Men We Reaped

Roger Eric Daniels III. Born: March 5, 1981. Died: June 3, 2004

Ann Arbor was gray. The sky was always overcast, blanched sooty and cold, even though it was spring and the trees had bloomed bright green. I was miserable with allergies. I’d just finished the first year of my two-year graduate program, and my nose was running so badly I could only breathe out of my mouth. I’d never had allergies like that before my time in Michigan, and having them then made me feel as if the very landscape in Michigan hated me, as if I were a foreign body it was attempting to eject.

My cousin Aldon flew into Detroit to help me drive from Michigan to Mississippi for the summer of 2004. Joshua was a month older than Aldon, and we’d grown up as close as siblings. As I was twenty-seven, he had grown into my big cousin at twenty-four, dwarfing me by seven inches. He had a gold tooth, braids cornrowed thickly to his head, and everything about him was capable and kind, so when he took the driver’s seat for the first leg of the fifteen-hour drive, I hunched over in the passenger seat, glared at the miles of highway, fields, and billboards before us, and was grateful and apprehensive. I would like to breathe again, I thought, but I was going home. My homesickness always meant that the thought of going home was exhilarating and comforting, but over the past four years, that sense of promise had turned to dread. When my brother died in October 2000, it was as if all the tragedy that had haunted my family’s life took shape in that great wolf of DeLisle, a wolf of darkness and grief, and that great thing was bent on beating us. By the summer of 2004, three of my friends had died as well: Ronald in the winter of 2002, C. J. in January 2004, and Demond a month later, in February. Each friend’s subsequent death was a hard blow, as that wolf hunted us. But I didn’t say this to Aldon. Instead, I said: “I can’t breathe, cuz. It’s the air.”

Aldon turned up the music: rap. It beat us down those highways, over the miles. By the time we stopped in the middle of the plain farmland of Ohio for Coke, for bathroom breaks, for snacks, I didn’t have to plug my nose with tissue. By the time we crossed the Ohio River over to Kentucky’s rolling green hills, I could inhale and exhale through my nose. Aldon drove with his left hand on the wheel, his right on the armrest, centered.

I hope nobody dies this summer, I thought.

While my classmates remained in Ann Arbor or worked on fishing boats in Alaska or visited family in Cape Cod during their summer breaks, I always went home to Mississippi. I had done the same every winter break, every spring break, and every summer break while I was an undergrad at Stanford University from 1995 to 2000, and I continued the tradition in the summer of 2004. Homesickness had troubled me ever since I’d left for Stanford in 1995. I would hide weird crying jags from my then-boyfriend when I saw down-on-their-luck men who reminded me of my father. I would beg long conversations on the phone with my friends at home so I could listen to the sounds in the background, wishing I were there. I dreamed of the woods surrounding my mother’s house, that they were being razed and burned. I knew there was much to hate about home, the racism and inequality and poverty, which is why I’d left, yet I loved it.

During visits, I lived in my mother’s house, a white double-wide trailer, set on the back of an acre, away from the road. Spanish oaks and small garden plots filled with azaleas and bulbs dotted the front yard. My mother was proud of her yard and worked hard at cultivating it, even though we lived at the top of a hill, which meant that when the heavy rains came during the spring and the summer, the earth washed down the hill into the street, and the front part of the yard remained sandy. Joshua was four years dead that summer, so my mother had converted his room into a bedroom for my seven year-old nephew, De’Sean. My middle sister, De’Sean’s mother, Nerissa, twenty-one, lived in a duplex apartment in Long Beach, Mississippi, at the time. She’d given birth to De’Sean when she was thirteen, and hadn’t had the opportunity or the maturity to be a mother to him, so De’Sean lived with my mother, and Nerissa had learned to mother him on weekends. My youngest sister, Charine, eighteen, still lived in my mom’s house. She graduated from high school days after I made it home from Michigan.

When Aldon and I arrived from our long drive, I let myself in the back door, tiptoed into Charine’s room, and climbed into bed with her. She didn’t turn me away, even though I was sweating Coke and Corn Nuts with concentration thinned to its most desperate. I threw an arm around her, faced her back. We were the same height, nearly the same weight, had the same long-limbed petite frame, except her hips were slimmer than mine, her eyelashes thick as Joshua’s and Nerissa’s. When I first went away to college, she was eleven years old, and she saved my fingernail clippings and the glass Coke bottles I drank out of. She was my baby sister. I let myself be weak for a moment. Either she was asleep or she had the grace to pretend that she was asleep, because when I lay behind her and cried, my unsteady breathing the only clue I wept, from dread or relief, she let me. That is how we began our summer.

When we woke, she didn’t mention my crying. Instead, we went for a ride in the car. Charine suffered from motion sickness, and air-conditioning made it worse. I wanted to soak in all the heat I could, since my first Michigan winter had stunned me with relentless snow and unyielding cold, so we rode with the windows down in hundred-degree Mississippi heat. We had nothing to do. We rode down to the county park, the swings hanging limp and smelling like singed rubber in the sun, the nets on the basketball hoops still, the bleachers empty. The landscape echoed with loss and grief. We were lonely.

“Let’s go chill by Rog,” Charine said. “There’s always people over there, and he’s always home.”

Rog lived in a subdvision in Pass Christian called Oak Park. It was mostly Black, and the maze of its streets began at North Street, on the north, and ended on Second Street, in the south, which was around two long blocks away from the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. The houses closer to North Street were standard to most of the subdivisions I’ve seen in south Mississippi: brick, one story, three bedrooms, a sliver of a concrete slab serving as a porch across the front. The houses that were closer to Second Street, closer to the beach, even by scent and not sight, were larger. Rog and his mother, Phyllis, who everyone called Mrs. P., lived in a house that was closer to North Street.

Rog was short and lean. He was brown as pine bark, and wore braids, and clothes so loose he almost disappeared in them. His eyes were always half lidded, always squinting. His face was narrow and long. His smile was shocking, bright, wide. He smiled a lot.

Rog’s father, Roger Eric Daniels II, or Jock for short, had died when he was twenty-eight of a heart attack, so Mrs. P. was the sole caregiver, which meant that Rog, like most of us who grew up without fathers, spent a lot of time with his two older sisters or other kids his age, unsupervised, especially in the summer. One Fourth of July, he and his cousins twisted firecrackers together in a sulfurous bunch, put the firecrackers in mailboxes, and lit them. The mailboxes exploded. Someone called the police. When the police arrived, they told the kids that it was a federal offense to tamper with the mail, and they took the other two boys to a juvenile detention facility. This is how silly pranks by Black kids are handled in the South, Rog learned. Rog was lucky in some ways: he wasn’t caught.

When Rog was in seventh grade, he dated my middle sister, Nerissa, for a week. She hadn’t become pregnant with my nephew by then, but she soon would. Nerissa’d had curves since she was nine. She had long glossy hair, and one mole on her chin and another on her chest, lined up like buttons; from when she was a toddler, my parents recognized the curse of beauty put on her. If we ever have to worry about being made grandparents early, my mother would say of Nerissa, she’s the one. Nerissa, unlike me, was popular in middle school, had boyfriends. She said she was head over heels for Rog, thought that he was the cutest thing in middle school. They passed notes in class. His asked: Do you want to go out with me? My sister replied: Yes. She wore big T-shirts she borrowed from Josh, big shorts, and tennis shoes. A year or so later, when she got pregnant for a nineteen-year-old boy from Gulfport, those T-shirts she borrowed from Joshua would hide her growing belly for the first five months.

Nerissa and Rog’s romance lasted a week. She was too boyish, with her big shirts and shorts, so Rog broke up with her. But they were still friends. Years later, when she was living in her first apartment, Rog would visit, walk through the front door, throw his arms around her, ask her, “When you going to be my old lady?” Smile.

“You had your chance,” Nerissa joked. Rob, her boyfriend, sat on the sofa, with a black cigar in the corner of his mouth, a beer at his side. He smiled, his genial, easy smile, and showed the gold teeth he polished so religiously they shone against his dark face.

“Aw, come on Nerissa, give me another chance,” Rog said.

“Nope,” Nerissa laughed.

Rog’s bedroom was dark: dark walls, dark curtains. He had shelves up, and on his shelves were model cars with shiny chrome wheels on them, so carefully put together, down to the smallest detail. In his stereo, you’d find Tupac. Old No Limit and Fifth Ward Boyz, both out of New Orleans. Camron and Dipset out of New York City. And on his wall, he hung pictures. He was a good artist. In Mississippi, out in the country where there is no concrete or enough buildings crammed closely enough to make a good canvas for graffiti, kids who would normally develop their street art and tag do it like Rog did, by papering their rooms with sketches. Rog drew pictures of cars and some of people. He tried his hand at stylized words. OPT, one piece of artwork said. Another: THUG LIFE. And another: LAUGH NOW, CRY LATER.

Rog dropped out of school in the tenth grade; it’s not uncommon for young Black men to drop out here. Sometimes they are passively forced out by school authorities, branded as misfits or accused of serious offenses like selling drugs or harassing other students: sometimes they are pushed to the back of classrooms and ignored. Rog sat in the back of one such class and beat-boxed while his cousins sang spirituals that substituted the teacher’s name for Jesus’. He left school, worked, and then in 2000 went to Los Angeles to live with his relatives. He loved it. He worked in an auto body shop, made more money than he would have been able to make in Mississippi, and enjoyed the city: theme parks, roller skating rinks, the beach, where the water was blue and rushed the palm-decked shore in waves, so different from our beach, where the dirty gray Gulf lapped desultorily at a man-made beach ringed by concrete and pine trees.

Later, I wondered if it was a kindness to Nerissa, a remembrance of their short middle school romance, that made Rog hang out with us during the 2001 Mardi Gras Pass Christian parade, when he was visiting home. I had been out of college and without a job for almost a year, but I’d booked a ticket and flown home from New York City for Mardi Gras. This added to my considerable credit card debt. I didn’t care. I needed to go home, even if only for three days. My brother was newly dead. I expected him to be alive every day when I woke. On that February day, I did not know he was only the first. It was raining and chilly. We were all subdued, except Rog. He swaggered between clusters of friends and cousins from DeLisle and Pass Christian. He stood at the edges of pictures with a haul of big purple and green and gold beads on his neck, the kind that in normal years we’d plead the loudest for the pleasure of wearing them for a day. My sisters and I huddled under umbrellas and watched the press of people, ignoring the beads that pelted our umbrellas. My three-year-old nephew, newly bereft of his uncle and bewildered by the crowds, hugged my leg. My grief was so great that the sheen of the colorful beads, the music sounding from the floats, the celebration of that day felt like a farce, an insult.

On the day of the first Mardi Gras parade I’d attended after my brother’s death, the reality of Joshua’s absence was soothed by Rog, his easy smile, his arm casually slung over my or my sisters’ shoulders. Hey, he said. And then: What’s up?

I don’t know why Rog returned home to Mississippi for good in 2002. I imagine that it was because he was homesick, because he missed the narrow, tree-shaded streets of Pass Christian, the houses scattered here and there and set twelve feet high on stilts to protect them from hurricane storm surges. Maybe he missed Mrs. P., his sisters Rhea and Danielle, his large extended family scattered through Pass Christian and DeLisle, his cousins. Many leave and never come back, lured away by cities where it’s easier to find working-class jobs, where opportunity comes easier because those in power are less bound by the culture of the South. But I’ve heard others who’ve moved away from Mississippi, worked for five, ten years of their adult lives somewhere else, and then moved back to Mississippi say: “You always come back. You always come back home.”

The first night Charine and I went to Rog’s house in that summer of 2004 after Aldon and I had driven home from Michigan, we didn’t go inside. Our cars lined the street, bumper to bumper. The night swooped down in great black swaths, and the streetlights, spaced far apart, shone weakly. Insects swarmed in foggy clouds around the bulbs, dimming them even further so we were dusky shadows, and the stars dozed on the dome of the sky like larger, distant insects.

The boys turned the bass up on their car stereos, and we sat on their trunks and hoods, jiggling to the beat, sweating and sliding down the steel. Rog walked over, his Budweiser in one hand, his other hand waving like a child’s slicing through the air out of the passenger window of a car.

“Aaaaawwww,” he said, and hugged all three of us at once: me, Tasha, my brother’s last girlfriend, and Charine. He half jumped on us. Threw his leg over the row of our feet.

We laughed. We could laugh when we were drunk, even in the summer of 2004.

“All right, Rog,” Charine said. “You messing up.”

“What you mean?” Rog slid off us.

“I can’t feel the trunk with you jumping like that. Do you feel that?” she asked me.

“Like a massage, huh, Charine?” Rog said, and then he passed her a black cigar. “You dead wild.”

He danced around the trunk that night, kept us laughing. His smile never disappeared from his narrow face. While the other boys huddled in their cars, having conversations that we were not privy to, discussing and doing things I had no idea they did, Rog held court with us. He reminded me of Aldon. There was something gentle about him, considerate. Good. The first time he saw one of his younger cousins experimenting with weed in the street in front of his house, he stopped him. He walked up to him in the dark and said, “Aw, man, what you doing? You need to cut that out. You don’t need to be fucking with it like that.” His younger cousin laughed; he was already high.

We partied inside the house only once that summer. We were drinking. We were always drinking. But it was a different kind of drinking from what we’d done the previous summer. That drinking had been insane, ecstatic. We’d taken shots of Everclear that summer, felt that liquor running through us, thrumming: for this moment, you are young and alive. Live, more. The summer of 2004, we were no longer rebel drinkers, imbibing to break rules, to shit on mores. Now, we were subdued drinkers, drinking to forget. By the summer of 2004, we knew we were old: by the end of the summer, we’d know we had one foot in the grave.

On that night at Rog’s house, we’d gotten cases of Budweiser, Rog’s favorite beer, and we were playing dominoes, smoking, and talking. Charine, who never drank, decided that she was going to drink instead of smoke that night. I stood in the back room, which felt like a screened-in porch, and talked to my younger cousin Dez, who like most of my younger cousins stood taller than me, so he had to bend over when I spoke. He asked me about my writing, what I was working on, and I told him: a book about twin boys, young men, from a place like DeLisle. He made me feel embarrassed when he praised me in the dark room, under the music, for writing about “real shit,” he said. I sipped my beer: I hated the taste of it, but I loved the buzz of it. Charine downed her liquor, drink after drink, until she staggered past me.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

Rog led us down the hallway as I walked Charine through his mother’s room to her private bathroom. I turned on the light, and Charine sank to her knees, let her head fall in my lap, and passed out. Unconscious, she threw up. Rog disappeared, then reappeared.

“She all right? She need to drink some water.”

“Yeah, she a lightweight,” I said, stroking her hair, staring blearily at the yellow rug.

For the two hours we sat on the floor of his mother’s bathroom, Charine asleep in my lap, me drinking the last of my warm beer, nursing my dark buzz, Rog came with offerings: one glass of water, two glasses of water, potato chips, bread for Charine’s stomach. Charine drank the water but refused the bread and chips, so I ate them. When I’d sobered up enough to drive, Rog helped me bring her out to the car and saw us off into the bayou, the night.

The next day Charine and I visited Rog. The day was hot and bright, cumulus clouds like mountains loomed in the sky, but it did not rain. Rog was sitting in a hard plastic chair, and when Charine and I walked up the driveway to the carport, he dragged over two other chairs, metal with plastic weave. We sat. I was hungover. The woven straps dug into my legs, but it felt good to sit, to find a little ease in the shade as Rog and Charine smoked, as the cicadas trilled and ticked. Rog and Charine talked about how things in the hood had changed, how we felt like death was stalking us, driving us from one another, the community falling apart. They talked about how messed up they’d been the night before. They talked about California. They talked about change.

Rog talked about change, about returning to California, with others, too. It was all he could think of then, and I imagined the pines and the thick air felt like the walls of an invisible room to him, closed on all sides. Perhaps this made him use more, because like many people, Rog medicated with drugs and alcohol. His habit became more evident. He lost weight, became even more wiry, even more lean, his smile, slight when it shone, dimmer in his face. His cousin Bebe said that leaving was all he talked about one summer day, leaving Mississippi to return to California. He missed his job; he missed the freedom of the different, the new. He told her, “Cuz, you know, it’s a better place for me out there. I can make a better way.” He turned his bottle up. “I’m ready to change, ready to go,” he said. “I’ll be straight out there, but here …” And as he spoke, a boy from the neighborhood who was notorious for using drugs, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, drove up in his Cutlass. Parked. Walked up and said: “What’s up?”

Some knew that Rog was snorting cocaine, and others didn’t. In Mississippi, cocaine was a party drug in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties. People in my parents’ generation snorted it, or they smoked it with weed. They did it secretly, casually. For some the habit stuck, and for others it didn’t. And then came crack, a terrible development for those with a coke habit: it was a cheaper, more addictive high. Those who couldn’t stop changed from partiers to addicts. They stole from their families, from strangers, to support their habit.

There is a story that I like to tell about the close-knit nature of DeLisle and the Black enclave of Pass Christian. When you wake up and find that, say, your car stereo is missing from your car, you’re pissed off about it. You call your cousins and tell them about it, mention it to a few friends. You suspect who may have stolen it. By noon, one of your cousins or friends has called you with news, told you that someone saw someone else walking through the woods or loping along the street with your stuff under their arm. That afternoon, you show up at the thief’s house, which is small, a little worn, but neat. You get loud. You demand your radio back. They are shamefaced as you berate them, and they may even curse you back or smile nervously, but they will return what they stole. This is how stealing was handled when I was growing up through the eighties and the beginning of the crack epidemic in the nineties. This is not what happens today. By the time you get to the thief’s house in the afternoon, a house that has no electricity and a rotting floor, they will have pawned your radio, and they will have smoked it, and their eyes, jittery in the skull, will slide past you to the red dirt ground, to the sky, to the trees waving overhead, and they will lie until you give up to follow the trail elsewhere, until you leave.

There is a stigma associated with coke among the young in DeLisle and Pass Christian because it is too close a cousin to crack. Kids will take shots of white strong liquor, they will smoke weed wrapped in thick blunts, they will even take Ecstasy or prescription pain pills, but they will not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the table at a house party. Why? Because the specter of the cousin or the uncle or aunt or the mother or father who couldn’t stop partying, whose teeth are burned brown from the pipe, sits next to them at that table. Young people who do coke lie about it, attempt to hide it, and often fight it. Rog hid it and fought it.

Some of my relatives, on my mother’s side and my father’s, have abused crack, on and off, for years. I can’t fault them for it, Charine always says when we talk about it, that’s just their high that they like. Fuck it. It helps them cope. And then: They’re grown. I understand her now, but I did not understand her point in the summer of 2004. Did not see the way liquor had been my drug for years. Was not connecting the relief I felt when I drank with the drugs others were using, or even thinking that it could be the same for my relatives, the same for my siblings, or the same for Rog. I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.

The last time that I remember seeing Rog in the summer of 2004 was at a gas station. I don’t remember whom I was with, but we’d stopped to get gas at the BP on the beach in Pass Christian, the BP that would disappear a year later when Hurricane Katrina swept in and decimated the coastline. The pumps buzzed, and I jumped out of the car when I saw Rog lope by with his beer, his face long, his mouth closed, no teeth this time. He was so skinny. His eyes were closed to slits like he was smiling, but he was not.

“What up, Rog?” I said.

“What’s up?”

He hugged me, black T-shirt loose on his frame. His shoulders barely touched mine. He was already pulling away, already out of the polite embrace. He was already back in the car with two men from the hood. He was already swallowed by the black reach of the highway. The wind from the Gulf stuttered in, blew sand lazily across the parking lot, across my feet, and Rog disappeared into the dim, tree-tunneled streets of Pass Christian, like an animal down its secret hole.

Years later, Charine told me she tried to visit Rog after he died but before he was found. In other words, she visited him when she thought he was alive. She and her friends banged on the door of the dark, shuttered house, not knowing that Rog was already dead inside. His sister Rhea would find him two days later. They called his name: “Rog!” They said, “His ass is probably passed out in there. Rog!” Louder. “Come open the door!”

Now, Charine says, knowing how he lay behind that door breaks something inside of her.

Years later, Nerissa told me about Rog’s visit with her in February 2004. This would have been when Rog and our cousins were doing too much coke because C. J. had just died. This would have been when they were raw with love, with losing. This would have been when Rog passed out, when our cousin was afraid he wasn’t breathing, when he carried Rog into Nerissa’s bathroom and put him in the tub, ran the water cold, hoping for a miracle, for the flame not to go out. My cousin cried. He yelled, “Don’t do this to me!” Beat Rog on the chest. “Not you!” Yelled at Rog, “Not again!” And then Rog drew a breath and opened his eyes.

Rog did cocaine, and then he took a few Lortabs on the night of June 3, 2004. For once, there was no party, no casual gathering of friends at his mother’s house. Then Rog, the boy with the beautiful smile and the long face, lay back in his bed, feeling high and low, feeling everything and nothing, all at once. Perhaps he was thinking he should be somewhere else, maybe out under the palm trees in California, walking along Venice Beach with his cousins, smelling incense that you could almost mistake for weed. Maybe he thought of the sky over the Pacific Ocean, the water stretching away to meet the clouds and disappear over the horizon, the way it seemed to go on forever. Maybe he was thinking of his family, of his mama’s return from working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico on an oil rig. Maybe he was thinking about the air conditioner, how good it was to lie in a cool dark bed at home, to be. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about any of these things, but I like to imagine that he was thinking about all of them when the seed of the bad heart that had killed his father sent out roots and bloomed violently in Rog’s chest. Sometime that night Rog died of a heart attack.

I was at my mother’s house, alone, when my brother’s last girlfriend, Tasha, called and told me Rog had died.

“They killed my brother!” she sobbed. She’d been close to Rog.

I left my mother’s house and drove through DeLisle, deep into the country. I drove with the windows down and my lights low. On a solitary road I ran into my ex-boyfriend from high school, Brandon; we stopped our cars in the middle of the empty darkness that is endemic to rural Mississippi. I’d known Brandon since I was seven years old, and his face was as familiar as my own. I walked to his car and passed a hand over my forehead and leaned into the driver’s-side window. His own eyes were wide and black, and the woods around us burned with calling insects.

“You heard?” I said.

I hugged him. Rog was his first cousin, his younger cousin. They had the same black eyes, the same curly black hair. Brandon nodded. My face brushed against his as I pulled away. His skin was wet: the night was so hot I didn’t know if it was sweat or tears.

“You heading to Oak Park?” I asked. After days of others knocking but not walking in, Rog’s sister Rhea had found Rog. I do not like to imagine what it must have been like for her.

“Yes,” Brandon said.

I left him behind in the middle of the street. When I arrived in the Oak Park subdivision, I parked my car on a cement curb and walked over to stand on the lawn in front of Rog’s house. People stood in drifting pockets at the edge of the same street we had partied on. Charine and Tasha met me there. We faced the house. A long hearse, gray and black with silver accents, took Rog away. It had a hard time maneuvering the driveway. The street lamps buzzed. When they rolled Rog out on the stretcher and loaded him into the back, I cried, my mouth open. I hated the hearse. I wanted to set it on fire. As the driver clumsily crushed the grass and swerved out of the yard, I thought of what my ex had said to me before I drove away.

“They picking us off, one by one,” Brandon had breathed.

After the people dispersed and Rog’s immediate family locked the house and turned off all the lights, we milled in the street, waiting. We waited as if we could will the hearse back to the house, will Rog to rise out of the back, alive. Will him to joke, to smile. I drove home across the black, inky bayou by myself. I thought about Josh. I thought about C. J., about Demond, about Ronald. I rode with the windows open and thought about Rog.

I thought about what Tasha and Brandon had said, and I wondered who they were. Rog had died by his own hand, by his own heart; were they us? Or was there a larger story that I was missing as all these deaths accumulated, as those I loved died? Were they even human? My headlights lit a slim sliver in the darkness, and suddenly they seemed as immense as the darkness, as deep, as pressing. I turned off my music and rode home without the narrative of song, with only the bugs’ shrill cry and hot wind whipping past my window. I tried to hear the narrative in that, to figure out who the they that wrote our story might be.

After Rog’s funeral, I tapped Rhea’s shoulder. I opened my arms, hugged her. Her big, expressive eyes were bloodshot and wandering. I wondered what I would have wanted someone, anyone, to say to me when my brother died, anything beyond Are you all right? and Are you okay? I knew the answers to those questions. I whispered into her ear: “He will always be your brother, and you will always be his sister.”

What I meant to say was this: You will always love him. He will always love you. Even though he is not here, he was here, and no one can change that. No one can take that away from you. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, and if your brother was here with his, his humor, his kindness, his hopes, doesn’t this mean that what he was still exists somewhere, even if it’s not here? Doesn’t it? Because in order to get out of bed this morning, this is what I had to believe about my brother, Rhea. But I didn’t know how to say that.

After every funeral in the hood, including Rog’s, there is a gathering or a repast. Older women brought large pans containing casseroles and meat to Mrs. P.’s house. We all found our way there, and we parked in front of her house, some of us in neighboring yards, our cars half on the grass, half on the asphalt, this time in the middle of the day. We ate with plates balanced on our laps, one foot in our cars, the other out. We smoothed our shirts down, white T-shirts with pictures of Rog framed in blue. In Rog’s picture, he has deep dimples and an even, blinding smile. We breathed heavily.

The memorial shirt is most common at funerals for young people. I do not know if it is common in Black neighborhoods in the North or East or West, but in the South, it has become as traditional as the repast. Rog’s shirt was made by his cousins: they gathered the pictures for the shirt, designed it, and then offered one to anyone who could afford the $20 it cost to make it. In this way, the young memorialize the young. On his memorial T-shirt, Rog has a charming grin, looks as if he is on the verge of saying, Hey, how you doing, what we getting into tonight? Around Rog’s larger picture, there are pictures of the other dead young men: Ronald, C. J., Demond, Joshua, and two others who had died years before and whom I was not so close to, one in a car wreck and the other by suicide. They are all smiling in what look like school photos or family reunion shots. My brother looks like a young thug in his picture, like he could run with the best of the phantom menace in New Orleans. He holds my father’s SK gun and postures for the camera, a bandana over the bottom half of his face, his hair cut close to his head. He must have been sixteen then. I had never seen this picture of Joshua before, and seeing him there with all the other dead young men made me cry while I ate. I chewed my funeral food on a hot Mississippi summer day and looked at my brother’s eyes, large and brown and wide, in a picture that revealed nothing of what he was, and represented everything that he wasn’t.

Yagga yo and what you mean? it said on the back of Rog’s memorial shirt. This was something he said often, I was told, but his cousins did not tell me its meaning. OPT, the shirt also read. Rog’s picture was an insult to the living man, too blurry, too static for the smiling, open-armed twenty-three-year-old he’d been. Written on the front of the shirt and finished on the back was the declaration: THE SAME THING THAT MAKE YOU LAUGH MAKE YOU CRY. This was too pat, I thought as I wiped my tears. In that moment, I could not remember ever laughing, could not recall what it felt like to open my mouth and scream my loud, embarrassing laugh with Rog. I looked at my family and friends, all of us crying and looking away from each other, and I could not recall having the ability to laugh at all. Only this loss, this pain. I could not understand why there was always this.