat, Josh and I would tussle with our elbows, each of us fighting for room by leaning forward and smashing the other person’s arm into the seat. I usually lost because he was bigger and stronger than me; at the time, I was beginning to realize that all the dominance I’d exercised over him while we were growing up was fading. The trunk was even more crowded with paper bags filled with groceries; even when we weren’t with her, my mother took responsibility for feeding us. She knew my father’s refrigerator held only condiments. She packed easy things to cook, things she thought we could handle: Top Ramen noodles, tuna fish, eggs, boxes of Tuna Helper, sandwich bread, peanut butter and jelly, cereal, and gallons of milk. During the summer, when we stayed with my father for a week at time, we’d run through the food, so at the end we were eating dry cereal out of the box for breakfast and lunch, and inventing things for dinner.

“I’m hungry,” Nerissa said.

“Are you hungry too?” I asked Charine.

Charine nodded, hopping in front of a large mirror my father’d set against a wall in the living room. She was preening. My father, as usual, wasn’t home. He wasn’t next door at his fourth baby mama’s apartment, either. We didn’t know where he’d gone. He did that often, leaving us alone in the apartment while he disappeared. I worried about him, but I knew that eventually, sometime later that night, he’d be back. I was accustomed to being in charge when my mother was gone or working, so I took it as my obligation. Of course I had to feed us.

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.

“Why is everybody so skinny?” I asked.

My father looked at me. He always talked to me like an adult.

“They’re on crack,” he said. “They’re all crackheads.”

Josh walked on his other side, munching on a pig’s lip.

“All of them?” I said.

“All the ones you see that are skinny like that.”

I frowned. The majority of the neighborhood was smoking crack. Skeletal men and women walked with jarring steps every day in an endless roam, it seemed; the only other people in the streets were one or two handsome teenage boys, a few years older than me, wearing wifebeaters and gold. They slouched on metal fences in the shade of spindly oaks, yet they still turned brown in the sun, and the walking dead clustered around them, while kids on bikes and on foot cut through the throng, playing and laughing.

But I wondered if my father’s philosophies could ever make any sort of difference in New Orleans. My father’s revelation about addicts and dealers made me see the neighborhood clearly, see the way the narrow streets were all pothole-ridden and mostly empty, where families seemed empty of everyone but the very old and the very young, the old driven to infirmity by crack, the young either ignorant or profiting from it. The air was redolent with the scent of marsh mud, burnt coffee, and something that smelled like raw sewage, but I sensed something else: violence driven by desperation and despair. Crack, with its low prices and quick, searing high, was eating away at the soul of neighborhoods and communities all over the United States in the late eighties and early nineties, its consumption driven by those desperate for escape, release. I was scared to walk through the neighborhood, and never did so without my father and my siblings. Joshua, however, was braver, perhaps because he had to be. He would have recognized the danger in that place long before I did, and would have known that he could do nothing but navigate it without flinching, smartly, or else be unable to walk down the street as a man. To be a man was to posture strength and capability; for my brother, this meant he had to be unafraid. He had to show a strength he may not have felt, had to evince a ruthlessness in his swagger that was not in him. The next weekend, when my mother brought us girls back, my father told me that my brother had been walking to the store during the week and two kids on a bike had ridden by and punched him in the back of the head. “Because he wasn’t from their hood,” my father said they told him.

“What did you do to them?” I asked.

“I talked to them,” my father said, “and told them it was wrong.” This approach, coming from my black-belt martial-artist father, disappointed me, but I didn’t understand that this was exactly what his martial arts training had taught him. Violence should be the last resort. The music my father listened to reinforced that; there were other ways to resolve conflict. And in handling the situation the way he did, my father was trying to teach my brother to avoid the violence that plagued the Black community he lived in. Perhaps he thought he could raise a different young man, one resolute against the deluge of racism and socioeconomic inequality and history, and the self-loathing and destructive behavior that engendered. Maybe he wanted a son who could foment change like a Panther. At the time, I didn’t see this, and all I knew was that I wanted to find the boys who had hit Joshua and fight them. I wanted to take up for my brother in the way I almost never took up for myself at school. He doesn’t need your hood, I would have told them. When I saw Josh, he told me that the roaches were still on patrol, and he was still terrified of them. He made me laugh. Even though we were living in different households, we were still as close as ever. I wanted him to tell me about the boys, the bike, the blow, hoped that he would come to me the way a little brother would to an older sister. And even though we talked about mostly everything, he never did. He knew there was nothing I could do for him.

At the end of our last weekend of the summer, we returned to Mississippi and the beginning of another school year. On occasion, if my mother was not yet done with her duties for the day, she would pick me up at the end of the school day before returning with me in tow, while Josh watched Nerissa and Charine at home. The family my mother worked for lived in a large old mansion on the beach, which was painted dark blue and had a two-story guest cottage that had been servants’ quarters in the near past. On days like these, I sat off the kitchen with the wife, and as the children of the family, who were several years younger than me, watched television, we talked. I watched my mother clean; she was such a formidable presence at home that I couldn’t stop looking at her, and this meant I had trouble paying attention to the wife. Why was my mother so silent? Why did she seem so meek? I’d never seen any of that in her. My attention was split between two worlds.

“What language are you taking in school?” the wife asked. She was tall and healthy and blond, robust and gregarious.

“French,” I said. I watched my mother shoo the cat from the counter and spray the tile with Lysol before wiping it down.

“It’s a hard language to learn.”

I nodded. My mother rinsed dishes, began loading the dishwasher.

“It’s difficult to hear the words, to tell where one ends and the next starts.”

I nodded again. My hands felt wrong in my lap. I felt I should be at the counter, helping my mother, handing her dishes.

“Spanish is much easier,” the wife said.

My mother bent, poured powder into the dishwasher. When she closed the machine’s door and stood, she straightened like it hurt her. My mother grabbed a broom and began sweeping.

“Well, our family used to speak French,” I said. “Creole French. So that’s why I want to learn it.” My voice sounded strange. My mother continued to sweep the kitchen, worked her way around the counter. The entire house had wooden floors, upstairs and down, and my mother cleaned all of them by hand.

“The best way to learn is to travel. Immerse yourself,” the wife said. The family’s parrot, which was as large as their cat and kept in a four-foot-high cage in a corner of the sitting room, squawked and spread its wings. Birdseed littered the floor. My mother patiently worked her way around the cage and continued sweeping. The parrot stretched its wings wide again, raising its beak to the air, stretching as if it would fly, but it settled. My mother pushed and the broom shushed its way around the cage. I nodded.

Years later, in college, I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother’s employer’s family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home. I thought of how it felt to witness my mother at work, of how I saw her in a broader context, as a Black cleaning woman, almost cowed, and of how I was very conscious in that moment of my dark skin, my overbite, my irascible hair, the way my hands itched to help my mother. How my legs tingled as I sat and looked at my mother as she worked, and how I was aware that the wife was talking to me like an intellectual equal, engaging me, asking me about my college plans. How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.

When my father moved back to Mississippi from New Orleans, my mother decided my brother should live with him full-time. My brother was still struggling in school, and my mother thought perhaps he’d do better with my father. My father moved into a long, low one-story redbrick house in Gulfport. The house was in a historically Black neighborhood, Turkey Creek, which was a community that had been established by freed slaves after the Civil War in 1866 and was still a mostly Black neighborhood of narrow streets, modest wooden-sided houses, and small, neat yards with immaculate grass, surrounded by woods on all sides. In some ways, it felt like DeLisle, except it was encircled by Gulfport’s sprawling development. The creek they named the neighborhood after was notable mostly because it cut a large ditch and warranted a small bridge, and sometimes swelled when it rained. The woman my father’d had an affair with while he was living with us in the seedy subdivision had had a child for him by that time, so she and her child moved in, as did my brother. My brother wanted to live with my father, even though it was hard for him to change schools, make new friends, and leave DeLisle. When Joshua moved in with Daddy, he had his own room again, which he decorated with movies and kung fu weapons he took from my father, or things that he stole.

When Joshua was fourteen, he was a good thief. This was something that he’d never done when he was living with us, and it marked a new turn in him, one of the first that I saw in an ascent to manhood. To be a man meant one should be self-sufficient; he had to provide for himself. He was the same height as my father, and he’d lost his fat-boy belly, but the meat on his bones was evenly centered, proportioned in his long arms and legs, and would solidify to even leaner muscle. He wore big clothes that he didn’t fill, and when he walked to the local Walmart with his new friends he’d met in the neighborhood, their large shirts and their oversize jean shorts were what they stuffed their booty in. They stole stupid things like boxers, candy, and Dickies pants, which he told me about when Nerissa, Charine, and I visited one weekend.

“I’m banned from Walmart,” Josh said. I sat on his bed, which was made. His room was bare and neat. He’d been drawing pictures, and these he’d tacked to the wall, pictures of cars alongside pages ripped out of my father’s lowrider magazines, which featured pretty Hispanic girls bending suggestively over elaborately painted Chevys.

“How you get banned from Walmart?” I said.

“We was stealing,” he said.

“Josh!”

“It was just little stuff. Candy and boxers.”

“What would have happened if they would’ve called the cops?”

“They didn’t. They just took us back in the back and took all our names and told us that we was banned.”

“You could’ve went to juvie.”

“We done stole out there before and ain’t got caught. The time before last they hollered at us when we walked out the door but we started running and they couldn’t catch us.”

I laughed at the image and felt like I was encouraging him, so I stopped. I’d meant to chastise him, be the big sister who reminded him of larger consequences. I was worried for him, worried at what the world demanded of him as a young man, and of what he would do to satisfy it, to stand. Yet I admired his recklessness at the same time. He was still struggling in junior high: then, I did not understand why he was having such a hard time in classes. He was smart, witty, adept at solving problems quickly and efficiently. Now, I assume he learned and tested differently from other kids, and the public school system didn’t recognize that. Even though he stole stupid things from stores, he was still a tame kid: I knew he’d experimented with weed, but it wasn’t something he smoked all the time. I also knew he’d gotten drunk for the first time with Aldon, and our older cousin had then loaded him and Aldon into the backseat of his Cutlass and spun do-nuts in the middle of the road, causing them to throw up all over his car. I’m assuming he was trying to teach them a lesson, and as far as I knew, it had worked, since Josh really didn’t drink much after that.

“So I guess we can’t walk over there and get something to eat, huh?”

“Naw,” Josh said. He laughed. “Come on.”

We left the house, which had the sort of low ceilings that feel oppressive even to me, a short person, and walked out into the street, where we stood for a minute before seeing one of his new friends, skinny and dark in the distance, his shadow trailing him like a tail, and we set off walking toward him. I missed my brother.

When I was in school during the week, I wondered about Joshua, running through the hallways of a new school, being collared by new teachers, navigating the world without the luxury of having known all his classmates since elementary school. He was alone. Like me.

As I grew older, I became a part of my private school’s community, sort of. I was a cheerleader and in the drama club, served in student government, and briefly revived the student literary magazine, but I was still other, racially and socio-economically. My mother forbade me to date anyone (in or out of the school). Like most mothers in the Black South, she was terrified that I would become pregnant as a teenager. She didn’t allow me to go to any of the school dances until my senior year, when I was allowed to attend my senior prom, alone. I hated all of the music. One or two of the White boys I attended school with were attracted to me, and I heard rumors that others were as well, but they wouldn’t act on it because I was Black. They feared the judgment of their families and community. I found out how dangerous this intersection was when I was heavily petted by a boy one night during my senior year, and the next day, in conversation with another one of my classmates, another White boy, he said: I don’t believe in the mixing of the races. Years later, I recalled that he’d touched me, but he’d refused to kiss my mouth or my face. My otherness was physically tangible. At least, I thought, my brother doesn’t have to deal with this in his school.

To cope, I spent more and more of my free time, what little there was, at school, hiding out in the library, picking random books off the shelf to read. In seventh grade I read Gone with the Wind; while Scarlett’s and Rhett’s relationship spoke to the teenage romantic in me, the defeated Confederates’ vilification of the freed slaves did not. And the fact that the book and movie were so beloved in America, across regions, horrified me. Do they really think of Black people like this? I wondered. My time at school seemed to attest that some did. By the time I was in my junior and senior years of high school, I was reading Roots and Invisible Man and Native Son and The Color Purple and, at my father’s insistence, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This was the early nineties, when conscious rap groups wore African-print clothing and Chuck D exhorted us to “fight the power.” I wore a Malcolm X T-shirt that my father had given me to school and I was cornered by a girl in the bathroom and told: “Well, Mimi, I see I should have worn my David Duke T-shirt today.” In my reading life, I was proud of my African heritage; at school, I was reticent. While I was reading and listening to Public Enemy, I understood resistance and fighting for civil rights as strength; when I was at school, I was bewildered. At home, I’d have moments of clarity while riding down the street with one of my friends, listening to Tupac, and I’d think: I love being Black; then a few hours later, I’d wrestle with my hair while obsessing over my antiseptic dating and social life at school, and loathe myself. When my mother picked me up from school one day, I began telling her about a school project, and she interrupted me, speaking to the pebbly asphalt road, the corridor of trees leading us home to our trailer, and said: “Stop talking like that.” As in: Why are you speaking so properly? As in: Why do you sound like those White kids you go to school with, that I clean up after? As in: Who are you? I shut my mouth.

I worried about my brother. While I faced a kind of blatant, overt, individualized racism at my school that had everything to do with attending school with kids who were White, rich, and privileged in the American South, Joshua faced a different kind of racism, a systemic kind, the kind that made it hard for school administrators and teachers to see past his easygoing charm and lackluster grades and disdain for rigid learning to the person underneath. Why figure out what will motivate this kid to learn if, statistically, he’s just another young Black male destined to drop out anyway? He was never referred to a counselor, never tested for a learning disorder, never given some sort of individual attention that might better equip him to navigate junior high school and high school. Both my brother and I were coming up against something larger than us, and both of us were flailing against it, looking for a seam, a knob, a doorway, an opening through. And both of us were failing.

I was sixteen when I had my first drink. I spent the night with my best friend from my high school. She was a tall, generous girl who was unfailingly honest with me, who pulled me through some of my darkest bouts of teenage angst and adult depression, those times when my vision narrowed to a pinpoint and the world as I knew it beat me into hopelessness. We sat on the floor in her family’s living room and took shots of cooking sherry. When the buzz hit me, I was euphoric. All the self-loathing, the weight of who I was and where I was in the world, fell away. I lay with her on the sofa, watching television, and said, “Mariah, I hope this feeling never ends.”

“With as much as you drank, I don’t think it’s going to end anytime soon,” she said.

We ran upstairs when her parents returned home. My euphoria turned to nausea, and I vomited all over her shag carpet. She cleaned up my vomit and helped me to the bathroom, where I spent the night with my face on her cool toilet seat, blacked out. The next day she dropped me off at my father’s house, and I stood out in the road with Joshua.

I was cold. I wore one of my brother’s jackets with my arms pulled into the sleeves to keep my hands warm, and I hugged myself. The skin at the sides of my mouth was dry, but my forehead and chin were dotted with acne. Joshua, who was fourteen, didn’t have any acne. He wore a puffy Oakland Raiders coat, and he laughed as I told him about my night.

“And then I woke up on the toilet. I feel like shit.”

Joshua smiled. He was winter pale, which meant he was a gold color, and his hair seemed darker than it would, sun-lightened, in the summer. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

“You smoked weed yet?”

“Naw.” I wouldn’t until I was eighteen.

“It’s better. You don’t have a hangover.”

A woman was walking toward us. She wore a white long-sleeved long john shirt with black basketball shorts, and her calves were skinny and ashy. Her processed hair stuck up in sheaves over her head. I wondered why she wasn’t cold.

“I liked it at the beginning,” I said. “It was just when I wanted to throw up that things got bad. Ugh,” I said, tasting the puke in my mouth. I’d vomited so violently it’d poured out of my nose.

The woman stopped and spoke to my brother.

“What’s up?” She said this genially, with a grin. I thought maybe she thought he was handsome, as I did, even though he was at least ten years younger than her.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just chilling.”

They spoke as if they’d had this conversation before. I hugged myself, feeling a residual wave of nausea. My brother shook hands with the woman, and then she ambled away from us, one of her hands swinging loose, the hand she’d shook with my brother balled into a fist and held tightly to her chest, her hips swaying.

“She gotta be cold,” I said.

Joshua looked down at me, smiled a small smile, so small I couldn’t see his teeth. He let it go and shook his head.

“I’m selling crack,” he said.

He looked anxious. He thought I would judge him, which I did, but not in the way he thought I would. The woman disappeared around the bend of the road, clutching what he’d sold her.

“How?” I asked. “Why? When did you start?” I shivered, hugged myself tighter. The fear that I’d felt for him grew larger, so great and immediate my back rounded in my brother’s coat, my whole body tensing for a bone-breaking blow.

“I need money,” he said. I didn’t dispute him. Our father was struggling to make the mortgage payments on the house, working menial jobs that didn’t pay well, first as a casino worker, then back to his adolescence as a gas station attendant. There was little extra money for food and clothes. Joshua was still too young to have a legitimate job. He may have been asking Joshua for money to help with bills; once, when my father was living in New Orleans, he’d asked me to help him pay his rent. I shouldn’t have asked my brother why. My brother had learned: to be a man meant to provide.

“My friends out here,” he said, “they do it. So one day … It’s not hard — well, sometimes.” He looked off in the distance after the woman when he said it.

“You ain’t scared?” I asked him. He didn’t answer.

I looked at the fine down over his top lip and his dark brown eyes and thought for the first time: He knows something I don’t. Perhaps he’d looked into his own mirror and seen my father when I had only seen my father’s absence. Perhaps my father taught my brother what it meant to be a Black man in the South too well: unsteady work, one dead-end job after another, institutions that systematically undervalue him as a worker, a citizen, a human being. My mother had found a way to create opportunity for me, to give me the kinds of educational and social advantages that both Joshua and I might have had access to if we weren’t marked by poverty or race, so I was bent on college. Joshua had lesser models and lesser choices, and like many young men his age, he felt that school was not feasible for him. He never envisioned college for himself, a path through education to an upwardly mobile future, the American dream shining like some wishing star in the distance. For me there were hopes: a house of brick and wood, a dream job doing something demanding and worthwhile, a new, gleaming car that never ran out of gas. Joshua would hustle. He would do what he had to do to survive while I dreamed a future. My brother was already adept with facts. His world, his life: here and now. Josh is older than me, I thought. More mature. It was as if he’d drunk an entire case of Tabasco.