Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  “See that? That’s a Y for Yahweh.” I thought, No, that’s a V. But I said nothing.

  He seemed like a pleasant man, but his logic was laughable to me, trivial, especially in light of the fire-and-brimstone, blood-and-sacrifice, help-us-please-Savior message that had been drilled into me since I was a sprout. I knew who Jesus was, I thought. He was a white man with stringy yellow hair and blue eyes, notwithstanding the Bible’s hair-of-wool, feet-of-bronze description.

  I told my mother about where I’d been that day and the strange things that the strange man had said. She directed me, in no uncertain terms, to “stay away from down there!” My mother was right. Years later, the cult’s founder and leader, Yahweh ben Yahweh, would be convicted in Miami of conspiring to murder white folks as part of an initiation rite.

  Within months, the strange man and his daughter, unable to find willing converts or a warm reception, moved away, like Shane’s family.

  Having spent so much time with a girl, and before that a boy who folks thought acted too much like a girl, I was now feeling the need to rejoin the fray of the other boys.

  If Shane and Nevaeh were at one end of the spectrum, the Sparrow children were at the other. They lived down the block where the street met the highway, near the upholstery shop where Lawrence came to talk slick before someone tied him to a bed and took his life. There were three of them—two boys with a girl in between. They lived in an aging trailer where my father, after he and my mother split, often spent all evening getting drunk.

  The Sparrows were an unruly bunch. The older boy would hold his sister down and kiss her in response to the slightest dare. I got the sense that her protests had lost their force, that she had resigned herself to a trapped life with nowhere to run. In fact, she was the star—or victim—of the first sex tape I experienced. It was a cassette audiotape of several neighborhood boys crowding around a bed about to have sex with her.

  The boys taunted and prodded her.

  “Gul, take dem big-ass pannies off.”

  She pleaded for time to consider the act.

  “Wait a minit! Wait a minit! Let me thank! Let me thank!”

  The tape stopped before the action started, but start it did. The boys couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen at the time, and she was even younger.

  Sometimes I played with the Sparrow children, in part because there were only a handful of families on our street with children. We stayed in their yard while their folks and company talked, gambled, and drank inside, the air always charged with a hint of danger and the possibility of disaster. One evening, a well-liquored woman with shaky footing stumbled out of the house. She folded herself into her car and turned the ignition, and the car lurched forward. It sped through the yard, across the highway, and into a ditch, then slammed into a railroad embankment.

  The train tracks, which ran through town along its northern edge and on to the interchange at the center of town, had turned 1890s Gibsland into a booming shipping center. Paradoxically, Interstate 20, opened in the early 1960s less than a mile north of the tracks, now threatened to choke the town to death by diverting through traffic. The tracks themselves had become a nuisance and a hazard, taking a life or two every few years from those who snaked around the crossing arms—at the one level crossing that had them—assuming that they’d malfunctioned, as they often did, or from those who failed to heed them.

  But this was the first time I knew the tracks to threaten a life without the help of the train, and the only time I’d seen it happen in front of me.

  The adults ran screaming to rescue the woman in the ditch as we ran behind them.

  “Git some candy! Git some candy! She got da suga’!” They searched, but no candy could be found, at least not in time. She’d had a diabetic seizure and died in the ditch.

  It was all too much for me. I never played at the Sparrow house again.

  Seeking a middle ground between the taint of ostracism at Shane’s and Nevaeh’s houses and the air of calamity at the Sparrows’, I started to play at the home of the children over the hill. One of them, a boy with two first names, Sam Robert, became my new best friend. He looked the way my father must have looked as a boy—same dark brown skin, same head of big, wet-looking curls. Only this boy walked with a wobble, like his legs didn’t fit right at the hip, and his teeth were stacked like some of the permanent ones had insisted on coming in before the baby ones fell out.

  He was the second oldest of six children—most with different daddies—and he was one year older than me. His family had even less than mine did: rubber balls with leaky valves, naked dolls with lazy eyes. The children were born to a toothless, canned-beer-swigging woman who didn’t work and yelled profanities when she was sober enough to talk straight. “I done pushed six muthafuckas out my ass! I’m grown.” “Can’t nobody tell me shit! I tell you what to do.” “Sit yo’ ass down somewhere!” She was a West End woman.

  Their house was unpainted and sat on a grass-bare, red-dirt lot with a four-foot dropoff to the street. On the side of the house was a pine tree under which we all sat and talked. On occasion we went inside and watched the family’s static-plagued black-and-white television in the front bedroom, which was dominated by a squeaky bed that reeked of piss and sadness.

  Sam Robert looked after his younger brothers and sisters most days, a responsibility his mother often shirked. I deeply respected him for this. I think that’s what drew me to him—a boy who looked like my father but did the right thing by children.

  But a boy of his age could only be so vigilant. One day, one of his little sisters was riding shotgun on a bike while wearing no shoes, and the toes of one of her feet got caught in the spokes and were ripped off—the great toe and a couple of lesser ones. We rushed to tell her mother as the girl lay in the street, in shock, silent, not even crying. Her mother ran from the house, yelling and cursing. She grabbed the girl and the ripped-off toes, begged a ride from a man in a nearby truck, and sped away to the hospital, hoping that something could be done. Of course, there was nothing that could be done.

  I pretty much stayed at Sam Robert’s house, until one winter day when I went there and knocked on the door. “Who is it?!” the mother yelled.

  “Charles,” I answered. Then she said, loud enough for me to hear, “God dammit! He stay his muthafuckin’ ass ova here.” She said it the way a person talks tough to a door to shoo away whatever’s on the other side of it—a bump in the night, a scratching cat, a bill collector before payday. I felt ashamed and embarrassed, so I ran away before the door opened and never went back.

  I could find no real place for myself in the world, so I began to spend more time alone, often in the abandoned house right across the street from our own house, set between our two truck patch gardens. Years before I was born, Papa Joe had rented the small, four-room house to a couple with two children, but the children had drowned during a day of water play on Merrick Pond when the boat they were in capsized. All the other children were saved. They weren’t. They never came home. The couple quickly moved out, unable to stay in a house so drained of joy. No one ever rented the house again.

  The house held a certain allure, a kind of grace as it tilted and fell in on itself, like an old lady among younger ones, challenging the eye to see it as it had been, not as it now was. It was beautiful to me in that way—its tragedy notwithstanding—the way romance hangs on a building as it rots.

  It was a place from which life had been withdrawn in a hurry. There were things from that abandoned life, large and small, still strewn about, but it was the small things that caught my attention: a broken plate; a white saucer with two blue rings near the lip, the big one twice as wide as the small; a tin cup dented on both sides. They were the things that had been touched and held long ago by now-dead children, and they beckoned me, a boy trying to find his way back to life, to touch and hold them again.

  The house became my own Fortress of Solitude—like Superman’s retreat—where I hid and healed and thou
ght and played and pored over my brother’s secondhand dirty magazines, their pages stiff from being exposed to the weather, mildew growing in the spines where the women spread their legs. Or I would draw portraits of people, populating my world with imaginary faces to replace real ones.

  As a young child I had once drawn a black man with a necklace of bones and teeth, like the “natives” on the Tarzan television show, one of the only ways the show seemed to portray black people. Everyone was surprised at how well the drawing turned out, including me. I always drew from then on. It was fun, but just a hobby.

  Still, I bristled every time someone said, “You’re going to be an artist.” The only “artist” I’d ever known was not held in high esteem. He was a black man with a Jewish name—Hammerstein—who lived down by the railroad crossing. But folks didn’t call him an artist. They called him crazy. His yard on all sides was filled with house-high piles of scrap metal, and he spent his days welding the metal into spooky totems.

  Folks laughed at the futility and impracticality of his undertaking. I found the towering figures beautiful, but I didn’t want to be a joke like Mr. Hammerstein. So I drew mostly for my own amusement, like I was doing in the House of the Drowned Children.

  The only thing I ever knew to live in that house was a young deer, which had darted from the woods and across the road in front of my father’s truck, the truck clipping its back legs so that it couldn’t run and could hardly stand. My father, full of liquor, loaded the deer into the truck and brought it—panicky, kicking, and wide-eyed—to our house, for us to keep as a pet, I suppose. He put the deer in the House of the Drowned Children, in one of the rooms in the back, the one with the fewest things in it. We did our best to barricade the openings where the windows used to be, but as soon as the deer’s leg healed enough for it to stand, it bolted through one of the openings and back into the wild.

  For me the house was neither cage nor morgue, but sanctuary—a place that shielded me from unpleasant things. I didn’t want to bolt back into the world but to steal away from it. There in that house I stopped running from loneliness and embraced it. Loneliness became my truest and dearest friend, a friend who would shadow me for a lifetime. On the other side of the street, loneliness had killed Papa Joe, but on this one it kept me alive.

  But the house continued to collapse until it had to be brought down, which meant I had to find a new sanctuary, another place where I could run away from the world when it felt too much for me. I took my loneliness into the forested lot between Shane’s old house and our own field. There the vine-strung trees stood like pillars, tall and straight, with branches intertwined high above, giving the space an airy, sun-dappled feel like the inside of a cathedral. It was peaceful, scented with spruce and pine, and quiet save the call of distant birds, the rustling of small animals, and the occasional stampede of the horses in the large field that ran behind most of the houses on the street.

  I passed the hours there, reclining on a fallen tree, sometimes even taking off all my clothes, drawing myself into greatest agreement with my surroundings. I drifted back and forth through the fog of consciousness, peacefulness overriding the pain of the bark pressing into my back and the mosquitoes nipping at my flesh.

  Time ground to a halt and the trees whispered in the language of God and nature about steadfastness and resilience—gently saying that one could be constantly stirred yet not moved, bent but not broken, that a thing well grounded and deeply rooted could ever stand.

  That year, when I was nine, my mother got a job teaching home economics at the high school in Gibsland, a much shorter commute. I was going back to rejoin the classmates I had left after kindergarten.

  This was the first time I noticed that our town’s school was attended almost entirely by black children. The year I was born was the first year our school district, like many Louisiana school districts, had been forced to desegregate its public schools, after dragging its feet for sixteen years following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Louisiana had taken the ruling particularly hard because it overturned Plessy v. Furguson, the Louisiana case that established the legal justification for Jim Crow throughout the South. In Gibsland, the white school was combined with Coleman, the black school, to create one school system. The old Gibsland campus became the lower school—Gibsland Elementary—and the Coleman campus became the upper school—Gibsland-Coleman High School, where my mother was to teach.

  Local whites were not pleased. They removed their children and bused them off to the all-white academies that were springing up to protect their children from the imaginary dangers of commingling with “coloreds.” Many white teachers left as well, some even taking the textbooks with them. Only a handful of desperately poor white children remained at the Gibsland schools. In fact, white children seemed to me like ghosts in Gibsland, fleeting images seen through the windows of passing cars.

  At Gibsland Elementary, I was placed in Mrs. Collins’s fourth-grade class. She was a pint-sized firecracker of a woman, with short curly hair, big round glasses set wider than her face, and a thin slit of a mouth she kept well lined with red lipstick.

  On the first day of class, I sat at my desk, a little nothing of a boy, lost and slumped, flickering in and out of being. She gave us a math quiz. Maybe it was the nervousness of being the new kid, but I quickly jotted down the answers and turned in the test—first.

  “Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call you Speedy Gonzales.” Mrs. Collins said this with a broad, approving smile, the kind that warmed you on the inside. She put her arm around me and pulled me close while she graded my paper. I got only a couple of the answers wrong.

  I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval, or putting her arm around me, or praising my performance in any way. It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared about me, truly saw me, or believed in me. I never got a bad grade again. In fact, from that point on, mine were among the best grades in the class. I figured that if I always shined by my work, Mrs. Collins—and everyone else—would always be able to see me. I wanted to make her as proud of me as she seemed to be that day. And she always seemed to be.

  I felt life stir in me. I’d always known that I was smart, but when the teachers at Ringgold had treated me like I wasn’t, I’d lived down to their expectations.

  I don’t know if race was a factor, but most of the Ringgold teachers had been white, and Mrs. Collins and most of the teachers at Gibsland were black. In fact, Mrs. Collins was the first black teacher I’d had since kindergarten, and the difference seemed real. She often interrupted her scheduled lesson to talk to us about citizenship, or hygiene, or whatever she thought we needed to know to be better people—not just teaching us, but raising us.

  I didn’t remember hearing about Black History Month at Ringgold. President Gerald Ford had only officially recognized it in 1976, when I was in the first grade. But at Gibsland it was an event, one that opened my eyes and gave me a newfound sense of pride. It was the things that I learned had been invented by black folks—everyday things, things that I regularly saw and touched and tasted—that especially impressed me. Potato chips and peanut butter. Refrigerators and oil stoves. Straightening combs and brushes. Mops and dustpans. Lawnmowers and traffic lights. Bicycle frames and ironing boards. Those things stuck with me.

  The arts teacher, a thin, elegantly turned-out woman, taught us the so-called Negro national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with its plaintive lines and demanding low notes that wreaked havoc on my voice, which was beginning to crack early. It was the only song on which we were graded. The song spoke to me in a special way, building in me a lyrical narrative of struggling and pushing through suffering.

  Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

  Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.

  But of everything about Gibsland Elementary, it was being embraced by the popular boys that most changed me.

  It began the sum
mer before, when I met a boy named Russell.

  That summer seemed particularly hot. We had one small air conditioner, which was in William and Robert’s room. We crowded into their room all day to stay cool. My mother wanted a larger air conditioner for the living room, to liberate us. She bought it, but to install it we had to have an outlet rewired. She had an amateur electrician come one day to do the job.

  The man had a son and grandson who were the same age, and my age as well, and he brought them with him. Russell was the grandson. He was a tall, muscular boy with an easygoing manner, the kind other boys were drawn to because they wanted to be like him, a jock. As the old man worked with the wires, Russell, his same-age uncle, and I wrestled in my brothers’ room, jumping from sofa to bed and back again. Strong for my age, I tossed the boys with ease. It was fun. I made friends that day. Unfortunately, the old man bungled the wiring job. Every time we touched the air conditioner, it gave us a shock.

  I had not considered that Russell and his uncle would be at the school and in my grade, but they were. When lunchtime came, I saw them. There were fewer than forty children in the entire grade, and we were split into two classes. The two boys were in the other class. I had no way of knowing that Russell was one of the popular kids in the grade.

  During that first lunch break, he heaped praise on me in front of everyone, for being strong and cool and tossing him and his uncle around when his grandfather was working on our wiring. I was his new friend, and that mattered. On the sheer force of his effusive recommendation, I instantly became one of the cool kids.