Men We Reaped

Demond Cook. Born: May 15, 1972. Died: February 26, 2004

I never knew Demond when he was younger. I came to know him as an adult, when he was old enough to have sharp smile lines and the thin skin at his temples was threaded through with veins. The skull beneath looked hard.

I met Demond when Nerissa lived in a large two-bedroom apartment in Long Beach. Nerissa was the first of the four of us to leave home and rent her own place in Mississippi. I was the eldest and the first to move away a distance, but in some ways Nerissa had been the first to grow up, the first to cut ties with our mother and leave her house. She had little choice. My mother had kicked her out after they’d repeatedly disagreed on Nerissa’s mothering of De’Sean, who by then was three years old. De’Sean was a brown boy with a flat nose he inherited from his nineteen-year-old father and a ready smile filled with teeth like candy, small and perfect. Nerissa was the middle girl, taking on the middle child role, and once when we were all younger, Joshua had told her in an argument: “Mama and Daddy love you the least. All of us are special: Mimi’s the oldest, Charine’s the youngest, and I’m the only boy — think about it.” And even though this wasn’t true, it colored Nerissa’s sense of self and made her want to act out, to be special to someone: her parents, the boys drawn to her by her beauty and her funny, casual coolness. We have a tight bond, we three sisters, which meant that both Charine and I spent days at Nerissa’s first apartment, sleeping on old couches our cousin Rhett had given her. I was sitting at the glass table my mother’d given Nerissa as a house warming gift, after they’d reconciled, when Demond walked in the front door with Rob, Nerissa’s longtime boyfriend.

Demond was around five foot ten, and he had my brother’s coloring: tan, light brown hair, but he was shorter-limbed and more compact in the chest. He was mostly muscle, where my brother had been softer, still losing his preteen baby fat. Demond wore his hair in dreads that swung and brushed his shoulders when he spoke.

“What’s up, Pooh?” This was Rob’s nickname for Nerissa while they were dating. Demond put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, lit it, talked around it.

“What’s up, Demond?” Nerissa said. Demond smiled at her and put his arm around her. He was yet another of Rob’s friends that she was close to: they confided in her because they liked her dimples, her smile, her warmth and openness. They told her their secrets, and she kept them. She embodied femininity in the way she sat, legs crossed, toes painted and polished, a bundle of curves, and then sullied it with the way she cussed easily and made them laugh.

I was drinking a beer. There were many beers in the apartment that year: cold bottles in tight brown sleeves on counters, on tables, leaning in loose hands on laps, on sofa arms. It was 2003. We’d gone crazy. We’d lost three friends by then, and we were so green we couldn’t reconcile our youth with the fact that we were dying, so we drank and smoked and did other things, because these things allowed us the illusion that our youth might save us, that there was someone somewhere who would have mercy on us. We drank Everclear in shots in cars loud with beat under overcast, dark-smothered skies, night after night. My cousins turned the hot tip of blunts to the insides of their mouths, exhaled, pushing smoke out into each other’s mouths. This is what it means to live, we thought.

“This is my sister Mimi,” Nerissa said. She nodded at me, and I smiled over my bottle.

“Hey.”

I’d let the beer turn flat, warm, but I’d still drink it. I am happy, I thought. And then: This is what it means to be spared.

Demond had grown up in DeLisle. Not only was he unusual because he was an only child, but he was also unusual among my generation because he had both parents, and both of his parents had solid working-class jobs. His mother spent years at the pharmaceutical bottling company where he would later work. Being an only child and having a two-parent family meant Demond was the kid in the neighborhood who had all the things the other kids wanted: a swimming pool, an adjustable basketball hoop. Even when we were children, Demond’s house was the house where all the kids wanted to be. While my brother and sisters and I were too young and lived too far away to enjoy his family’s largesse, the older boys in the neighborhood spent hours at Demond’s, swimming away afternoons, wrestling in the water until they smelled strongly of chlorine, their eyes and skin burning. Or sweating for hours in the Mississippi heat, hurling the ball toward Demond’s basketball hoop. When Demond graduated from high school, he joined the military. He enlisted in the army for four years, but at some point in his stint he decided that the military was not for him, so he returned home to DeLisle.

Demond was a hustler in the traditional definition of the word, in the way that many, younger and older in DeLisle, were made to be by necessity. He would do what he had to do to support himself and, later, his family. He learned trades as he went. Whatever the project called for, he did: once he worked as a carpenter even though he had few of those skills. For a longer amount of time he worked at a clothing factory; everyone from DeLisle called it the “T-shirt factory.” They didn’t only manufacture T-shirts there but also acid-washed jeans that were too big in the crotch and too tight in the legs. It was hot in the building, made hotter by fans circulating the dense air. His last job would be in the pharmaceutical factory his mother worked in. The factory was cavernous: long assembly lines snaked through the space, carrying bottles of Pepto-Bismol and capsules of Alka-Seltzer past the workers, who covered their hair with plastic caps and wore thick plastic glasses and face masks. Their jobs were tedious and repetitive, and consisted of bottling the product, screwing caps on, loading the bottles in boxes and onto pallets. This was one of the last good factory jobs on the coast, since the glass bottling company next door had closed years before. The economy of the Gulf Coast had changed drastically in the late eighties and early nineties; many factories had closed, and the seafood industry offered fewer opportunities for employment. As the economy ailed, the Mississippi legislature passed gaming laws that introduced casinos on barges. In general, there was a move from manufacturing and making things to service and tourism. And Black people in the region, who historically did not have the resources to attend college and so did not qualify for the administrative positions, were limited to jobs as cocktail waitresses, valet attendants, and food preparers. Demond was lucky to have his job. At the pharmaceutical plant in Gulfport, he worked different shifts: sometimes overnight, sometimes during the morning and into the afternoon, and sometimes during the afternoon and into the early evening. Most of the time when I saw him he was in throwaway tees, work pants, boots, with a bandana tied around his dreads to hold them away from his face, to protect them from whatever machines he worked over in that factory. He wore his work jumpsuits and his boots like a badge of honor, and when I saw him in them, dusted with whatever compound he packaged in that factory, he looked so much like my brother when he’d flitted from factory job to factory job that it was hard to keep my gaze on him.

Demond lived in a seafoam-green house. It had belonged to his grandmother; her husband had probably built it for her, as was the custom in DeLisle in those days. When his girlfriend gave birth to their child when he was in his late twenties, his mother gave him the house for them to live in. It was like most of the older houses in DeLisle: perched up on cinder blocks, two or three, in case of flood; low ceilings, wood paneling, small corner kitchen. Demond’s house was set at the rear of a long, roomy piece of corner property. His yard was mostly grass with a few trees clustered closer near the front of the house: an old spreading oak, pecan, a crape myrtle gone to seed. The house was fronted by a wood-framed, screened-in porch. The living room was always dark, lit only by the neon play of the television across the walls, our faces. The dining room was usually empty except for domino and spades games on the older wooden table, the kitchen brown as the rest of the house. The bathroom was shoved behind the kitchen in a weird, diagonally placed nook off his child’s bedroom. The rest of the house, which included two more bedrooms, was designed like a shotgun house, each room opening onto another.

I never went through the door in his child’s bedroom wall into the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend, through that door to the extra bedroom in the back where sometimes his girlfriend’s twin slept. I wondered about those rooms often, wondered if they were as dark as the rooms in the front, if they seemed as sealed, as insular, and I imagined them stretching off into a great distance, room after room, each one more cavelike than its predecessor, each holding what would later become treasure: a picture of Demond grinning and holding his child, his Enyce fits, his Timberland boots, still smelling faintly of the sweat of his feet. I never imagined people in those rooms since all the living seemed to be done in the front.

We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new. I wondered about Demond’s grandmother and her kids, and wondered what their lives in Demond’s house had been like. Had they lived with the dead as we did? Had they quaffed shine the way we did beer and weed and pills, and then stare at each other in the dim light, glassy-eyed, hoping for a sea change? Even though Demond’s parents had remained married and both had good jobs, his family wasn’t so different from my family, his reality the same, death stalking us all. If Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?

That same summer, we decided to have a crawfish boil at Nerissa’s apartment. Rob borrowed a gas burner and a huge silver pot from a friend in the neighborhood. He set it at the edge of Nerissa’s small concrete back patio, pulled out a plastic table, set six chairs around it. It was a bright, warm day; the grass was tough with water because it was summer. It had been raining at least every other day for the past month. Rob set out with two empty coolers and went to a seafood shop that specialized in crawfish during the season, and returned with them full and crawling with mud-green crawfish. He and Nerissa chopped seasonings, dumped them in the heavy silver pot so large an infant could fit inside, and began boiling the sides. Charine and her boyfriend, C. J., cuddled on the sofa, demanded that the rest of us watch the Bruce Lee biopic Dragon over and over again. People arrived one by one, in pairs, in carfuls, Rog and Demond among them. Once there, Demond took a seat at the table where a dominoes game was in mid-slap. A cooler of beer appeared, a few bottles of Crown, some fruity malt beverages for the girls. We spread newspaper over the kitchen table inside the house, dumped the boiled crawfish, now blood red, on the table. We peeled, sucked, and ate. My lips began to burn and I noticed that everyone who was eating crawfish was sniffing, eyes watery, lips red and puffy as pickled pig’s lips in a jar. Demond sat at the table with Nerissa and me and Charine, passed us drinks, asked me questions about what I did.

“So what you doing up there?”

“I’m trying to be a writer.”

“What you want to write?”

“Books about home. About the hood.”

“She writing about real shit,” Charine said.

“What you mean?” Demond asked.

“They be selling drugs in the book,” Charine said.

“For real?” Demond asked, took a swig of his beer.

“Yeah,” I said. Laughed, drank a third of my bottle.

“I told you she be writing about the hood,” Charine said.

“You should write about my life,” Demond said.

“I should, huh?” I laughed again. I heard this often at home. Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about. Then, I laughed it off. Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims.

“It’d be a bestseller,” Demond said.

“I don’t write real-life stuff,” I said. It was my stock response for that suggestion, but even as I said it, I experienced a sort of dissonance. I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn’t pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys, Demond among them, experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the South, and to write honestly about that. How to be an Old Testament God. To avoid all of this, I drank.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I smiled. Demond smiled. The vein running down the center of his high forehead pulsed and the skin around his eyes bunched at the corners.

Rob put the last batch of the eighty pounds of crawfish to boil at midnight, cut the burner off, and then went inside and forgot about them, fell asleep. We all slept, drunk, lips tender, on sofas, on floors, in beds. I woke at 2:00 A.M. hungry and drunk and stumbled out onto the slab to find the pot cold, the crawfish bloated with water, soft and ruined, and rain falling, the drops fat and warm. The dominoes, the table, the chairs: all wet. When I stepped out into the grass, searching for some crawfish that had been spared, hidden away on a plate or container, the grass gave and my feet sank. Every step was an exercise in loss. I looked up into the rain, then gave up, slipped back inside, figured somebody would clean up the mess in the morning, and fell asleep in the bunk bed that my nephew slept in when he visited Nerissa.

Illusions was a club that had been many things before it became what it was for us that summer and the next. It had been a country bar, a teen club, a “Black” club, a pop club, and then finally it became what it would be when Katrina’s storm surge bulldozed the beachfront property flat: a Black club we affectionally called “Delusions.” The first floor consisted of a bar and small, crowded dance floor. Upstairs, there were pool tables, another bar, and a small space for a photographer to work, where my cousins and I took pictures in front of a banner spray-painted with a city skyline that was completely alien to the long, low towns of the Coast. God’s Gift, the frame around the Polaroid reads. When the club was packed to capacity, the walls sweated and the glass fogged with perspiration.

That night, I drove to Illusions while Nerissa rode in the passenger seat and my brother’s last girlfriend, Tasha, laughed in the back. We were perfumed, giddy, glad to be out of Nerissa’s apartment, out of Demond’s house, where we’d been spending a lot of time: out. I wore black. Rob and Demond followed in Demond’s car, an older-model Z40 sportscar, sleek and low to the ground. My old boyfriend Brandon met us there. Charine and C. J. had decided to stay at Nerissa’s apartment, watching Forrest Gump and smoking. Upstairs in Illusions, Rob gave us his shining grin, gold in his dark face, and bought Nerissa, Tasha, and me drinks. They were walk-me-downs, fluorescent blue and sweet, made of nearly every liquor behind the bar. I couldn’t taste the alcohol in it. I gulped mine down, anxious, almost, for the buzz to hit. We stood at the end of the bar with Rob and Brandon, a cigar at the corner of Rob’s mouth, watching the women gliding like sleek ducks through the crowd, dressed in gold and pastel denim, hairstyles molded stiff, and the men separated by hood, drinks in hand, stopping girls with a pinched waist, a grasped wrist, a smile, hey. I looked at the crowd of people and wondered at their stories, and for a sober moment I knew that their stories were ours, and ours theirs.

“Y’all want another one?” Demond asked. The corner of his mouth made a gesture at a smile.

“Yeah,” Nerissa said. I nodded, as did Tasha. He bought us each another drink, slid them across the bar to us. The clear plastic cups were cold to the touch, perspiring instantly. I drank. When I swallowed, I smiled at Demond in what was supposed to be an unspoken thank-you. Demond laughed and told me that he liked my outfit. His dreadlocks swung. He was handsome, fair, charming. Women approached him, lingered in his field of vision, waiting for him to talk to them, to hit on them, to say hello. He didn’t have to flirt. People were attracted to him, and he was charismatic enough to draw them even closer to him with conversation when he wanted to. When he didn’t the planes of his face were more severe and he was a closed door, his eyes peepholes viewed from the wrong side, obscuring everything. He had a temper. But that night he was all geniality.

I sucked up the drink: I was thirsty, and it was cold and lemony. I danced at the bar. Nerissa threw her wrist over my shoulder and danced with me. Tasha, who could dance better than both of us, laughed and drank. Everything turned hazy then: Demond’s face blurred, and I told my sister I didn’t feel so good. We went to the bathroom together. She took the last available stall, and I heard her vomiting into the toilet. I swayed and my throat burned. Something was wringing my insides out. I was wretched.

“Fuck it,” I said, and leaned over the garbage can, large and full to the brim. I threw up. Everything was hot and sticky: I could feel the bass thudding through the building from the dance floor downstairs through the grimy tile of the bathroom wall. Pretty girls using napkins to wipe sweat from their foreheads: they walked in and out of the bathroom, ignoring me. Some girl in purple and gold stumbled in wearing stilettos and said, “Get it all out, baby.” This was comforting, and I gurgled. Vomit splashed on the top layer of plastic cups. Nerissa came out of her stall, and suddenly I was finished. The world spun. I grabbed her shoulders, followed her out of the bathroom, and blacked out.

When I came to, I was in the backseat of my car, slumped over in the center. Nerissa was on my right, leaning over on my shoulder. Tasha’s back was to me because her head rested on the upholstered seat. Brandon and Rob and Demond’s voices were loud. I opened my eyes only long enough to see them standing near the two open doors of the car, smiling down at us. The breeze from the Gulf cut cleanly through the car, hot and salty. I couldn’t move.

“Walk-me-down, huh? It sure walked them down,” Brandon said.

“Look at them,” Rob said.

We were all sick.

“It’s not funny!” Tasha yelled, and in my drunken stupor, I felt like laughing. They did this: despite all, they made us laugh damn near every time we were together. But I couldn’t open my mouth. I could only listen as Demond laughed for me, clean and cutting, and the wind carried it away across the parking lot to the Outback steak house, where it sputtered away like a desultory breeze. I curled in on myself. All I wanted in the world was for it to go dark, to not exist. I wanted to black out again. Then I did.

The next time we met at Illusions was New Year’s Eve of 2004, over a year later, and there were more of us. This is when we took the picture with the God’s Gift background. I left my hair down, curly and big, wore a red one-shoulder shirt and red boots with silver studs and silver stiletto heels shaped skinny and sharp as knives. In the picture, we are all drunk, and everyone smiles. We know that taking this cheap picture is tacky, but we are a neighborhood, a community, a hood, a family, so we grin. Knees bend, hips angle, waists are grabbed. Drunk and sentimental, I loved every one of them for still being alive.

I never drove home when I was drunk. One of my more sober cousins or friends, one of my sisters maybe, drove us back to DeLisle that night, where we ended up in Demond’s yard at 4:00 A.M. The sky was deepest black, salted with stars. We were all drunk, all high, all smoking packs of Black & Mild cigars while we perched on car hoods. The music played in the cars where some of us sat having conversations, club-sweaty, intoxicated and serious. Demond wove his way through the cars with a 22-ounce of beer in his hand, talking and laughing.

“You on a all-night flight, huh?” he asked me as I leaned on the car next to my cousin Blake, passing a cigar back and forth, which I had never smoked before. It was so strong it was making me dizzy and tingly, and I liked the sensation, but not enough to smoke one again, I thought. It was making my throat burn.

The night pulsed with bugs; they gave low, staccato ticks. I smiled at Demond, at all of them. There was no place I wanted to be more than that yard, leaning on that car, interior lights flashing on and off, a lone streetlight a block away leaving us wide-eyed, struggling to see each other in the dark.

Demond ducked his head into the window of a car where two of my cousins were sitting and said, “Hey man, turn the music down.” He didn’t wait for them to reply and walked off, his dreads swinging. He liked the party, but he didn’t want the county cops to wander by and stop, drawn by the music, and he didn’t want the neighbors to complain. Not only did he have responsibilities, but he also had spent the last couple of years dodging the kind of bad luck that afflicts the innocent in drug-plagued neighborhoods, where every other cousin or friend is a drug dealer, every older cousin or friend an addict. Demond had been witness to the aftermath of a shooting and had agreed to testify against the alleged shooter. The shooting had occurred in DeLisle, during a holiday. He’d also agreed to testify against a drug dealer who wasn’t from DeLisle but had been operating in the neighborhood. His conscience had made him agree to testify in the first case, and since he’d been stopped while riding in a car with the drug dealer in the second case, self-preservation had made him agree to testify in the second. These things weighed on him and he felt he had no room for error.

My cousins rolled their eyes, said “Fuck that nigga,” and kept the volume where it was. The sun came up, washed the yard a milky gray, then white, and we departed one by one to our houses, where we eased open doors, tiptoed inside, and fell into dead sleeps while the sun burned its way higher into the sky and the community rose to face the day. Everything about the night seemed stolen, lived in those murky hours while others slept or worked. We crawled through time like roaches through the linings of walls, the neglected spaces and hours, foolishly happy that we were still alive even as we did everything to die.

On February 26, 2004, Demond was working third shift, at night. He called Rob before he left work, told him he would call him when he made it home, that maybe Rob could ride with him to a twenty-four-hour pharmacy in Gulfport, to Walmart, to get diapers for his daughter.

On another night, Demond would have driven to DeLisle, turned into Rob’s mother’s driveway, which dipped down from St. Stephen’s, and stopped to the side of Rob’s mother’s house. Rob would have loped out, slid into the passenger seat of the maroon two-door car, eased into conversation with Demond, and they would’ve driven up Lobouy Road, pine-cloaked under the night sky, thick with animal secrets, to the interstate. At that hour, Gulfport would have been desolate: a stretch of chain stores, fast-food restaurants, two-story hotels, neon lights, black and yellow oil-spotted parking lots, and beyond them, pines and ranch-style houses divided into subdivisions. Demond’s car would have been one of a few idling at stoplights, filling up in gas stations, parked near the doors at Walmart. They would have flicked the ashes from their cigars out the window to turn to dust on the asphalt. It would have been a night like any other, where the company of a friend eased Demond out of a shift spent standing, repetitively doing one thing or another. But this was not a night like any other night because Demond never showed up at Rob’s house.

Later, talk around the factory where Demond worked, from the guard shack, would be that there was a truck lurking near the gates, that someone was watching the cars leave after second shift, arrive for third. Instead of going to Rob’s after he left work, Demond went home. Rob waited for him and fell asleep. In Rob’s blue room, the light from the television pulled him into his dreams: Rob slept, and the light shone over him with an aluminum crackle, flashing, but he didn’t wake. Neither did anyone in the houses next to Demond’s, or in the house across the street. Neither did Demond’s fiancée or his daughter when someone stepped out of the bushes in front of Demond’s house and shot him as he walked up to his door, tired and grimy with dried sweat, wanting a shower, maybe a beer. Hours later, Demond’s absence in that cavernous room, in a cold bed, woke his fiancée. She looked outside and saw his car. She walked out on the porch, her small feet making the wood creak, and saw someone asleep on the lawn. Who was asleep in the yard? Demond lay there, his dreads splayed away from his head, his face still, his eyes open, his chest red; but for that, he would have been asleep. She fell on him and screamed.

Charine got the call at around seven o’clock the next morning. We had a de facto phone tree: the first person to hear would call the second person, who would call the third, who would call the fourth, and somewhere in that line someone would call Rob, who would call Nerissa, who would call Charine, who would tell me, no matter the time. I was home for my spring break, asleep, dreaming of nothing, when she came into my room in my mother’s house, switched on the light, and without preamble said, “Mimi, Demond’s been shot.” I heard her, covered my eyes, breathed. Death rushed me like water does the first summer jumper into a still-chill spring river.

“What the fuck!” I said.

Charine hopped from one foot to another.

“What happened?” I said.

“I don’t know. It might be drug-related. You know he was supposed to testify against that dude from New Orleans.”

Charine climbed into the bed with me, turned toward the wall. If she cried, she was silent, and I could not feel it in her back or her stomach. I spooned her, threw my arm over her ribs, held her like I had when she was a baby, when she was growing out of her chubby precociousness to walk, and I was an eight-year-old growing faster from the legs than anywhere else. She fell asleep, and every time my arm rose and fell with her breath, I thanked something that she still breathed, even as I was sick about it, whatever it was, that killed us one after the other. Senseless, I thought. This is never going to end, I thought. Never.

I woke up four hours later. My eyes were puffy and red, matted at the seams from crying, from sleeping. I threw on a sweatshirt and drove with Charine to meet Nerissa at Demond’s house. I played one song over and over in my car, parked on the street, felt the acute sense that life had promised me something when I was younger, that it wouldn’t be this hard, perhaps, that my people wouldn’t keep dying without end. I’m only twenty-six, I thought. I’m tired of this shit.

We sat with Demond’s fiancée, a widow at my age, her face swollen, red-tinged underneath the black. She smoked cigarette after cigarette.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “Nothing.”

She said it as if the fact that she hadn’t heard the gunshot meant it couldn’t have happened. We did not know then that the police would conduct an investigation for a few months, post signs at the local gas stations near the interstate asking for any information about Demond’s murder. We did not know the murderer would remain faceless, like the great wolf trackless in the swamp, and the police’s search would be fruitless.

On the day after Demond died, I sat on his concrete porch steps. When the sun set, the coven of bats that lived in Demond’s roof burst from the vents and out into the night in a black, squeaking mass. Where we had parked and drank and gotten high on Demond’s lawn, now there was yellow police tape draped from pine to pine, circumventing the mimosa. It read: CAUTION. Nerissa smoked, exhaling clouds into the cold air, the skin dry at the sides of her mouth, and I wondered who had come out of the dark and killed Demond. Even as I knew the figure that had waited hidden for him in the shivering pockets of the trees was human, I wanted to turn to Nerissa and ask her: What do you think it is? What?