Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  I would be much older before I fully realized that Big Mama worked for the Beales and not with them. But it wasn’t the working relationship that stood out and made the most difference to me as a young boy. It was what I registered then as their basic goodness to each other, their sense of sameness.

  My family’s interactions with the Beales prevented racial fear and mistrust from taking hold. There seemed to be a warmth behind their eyes—just folks like any others. The relationship between our families helped me conceive of the beauty beyond—and the humanity between—black and white. It helped to rescue me from the bitterness—not by some grand act of racial contrition, but simply by acts of human kindness.

  5

  Look-Away Jesus

  With another year came another betrayal.

  When I was ten years old Nathan graduated from high school and went away to college at Grambling. This left me alone in our shared bedroom for the first time. I couldn’t stand it. There were too many bad memories in that room, crouched in the corners, waiting for night to fall, waiting to get me alone, waiting to pounce. I tried to rearrange the furniture, to point the bed in different directions, to disorient the memories of death—Mam’ Grace’s and my own—and the male apparitions, but it could not be done. They still stirred sometimes when the room fell dark.

  I didn’t want to wait for them, so I slipped away to other rooms. Sometimes I lounged in William and Robert’s room to talk and debate and watch television with them, trying desperately to wedge myself into their relationship. At other times I’d gravitate to Uncle Paul’s room, searching for the feeling of the simpler, more innocent times when we roamed the streets like buddies, me skipping beside him, oblivious to life’s land mines.

  After I’d started school, Paul no longer had the job of taking care of me, so he made his own. Every day, sunup to sundown, he chopped the thigh-high weeds that grew in the field where Papa Joe had raised his hogs—swinging a sharp blade at the end of a wooden handle back and forth like the pendulum of a clock, ticking away the time, batches of grass taking flight at the top of each motion as the blade slowed and momentarily stopped. When the day was done, he raked his cuttings into a pile and set fire to them, the green grass mixed with the dry to produce great plumes of white smoke that trailed off in the breeze.

  So, at the end of the day, after school was over and the weeds were burned, after supper was eaten and baths were taken, I’d go to Uncle Paul’s room and loll about as he reflected on his day of hacking weeds and doing nothing. The room was spartan and ordered, like Aunt Odessa’s house. There was an oak chest of drawers and a matching dresser with a tilting mirror. On the dresser was a pipe stand and ashtray, a boar’s hair shaving brush and matching soap dish, and the hat that Uncle Paul wore every day.

  There was an old rocking chair in front of a homemade box that rested on the floor, kept padlocked by day, filled with pouches of tobacco, cans of snuff, bundles of pipe cleaners, and jars of coins. Uncle Paul chewed tobacco or tucked a pinch of snuff between his lip and gum, spitting the black juices into a darkened coffee can. Other times he puffed on one pipe while cleaning another, threading the pipe cleaner through the stem, slow and gentle, the forward end emerging with every thrust like a caterpillar peeking out the end of a hollow stick.

  The only things on the wall were two dime-store pictures above the bed—one a print of a white Jesus looking away into nowhere, the way people do when they pretend not to see you even though you know that they do, and the other a print of a kitten with too-big eyes that looked like it was about to cry.

  Uncle Paul told me wonderful, simple stories about the boy he’d been before age wrapped an old man around him. He pulled the stories through time and space and out of the side of his mouth not champing down on the bit of the pipe, its bowl bouncing as he formed the words and swinging so low that I could see the yolk-yellow glow of the embers when he drew on it. Ribbons of smoke rose from the corners of his mouth, caressed his face, then found their level in the room.

  I lay on the bed, soaking it up, staring into his eyes. They were the same color as Jed’s eyes—brown, a hint of gray around the edges, sunrise yellow where the whites should be. But they were different. Weary, not sweet. The skin above Jed’s eyes fell soft, releasing the worries before they could stick. The skin above Paul’s eyes was held tight. Paul had the kind of eyes that stepped you back rather than drew you in, the kind that belonged to a man you could know your whole life and never wholly know. You could only look a little ways into Uncle Paul’s eyes before you hit a wall, sensing something held apart, locked away, like the box on the floor.

  Sometimes, when the evening stretched deep into the night, I’d simply roll over on his bed and fall asleep. I felt safe there.

  That is, until the night I was awakened by the feel of his hand moving across my hip, arcing the way a snake moves across a log, slow and deliberate, searching for a soft spot to come down, purposeful, not a mistake. My stomach got knotty and my skin went cold—flesh remembers things. I’d been to this sad place before, only this time it was under the chin of the kitten trying not to cry and under the gaze of look-away white Jesus trying not to see.

  Without a word, before the hand found its target, I quietly got up and walked out of Paul’s room and back to mine. I never slept in his room again, and neither of us ever spoke of the hand that had moved across my hip like a snake. Whereas Chester’s betrayal had broken my spirit, Paul’s broke my heart. And yet, I struggled to convince myself that something else had moved that hand. Not Paul. It couldn’t have been him. He wouldn’t have done it. It was that thing without conscience or calculation that took up in the body when the mind went quiet that moved the hand. It was that thing that ran through a sleeping body like bold mice through an empty house—the twitch of a nose, the jolt of a shoulder, the jump of a leg—movements without meaning. That’s what it was. Not Paul.

  I had to resort to the most useful and dangerous lesson a damaged child ever learns—how to lie to himself.

  I had to make up a reason, an excuse, because there is nowhere to hide in a small house. I had to make room within the rooms, a safe place midway in the mind, behind seeing and before knowing. There I could resurrect memories and bury secrets.

  That’s what people in this town and in our family did with secrets. No matter what it was—not a word. No good could come of giving voice to vice. Down the hole. Better there. Pack the dirt, tight, and move on. Otherwise, we might have to deal with the emotions those secrets might stir, and emotions were tricky for us. In our family we pretended we didn’t have a full range. We stuck to jokes and laughter, bravado and theatrical indignation. Have fun often; have a fight occasionally. That was it. No talk of love, or sadness, or longing, or pain. No crying, no hugging, no consoling. No “I love you,” “I’m proud of you,” or “I miss you.” That was soft talk for babies, not boys.

  The fact that we loved each other was without question, but the precious few times that I heard those words they were cloaked in a joke. That didn’t satisfy. It never satisfied. I longed to hear the words said somber and straight, delivered naked and fragile.

  But if a thing so treasured as love couldn’t be spoken, how could I speak a thing so terrible as what Chester and Paul had done? Besides, my mother was worried enough about how I was turning out. I had learned early to read the worry in her eyes and listen for it in her voice.

  One night a few years earlier, at a high school basketball game, after playing with a bunch of other boys in a corner, I’d run during a break in the game from one corner of the court to another to meet my mother, whom I saw at the concession stand. I was full of the frenetic energy that little boys draw from the company of other little boys. But as I ran, a few people snickered, I suppose at something in my gait, at the way I held my head and my hands. I heard it, though I pretended I didn’t. My mother apparently heard it too, because when I reached her, all smiles and open arms, her eyes were oozing dissatisfaction and fear. She laid into me i
n front of everyone. “Don’t you run like that!” I knew then that it scared and worried her. Knowing that those thoughts were in her head sent pulses of shame through me. I never wanted to see that look in my mother’s eyes again.

  Another time, I’d sent a girl a secret-admirer letter and she replied, asking me to describe myself. I wrote a list of things designed to impress, one of which was “good-looking.” I didn’t believe I was good-looking, but I thought it a smart thing to write down. I hid my new letter on top of the hot-water heater in the bathroom, up high, higher than I could see. It didn’t occur to me that higher than I could see was eye level for my mother. So she found the letter and read it. And she laid into me again, this time for describing myself as good-looking. That was a thing girls said, not boys.

  It was clear to me that she was worried I wasn’t turning out right, that I was sliding down an unspeakable path to an unspeakable end. She was adopting other people’s doubts. If I had any remaining thought that I might not need to keep my troubles to myself, it dried up like the morning dew. These were things that I had to learn to fold tight so that no one could read them. Even though it now seemed to me that the world was full of boys like Chester and men like Paul—the kind whose sense of right broke down in the dark and still of the night—the ones who looked at me and saw a chance, not a child.

  Another such man was a college friend of Nathan’s. One day toward the end of a semester, Nathan let me come to school and spend the day with him. When night fell, he, his friend, and I drove back to Gibsland. When we got back to town, my brother stopped for gas. As soon as he ducked into the store to pay for it, the friend twisted himself around in his seat to make his face square with mine.

  “So, do you have a girlfriend?”

  I knew exactly what he was asking and why he’d waited for my brother to leave to ask it. I knew by the way he hung on the words, by the way his lips pushed back on his teeth, the way a dog looks like it’s smiling when it’s about to bite. I knew by that look in his eyes—those cold, black, devil eyes that catch no spark, like the eyes of the German shepherd when he pinned me down as a child and tried to kill me.

  My brother’s friend wasn’t asking “Which girl do you like?” He was asking “You don’t like girls at all, do you?” It wasn’t so much to mock me as to excite himself. I could see that he was stimulated by the idea of what he presumed would be my answer, rolling it around in his mind, savoring it, the way the tongue plays with a piece of butterscotch.

  I didn’t answer. Instead, tension drew up my shoulders and arched my back. Anger shot across my face. I started to breathe deeply, loudly, so that he could hear me. I crossed my arms, trying to make myself look bigger than I was, tougher. I summoned the courage of an animal trapped in a corner.

  I wasn’t seven anymore. I was eleven. I didn’t just want his eyes off me, I wanted them out of him, clean out of his head, gobs of gooey white stuff in my hands.

  He held his gaze, as if saying to me, “I see you.” I held mine, saying back to him, “I see you too.”

  When my brother returned to the car, he glanced in the back seat and saw my face. “What’s wrong with him?” His friend turned and laughed it off. “Nothin’. He just mad ’cause he ain’t got no girlfriend.” They both laughed. But that wasn’t it. He and I both knew that he had tried me, probed something he was sure was softer than it seemed, only to find out that it was harder than he thought.

  I realized that men like that would always be around, always making that same assumption—that I was in a space where rules didn’t apply, where everything was easy and loose, where my boyhood body was seen as a playground for something inside them that they kept hidden and tied down, predation so shameful that even white Jesus turned away and pretended not to see.

  And I was afraid that men like that could see the hole in me, a thing I dared not admit even to myself: that I had an aching need to be chosen, to be seen, even if the eye doing the seeing caught no spark. It was a need beyond sex, unrelated to it. It was the need of a little boy whose light flickered in and out of register, on the verge of being snuffed out.

  But being seen was a far cry from sexual submission. Submission—to anyone for any reason—was neither attractive nor acceptable to me. So in that moment I embraced the fire of righteous combat emanating from my mother and absorbed by me over a decade spent at the hem of her skirt. I told myself then that never again would I go without a fight.

  I decided to try God again, to give me the strength to fight the fights that I couldn’t.

  Luckily, Reverend Brown left Shiloh soon after my botched baptism request. He was replaced by a smaller, less intimidating preacher. So I got up the courage to walk down the aisle again, and this time, when asked if I wanted to be baptized, I said yes.

  When the baptismal day, Easter Sunday, rolled around, I focused on the minutiae of the morning, carefully recording the details: The clear sky the color of a Louisiana iris petal—deep blue, a hint of purple, a spot of yellow along the edge as the sun rose. The glow of my bedroom lit through sheer curtains softly rolling in the breeze. The chirping of morning birds outside my window, occasionally interrupted by the hum and beep of passing cars. I was desperate to remember everything about the world before I went under the water, sure that whatever was down there would fundamentally and irreversibly change me.

  I put on my only suit and tie and got into the car with my mother and brothers. I pressed my head against the window as the car made its way down winding roads bracketed by lush spring foliage. No one spoke.

  We pulled into the church parking lot, the gravel crackling under the weight of the car, and found a space. I got out and was escorted through a back door and into a hallway. One of Grandpa Bill’s brothers, Uncle Lee Arthur, was waiting there, smiling proudly. He led me to the bathroom to change into my baptismal robe—a white bed sheet to be draped over my shoulders and pinned in the front. The preacher’s chatty son went into the bathroom with me and made small talk. I could hear that the service was in full swing, but I couldn’t make out what was being said. It didn’t matter, because I could keep up with the timing by the tone. The services were all the same—the same arc of excitement building to the same-sounding sermons:

  “Good moanin’, saints. Can I git a aman?!”

  “The spi’it movin’ in heh dis moanin’ . . . Aman?!”

  “Dis moanin’, I would like to come to you from the [whatever] chapter of the [whichever] book of [whomever]. And the wird sed . . .”

  If God was quoted speaking in the passage, it would have to be repeated at least three times.

  “‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

  “Y’all didn’t heh me dis moanin’. ‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

  “Ha! Ha! We ’bout ta have chuch in heh dis moanin’! What he say?! ‘And the Lawd sed . . .’”

  If the Word came from one of the more cryptic books of the Bible, a deacon would stand and shout, “Make it plain!”

  Then, the same overweight woman, sitting in the same spot, would erupt into pew-tilting, Holy Ghost–inspired convulsions at the same point in the sermon—every week. It often felt like the repeat of a play, folks pretending.

  But one of the more authentic people, I felt, was the pastor’s wife. She suffered from vitiligo, giving her a calico complexion with ghostly splotches of pale skin overtaking the dark. “Turning white,” folks called it. She sat in the choir stand, stoic and quiet as if her burdens were heavy. She stood, staring up at spirits in the rafters, spirits only she could see, and sang in a whisper-thin voice, each word laced with a meaning greater than its definition, each note honed sharp and smooth before she pushed it out. The sound was true. Not perfect, but true, the way milk is most true when it’s first squeezed, before they boil out the bits that could make you stronger or kill you.

  After I had slipped on the sheet, I walked out of the bathroom and the ushers lined me up behind the other children. The line was arranged from youngest to oldest, shortest to tallest. I w
as the oldest and tallest. Last. I was visibly nervous, so Uncle Lee Arthur tried to calm me.

  “Ain’t nothin’ to be scared of, baby.”

  I recalled the story my mother had told me about her own baptism, which took place in a snake-infested creek. When she stepped into the water, shivering from fear and the chill, Uncle Lee Arthur had calmed her fears as well.

  “Cain’t nothin’ hurt you in dis water.”

  The choir began to sing the old Negro spiritual “Wade in the Water,” with its haunting refrain, “God’s a-going to trouble the water.” It recalled the Bible story of the pool at Bethesda, encircled by the infirm. As it is written: “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”

  The pastor invited the other children, one after another, into the pool, which was up behind the choir stand and looked like a bathtub three times as deep as it should have been. The pastor stood waist-deep in the pool, draped in a full pastoral robe, which floated beneath the water like fabric that had caught a breeze and got stuck midflutter. He prayed and marked the moment with a proclamation about another soul being delivered to God.

  I wanted to be made whole, but I was still afraid of whatever spirit was in that water. I didn’t want to be seized by something that would take me over, something that, holy or not, I couldn’t control.

  The pastor prayed and proclaimed over the boy in front of me. He put one hand on the small of the boy’s back and the other on his forehead and swiftly dunked him backward into the water and brought him back up. The boy wiped the water away from his eyes and climbed out of the pool and into the arms of ushers standing with towels at the ready.

  I was next. The pastor beckoned me with an outstretched hand. I slowly stepped in, trembling as I descended, the cold water rising to my chest.