Men We Reaped

We Are Watching, 1987–1991

After my father left, we headed to Orange Grove, a neighborhood in Gulfport, Mississippi, a small city a few towns over from DeLisle. Even though Gulfport was within spitting distance of DeLisle, it afforded my mother a certain sense of freedom. She felt smothered in DeLisle, where she knew everyone, and everyone knew her; worse, they were witness to my father’s faithlessness. She thought the women of the community gloried in her misfortune, delighted in the way the dissolution of her family became grist for gossip, and judged her for having four children with a fickle man. Gulfport offered anonymity: especially in the many newer subdivisions in the north of the city that were developed in the spare space between new strip malls and grocery stores, neighbors were transient strangers. I was ten, Joshua was seven, Nerissa was five, and Charine was three when we packed our things, boxes of kitchen utensils, our clothes, a few books, and toys, and moved from the home of our extended family into the new house we would live in with our mother, without our father.

Gulfport was not the wilderness we’d been born to in DeLisle. The suburb was off the main highway running north and south through Gulfport. A big wooden sign at the corner of the neighborhood read BEL-AIR. To the west, and closer to the highway, was one of only two undeveloped areas in that section of the city. It was wooded and bordered by baseball fields, cut with a creek, and there were rough trails through it where families sometimes walked on weekends. My mother never allowed us to walk to that park alone for fear that some deranged person would kidnap us. The other undeveloped tract in the area was directly behind our house, which was on the northern edge of the subdivision. It was a rough rectangle, probably a square mile in size, and bordered on all sides by subdivisions filled with small two- and three-bedroom ranch-style houses built in the seventies, all variations on the same three prototypes.

Our house was chocolate-brown brick. There was an anemic tree in the front yard, and a tall deciduous tree in the back that fluttered purple and gray in the light of the city night sky. The backyard was small and surrounded by a metal chain-link fence, like most of the rest in the neighborhood. The houses were so close together we found shade on hot days by sitting in the grassy spots between them.

Moving into the new house that day felt alien and strange. I would be switching schools, and the community of extended family that I knew in DeLisle felt distant in Gulfport. For the first time, we would be a nuclear family, and we would be a nuclear family without a father. The world seemed new and dangerous; I was an animal seeking shelter away from its burrow.

Both my parents had been raised without fathers in their homes, and neither of them wanted that for their children. But as children and as adults, a two-parent family eluded them. This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn’t, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery. Like for many of the young Black men in my community across generations, the role of being a father and a husband was difficult for my father to assume. He saw a world of possibility outside the confines of the family, and he could not resist the romance of that. But like many of the young Black women in her generation, my mother understood that she had to forget the meaning of possibility, the tender heat of romance, the lure of the vistas of the world. My mother understood that her vistas were the walls of her home, her children’s bony backs, their open mouths. Like the women in my family before her, my mother knew the family was her burden to bear. She could not leave. So she did what her mother did before her, what her sisters did, what her aunts did: she worked and set about the business of raising her children. She did not know it then, but she would be the sole financial provider for us until we reached adulthood.

My mother didn’t have many options regarding work: she had a high school diploma, but she had to find jobs that would allow her to be home with her children in the afternoon to ensure we did our homework, took baths, went to bed on time, and got back out the door for school in the morning. If she could have done shift work at one of the vanishing factories, she’d have had access to jobs that paid better, but she couldn’t. She had family who would help, but she felt the responsibility of her and my father’s choice to have four children keenly; she wouldn’t foist the burden of raising us on her extended family, and she wouldn’t depend on institutional child care even if she could afford it. She was our mother. So she found jobs that would allow her to raise us. Just before my father left, she worked as a laundress at a hotel in Diamondhead. She carpooled with her cousins to work because she didn’t own a car; my father had taken his car and his motorcycle. Before we moved to Gulfport, my mother saved and bought a blue Caprice from the seventies, so old the paint was matte and closing the doors took both hands. This is how she commuted to work at her next job, which was as a housekeeper for a rich White family who lived in an antebellum house on the beach in Pass Christian.

When I was older, she would tell me stories about how she raised her brothers and sisters. She would tell me her father left her family, too, and that she and my father had promised each other when I was born that they would raise their children with both parents. My grandmother worked hard to support her seven children, so it was my mother, the eldest of seven, who rose early in the morning, woke her siblings before school, and made sure they were dressed. She wrangled her sisters’ hair into precise pigtails, and when they grew older, she disciplined her brothers and sisters like a mother.

When my parents were together, I thought they were both disciplinarians. My father disciplined my brother, while my mother disciplined all of us. When we moved to Gulfport, I realized that my mother had actually been the disciplinarian all along. Before he left, my father posed us in silly pictures while we held his kung fu weapons and wore bandanas with cryptic kanji characters tied around our skulls. He was the one for riding his bike to the elementary school, parking it out front, and wowing our classmates when we climbed on the back to ride home. My mother cooked the meals, cleaned the house, set us to small chores like emptying the litter box when we had a cat, making our beds, cleaning our rooms, and vacuuming. My father brought in the income, and my mother worked low-paying jobs and kept the household together.

When we moved to Gulfport that summer, my mother taught me that I had a new responsibility in the family: I was the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and I had to do as she had done and help keep the household together. Mama bought home a spool of green plastic cording. She dug a hole at the opposite end of the backyard from the tree and slid a wooden cross into the ground. She unspooled the cord and tied it tightly around one side of the cross, and then stretched the cord across the yard and knotted it where a low branch met the trunk of the lone tree. Then she tied another cord to another low branch, and stretched it across the yard to the other side of the cross. She had hung two clotheslines. She unloaded a fresh basket of clothes from the washing machine, walked through the kitchen, and said, “Mimi, come here.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Joshua and Nerissa and Charine were watching TV. Nerissa followed us out into the yard, while Charine sat in Joshua’s lap on the floor in front of the couch.

“Hang up these clothes,” she said. She pulled a wet shirt, wrinkled and heavy, from the hamper, and then a clothespin from a bag she’d pinned to the line. She then took a pin from the bag, looped the shirt over the line by its bottom hem, and clipped it to the line.

“This is how you hang shirts. Upside down.”

I nodded.

“Pants by the waist.”

She handed me a shirt.

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

I knew how to do some of it from watching her for years at my grandmother’s, where she and her sister washed clothes and sheets for thirteen people and hung them out to dry on lines that stretched the length of the yard. I began hanging on the opposite line: pants crooked, towels like big triangles. Hanging the shirts bothered me. I wanted to hang them from their shoulders because our shirts were constantly stretched out at the hem and hung on our bony frames like A-line skirts, but I did not.

This is how things were done in my mother’s house.

My father’s leaving affected me. I locked myself in the bathroom sometimes, which was the only room in our new house where I could claim some privacy, and I looked at myself. I could not see my father in my facial features. He figured prominently in my siblings’ large, dark, heavily lashed eyes, but my own seemed small. Too light brown in color. Too sparsely fringed. The rest of my body was also a disappointment: my birth scars mottled and angry and red, my frame weakly muscled, pale. My hair was the opposite of my father’s: while his was silky and black, mine was dirty brown and prone to matting. This disappointed me the most. It seemed I had been able to keep nothing of my father. His leaving felt like a repudiation of the child I was and the young woman I was growing into. I looked at myself and saw a walking embodiment of everything the world around me seemed to despise: an unattractive, poor, Black woman. Undervalued by her family, a perpetual workhorse. Undervalued by society regarding her labor and her beauty. This seed buried itself in my stomach and bore fruit. I hated myself. That seed bloomed in the way I walked, slumped over, eyes on the floor, in the way I didn’t even attempt to dress well, in the way I avoided the world, when I could, through reading, and in the way I took up as little space as possible and tried to attract as little notice as I could, because why should I? I was something to be left.

I was too young to realize this, but others saw the self-loathing sprouting in me, and they responded to it. At the end of the summer, my mother enrolled us in the unfamiliar local elementary school. I was in the fifth grade. For the first two weeks of the term before my aptitude test scores were processed, I was in a class with a large boy who singled me out for taunting and abuse. Anytime he found me alone in a corner of the library or near the back of our homeroom, he grabbed me by the joints, pinned me to the floor or to my desk or to a wall, and tried to grab my butt. I yanked away from him and did my best to avoid him, but it did no good. I fought like the rabbit I was: timid until grabbed, and then frantic, kicking and twisting. In three weeks, I moved to a more advanced class. But I did not shed my innate sense of worthlessness. I was friends for around a month with the other three Black girls in the class. Then they began bullying me, and my grades dropped. I was miserable, perpetually afraid, and addled on adrenaline, but secretly I was not surprised by it. I thought I deserved it because others were only seeing what I saw, that I was a miserable nothing, and they were acting accordingly. I was depressed at home when I had no idea what depression was, so much so that my mother became concerned enough to pull me out of the school and enroll me in the middle school in Pass Christian during the winter break.

I was excited and anxious at once. I would know some of the other kids. Most students who graduated from DeLisle Elementary were transferred to Pass Christian middle school. But it would be my second school in half a year, and the other experience had been miserable. What if the bullying continued? I knew without knowing that others would see me as a target, and they did. At Pass Middle, I was bullied by three separate groups of girls. I spent all my spare time in the underequipped library, which seemed to have fewer books than my elementary school. I made only two friends, a Black girl and a Vietnamese girl, and we spent our time eating crackers we’d stolen out of the cafeteria, talking about boys and books. I felt more of a kinship with the Vietnamese girl; she was as much of an outsider as I was. I spent my time with her trying to learn Vietnamese through Vietnamese pop songs she taught me. But I was alone in the locker rooms, in the gym, in most of my classes with all the other groups of bullies, and my grades continued to slide southward.

My mother didn’t know what to do. Her understanding of my hatred for myself was muddied, unclear. Instead of seeing it as directed at myself, she read it as a sullen anger, a prepubescent hatred that was aimed at her for leaving my father and breaking up the family. This made her pull me even closer, demand even more of me as a cleaner and caretaker in the household. She thought she could discipline it out of me, this sulky hatred. When I turned twelve, I began watching my siblings alone while my mother was at work. My mother knew I was still smart even though my grades were plummeting, so when the employer she’d worked for as a housekeeper since leaving my father and moving to Gulfport asked about my grades, she was honest. Her employer was a White lawyer who’d attended Harvard and practiced corporate law in New Orleans, and in her early days of working for the family, he’d heard stories about her oldest, who was smart, who’d excelled in public school and been in gifted programs. My mother told him that my grades were bad. That I was being bullied at all the schools I attended. Perhaps her employer had been bullied as a child, because even though he had the build of a linebacker, he was soft-spoken and gentle, which would be easy for others to read as weakness. Whatever his reasons, it was unusual, but he offered to pay my tuition to attend the private Episcopalian school his children attended. My mother, always loath to accept help after being betrayed by my father (when he left, she had no credit because he’d had all the cars and bills in his name, and she was left with four children to feed and a nonexistent financial history; she still hates to accept help today, for fear that after it’s given it will be taken back), mulled it over for a bit but then accepted the offer. When she asked me if I wanted to switch schools, I gladly accepted. I think my mother would have worked for the family whether or not the husband offered to pay for my schooling, but in accepting his offer, I’d locked her into this employment situation for at least six more years, the time I would need to graduate from high school, regardless of whether she was happy or wanted to work elsewhere. But she saw no other options; this was the job she would work to provide for her children so she could still have enough time out of work to raise them. She would not be an absent mother.

I wasn’t the only one having trouble in school. Joshua was only doing enough work to scrape by in second grade. Nerissa was also having trouble in kindergarten; her teacher sent her to the school counselor, who called my mother in for a conference and told her she thought Nerissa had an attention disorder and should be medicated. My mother refused. Charine was oblivious and swimming through preschool. My mother tried her best to support us academically at home. Homework was always a priority. But all of us felt our father’s loss keenly, and this sense of being lost and unbalanced found its way into our schoolwork. Even though she tried her hardest, our mother could not be there in school with us during the day; there were some ways that our mother could not help us. Every day after school, we sat at the table with our books, all of us desperately trying to do better and all aware, in the bewildered way that children are, that we were failing.

My father had visited once or twice since we’d moved into the house in Gulfport, and when he did, our mother spoke to him briefly and then confined herself to the kitchen or to her room, her door shut. Often she listened to us talking to him, dancing around him, dizzy with longing. It must have been palpable to her, how we changed when we were around him; he had the luxury of being emotionally engaging and attentive while he was with us, while my mother, ever the disciplinarian, felt that she could not. Perhaps she saw in our worshipful faces some of what she’d felt toward her father when she was a child. Perhaps this was why, unbeknownst to us, she began talking to my father about reconciliation.

On his third or so visit, my father sat in the living room, a tray on his lap. My mother had cooked for him, served him food; usually she ignored him. After we’d eaten, we all sat in the living room, watching television, until my mother told us to take baths. We did, and then she sent us to our rooms. Nerissa, Charine, and I lay in the dark, undulating gently on the waterbed. Nerissa and Charine fell asleep, but I was awake, waiting for the side door to open, to close, for my father to catch his ride, or for my mother to take him wherever he was living at the time. He’d been drifting from job to job since leaving my mother, and at the time he was unemployed. He’d wrecked his motorcycle and his car was broken. But the sound of the door didn’t come. I eased off the bed, hoping I wouldn’t wake my sisters, and crawled across the floor to the door of our room. I eased it open. All the lights were off in the house except my mother’s, and her door was closed. I crawled out into the hallway to my brother’s room.

“Josh?”

“Huh?”

“You up?”

Stupid question. I crawled into the room, stopped beside the bottom bunk bed.

“Daddy ain’t left yet.”

“I know,” he said.

I didn’t know what else to say. We sat in the dark for a while, listening to the other rooms, hearing nothing, talking once in a while: Do you hear that? Do you think? We wondered in silence if our father had returned. I sat on Joshua’s floor and lay my head on his bed. Josh’s breathing grew deeper, until I could tell he was asleep. When he snored, I crawled back to our room, afraid to walk, afraid for my mother to find I was out of bed when I shouldn’t be. I climbed into bed with my sisters, pushing Charine over to sleep next to Nerissa, but it was a long time before I fell asleep, my heart beating wildly in my chest with hope and fear.

This is how my father came back.

After my father moved his clothing and his kung fu knickknacks in with us, his dream, he told my mother, was to open a kung fu school. Perhaps having my father vocalize his dreams made her realize how strongly my father yearned for them. My mother acquiesced: You can do it, she said. He would take his children on as his first students, recruit others, find a space. Okay, my mother said. What my mother left unsaid: I’ll keep working, supporting us all, while you try to live your dream. Her sacrifice remained unacknowledged. One day, my father said, the school will support the family. I think a part of my mother wanted to believe that this was the truth, so she agreed.

First, my father arranged to teach classes in an after-school program in Biloxi, and then he arranged to teach a class at a dance studio in Pass Christian, and another in Gulf-port. He recruited students. The Biloxi program never had more than two, so he cancelled those classes and concentrated on the others, which had more, around ten in Pass Christian and fifteen in Gulfport. He carted us around with him to classes four out of five nights of the week, classes that lasted three hours at a time. We were decent students; he’d taught us forms and one-step sparring since we’d lived in my grandmother’s house in DeLisle. We learned the Eight Elbow form out on the patchy, sandy front yard. In our classes in Gulf-port and Pass Christian, my father made us do endless sets of sit-ups, push-ups on our knuckles, forms, and sparring. While this was a great start for his business, there still wasn’t enough money coming in from students to cover expenses. Once he paid to rent the spaces, there was barely enough money to put gas in the car. This became apparent to me one night after our kung fu class. We were all in the car, including my cousin Aldon, leaving Pass Christian and returning to Gulfport. I noticed the car was gradually slowing.

“We ran out of gas,” my father said. I thought he was playing a joke on us. I started laughing.

“No, really,” he said.

“We’re running out of gas?” Josh asked. Aldon sat up straighter beside him and leaned forward. The car rolled to a stop. The road was dark.

“We have to push,” my father said. “Everybody but Nerissa and Charine out of the car.” This meant me, Josh, and Aldon. I was twelve, and they were both nine. We were all sore from our workout, still in our uniforms.

“Out,” my father said.

We got out.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” he said, his teeth white in the dark. There were streetlights every quarter mile or so, but no traffic on this lonely country road, and my father didn’t want to leave us alone with the car. “There’s a gas station up at the corner. We need to make it to the pay phone.” We nodded. “Now, I’m going to steer and push from the front, while y’all three get in the back. Grab the bumper…. Yeah, that’s it.” My father walked around to the front of the car, leaned into the driver’s-side door, and grunted, straining.

“Now push!” he said.

We leaned against the car. It rocked but did not move.

“Come on. You have to push harder!”

We dug the toes of our tennis shoes into the rutted asphalt and pushed with our legs, our backs, our arms. We grunted like our father, straining, and the car rolled forward so slowly I could hardly believe it budged.

“Keep going!” Daddy said. “It’s right up the road.”

It wasn’t right up the road. It was at least a half mile up the road, but I didn’t know that. Every time I felt like I couldn’t push any longer, like my arms had burned to ash and my legs would crumple under me, I wanted to ask my father, Are we almost there? How close are we? But I wouldn’t. I didn’t have the energy to, and he wouldn’t have heard me anyhow. Instead I stared at the faint gleam of the car in the darkness and listened to Joshua and Aldon, on both sides of me, breathing in quick little huffs. I imagined a car coming up behind us, slowing to pass us, and then rolling down a window, offering us a ride to a gas station, gas from a spare gas can they kept in the back of their truck, anything so I could stop straining with everything in me, but no cars came. No kind strangers appeared. The air was warm as tepid bathwater, and as close, and the night bugs and the wind were the only things singing and moving in the patches of woods and yards around us. The final stretch of road before the store was up a hill, a steep hill. My father sounded like something in him tore when we crested the hill and rolled into the driveway of the closed gas station, and I felt quivery and soft: useless. The car came to a stop in the parking lot, which had been paved so long ago that it had been ground to gravel. My dad fished out a quarter from his gym bag in the car and dialed my mother from the pay phone on the sidewalk that fronted the shuttered corner store. Joshua and Aldon and I climbed into the car, so tired we didn’t speak. Nerissa and Charine slept in the front seat. My father joined us. He too was quiet until my mother arrived with a can full of gas.

“When we get home, y’all need to take a bath and get in bed,” she said as she handed my father the gas can. It was late. Her mouth was tight. She climbed back into her car, which she had left running, and waited for us.

I imagine my mother nursing her resentment that her hard work, her cleaning of toilet bowls and mopping of four-thousand-square-foot houses, was allowing my father to pursue his dream. I imagine that the reality of pursuing his dream took my father aback; that in his head, he saw himself with eager, malleable students like a wise martial arts master in the kung fu films we sometimes watched as a family on Sundays. For those masters, money was never a concern, and they seemed to be childless. I imagine both my parents began to resent their roles in the family. My mother’s coping mechanism for this was to become even more silent, even more strict and remote; one of my father’s was to watch movies, which was an escape he could share with us.

My father led us through the woods behind our house into a cluster of backyards and on through the neighborhood to a strip mall along Dedeaux Road in Gulfport. At the video store, my father would pick out three movies he wanted to see, and then he allowed me and Joshua to pick the other.

Joshua and I lived in the horror section. We stood side by side, studying the pictures on the movie cases, which were always badly drawn and mildly threatening. I read the synopses seriously, ravenously, which was the way I read books. After we’d rented all the store’s mainstream horror movies, we began renting the less well-known: movies with leprechauns and ghoulies and blobs and strange sewer-dwelling animals. My mother purchased a popcorn machine, and most weekends found us on the carpeted floor with a big bowl of popcorn between us. It was the cheapest way for my parents to entertain four children. We loved it. For those hour-and-a-half increments, the fantasy of a two-parent family, what we’d longed for in my father’s absence, lived for us in perfect snatches. Ignorant of my father’s and mother’s dissatisfaction, we were butter-faced and giggling and happy.

One night in the winter of 1990, my mother received a phone call. It was from a woman she knew from DeLisle, who worked at the local police department in Gulfport.

“Do you know where your car is?”

When the woman told my mother the address, my mother knew where my father was. He was with his teenage love. He had parked my mother’s car around the corner from his girl’s house. I assume he’d told my mother he wasn’t seeing her anymore, that he was committed to their relationship and to raising a family together while she worked and he tried to establish his martial arts school. She wouldn’t have taken him back without those words. I can imagine the dread she felt when she heard that woman’s voice on the phone, the way it washed to pain across her chest before it sank to her stomach. She would have sat for a moment when she got off the phone, staring at the floor, looking at a wall, hearing us through the perfect, awful silence in her head fussing or playing or watching TV in the background. My mother would have steeled herself, but this steel would have been worked thin, thin as aluminum over her love. And underneath it all would have been fatigue. Her joints would have hurt, the marbles of her knuckles already releasing a steady, slim stream of pain that would, five years later, be diagnosed as arthritis. This was what it meant to clean. This was what it meant to work. This was what it meant to forget whatever she had dreamed the night before and to stand up every day because there were things that needed to be done and she was the only person who could do them.

She told me to watch my siblings, and she walked out of the door to get her car. She’d purchased a second car by then, a small blue Toyota Corolla, a stick shift that was new enough to shine a slick blue. She drove to the girl’s house, looked past the girl as she sat in my father’s lap, and told my father to get in the Caprice and drive it home, and once he did that, she said, he could get the fuck out.

My father has always worn his dreams on the outside, so even as a preteen I knew what they were. I’d known for years he’d wanted to have his own school. He had other dreams that I recognized but still can’t articulate, even as I’ve gotten older. His ill-advised motorcycle purchase; his leather suits, studded and fringed, that he wore in ninety-degree weather; the Prince he listened to on his Walkman while he rode: there was something at the heart of my father that felt too big for the life he’d been born into. He was forever in love with the promise of the horizon: the girls he cheated with, fell in love with, one after another, all corporeal telescopes to another reality.

My mother had buried her dreams on that long ride from California to Mississippi. She’d secreted them next to my brother in the womb, convinced as she was, with a sinking dread, that they were futile. She’d tried to escape the role she’d been born to, of women working, of absent fathers, of little education and no opportunity. She’d tried to escape the history of her heritage, just as my father had. Going to California to join my father had been her great bid for freedom. When she returned, she thought it had failed. She’d returned to the rural poverty, the persistent sacrifice that the circumstance of being poor and Black and a woman in the South demanded. But the suggestion of that dream lived on in her conception of my father. It’s part of why she loved him so long and so consistently, and it is part of the reason it hurt her so to meet him at the door with his leather jackets, black sweatpants, and black fringed T-shirts shoved in garbage bags and to tell him: Go.

And just like that, my father left.

With my father gone, I picked up my mantle of responsibility. Perhaps if we’d still been in DeLisle, maintaining our family would have been a little easier, but in Gulfport, my mother couldn’t bear the burden of the entire family by herself. I was learning that. My mother gave me a house key. It was one item in a growing list of responsibilities. In addition to hanging clothes, gathering them, folding them, putting them away, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning the bathrooms, babysitting my brother and sisters during the day during the summer while my mother was at work, the key meant that during the school year I should let us in the house if we got home from school before my mother made it home from work. But even as a young teen, I was absentminded, forgetful. In the summer, I often left my key inside and turned the lock on the knob and pulled the door shut behind us, locking us out of the house. After our father left, there was no one to open the door if our mother wasn’t home. During the school year, I didn’t realize I’d left the key at school until I stood before the door with my brothers and sisters.

I patted my short pockets, Josh at my elbow, Charine on my hip.

“I forgot the key.”

“What?” Joshua said.

I fumbled around Charine’s leg, tried to make her slide down my hip to stand, but she wouldn’t.

“I’m so stupid!” I said.

I looked at Josh. He was only a few inches shorter than me, even though he was just nine. He rolled his eyes.

“I have to pee,” Nerissa said.

“Me too. I have to pee too,” said Charine.

“We going to have to go in the woods.”

“I don’t want to go in the woods,” Nerissa said.

“Me neither,” Charine said.

Joshua followed us as I grabbed Nerissa by the hand. I led them around the yard and into the woods we’d walked through with our father to get to the video store; we weren’t allowed to walk all the way to Dedeaux Road without him. Fifteen feet into the woods, next to a trail on the right, was a dense cluster of bushes. Further behind the cluster of bushes was a full-size mattress that someone had dumped, probably the previous tenants who’d lived in our house. This, I thought, would have to do.

“Come on,” I said. I led them behind the screen of bushes. Charine began to cry. She was convinced that when she pulled down her pants something would bite her. A snake, she said. Or ants.

“Ain’t no snakes,” I said, although it was summer and hot, and the underbrush could be teeming with them, reptiles cooling themselves in the hottest part of the day.

She resisted.

“You want to pee on yourself?” I threatened. Sobbing, she squatted. I felt guilty for bullying her. “That wasn’t that bad,” I said. Charine nodded and wiped the snot from her nose with her hand. Josh, who’d watched the path for us, ran past us to the mattress.

“I’m going to do a flip,” he said. He sprinted and leapt on the mattress. I expected to see him spring high into the air, soar into a flip. He bounced about a foot or so. The ground had no spring, and the mattress was a sorry trampoline. Still, he did the front flip and landed on his back. When he stood, he smiled dizzily, swaying, and began to bounce again. Nerissa skipped to join him, and Charine let my hand go and ran for the mattress as well, snakes and ants forgotten.

Even though I felt the weight of responsibility with my father gone, as my mother had felt it when hers left (except in even larger measure), I was still a kid. We were still kids, in love with the mystery and beauty of the woods, deriving a certain pleasure out of our scrappy self-imposed exile from the house. We ran wild in the hours between our dismissal from school and my mother’s return from work.

One day, while I was sitting with Charine and Nerissa and weaving flowers into rings and necklaces, Josh appeared and sat with us. He’d been off exploring.

“I found something,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A secret room,” Josh said. “I’ma show you.”

We followed him further into the woods, along the trail that curved to the right, the trail that would take us through the subdivision and to a corner store on Dedeaux Road if we followed it. We walked in single file because it was so narrow. Underbrush and weeds grew thickly off the dirt path, scratched our calves, our shins. I picked Charine up and carried her. She was four. Joshua led and Nerissa trotted on his heels, proud to be keeping up with him, even at six. Then he led us off the trail, and I hoisted Charine around to my back and bent, all of us burrowing our way through thorny, leaf-drenched bushes, stumbling through blackberry brambles as the pines shivered above our heads. Suddenly the woods opened up into a small clearing. The ground was soft and spongy below our feet, padded with layers of pine straw.

“Watch,” Josh said, and knelt. He felt in the straw along what looked like a shallow ditch, then pushed the earth. There was a scraping sound. The straw moved, and there was a black hole where the ditch had been. “Look,” he said.

We clustered behind him. I grabbed Nerissa’s hand and leaned over Josh’s narrow back before I understood what I was seeing. Someone had dug into the earth, made a cellar, and then covered it over with two-by-fours before strewing pine straw to camouflage it.

“Who made this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Joshua said. He had friends in the neighborhood, too, Black boys and one White boy, all who, like my girlfriend, lived there with their single mothers. Maybe they made it, I thought, but it seemed too large an undertaking for skinny little kids with knees like doorknobs, shirtless boys whose ribs you could count when they rode their bikes through the streets. So much digging, I thought. And planning.

“Let’s go,” I said. I pulled Nerissa’s arm.

“You don’t want to go down in it?” Joshua asked. I could tell by the way he said it that he hadn’t gone down in it yet, and that he thought we might explore it together.

“No,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I yanked Nerissa to walk.

“Hold on,” I told Charine, and she tightened her legs around my waist, locking them at the heels. I pushed branches out of the way, began shouldering through the underbrush back to the trail. Josh stood behind us, still at the mouth of that hole.

“Come on!” I said.

He hesitated, then followed. When we reached the trail, I began trotting, Charine bouncing up and down on my back, laughing.

“Run,” I said.

We ran, stumbling on roots, plants whipping us like fishing line at the ankle. When we reached the end of the trail, we ran past the mattress, leapt over the ditch that bordered the woods and our yard, then let ourselves into the fence and the backyard, where we stopped, breathing hard. I turned on the hose and made everyone drink, and I kept us close to the yard for the rest of the day. Josh did a few desultory flips on the mattress, but he was the only one who reentered the woods before coming back out again.

That night, after my mother had fussed at me for forgetting my key again, after we’d all been bathed and ordered to bed, I lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to see the dresser, our stuffed animals, my lonely fish in its small, plastic rectangular tank the size of a saucer. I wanted them to glow brightly, to pacify me and let me know I was not alone, but they stood silently in the darkness, beyond my view. I was tempted to shake Nerissa awake so she’d open her eyes because I knew they would be white in the dark and she would at least grunt at me, but I did not. Along with the responsibilities I’d resumed when my father left again, his departure renewed my sense of abandonment, worthlessness. While I lay next to my sleeping sisters, questioning my father’s love, I equated the cellar out in the woods with my deserved misery. Instead of waking Nerissa, I pictured the open mouth of that cellar off in the darkness, in the future, gaping as a grave.

The next day, I didn’t ask my friend Kelly about the cellar, or my friend Tamika, or my friend Cynthia. Instead, I stood barefoot in the empty lot next to our house, still thinking about it, while half listening to Kelly talk.

“Girl, have you heard that new song by that White rapper?”

I looked confused.

“He is so fine,” she said. I was thirteen by then, all slim lines and teeth and unruly hair that my mother had first given up on combing, and then attempted to tame with a relaxer. When Kelly said this, she smiled and her entire body shook, the woman parts of her moving like water. Kelly was fourteen. She rolled her eyes.

“Wait till you see him.”

When I saw him on television, the White rapper was all hard lines and sequins. There were other boys I saw in the neighborhood who I thought were more attractive, boys with prominent cheekbones and black hair and dark, almost black eyes. Boys who looked like my father when he was younger. But I had no boyfriends. I thought I was too skinny and ugly to get a boyfriend: I would never approach and speak to a boy I didn’t know, and most times they wouldn’t approach me either. And if they did, I didn’t feel flattered. I felt embarrassed. But Kelly had boyfriends, and so did Crissy, one of my friends from the middle school in Pass Christian. We still talked on the phone sometimes, and she told me stories.

“I almost had sex,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I did.”

“Really?”

“My boyfriend came over and my mama wasn’t home. We was in the room and we was kissing and stuff. He tried to put it in, but it wouldn’t go.”

“Oh,” I said, amazed at her brazenness.

“I guess that meant God didn’t think it was the right time,” she said.

We were thirteen, but even so I was surprised by her mention of God. My ideas about God at the time were that He’d have nothing whatsoever to do with sanctioning an unwed woman, a teenager, having sex, so I didn’t understand Crissy’s logic.

“I guess not,” I said.

We weren’t allowed to let kids into our house when our mother was at work for the day, and mostly I didn’t want to. We met our friends on the street or in the woods, and in Gulf-port, all of my friends were girls. Even though my girlfriends were dating, I didn’t want to. I was still reading books and playing with dolls in secret. I let a boy into my mother’s house once when she was at work, but I did not let him in because I thought he was attractive, or because I wanted something to happen between us; I let him and his friend in because I thought they were Joshua’s friends. It was a disaster. It was a few weeks after we’d found the cellar, and two boys we knew from the neighborhood came by. Phillip was actually Joshua’s friend, skinnier than my brother and maybe a few inches taller, and he liked to wear his hair in a lopsided Gumby cut. His friend was a boy named Thomas, who was around my age, twelve, and we didn’t know him well. He was taller than Phillip, by at least a foot, and thick. He had a wide, flat nose, and his shoulders seemed lopsided, set at an angle, like whatever aligned him was askew.

“Can we come in?” Thomas asked.

Joshua and Charine and Nerissa were in the living room, watching You Can’t Do That on Television, and I stood at the side door that opened to the carport. The day was bright and hot beyond them, the bugs loudly lamenting the heat. The house was cool, even though my mother kept the thermostat at eighty to save money on her electricity bill during the summertime. We were threatened with whipping if we changed the setting. We never did.

“I guess,” I said.

The two boys followed me into the living room. Phillip sat on the sofa next to Josh, and they began talking. I sat on the long sofa. Nerissa and Charine looked up from their playing for a moment, dolls in mid-meal on the floor, and then went back to it.

“Can I sit next to you?” Thomas asked.

“I guess,” I said.

Thomas sat next to me on the sofa.

“What y’all been doing today?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Watching TV.”

“It’s hot out there.”

“Yeah.”

Thomas scooted closer. His leg touched mine. I scooted over, further into the crack of the sofa.

“Where y’all mama?”

“Work,” I said.

Thomas edged closer so his leg was touching mine again, and I tried to scoot over, but I was jammed into the arm of the sofa. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t talking to Josh and Phillip.

“Why you keep scooting over?” Thomas asked.

I shrugged, turning a shoulder to him and leaned away from his face. Josh and Phillip, still talking and laughing, walked out the side door. It closed behind them.

“I like you,” Thomas said.

I was mute. He pressed against me, sandwiching me between him and the cushions. I half stood, and he grabbed my arm and yanked me back down to the sofa.

“You don’t like me?” he said.

I shook my head. His hand slid up my arm, to my shoulder, my neck. I jerked away from him, and he moved with me. I was helpless.

“Stop,” I said. It was a squeak.

“What? I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop touching me,” I said. I deserve this, I thought.

“Come on, girl,” he said, leaning into me again, leading with his mouth. He grabbed my arm hard. This is my fault, I thought. Charine and Nerissa were quiet.

“Stop it!” I couldn’t breathe. He was too big. Just sit there, and if you take it long enough, it’ll be over, I thought.

Charine jumped up from her squat on the floor and ran toward the sofa. She leapt into Thomas’s lap feet first and began jumping on him, stomping his crotch.

“Leave my sister alone! Leave my sister alone!” she yelled.

“Get off me,” he said, trying to push her away, sliding over enough that I was able to get up and away from him. I stood.

“Leave her alone!” Charine said, kicking. Nerissa was crying. I scooped Charine up under her armpits and swung her to my waist. She had given me my voice back.

“Get out!” I said.

“What?”

“Get out!” I said. “Or I’m going to call my mama!”

He jumped up from the sofa. I ran to the side door, Charine still on my hip, and swung the door open wide, letting in the heat of the day.

“Out!”

He walked past and out into the heat, looking down at us.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Fuck you!” I said, slamming the door, locking the dead-bolt. I was surprised I could be so angry.

Thomas hit the door, hard.

“You stupid bitch!” he said.

“I’m not a bitch!” I said. But even as I said it, I was ashamed for not fighting back earlier on the sofa. I had to be saved by a three-year-old, I thought.

“Fucking slut!” He hit the door again.

I backed away from it, Charine clinging to me. We stared at the shuddering door: Charine was alert, ready to go at him again. I’m pathetic, I thought. There was a knocking at the back door, and then Josh opened it and walked inside. I locked that one, too.

“What you locked the side door for?” Josh asked. Thomas banged again. I could hear Phillip laughing on the carport.

“Him,” I said, pointing at the side door.

“Bitch!” Thomas hit it again. There was quiet on the other side. I put Charine down, walked to the front window, knelt, and peered through the blinds as the two boys skipped out in the sun and slowed to a walk in the middle of the street. I watched them until they disappeared around the corner of the house.

It didn’t matter if my mother was home or not. Thomas caught me out when I was hanging clothes by myself or sweeping the carport. He wouldn’t come into the yard, but he would roam the edges of the fence, the woods at the back of the house, scream, I know you hear me talking to you. You hear me talking to you. And then: I see you. When he said this, I thought he meant that he saw all the misery in me, saw that I deserved to be treated this way by a boy, any boy, all boys, everyone, and I believed him.

My mother withdrew after my father left. When she was home, she was cleaning. Or she was in the kitchen, cooking. There were no more movie marathons. We had food stamps then, books of them that I was always embarrassed to spend at the Colonial Bread store, but my mother had no compunctions about using them to keep the refrigerator stocked. Unlike my father, my mother wasn’t comfortable with physical shows of affection. She didn’t hug us or kiss us or touch us when she talked to us, like he did. Sometimes I think that my mother felt that if she relaxed even a tiny bit, the world she’d so laboriously built to sustain us would fall apart. So since she couldn’t overtly express her love for us, which was as large and fierce and elemental as the forest fires that sometimes swept through the woods behind our house, she showed us she loved us the only way she knew how beyond providing a home for us, cleaning, taking care of us, providing discipline: through food. She cooked huge pots of gumbo, beef and vegetable soup, pork chops, mashed potatoes, roasts, red beans and rice, cornbread, and desserts — pecan candy, blueberry muffins, German chocolate cakes, and yellow sheet cakes that she decorated with elaborate flowers and vines made of frosting.

When she wasn’t cooking, she was in her room watching television. She had one friend in the neighborhood, a woman who’d married my mother’s distant cousin. They lived across the street. My mother’s cousin was struggling with drug addiction, so my mother bought his wife and family food sometimes, allowed her children to come inside our house when they came over to play. My mother had one close friend who was also her cousin, who’d moved away to Atlanta. Other than that, she was alone. Even as she nurtured a general suspicion of men, she saw the cunning, messy cruelty of women, too; the various women my father had affairs with, some of whom had been her friends, some of whom had known her since they’d been children, had gloried in my mother’s disgrace, had called her and told her: He doesn’t love you — he loves me. She didn’t trust women or men. Her children were her only company, but we were a boisterous, gregarious tribe she loved wholeheartedly yet had little patience for, since she had been raising children her entire life. All the choices and all the circumstance of her existence heated to a rolling boil that summer of 1990, boiled and bubbled over and burned her. It was too much for one person to bear. She stumbled.

When one of us did something wrong, like leaving our clothes on the bathroom floor one too many times after bathing, or getting into arguments with each other and fighting, she whipped all of us. Sometimes she used the short shaft of a wooden toy broom. When Joshua found it one day while she was at work, he snuck out into the woods and threw it away. She bought another one. After months of touching us only when she physically disciplined us, she switched to psychological tactics. One day she threatened to give us up for adoption, and when she heard me crying in our room late at night, she called me to her doorway and asked me why.

“Because you said you want to give us up,” I said.

“Maybe if y’all weren’t so bad,” she said, “I wouldn’t have to threaten y’all.”

And still we felt our behavior would never be good enough. I was failing her. Driven by her sense of isolation or loneliness or a desire to reveal something about her sense of discipline to me or to warn me against what she might have seen of her legacy coming to life in me, she parked her car in the carport after a trip to the store one day and told me brother and sisters to go inside, and then said to me: “Wait — stay here.” And then she did something that must have been incredibly hard for her since it was so opposite to her nature; she talked to me. She told me stories. “Mimi,” she said, “your father …” And then she opened herself up in ways she wouldn’t do for many years. She told me some things I understood at the time, and other things I wouldn’t understand until I was her age, and other things I still don’t understand, about how she grew up as the caretaker for her brothers and sisters, about her relationship with her mother, about how she loved her father and her husband and lost them both, again and again. At thirteen, I glimpsed something of what my mother had suffered. For an afternoon, I knew some of my mother’s burdens, some of which mirrored my own. For a moment, I felt keenly what it meant to be my mother’s daughter. For a little while, I was wiser than I had the maturity to be, and I did what I could. I listened.

And my mother listened too, when she could, to our furtive whisperings. We missed DeLisle, we said. We missed running barefoot along the dirt roads and eating blackberries, hot with juice and sugar and sun, and floating in the current of the river. We didn’t like walking in a little tight group down to Bel-Air Elementary in the summer to eat free lunch in the cafeteria, feeling awkward and poor. So she asked us: “Do y’all want to move back to DeLisle?” And we said yes.

My mother, frugal by necessity, had saved enough money to buy half an acre of land from her father’s sister. In the summer of 1990, she set out to clear it, armed with machetes and chainsaws along with her brothers. Sometimes she brought us along on her days off that summer before we moved, and sometimes she didn’t. On one of the days when she didn’t, Joshua and I left Nerissa and Charine in the house and walked back into the woods. If my mother knew, she’d be angry I left my two youngest siblings alone, but I wanted to see that cellar again. I needed to see if it still gaped in that small clearing. I didn’t fully understand that it had taken on a symbolic importance for me, a physical representation of all the hatred and loathing and sorrow I carried inside, the dark embodiment of all the times in Gulfport when I had been terrorized or sexually threatened. I didn’t understand that it had become an omen for me. When Joshua and I got there, we found the plywood that had covered the top of the cellar gone, so what remained was a large, open ditch lined with pine straw, perfectly square and dark. Somehow it was even more awful to see the dim recesses of that man-made hole, and my response was visceral. I felt as if I were down in it, as if my world had shrunk to its confines: the pine straw pricking my legs and arms, the walls a cavern around me, tall as a line of trees, the sky itself obscured. I couldn’t escape it. Its specter would follow me my entire life. Joshua and I stared into its maw without talking, and then left. I wonder if he felt something as well, standing there on the crumbling edge of that awful hole, of the awful future we would bear.

The house was messy. I was grateful that at least Nerissa and Charine hadn’t broken anything. I set Nerissa and Charine to small tasks, picking up their toys in the living room, while I washed dishes. Joshua was outside in the backyard. I walked to the window with wet and soapy hands to talk to him.

“Josh,” I said, “you need to come inside and take out the trash.”

“All right,” he said.

I washed a sinkful of cups and moved on to bowls. He still wasn’t inside. I walked to the window again.

“Josh!” I said. I was frustrated: I felt the weight of being a child with adult responsibilities. I was inadequate. I was failing.

My brother stood out in the yard, peering into the dark of the house. He wasn’t looking up at me, and I realized that he and I were the same height now. His hair was a sandy brown in the sun he squinted against, and his black T-shirt was fitted on his frame, pulled so by the way he was gaining weight at eleven. Joshua looked through the screen and it was as if he saw me clearly with my soapy hands, my wrinkled fingers, my jaw grinding with frustration and self-abasement, and he hated me. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.