Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The House with No Steps

  Thanksgiving

  Chester

  The Punk Next Door

  Look-Away Jesus

  Change

  Another Boy’s Baby

  The Brothers

  Hell Week

  The Champagne-Colored Girl

  Lie Detector

  The Just-in-Case Gun

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Charles M. Blow

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Blow, Charles M., date.

  Fire shut up in my bones : a memoir / Charles M. Blow.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-22804-7 (hardcover)

  1. Blow, Charles M., date. 2. Journalists—United States—Biography. 3. African American journalists—Biography. I. Title.

  PN4874.B575A3 2014

  070.92—dc23

  [B] 2014006729

  eISBN 978-0-544-30258-7

  v1.0914

  “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” words and music by Thomas A. Dorsey, © 1938 (renewed) Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

  Author’s Note: Nearly all names of people in this book have been changed. No place names or other details have been altered. Some passages in this book were previously published in the New York Times.

  To my mother, who is my rock.

  To my children, who are my reasons.

  Prologue

  Tears flowed out of me from a walled-off place, from another time, from a little boy who couldn’t cry.

  I had held on to the hurt and shame and doubt for so long, balling it up in the pit of me, that I never thought it would come out, or that it could. I certainly didn’t think it would come out like this. Not in a flash. But there it was.

  Some of my tears streamed over the arc of my cheeks and off the rim of my jaw. Others rounded the corners of my nose and puddled in the crease of my lips. I didn’t wipe them. I wore them.

  I looked over at the rusting pistol on the passenger seat. It was a .22 with a long black barrel and a wooden grip. It was the gun my mother had insisted I take with me to college, “just in case.” I had grabbed it from beneath my seat when I jumped into the car. I cast glances at it as I drove. I had to convince myself that I was indeed about to use it.

  The ridges of the gas pedal pressed into the flesh of my foot as I raced down Interstate 20 toward my mother’s house, just twenty-five miles away. I had driven this lonely stretch of north Louisiana road from college to home a hundred times. It had never gone so slowly; I had never driven so fast.

  I began to scream as a fresh round of tears erupted. “Motherfucker!” I slammed my fists down on the steering wheel over and over. “No! No! . . . Ah! Ah!” In part I was letting it out. In part I was pumping myself up. I had never thought myself capable of killing. I was a twenty-year-old college student. But I was about to kill a man. My own cousin. Chester.

  Minutes earlier I was in my apartment at school doing much of nothing, just pushing back against sorrow as it pressed down. My mother called. She told me someone wanted to speak to me. There was a silence on the line, and then words: “What’s going on, boy?”

  It was Chester. He was at my mother’s house, at our house. It had been years since I had heard that voice. “What’s going on, boy?” like nothing had ever happened, like everything was buried and forgotten. But betrayal doesn’t work that way. Even when it’s buried, it doesn’t stay buried. It’s still alive, down there, scratching its way back to the surface. It must be buried over and over again.

  I don’t recall saying anything or even hanging up. I flung myself down the stairs of the apartment wearing only pajama pants and a T-shirt. No shoes. I burst out of the door and bolted to the car.

  I was fully engulfed in an irrepressible rage. Everything in me was churning and pumping and boiling. All reason and restraint were lost to it. I was about to do something I wouldn’t be able to undo. Bullets and blood and death. I gave myself over to the idea.

  The scene from the night when I was seven years old kept replaying in my mind: me waking up to him pushed up behind me, his arms locked around me, my underwear down around my thighs. The weight of the guilt and grieving that followed. The years of his bullying designed to keep me from telling, and the years of questioning my role in his betrayal.

  It was that betrayal, I believed, that had first caused a curiosity about guys to bleed into my attraction to girls. My lost innocence had to be avenged. My conflict had to be quelled. That is why he had to die. That is why I had to kill him.

  I was convinced that if I removed him from the world, the part of me that I despised would go with him. A second wrong would restore me to right.

  1

  The House with No Steps

  The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one.

  My family had gathered at Papa Joe’s house because Mam’ Grace was slipping away, only I didn’t register it that way. For some reason I thought that it was her birthday.

  Papa Joe was my great-grandfather. Mam’ Grace was his laid-up wife who passed the days in a hospital bed squeezed into their former den, looking out through a large picture window that faced the street, watching the world she was leaving literally pass her by.

  We were in the living room when he called to us.

  “I thank she ’bout to go.” I didn’t know what that meant. I thought it was time to give her a gift.

  With that, my family filed into her room, surrounding her with love. Their hearts were heavy. Mine, though, was light. I thought we were about to give her something special. They knew something special was about to be taken away.

  She peacefully drew her last breath as her head tilted, and she fell still.

  No dramatic death rattle, no fear-tinged soliloquy, no last-minute confession. Like a raft pushed gently from the shore, she drifted quietly from now into forever—a beautiful life, beautifully surrendered.

  But I recorded it differently. I thought she turned to see a gift that wasn’t there, and that something went tragically wrong in the turning.

  When Mam’ Grace left the room she took the air with her. No one could breathe. They could only scream.

  My mother was overcome. She ran from the house, and I ran behind her. She threw herself to the ground near the hog pen, wailing, her back rocking against it. I shooed the hogs away as they tried to lap at her hair. I was too young to know what it meant to die, but tears I knew. Sorrow flooded out of my mother like a dam had broken. It was one, though, that she would soon rebuild, taller and stronger than it had been. As a child, I would never see her cry again.

  I spent most of my life believing my three-year-old’s version of what happened that day, until as an adult I recounted my memory to my mother and she set the story straight—our gathering at Mam’ Grace’s bedside was not to celebrate the day she was born but to accept that it was her day to die.

  My mother’s telling of it seemed more fitting. As a child I became accustomed to death spectacles. I went to more funerals than birthday parties. My mother took me even when she left my older brothers behind. She thought me too young to stay home with them. I was also too young
to understand what I was seeing at the funerals. My brothers once asked me how the dead man had looked at one of the services. I responded as a child would: “Good, I guess. He was jus’ up there sleepin’ in a big ol’ suitcase.”

  I was born in the summer of 1970, the last of five boys stretched over eight years. My parents were a struggling young couple who had been married one afternoon under a shade tree by a preacher without a church. No guests or fancy dress, just the two of them, lost in love, and the preacher taking a break from working on a house.

  By the time I came along, my mother was a dutiful wife growing dead-ass tired of working on a dead-end marriage and a dead-end job. My father was a construction worker by trade, a pool shark by habit, and a serial philanderer by compulsion.

  My mother was a stout woman with a man’s name—Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes—no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin. She used only a stroke of lipstick, dark like a fig, and a little powder to cover the acne that still popped up under the balls of the cheeks that sat high on her face.

  My father was short for a man, with a child’s plaything for a name—Spinner. He had flawless dark brown skin and a head full of big, wet-looking curls, black as oil. And he had the smile of a scoundrel—the kind of smile that disarmed men and undressed women.

  We lived in the rural north Louisiana town of Gibsland, nearly halfway between Shreveport and Monroe and right in the middle of nowhere. The town was named after a slave owner named Gibbs whose plantation it had been. Its only claim to fame was that Bonnie and Clyde had been killed just south of town in 1934. Townspeople still relished the infamy. Gibsland was a place where the line between heroes and villains was not so clearly drawn.

  Although the town was already contracting, downtown retained a one-of-each-thing, much-of-nothing quaintness. There was one grocery store and one dry cleaner. One feed-and-seed and one drugstore. One dry goods store and one bank. One restaurant and one furniture store. One stoplight and one policeman.

  It was a place with whites and blacks mostly separated by a shallow ditch and a deep understanding. Main Street cut through town from north to south and was flanked on both sides by most of the white community. Most blacks, like my family, lived on the western side of town.

  Ours was a small, rent-to-own house on a narrow street—Third Street—that ran down a gently sloping hill. The street was populated with young families and old couples—everybody nickname-close. I wasn’t only the youngest boy in my family, I was the youngest boy in the whole neighborhood—not just my mother’s baby, but everybody’s baby, a fact expressed in a nickname of my own: Char’esBaby. That was what everyone but the single mother next door, a round woman with three round sons, called me. She insisted on Chocolate. She said that my skin looked “just like chocolate.” Every time she saw me, she met me with a smile and a request: “Come here and give me some sugar, Chocolate.”

  Our house had a small, uneven yard dotted with fire ant mounds, prickly weeds, and clover patches, but little grass. It had an unpaved driveway and a three-foot-high front porch with no steps. This meant that you had to either jump up onto the porch or, as was more often the case, enter through the back. My mother pleaded with my father to build steps. He could easily have done it, construction being his trade and all, but he never did.

  A lone pink-flowered mimosa tree stood near the street, stunted and distorted, bowing to passersby and drawing a charm of hummingbirds. A large sweetgum tree marked the property line, its muscular, runoff-exposed roots cascading into a ditch—twisting terrain for secondhand action figures and a handful of Hot Wheels. Wasp nests dangled from the overhangs. Paint strips peeled away from the house like husks from corn. Son of a Bitch, a dog my brothers found—they begged my mother to let them give it its literal name—sought refuge in cool spots under the house.

  I don’t remember much about my brothers in that house, only that I shared a room with my oldest brother, Nathan, and that my next-to-oldest and next-to-youngest brothers, William and Robert, shared the adjoining room.

  Theirs was the only bedroom in the house with a television, up on a chest of drawers between twin beds. That meant that their room served as a den by default. We had pillow fights and tickle fights in that room. We draped sheets over box fans to make inflated tents. We watched Soul Train, lighting up at the dancers getting down, joining in as they ended the show: “Love, peace, and soooouuul!” There was a hole in the wall that joined our closets, just big enough for me to squeeze through and make repeated “surprise!” entries into William and Robert’s room. To do so, I had to crawl over a bunch of old guitars that littered the closet floors like limbs blown down by a heavy storm.

  Nathan told me that they belonged to my father, that he had been in a band, that one night after a gig and a little too much liquor my father and his bandmates had a car wreck. My father was driving. Someone in the band was killed in the crash. My father did a stint in prison for his part in it. When he got out, he never played again. That’s when he took up construction.

  After my parents married, my mother was pregnant every couple of years, and perpetually recovering from or falling victim to illness. She was so sick when I was born that my maternal grandmother, whom we called Big Mama, took me to live with her and her fourth husband, Jed, in Arkansas, until my mother got better. Big Mama had also taken in my middle brother, James, before me. I stayed with them in Arkansas for three years before coming home. James never came home.

  So, two or three times a month, my parents, my brothers, and I piled into our battered Volkswagen Beetle for the hourlong drive to visit them. Everyone else found a seat. I curled up in the package tray under the back window, the engine buzzing beneath me as I stared up at silent congregations of clouds floating across the skies.

  On the way to the interstate we passed what folks called Boogie Woogie Road, the first road past the city limits on the west side of town. My mother told us that the road was named for the white man black folks called Boogie Woogie, who had run the now-abandoned, dirt-floor store at the junction where the road met the highway. But there were other reasons for the name that my mother refused to relay. Boogie Woogie was a long, straight road that descended a hill with several drops and as many plateaus, but only a few houses. It was perfect for racing hot rods by day and parking with a sweetheart by night. Boogie Woogie.

  Just past Boogie Woogie Road was Martin’s Pond. It was the pond my mother insisted was bottomless, because she had always been told it was, even though the stump of a cypress tree rose from the center of it. “Mama, it cain’t be bottomless,” we’d say, giggling. “Yes it is,” she’d insist, only half jokingly.

  When we reached Interstate 20 we took it for as long as we could. The road cut a path over rolling hills, which in spots were blanketed by stands of farmed pines, spaced like soldiers—in perfect rows, same age, same height. In other spots, virgin forest was being consumed by kudzu, a big-leafed, invasive weed from East Asia enveloping whole swaths of the American South, growing so fast that folks called it the mile-a-minute vine, blanketing acres of shrubs and trees.

  When we turned off the interstate, we took winding roads through small towns with sweet names like Dixie Inn and Plain Dealing; through stretches devoid of people, save an occasional farmhouse set far back from the road or a country café like the one called Ho-Made; and through vast landscapes of cotton fields—endless rows of brown plants stippled by hypnotic flecks of white.

  My mother told us stories of the black folk who used to work the fields before machines pushed them out, the pickers dragging long, teardrop-shaped bags they filled with one hundred pounds of featherweight cotton fibers plucked from unforgiving bolls that shredded the fingers by day’s end.

  She seemed to relish telling such stories—their power to educate and evoke, to turn our minds, to divert them from our own harsh realities.

  We rarely stopped along the way, but if we did, it was for gas, or a Co
ke, or a rummage sale, which my mother scoured compulsively.

  Occasionally we burst into song when a favorite tune came on the radio.

  Bad, bad, Leroy Brown

  The baddest man in the whole damn town . . .

  These were good times, family times—all crammed together in that tiny car, with no choice but to talk and sing and bind ourselves to one another.

  Soon we were pulling into Big Mama and Jed’s yard, while they stood on the porch to greet us, smiling and waving.

  Their Arkansas community was even smaller than Gibsland. For reasons unknown, it was called Kiblah, a name derived from the Arabic Kaaba, the cube structure at the center of the mosque in Mecca, the holiest place, the House of God.

  Kiblah was that for me, my place apart from the traumas of struggle and the need of things. There my spirit floated, without weight or worry, like a leaf upon a still water. It was home, in a way, my first home, and Jed, Big Mama, and James were my first family. It was there that I learned the meaning of love from Jed, the man I counted as my first father, although he was neither my father nor blood family.

  The house itself was tiny, with five rooms. It was set on a small patch of land perilously close to Highway 71 and between a forest on one side and the expansive cow pasture of a white farmer on the other. My brothers and I played in the dusty front yard. Traffic whizzed by just a few feet away from our ball games and bike riding.

  There was no gas heat or running water and no bathroom. For washing, cooking, and drinking, we drew water from the well in the front yard, and heated it on the wood-burning stove. Clothes were hand-washed in a number 2 washtub on the back porch. We bathed out there in that same washtub, sometimes in the laundry water.