Men We Reaped

Charles Joseph Martin. Born: May 5, 1983. Died: January 5, 2004

The first time C. J., one of my many cousins, moves into sharp relief is when he was around six and I was around twelve. He was fair and had a face full of freckles. As a toddler, he’d been blond like Josh, but as he grew older his hair darkened, grew long and curly, and his mother braided it to his head or cut it low on the top and left a long lock of it to grow down his back in a rattail. He was small and lean, angled all over with muscle. His face was shaped like a triangle, and the only things that were dark about him were his eyes, which were so deep in color they were a surprise.

At family reunions for my father’s side, C. J. would be there, small and gold and wiry, his rattail touching him in the middle of his spine. We children ate hot dogs with ketchup and mustard, crunched potato chips, drank cold sodas in big gulps so that the fizzy acid burned our throats, and chased each other in packs around the yard.

“Flip,” someone would say.

“Okay,” C. J. said.

We lined up in a human corridor so he could showcase his skills. He jumped a couple of times and then ran headlong down the strip of grass we’d left. Near the end of the line he punched into a round-off, then a back handspring, and then another handspring, his rattail streaming out behind him. He was a human Slinky. We cheered. I felt hot and weak. Again and again he flipped down our aisle, hurling himself through the air, which was thick with humidity, and each time he cut it cleanly in two. When he landed on his feet, he bounced. When he grew tired, he’d run off to get a soda. The group would dissipate. I wandered off by myself, feeling dissatisfied with how earthbound my body was, how bound by the heat, until I wandered into a playhouse, a square of plywood and two-by-fours. Lying on the floor, sand scratching my back, I watched the other kids. They ran the yard in pairs, yanking at one another in the waning day, fighting for the last cold drinks. I watched C. J. dart between them, trip them, take what he wanted, and run away so quickly they couldn’t catch him.

For a long time I did not see C. J. I went away to college when he was twelve, and when I came back, there he was: taller, my height at least, but short for a man. He was shirtless. The little-boy body he’d had was now larger, but he was still wiry, and his muscles were like rocks under his skin. There was no fat on him. He had grown all of his hair long and braided it back to his head, so his face stood out in hard relief. He was pale, freckled, and still able to do things with his body I could not imagine possible.

At this point, most of us lived with our parents, and while some of us had parents who didn’t care if we had people over, others had parents who did (like my mother). And even most of the parents who didn’t mind company minded if company came over too often, if there were lots of cars parked in the yard, because that attracted something we called heat: police attention. While that might not matter in neighborhoods that were mostly White and working-class, in our Black working-class community, it mattered. So kids from their preteens to their twenties spent most of their time down at the park, a former field that sat between the priests’ rectory and the graveyard. The county hadn’t invested much into its construction: they poured a small basketball court, then put up two swing sets, a wooden jungle gym, and two sets of small wooden bleachers that quickly rotted in the humidity and heat. My mother called the park “pitiful.” It made her angry that our county park was markedly different from those in other towns in neighborhoods across the coast that were White or more moneyed. But we didn’t care; we avoided the rotten spots on the bleachers and watched kids closely when they played on the jungle gym, and spent hours there, studiously ignoring the county police as they circled us like vultures, suspecting us of using and selling drugs wherever we gathered.

The day I took pictures of C. J. at the park, he wasn’t in the game. We sat on the benches, watching some boys from the neighborhood play basketball on one of the four hoops. Some of them were shirtless, sweat-glazed and shiny, others not, the cotton pasted to their chests before pulling loose at the neck and stomach. That day C. J. sat at the foot of the bleachers, smoking. Charine waited near him, a basketball in hand. She was around fourteen then. Every few minutes he’d walk up to Charine, and she’d throw the ball to him, and he would toss it in the air toward the hoop closest to the bleachers. Charine took a jump shot and missed it. The day was hot, heavy, and overcast, the rain perpetually five minutes away. The wind moved, and for a second it was cool. A tall Spanish oak tree shaded the bleachers where I sat beneath its green canopy, slapping mosquitoes dead. The road glittered in the distance.

Cars had pulled onto the grass near the basketball court, parked next to the concrete benches. Typically, boys who did this opened their doors and trunks and played music on loud audio systems.

Charine shot the ball, attempting jumpers and fade-away shots at the hoop closest to the fence near the Catholic priests’ house. C. J. snatched the rebounds and ran for another basket, dribbling the ball hard and fast, picking up speed before throwing his body upward and through the air. The ball slammed against the backboard and then ricocheted out of his hand and flew back into the game at the opposite end of the court. C. J. flew so high that he dangled from the rim by the crook of his elbow, giggling madly, swinging slowly from side to side.

“Jesus,” I said. I’d never seen someone so short jump so high. I cradled my old manual Nikon camera, hefted its solid weight, and yelled, “Do it again, C. J.!”

He dropped from the goal and bounced. Charine passed him the ball. He sprinted to the other end of the court and ran at his goal again, threw himself up in the air. He flew. Again the ball smacked into the wrong spot on the backboard, rebounded off, and again Charine caught it and threw it back to C. J. I walked down the bleachers, stood closer to the hoop, and tried to snap pictures of him, of the miracle of him flying through the air. But he was too fast and my camera was too old. I could hear the shutter snap open, lick against metal, and then snap shut again. Too slow. Later, when I developed that film back at college, C. J. would look all wrong in the air: awkwardly bent, blurry, all his terrific grace lost in the frozen moment captured by the camera.

“I can’t do it, Mimi,” C. J. said, walking to the bleachers. He said Mimi but it swung off his tongue before jerking short: it sounded like May-me. He and his closest cousin on Daddy’s side of the family, Mario, were the only two people who said my name like that. “I can’t.” He laughed, shook his head, sweat streaming down his face, his hair turning wiry and golden at the root, giving him the blond halo Joshua’d had when we were children.

“Shit, you jump high enough,” I said.

“You got it?” he asked, motioning toward the camera.

“I hope,” I said.

C. J. was fourteen when he and Charine began dating. He charmed her into it. There was something physically appealing in him: he was so short, so thinly muscled, his body performed magic for him. She and C. J. felt physically well matched, like a team. They didn’t endure the lopsidedness that gendered differences in size and muscle could foster. They were cousins, which means many people, including some of our aunts, his mother, and my mother, hated that they were dating. But Charine didn’t care, and neither did C. J. Cousins dated, had children, and married all the time in DeLisle and Pass Christian. They had for generations. In such small towns, in communities confined by race and class, this was inevitable. Charine loved C. J., and that’s what mattered above all else.

From the beginning, Charine and C. J. were inseparable, which was only possible because C. J. was a nomad. He had a room with a twin bed in his mother’s house in Pass Christian, but he rarely stayed there. Part of the roof and the ceiling in his room were caved in, and the floor and bed were covered in boxes of things that weren’t his. When he was home, C. J. slept in the back living room. This room held a sofa and a little TV. He folded his clothes and stacked them on the back of the sofa, the television. He put small pictures, photos Charine took from me when I developed my film, of him and Charine and his cousins, on a side table. The door into the room was open to the kitchen and the rest of the house. His mother was a single mother to two children, C. J. and his much younger sister, and had never married either of their fathers. She worked hard to provide a home for her children, pushing against all the constraints and limitations of who she was and where she lived. Perhaps C. J. felt like he was a burden; perhaps this is why he spent months living in other places, sleeping on other couches.

When he wasn’t living with his mother, he would sometimes live with his father in DeLisle, along with his father’s girlfriend and her daughters. His father tried to integrate C. J. into his new family, gave him a car, worked on it with him to get it running, but it was never fixed. When he wasn’t living with his father or his mother, he slept at our cousin Duck’s house, who was Joshua’s best friend. He slept in Duck’s room, at the front of the house; Duck’s mother didn’t mind him staying there because C. J. was family. Children moved from family to family in DeLisle and Pass Christian through the decades: women in my great-grandmother’s generation would sometimes give newborn children to childless couples after having five or ten or fourteen, and when children were older, they would often move out of the family home and live with different relatives. Sometimes they were driven away by their parents, and other times they were touched by the urge to wander. Here, family has always been a mutable concept. Sometimes it encompasses an entire community, which meant that C. J. also slept on the sofa in Rob’s living room and the sofa in Pot’s living room, though he was not related to them. At Duck’s house, C. J. wore the same clothes for a few days in a row, and sat sleepily picking out his braids in the middle, hottest part of the day on the roots of an ancient oak tree at the corner of Hill Road and St. Stephen’s. It was common knowledge that he was sitting on those massive roots waiting for his small clientele to show up so he could sell them drugs. I, like many others in the neighborhood, judged him for it. What I did not know at the time was that he hated sitting on that tree, that he wanted more for himself, but he didn’t know how to get it.

When C. J. was seventeen, he dropped out of high school. School had bored and frustrated him simultaneously, and he left after ninth grade. I do not know exactly why, but I can imagine that he felt ignored and unremarkable in the classroom, yet another body crowding the school. He was not an academic standout, and he didn’t like playing organized sports, even though he had the physical talent for it. The fact that he was a Black male barely scraping by in his classes meant he was seen as a problem. And the school administration at the time solved the problem of the Black male by practicing a kind of benign neglect. Years later, that benign neglect would turn malignant and would involve illegal strip searches of middle schoolers accused of drug dealing, typing these same students as troublemakers, laying a thick paper trail of imagined or real discipline offenses, and once the paper trail grew thick enough, kicking out the students who endangered the blue-ribbon rating with lackluster grades and test scores.

Sometimes C. J. followed Charine to Gulfport and stayed with her at my father’s rented house in Gaston Point. C. J. and Charine wandered the streets of Gaston Point wearing basketball shorts and white wifebeaters under long white T-shirts. Both of them dressed like boys. They walked to the stores for bread, for milk, for lunch meat before returning to my father’s house. They ate, watching movies and hiding from the heat. Sometimes in the cooler evening, C. J. would lift weights on the rickety weight bench my father had erected in the front yard.

On one particular hot summer day, one in a seemingly endless procession, C. J. and Charine and our cousin walked to the store for ice and Popsicles. On their way back, they heard a bark: breathy, tiny.

“You heard that?” Charine said.

“There,” C. J. said, and pointed at the porch of a house they were passing, which was bordered by an aluminum fence.

“Y’all want it?” our cousin asked.

On the narrow, open porch of the house, a pit bull puppy sat, ears wide and soft as houseplant leaves, her feet the biggest thing on her. She scooted across the porch toward them, barking again, throwing her head up in the air with each sound, as if she had to use her full weight to toss it out. She was feisty. They liked her.

“Come on,” C. J. said, and he vaulted over the low fence, scooped up the puppy, and carried her back to Charine, who opened her neon orange book bag and let them slide the puppy inside next to the Popsicles. They ran back to my father’s rental house and unpacked the dog instead of groceries.

“It was ours,” Charine said later. “It was like our baby.”

When I came home from Michigan during summers and winter breaks, I corralled Charine into spending time with me. Charine was the last of my mother’s children who still lived in her house, so even though she was eight years younger than me, I made her my best friend. She usually invited C. J. along, and then we usually picked up two or three people from the neighborhood. I dragged them to the movies, paid their way, made them watch things like Lord of the Rings, and then afterward we’d all sneak into another movie, leaving the theater four hours after we entered it, queasy with buttered popcorn. On Fridays and Saturdays, we went out to Illusions.

In summer 2003, we piled into my car, Charine and Nerissa and C. J. and me, and met up with Nerissa’s friend at a hotel on the beach near Illusions. He’d been renting a suite for a week. We had no idea why he’d been renting such an expensive suite for so long, since he had a house: I assumed he rented it because he could, because he wanted to brag about his wealth, which he’d gained by selling dope. It was an unspoken display of his status. Once there, we sat in my car and got high. The Gulf water, black in the night, rolled inexorably in. We felt good. We watched the parking lot of the nightclub, the cars moving like a current past one another, people swarming, preening. The bass from the club called out, and the bass from the cars answered. When we went into the hotel room, C. J. sat on the sofa. Charine sat on one of C. J.’s legs, and I sat on his other leg. I’d never sat on C. J.’s lap before: even in rest, his muscles were hard, and suddenly I felt bad for sitting on him, for bearing down on his small frame with my weight, so I stood.

“You ain’t got to move,” C. J. said. I sat back down. We were quiet. We watched the TV without any sound and watched Nerissa’s friend, who’d been a top college football draft pick but never gone to university. He walked to the bathroom, where he stayed for a few minutes, and eventually he emerged. He sniffed and sucked snot from his nasal cavity. After swallowing, he’d laugh and talk with us. His sniffing was staccato and annoying. He stays with a sinus infection, I thought naively. He was restless, walking back and forth, again and again.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

There were cigarette butts in the sink and in the toilet. There was no toilet paper. There was no soap, and there was only one towel in the room; it lay on the floor, rumpled and dirtied. I decided I didn’t need to pee, and went back to the sofa and sat next to C. J. and Charine.

“That bathroom is awful,” I said, suddenly depressed.

“Come on,” C. J. said, and we left the hotel room, darting between the cars speeding past on Highway 90 to the beach. The moon shone like a bleached oyster shell, and we spent the rest of the night until just before dawn drinking beer on the boardwalk. On the drive home, C. J., who was the only sober one, said, “They was doing coke in the bathroom.”

“What?” I said.

“That’s what they look like when people do coke in them. All them cigarette butts and shit.”

I laid my head down on the seat, stared out at the thin white line of the beach, the trees, the water, all of it lightening from black to gray to blue. Eventually I fell asleep, thinking about what he’d said. Had C. J. been in another bathroom like that? How did he know? If C. J. said anything else, I didn’t hear it.

Weeks later, one night when my mother wasn’t home, Nerissa and Charine and I sat at my mom’s house, watching movies. The front door was open: the light was on. Charine left us to use the phone, and a few minutes later we heard a dragging noise scratching its way up through the darkness near the road and bordering woods, past the front yard.

“What the hell is that?” Nerissa said.

Charine ran out the front door, down the concrete front steps, and out to the road, where the dragging continued between pauses. Nerissa and I stood on the steps and saw C. J. and Duck standing at the edge of the pebbled drive. We walked down the driveway into the night to greet them. A blue ice chest with a long white handle sat between the boys, and C. J. sat down on it and turned up a can of beer. He offered us some. I took one and drank in sips, the beer bitter. Duck told jokes but didn’t laugh at them. Duck didn’t stay long. He left C. J. and us to the cooler. C. J. knew my mother disliked him, so he often kept some distance from my mother’s house. For Charine and him, knowing that their relationship was opposed by so many lent it a romantic air, made them feel like star-crossed lovers. Even though Charine had told C. J. my mother was gone, we sat on the ground at the edge of the yard, slapping at mosquitoes and gnats, talking.

“Y’all can have this.” Tipsy, I stood up. I was tired of the sharp bite and the itchy burn of the mosquitoes. “I’m going inside.”

“Me too,” Nerissa said. She followed me into the house. Charine remained outside with C. J. Twenty minutes later, the house phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Man, y’all come outside.”

“Who this?”

“Your sister is upset. She think y’all mad at her. You need to come talk to her.”

“Oh Lord.”

Nerissa shrugged and kept watching TV. I walked outside, wondering what had gone wrong in the twenty minutes we’d been watching TV. C. J. pocketed his cell phone when I walked up. Charine was sitting on one of the wooden railroad ties my mother had used to landscape the yard. She was slumped over, and her face was in her hands.

“Your sister’s crying,” C. J. said.

“What for?” I said.

“She thinks y’all are disappointed in her.”

“Where did this come from?”

“For real man, y’all sister love y’all.”

I paused and scratched at my leg. I had no idea why Charine was so emotional, but I mistakenly understood it as hormonal histrionics: a teenage temper tantrum. She and C. J. must have gotten into a fight and she was funneling it into her relationship with me and Nerissa. The last place I wanted to be was outside in the yard with my needy sister. Regardless of how drunk or high he was, C. J. would choose to be no other place.

“I don’t know what to say to her,” I said. C. J. looked at me, his eyes wide and brown in the near darkness.

“Just talk to her,” he said.

Charine wouldn’t uncover her face.

“Charine.” Her shoulders shuddered. “What’s wrong?”

“Talk to her,” C. J. said.

“I be fucking up,” Charine said through her fingers.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “Calm down.”

“Tell her you love her,” C. J. said. He bent to the cooler, grabbed another beer, popped the top.

“What?” I said. “I’m talking to her.”

“Tell her.”

“Charine,” I said. “I love you.”

She cried harder. C. J. grabbed my arm and walked me off into the darkness, to the pebbled edge of the road. He leaned in to whisper, and his face was the brightest thing, made even harder than it already was by the night, which whittled his nose to nothing, his cheekbones to peach pits, his forehead, a sliver of light. He took a sip of his beer.

“For real, y’all don’t understand. You need to talk to your sister.”

He was insistent. I leaned away from the feeling that he held me by the back of my neck, like my mother had when I was a child and she led me through crowds by grabbing hard and bearing down.

“I’m going inside,” I said.

“You should talk to her,” C. J. said.

“All right,” I said as I turned and glanced at Charine. She still sat on the crosstie, still hid her face, crying.

“I’ll be inside,” I told her, and then I turned my back on both of them and walked up the driveway. The woods were riotous with night bugs. C. J. tossed a can into the street. It clinked, then went silent. The rocks dug into my bare feet, but once I was a few feet up the driveway, I ran on my toes to lessen the bruise. What the hell is wrong with them? I thought. Charine’s behavior I accredited to grief: Joshua had died three days before her birthday, and as the summer burned itself away to autumn, our loss made us act out in strange ways. I wondered to myself, Is C. J. on something? In the house, Nerissa was asleep; the TV turned her face blue. I heard shouting and the sound of the cooler being dragged, stopped, then dragged again, so I knelt on the rough green trailer carpet and raised the blinds so I could look out the window. In the pale reach of the one streetlight, C. J. tugged the cooler a few feet, drank his beer, raised it to the sky, and yelled at the woods. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. He flung beer after beer into the ditch, into the trees, kicked the cooler. Charine followed him, sitting on the ground or the plastic top of the cooler, or standing at his side. I could tell by the way he slung the cans, which must have been half full because they flew far and fell quickly and didn’t float like empty aluminum, that he was cursing. I sank into the carpet, watched Nerissa sleep, and wondered why I felt afraid.

“Call everybody,” I said. “We’re going to New Orleans.”

We left around 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. in a caravan, at least fifteen of us piled into a Suburban. None of us wore seatbelts. I was stupid and didn’t care. Ever since I’d left home, I’d learned that life for me in the wide curious world was a constant struggle against empty rooms, against the grief at my brother’s death and at Ronald’s death that followed me always, that made itself most felt in those quiet spaces. When I was in DeLisle, I liked to get as many of us as I could together, cousins and hood, and organize trips to New Orleans, twenty of us roaming Bourbon Street with Styrofoam cups. We parked on Decatur Street and walked into the quarter. A limousine with spinning rims was parked at the edge of the lot; we noticed because these types of rims were new and we’d only seen them on television. C. J. knelt next to the tire.

“Watch this shit,” he said. He spun the wheel and the metal caught the light like a knife flipping through the air. “It’s spinning!” he called. We laughed at the boldness of it, the silliness of it, the feeling that we were doing something stupid that we probably shouldn’t be doing. We spent the night getting drunker and drunker, walking, eyeing the doors of strip clubs that only a few of us were old enough to enter. C. J. shepherded Charine through the drunk crowd the entire night, her protector; he was only an inch or two taller than she was, and just as lean, but when he walked next to her he seemed larger, bolstered by attitude, possessiveness, loyalty.

The next morning, I woke up on the daybed in the second bedroom in Nerissa’s apartment. I stood up and walked toward the door, but my legs crumpled under me. I fell to the floor. I’d had fun the night before, and figured the only reason I felt so weak and had almost fainted was because of the migraine medicine I was taking to treat the headaches I’d suffered from since I was fifteen. C. J. and Charine and Nerissa and Hilton walked into the bedroom, and C. J. sat in a toddler’s chair on the floor, a white T-shirt wrapped around his head, and looked at me.

“You ready to go at it again?” he said.

I smiled.

“Yep.”

It was 8:00 A.M. We drank. We got high. C. J. plugged a small portable radio into the wall in the room with the daybed and the bunk bed, and he popped in a new Lil Boosie CD. He played the same song repeatedly; he rewound it over and over again and sang along. I’d never heard him sing before. His solid voice was clear through the T-shirt. He made me laugh with silly, unselfconscious jokes. He surprised me: I’d never known he could be so funny, so kind. And then, suddenly, the conversations shifted. We were talking about cocaine.

“You ever did it?” C. J. said.

“No,” I said.

“You know anybody who did it? In college?”

“Yeah, a few people. But we weren’t close.”

“Don’t never do it.”

C. J. shifted in the toddler’s chair he’d folded himself into, readjusted the T-shirt across his face, but it was too bulky and slid down. He was half smiling, half not.

“I tried it once,” he said. “I did it again.” C. J. rubbed his head. “I wish I’d never did it the first time.”

I nodded and understood why he’d known the bathroom at the hotel was so disgusting, why he was so insistent and erratic that night he dragged the cooler up the road, why one day he’d scare me, and the next, he could be another person, kind and funny, painfully honest, telling me things he was somewhat ashamed to tell me while wearing a T-shirt like a veil across his face.

I got a feeling I ain’t going to be here long, C. J. said. He told Charine this. He told his close cousins this. Not here, he said. He lived as if he believed it. He never talked like the rest of us, never laid claim to a dream job. He never said: I want to be a firefighter. Never: I want to be a welder. Neither: Work offshore. The only person he ever spoke to about his future was Charine; once every so often, he’d tell her he wanted her to have his children. We can hustle, he’d say, make money. Live good, he said. Live. But even after dropping out, he never got a legitimate job, perhaps dissuaded by the experiences of the young men in the neighborhood, most of whom worked until they were fired or quit because minimum wage came too slowly and disappeared too quickly. They sold dope between jobs until they could find more work as a convenience store clerk or a janitor or a landscaper. This was like walking into a storm surge: a cycle of futility. Maybe he looked at those who still lived and those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. Maybe in his low moments, when he was coming down off the coke, he saw no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, no hope. Maybe in his high moments, he didn’t either. Don’t say that shit, Charine would tell C. J. when he spoke of dying young. You ain’t going nowhere.

Years later, Nerissa told me a story she heard from one of C. J.’s friends in Pass Christian. They were walking along the train tracks, Nerissa said, because it was the fastest way to get around town. C. J. would have been surefooted, stepped easily over the hunks of granite that shifted while he skimmed from wooden crosstie to wooden crosstie. Over years, these had been burned black by the Mississippi sun and the heat of the trains. On either side of the tracks, ditches ran deep with water. Cattails grew tall. C. J. would have heard it first, the way the train whistled in the distance behind him. His friend loped on for a few steps and then crossed over the steel rails before wondering why C. J. kept walking, a small smile on his face, but even that was like a slide of rocks down a hill: all hard. Or perhaps C. J. glared at the ground when he walked. Either way, he ignored the blasting train advancing toward him. He ignored his friend, who flinched at the train’s blast. I ain’t, C. J. told people, I ain’t long for this world. He waited until he felt the train cleave the air at his back, until the horn made his eardrums pulse, until he was sure the conductor was panicking, and then he called on his lean golden body to do what it would, and he jumped from the tracks, out of the way, alive another day.

C. J., Hilton, and I spent January 4, 2004, at the park in DeLisle on the warped bleachers. C. J.’d asked Hilton to roll a blunt with some weed my sister gave him: the buds were bright green and damp and tight. C. J.’s blond-brown braids hung over his forehead and he smiled. The mild Mississippi winter sun made his blond eyelashes sparkle like gold wire. C. J. was mellow and calm. I asked him if he wanted to ride to the movies with us later that night and see Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai.

“For sure,” he said.

As Hilton rolled the blunt, I watched cars pass by, and tried to persuade C. J. to light a fire in the rusty steel barrel used as a garbage can, to drive away the gnats.

“Come on, C. J. You know you want to light a fire.”

“I think you want to do it, Pocahontas,” he said to me.

“No, I don’t. I protect nature.” I laughed.

“Come on, Mimi. You can do it,” C. J. said.

Hilton laughed at me; his face dimpled and his wide shoulders shook. I was depressed and hungover. I was dreading the drive back to Michigan the next day, its endless winter. I scanned the ground and assessed what I could use to set a fire: overgrown, dry winter grass, shorn oak branches, brown leaves, acorns, bits of napkins and potato chip bags and empty soda bottles littering the park. Through gaps in the pines, I saw two crackheads, our older cousins, former friends, walking up and down out on the main, pebbly street, waiting for dealers.

“I’m a junkie for this shit.” C. J. laughed and held up the blunt. “Really, though.”

I waved it away when Hilton offered it to me. They smoked for three hours until the sun set and a heavy fog rolled in with the night. Once every few years, a whiteout fog blanketed the entire Gulf Coast for days, reducing visibility to nothing. During winter fogs like this, we cursed and fiddled with our headlights, which did little to reveal the Mississippi landscape: our lights solitary seekers in the country dark.

We didn’t end up going to the movies. I had to pack. I folded clothes and burned CDs for my sisters and my cousins and loaded my car and stood in my yard and listened to the cacophony, even in winter, of insects in the woods surrounding my house. It was a blessed noise to hear the sounds of home even if I couldn’t see much of it in the thick fog. While I worked, Charine sat in my car in the driveway with C. J. and smoked for an hour or so. He didn’t want to go to whatever his temporary home for the night was, to walk to Duck’s house or Rob’s house or Pot’s house and sleep on the couch. He wanted to stay in my car with Charine, to talk into the night and through the morning. She was his home. But Charine told him: I hate the cold. She came inside around midnight, and he left. He walked down the street to Duck’s house, disappearing into the fog. I imagine him standing beneath the big oak tree, waiting for his cousins to appear out of the fog and pick him up. If he couldn’t be with Charine, he would avoid sleeping altogether and find other things to do with his night. They were planning to ride upcountry to bring his cousin’s infant son home.

Charine had fallen asleep but I was still busy packing when the phone rang at two o’clock in the morning. It was C. J.’s mother. Why is she calling the house? I thought.

“Hello?”

“C. J.’s been in an accident—”

I thought: No.

“—and he didn’t make it. Please tell Charine.”

I thought: I cannot do this.

“Okay,” I said.

C. J.’s mother sobbed and hung up the phone. I stared at the living room wall. I slumped over the sofa and tried to breath. The air felt wrong rushing down my throat. I called Hilton.

“Hello?”

I told him what C. J.’s mother had told me. I wiped my nose and said it all in a whisper.

“I cannot do this to her,” I cried. “I cannot tell her this. I cannot wake her up and do this to her.”

“I’m coming,” he said.

Thirty minutes later I let Hilton in the front door. He walked past me through the living room into the kitchen into the den and into Charine’s room. He switched on the light and shook her awake. He told her. She walked outside in the fog, and I put on my shoes. We three rode down to the park where I had seen him twelve hours earlier. We parked in the dark and people materialized out of the fog and woods and gathered with us until the sun rose, brought together again by a third tragedy, by another death and more loss and grief. They passed around blunts like napkins. My sister smoked until her eyes closed from the tears.

C. J. had ridden upcountry with his cousins: after they dropped the baby off, they hit a train. There was no reflective gate arm at the railroad crossing. There were flashing lights and bells that should have warned of the passing train, but they didn’t consistently work, and because it was located at a crossing out in the county in a mainly Black area, no one really cared about fixing them or installing a reflective gate arm. On that night, even if the warning system had been working, that errant mechanical sentry at that lonely Mississippi county crossing, it was no match for that blinding winter fog. C. J. was in the passenger’s seat. Our cousin swerved and slammed into the train with the right side of the car, which was crushed by the impact of the train car. C. J. was stuck in the automobile. The cousins tried to pull him out but he was sandwiched there. The car caught on fire and he burned while they stood by helpless, hollering for help into the cold white night, their cries swallowed by the Mississippi fog.

I cannot ask Charine about the facts of C. J.’s death. There are things that I don’t want her to think about, so I don’t ask her if he was still alive after the car hit the train. I don’t ask her if he spoke to his cousins when they tried to pull him from the car. I don’t ask her if he was still conscious when the fire sparked. I cannot ask if that’s what killed him, the fire. But I have heard stories from others, and they say he was alive. Some stories even say that he told them to leave him in the car while they were trying to pull him out; when I hear this, I think that he must have been in so much pain, his legs crushed by the metal, that he saw how futile their effort was. Some stories even say that the car burned and he was alive, and what is unspoken is that C. J. added his cries to his cousins’ hollering for help and they all screamed there besides those faulty lights and the train track that cut through the woods. But I do not tell Charine these stories; I would not add to her burden of loss, especially when she already carries blame. Often she says that if she had sat a while longer in my car, if only, he would have stayed at our house with her instead of leaving and riding with his cousins upcountry. If I would have stayed in the car, she says, he’d still be alive. The burden of regret weighs heavily. It is relentless.

The day after C. J. died, we drove to our friend’s house down the street, where we found him and four other boys from the hood sitting in a running car parked in his dirt driveway, beers in hand. They stared forward as if any minute they might hit the gas, drive north straight through the house, and leave this place. They cried with set faces. Charine climbed into the car, sandwiched in, and hugged one of them. I turned my back to the humming vehicle and covered my face. I saw everything. I understood nothing.

The night after C. J.’s death, I drove my sister around DeLisle while she smoked the rest of that batch of weed she had given C. J. We drove my tank dry into the morning as she rolled blunts, and I wondered if we were courting death: If we weren’t, why did he keep following us, insistently, persistently, pulling us to him one by one? She smoked that bag, and after she finished it, she smoked through other bags. She told me they calmed her like cigarettes. She smoked every day, and for years after that night, she wept abruptly in the car without warning. When she did I turned the music up, and I let her cry, able only to say: “I know, I know.”

I pride myself on knowing words, on figuring out how to use them so they work for me. But years later, my sister digs up C. J.’s funeral announcements, a pamphlet and a bookmark, after I ask her to do so. She begins crying, talks of regret and loss, grief constant as a twin, of how she dreams of C. J., and in every dream she is always chasing him. In those dreams, he is agile and golden as he flips and flies and leaps, and he will not allow himself to be caught.

The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C. J. knew this. I have no words.