Men We Reaped

Ronald Wayne Lizana. Born: September 20, 1983. Died: December 16, 2002

He’s going to be a heartbreaker when he grows up.

Ronald was nine then, and I was fifteen, but it was still evident even then, in his short, even-limbed frame, that he would grow yet more beautiful when he became older. He was light on his feet, seemed to be perpetually on his tiptoes, ready to prank, run, and disappear down the elementary school hallway. He reminded me of Joshua at that age. Ronald too was an only boy in a family of girls; I’d attended elementary school with his oldest sister. Teachers would stop his sister and me at play and ask if we were related. They’d say: Y’all look alike. Ronald looked even more like Josh standing next to my cousin Tony, who was also nine, but who was around three shades darker than Ronald.

I was a counselor at All God’s Critters day camp. It was sponsored by my high school, Coast Episcopal, and was designed to provide free summer activity for underprivileged kids. As a student, I could volunteer to be a counselor; as underprivileged kids, most of the kids I knew in DeLisle and Pass Christian were eligible to go, but only three of them attended that summer: Antonio, my cousin Rajea, and Ronald. I wrote Tony’s name in the attendance book.

“And who’s this?” I smiled at Ronald. He smiled back slowly: his teeth white, his skin copper, his eyes large and brownish black. He had a smattering of freckles across his nose. He’s going to get all the girls, I thought.

“Ronald Lizana,” he said. I wrote his name in the book.

“You’ll be with the other boys,” I said. “Come on. I’ll take y’all to your station.” I wrote Rajea’s name and grabbed her hand, leading her down the hallway. I looked back to make sure Ronald and Tony were following. Ronald grinned at Tony, and Tony started laughing at a private joke.

I’d volunteered as a counselor for the Christian day camp because I wanted to get out of the house for the two weeks the camp ran. By this time, Josh was old enough to watch Nerissa and Charine during the day while I was at camp and Mama was at work. My brother and sisters hadn’t wanted to go to the camp; they thought it was lame. “All them White people,” they said. “And church.” I shrugged. I was on the tail end of a devout Christian phase, where I spent at least half of every hour thinking about God, praying, and feeling suffused with divine love. When I’d transferred to the Episcopalian school in sixth grade, I’d found irresistible the idea of a God who loved me unfailingly, scars and all. Here was a man who would never leave, I thought. Someone whom I would never disappoint. Later, I would fall away from the church when the rigidity of the doctrine and hypocrisy of some of the most devout Christian students I went to school with became apparent to me. In the end, I realized sometimes some people were forsaken.

I was a cheerleader, which meant that instead of teaching arts and crafts or doing Bible study in the form of singing Christian folk songs with the other high schoolers and two seminary students who ran the camp, I taught dance. My co-counselor and I choreographed and taught the kids routines to “The Humpty Dance” and “I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller,” which they were set to perform for the rest of the camp at the end of the week. On the first day, Ronald was unimpressed.

“You don’t know how to dance,” he said.

“Yes I do,” I said.

“So you can pop?”

“Yeah.”

My co-counselor was teaching the other kids the beginning of the dance and counting: “And one and two and three and four and five and six and seven and eight …”

“Do it.”

“I ain’t fixing to pop for you.”

“I can do it.”

“No, you can’t.”

Tony ambled over.

“Watch,” Ronald said. He widened his stance, put his hands palm down in front of him, and began thrusting his hips back and forth. I laughed. He could pop. Tony joined in.

“We’re not putting that in the dance.”

“Why not?” Ronald said.

The corners of his mouth twitched. He was a natural flirt.

“You really think the other boys would do it?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You going to do it, Tony?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Okay then.” I crossed my arms. “We’ll put it in.”

Ronald was charming, a showoff. As I carried large plastic trays of juice and graham crackers down the narrow school hallway for snack in the afternoon, he’d stop in the dim space outside of the bathroom, pat the air in front of himself, and pop. I’d laugh, the crackers in their cups sliding across the tray, the juice sloshing over the side of the waxed paper cups, rolling in thin streams so that when I finally got to the classroom with the snack, all of the cups bottoms’ were soggy.

In dance class, he caught on quickly. He was like C. J., athletic, lean, and short. He was able to pick up movements easily and imbue them with his own character. I thought because Tony and Ronald were such good friends, they’d shrug off my authority, wander off to the back of the classroom to play with the detritus of the school year or disappear into the dim hallways on hourlong bathroom breaks. But they didn’t. When I asked them to listen, they did, and they executed all my awkward dance moves, moving gleefully whenever they looked at each other, or whenever they got to the popping eight count.

Towards the end of the two weeks, we made homemade Slip ’n Slides by rolling out long plastic sheets and coating them with dishwashing detergent and water. The sky was a boundless blue, and the air was clear, free of the usual torrents of summer rain. We set both slides side by side on a slight hill in a field.

One of my co-counselors, who was shirtless, pale, and grinning in the sun, was eager to test the slide. He ran at it, jumped, and flew down the hill on his stomach and off the slide at the end, whizzing across the grass. When he stood, his chest was green and red, and I wondered if it hurt.

“That was awesome,” he said.

Ronald and Tony had the same idea.

“Watch this, Mimi!” Tony said. He ran and hurled himself down the slide. The thump sounded as if it hurt, but he grinned into the soapy water, and he flew off the end of the plastic and plowed to a stop in the dirt. Ronald took Tony’s success as a challenge. He flung himself at the plastic from a run, and zipped down the slide before landing in the grass. Ronald ran up the hill to the beginning of the slide while Tony zipped down again. I added more water and more soap. The other boys followed suit, whooping and crashing into the lawn. Ronald stopped next to me, blades of grass on his face and in his hair. I brushed them away: his face was hot and clammy under my fingers.

“You should get on it,” Ronald said. He spat away a piece of green that had slid to his lip.

“Naw, I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“Get on in your clothes.”

“Then I’ll be walking around with wet clothes all day.”

“Come on,” he said.

“I can’t.”

I brushed another sliver of grass from his face, and he shivered and smiled. Boys ran by him in pairs. “You’re cute,” I said. I figured there was no harm in telling Ronald something he already knew.

“One day I’m going to marry you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yep.” He nodded, smiling his charming smile.

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

I laughed and brushed away another blade. Ronald ran to the slide and Tony followed and they threw themselves at it, both of them burning darker in the heavy sun. I rolled the sleeves of my T-shirt up so they bunched under my armpits and let my shoulders warm. When I told the boys their session was done, the others ran inside, but Tony and Ronald lagged behind.

“Help me pick up these hoses,” I told them. A few clouds scudded across the sky, shadowing them, and when they cleared, Tony and Ronald were carrying empty bottles of dishwashing liquid and dragging hoses, mud and grass smeared across their bellies. The boys saw me watching and stopped to dance in the field, popping while holding the hoses and bottles up. They looked like drunk adults on the edge of a parade, dancing as Mardi Gras floats passed. I laughed. The sun caught them, and they were beautiful.

As Ronald aged, he got taller: the planes of his face spread and sharpened, his shoulders broadened and his waist slimmed, but when his face dimpled, he was still that nine-year-old boy in the field, shining copper in the sun. Ronald didn’t lose his charm and charisma, or his handsomeness, as he grew older. If anything, he was more confident, especially with women. I saw him sometimes around DeLisle or Pass Christian. Sometimes I even saw him around my mother’s house when I was home visiting from NYC, since he and Charine were good friends; when he walked through the living room to Charine’s room, he always seemed to be smiling, to be leaning forward as he walked, all the angles of his body harmonious like a song. I never imagined that he carried something darker in him, never saw him when his mood was cloudy and he turned furious or depressed. I was too immature to imagine at the time that the darkness that I carried from my prepubescent years, that conviction of worthlessness and self-loathing, could have touched others in my community.

What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless. Some of us turned sour from the pressure, let it erode our sense of self until we hated what we saw, without and within. And to blunt it all, some of us turned to drugs.

But I did not know this in the spring of 2002, which is why I thought Ronald was happy when I saw him at the park. Nerissa was off sitting in what I later would find out was Demond’s car, which was pulled onto the side of the court and parked in the weak seasonal sun, and I was sitting on the bleachers with Hilton watching Ronald play basketball with a girl. I was home, visiting, and it was a relief to sit in the park again, be still under the trees and the great heavy sky.

Ronald was laughing and copping feels on the court. He pulled his sleeves back over his elbows and threw his hands in the air and shoved his crotch into the girl’s ass like he was guarding her. She dribbled the ball, bent over, smiled before glancing behind at him. He smiled encouragingly at the stands. This was Ronald’s flirting all grown up: knowing and corporeal. Hilton sat beside me, and we laughed at the joke. The girl was coy, noticing what Ronald was doing but not discouraging him. She was a teenager, exuding her budding sexuality with every smile, every jut of her hips as she dribbled, with every giggle. At the opposite end of the court, Charine and C. J. threw the ball to each other, playing a game of twenty-one. After his game with the girl, Ronald climbed the bleachers and sat next to us. Hilton passed him a cigar.

“We still getting married?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Ronald said. Hilton snorted. Something about Ronald’s face was surprised, pleased. “Hell yeah,” he said. The girl wandered off to the cars. After drawing on the cigar, Ronald followed her.

Charine said when they rode around DeLisle later that day, smoking and listening to music and talking shit, I came up in the conversation. Her friends talked about the way I jogged down the street for exercise in sports bra and shorts, hair a rough curly tangle escaping the bun at the back of my head, my right leg kicking out to my side in a circle, my arms hanging low with my hands open. What are you doing, one of them had once asked, running or swimming? Another would ride behind me on his bike, talking constantly about the neighborhood, about the weather, about the day, about the way the crackheads walked the block, all the while singing lines from the latest songs. Once I told him to get away from me through labored, wet breaths. That hurts my feelings, he said. And then: You still run funny. Charine and C. J. and their friends talked about me in that car and Ronald stopped them. He passed one of them the blunt.

“Shut up,” he said. “That’s my wife. Don’t talk about my wife.”

“Whatever,” one of them laughed.

“I’m not playing,” he said.

They all laughed and parked in a driveway lined with a column of azalea bushes almost tall as a man, and smoked the afternoon away.

After I saw Ronald that day at the park, I thought I knew him. I thought that if I were younger and we were in high school together, Ronald was the sort of boy I’d fall in love with: funny, confident, charming, a bit arrogant. But there was much I didn’t know about Ronald, about his life and how happy or unhappy he was. He was nineteen. When I saw him, he lived with his mother. They argued, so he moved in with his older sister. After some months, he and his sister argued, he moved out of her house and for a stretch of time in the fall, he was homeless. He squatted in an abandoned house until his older cousin Selina, who was in her early twenties, found out, so she tracked him down and told him, “Kinfolk don’t live on the street.” Ronald moved in with her.

Ronald snorted cocaine, and he hustled for money. This is why he fought with his family. They loved him, wanted him to start working and stop using drugs, but he could not. He knew he could not, which is why he told Selina he wanted to go to rehab: he loved his mother and his two sisters, and his estrangement from them pained him. He felt that he couldn’t please any of the women in his life, including his girlfriend. The charm and charisma of his youth were as meaningless as a tonsil or appendix in his adult life. He knew how to navigate the world as a child, but as a young Black man, he was unmoored. The hard facts of being a young Black man in the South, the endemic joblessness and poverty, and the ease of self-medicating with drugs disoriented him.

After Ronald moved in with Selina, she visited his mother to assure her that he was safe. She wanted to let his mother know that Ronald was helping out, was almost a father figure to her son, spending his afternoons taking care of him while Selina worked. She wanted to let his mother know he was okay. Ronald’s mother expressed her frustration and helplessness in the face of Ronald’s addiction. Ronald took this as rejection.

As they lay on their backs on the bed in Selina’s bedroom, staring at the ceiling, at a sky he couldn’t see, he told Selina: “It’s like my mama pushing me in the streets.”

“Ain’t no way, cuz,” Selina said.

“It feel like they do,” Ronald said.

“They want you to do better for yourself.”

Ronald closed his eyes, tamped something down.

“They want you to get a real job. Do it legally.”

One night Ronald and Selina took a ride through Pass Christian before parking under the wide, reaching oak trees that screened the city park from Scenic Drive, the highway, and beyond that the beach. My father told me he’d been chased out of that park as a child for being Black, called a nigger by the groundskeeper. The beauty of the massive oaks and the water over the southern horizon belied that history as Selina and Ronald sat in the car and talked about Ronald’s demons.

“I was in my sister’s car. I parked it right here,” Ronald said.

The oaks ignored the beach breeze.

“I had the gun under the seat.”

The Spanish moss in the oaks pulled tight as a flag in the wind.

“I pulled it out. I was going to pull the trigger.”

The moss wrapped around the trees’ limbs and caught.

“And then the phone rang. It was my sister.”

“Why?” Selina said.

“I got all these problems.”

“Like what?”

“My girlfriend.”

“What you mean?”

“She be doing shady shit.” He thought she was cheating on him and hiding her infidelities. He channeled all the frustration and darkness of his life into their relationship until their love took on epic proportions.

“They got too many women in the world,” Selina said.

“But I love her,” Ronald breathed. “I love her to death.”

The night before Ronald died, he met up with another cousin in Long Beach. They sat out in a car in the parking lot of an apartment complex, smoking and talking.

“I’m going into the military, cuz.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Been talking to a recruiter. I’m ready,” he said.

His cousin said he seemed optimistic, that the promise represented by the military had given him hope, or so it seemed. He was searching for a way out. But Selina remembers it differently. Her son’s birthday was the day before Ronald died, and she’d thrown a party for him, all balloons and party hats and streamers, all baby-boy blue. Ronald called her every other hour, said: “Cuz, I’m coming.” Said: “Cuz, I ain’t forgot.” Said: “Cuz, I’m on my way.”

But as the day waned and the party ended, she got another call from one of Ronald’s friends, who said: “I saw him at the Shell station. He doesn’t look like himself.” She looked for him and caught a glimpse outside the station, but something was wrong with his face under the fluorescent lights. When she maneuvered her car back around to return for him, he’d disappeared.

I don’t know all Ronald’s demons. I don’t know the specifics of what Ronald ran from, what he felt he was outpacing when he talked about going to rehab or joining the military and if he self-medicated with cocaine so he could feel invincible and believe in a future. I don’t know what that debilitating darkness, that Nothing that pursued him, looked like, what shape his depression took. For me, it was a cellar in the woods, a wide, deep living grave. I know what it feels like. I know that sense of despair. I know that when he looked down at his copper hands and in the mirror, at his dark eyes and his freckles and his even mouth, that he thought it would be better if he were dead, because then all of it, every bit of it, would stop. The endless struggle with his girlfriend, the drugs that lit his darkness, the degradations that come from a life of poverty exacerbated by maleness and Blackness and fatherlessness in the South — being stopped and searched by the police, going to a high school where no one really cared if he graduated and went to college, the dashed dreams of being a pilot or a doctor or whatever it was he wanted, realizing that the promises that had been made to him at All God’s Creatures day camp were empty and he didn’t have a world and a heaven of options — all of these things would cease. And this is what Ronald thought he wanted.

Years later, I searched for and found statistics about mental health and Black people in an effort to understand something about Ronald, about myself, about my community. Racism, poverty, and violence are the primary factors that encourage depression in Black men, and I’d guess that this is true for Black women as well. Seven percent of African American men develop depression during their lifetime, and according to experts, this is probably an underestimate due to lack of screening and treatment services. They will not get care for their mental disorders. The percentage of African Americans, men and women, who do receive care for mental disorders is half that of non-Hispanic Whites. Not treating these mental disorders costs Black men and women dearly, because when mental disorders aren’t treated, Black men are more vulnerable to incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse, homicide, and suicide, and all of these, of course, affect not just the Black men who suffer from them but their families and the glue that holds the community together as well. According to “Souls of Black Men: African American Men Discuss Mental Health,” Black men’s death rates from suicide are twice as high as those for Black women. And when Black males ages fifteen to nineteen years old die by suicide, 72 percent of them use guns to do so.¹

These statistics punctuate my experience like an exclamation point. I read these and think about what happened to Ronald and feel he intuitively understood what it took me years of suffering grief, battling my own depression, reading, writing to understand. In the end, I understand his desire, the self’s desire to silence the self, and thus the world. Ronald looked at his Nothing and saw its long history, saw it in all our families and our communities, all the institutions of the South and the nation driving it. He knew it walked with all of us, and he was tired of walking.

Ronald was at his sister’s apartment in a complex in Long Beach. He was there alone. Still, I imagine he went into the bedroom and shut the door when his girlfriend finally answered the phone and they began arguing.

“Why are you acting like this? I love you. Tell me you love me.”

“No.”

“I’m going to kill myself.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes I am.”

“Stop playing.”

“I am.”

“Whatever, Ronald.”

I imagined the apartment had white walls, a dark bedspread on the double bed in the room, the floor bare besides the carpet. He had to have thought about this, planned it, borrowed or traded or bought the gun and bullets for it, been home by himself at a certain time. He had to have felt his Nothing over his shoulder, bearing down on him while spurring him into action. He had to have forgotten what it was like to stand outside under the hot Mississippi sun, to burn gold in it, to feel loved and alive and beautiful. He had to have felt like this was the only thing left for him to do. Ronald hung up the phone, shot himself in the head, and died.

Charine called me at work in New York City and told me. I stared at the gray walls of my cubicle, the gray carpet under my feet, the gray buildings through the window, the gray New York sky bounded by skyscrapers, and thought, Not another death. I hated phones. After I hung up with Charine, I looked at my hands and then walked into my boss’s office after knocking timidly on the door frame.

“Come in,” she said.

How should I tell her? I thought. How do I say my friend, a boy I watched dance in the sun, mud-streaked and happy, killed himself? I think I might have called him my cousin when I told her. I tried not to but began crying, and she frowned with kindness.

“You should go home for the day,” she said. I wiped my face with my hands, embarrassed that I was crying in public, walked out, powered down my computer, and left work. I rode home on the deserted subway in the middle of the day, glaring at every person I saw. I walked through crowds on the street and thought I had never been in so crowded a place, yet had never felt so cold, and I hated every walking, breathing thing for being alive while Ronald and my brother weren’t. I cried.

Days later I was home for Christmas, and they were burying Ronald in the graveyard. What is happening to us? I asked. I went to New Orleans that weekend. Charine and Nerissa, so many of us, piled into one car and parked near the river. We walked toward Bourbon Street and the crowds. As we stopped at an intersection, we heard a gunshot and the crowds surged like water, as if a large hand had dropped a stone in the middle of us all. I grabbed my sisters’ hands and we ran with the panicked crowds, half carried by the mass of bodies. New Orleans police rode on horseback through the streets. The horses were large and red, the color of Mississippi mud, and they boiled toward us, prancing and kicking with menace. Another shot sounded, and we scattered, our grip on each other so tight it was painful, and I wondered at us, running through the streets. Running away from what? I thought. From what? We didn’t go home, and the crowds didn’t disperse. We circled the block and fought our way back to the few open bars. I drank more through the night, drank until I would not remember what I did the next day, blacked out, and peed in alleyways like the homeless people I saw in New York.

Years after Ronald’s death, I learned that his girlfriend did love him, although the night of his death she was too frustrated with him to say so. She was a curvy pale girl with brownish blond hair and light eyes. She’d been adopted and lived out in DeLisle north of the interstate. They’d gotten into a bad fight during the weeks before he died, and she’d felt threatened; at the time he died, she was attempting to distance herself from him. She was trying to avoid his phone calls, and when she did pick up the phone and talk to him, the conversation was strained.

“He called me,” she said. Charine and I were in her car in our mother’s driveway. Her car was green, and so wide across that all of us were sitting in the front seat. We were high. Charine nodded and I stared at the numbers on the digital clock, which were neon blue. It was 3:00 A.M.

“He told me he loved me.”

The numbers glowed so brightly they seemed fuzzy at the edges.

“He said it right before he got off the phone. He said: ‘I love you.’”

The minute changed.

“And I didn’t say it back to him. I didn’t. I was mad at him.”

I bumped Charine’s arm with mine, just so I could feel her next to me.

“But I did love him.”

Charine chewed her gum, looked down at our arms.

“I did.”

Later that night, after she’d left and Charine and I had gone inside to escape the sunrise, Charine told me she often had this conversation with his girlfriend. She said the first time his girlfriend had told the story about what happened before his death, the story about their last conversation, she’d cried. She sobbed at the end of that story, her voice breaking. But I did love him, Charine, she’d said. I did love him. I did I did I did I did. She’d said it over and over again, as if Charine doubted her, as if Charine were someone she had to convince, when Charine knew all too well the regret that comes with a lover’s death, the regret that says: You failed him.

We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine. We dream of speaking when we lack the gift of oratory, when we lack the vision to see the stage, the lights, the audience, the endless rigging and ropes and set pieces behind us, manipulated by many hands. Ronald saw it all, and it buried him.