Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read online

  I turned to see the choir and the congregation staring back at me. The pastor began to talk, but I paid no mind to what he was saying. The panic started to set in. I couldn’t swim. I didn’t know how to hold my breath. Was the old me really going to be washed away? And if so, who would emerge from the pool?

  I felt the pastor place his hand on the small of my back. My body tensed up. He put his other hand on my forehead and, without warning, splash! I’d closed my eyes, but I could hear the pastor’s murmurs through the water. It was getting in my nose! I started to kick and flail and claw at his hand. He wasn’t going to drown me. Not today. He tried to hold me down, but I wouldn’t be held.

  I came up out of the water to see that I’d soaked the pastor head to toe and splashed nearly half the water out of the pool and into the choir stand. The choir members had scurried to opposite sides of the stand to keep from getting wet. The congregation was rolling with laughter, and my mother had hung her head.

  I stared up at the pastor, and he back at me. He was not pleased. I’m not sure whether he thought I was being insolent or was possessed, but he grabbed me and dunked me again, for good measure.

  Now it was done. I moved toward the steps on the other side of the pool so that I could climb out. I’d expected a spiritual transformation, a rebirth, but—nothing. I’d been under twice and I hadn’t had any revelations—there was nothing down there. Maybe God had forgotten to send the angel to trouble the water. Or maybe, as with the Bible story, the first child had felt all the healing, leaving none for the rest of us. All I felt was wet and embarrassed.

  I stepped out. An usher wrapped me in a towel and put his hand on my shoulder. He couldn’t stop laughing.

  In the silent space where I waited to hear from God, my body began to whisper, then to shout, and eventually to drown out all else.

  I was eleven years old the first time I had sex with a girl, if you could call it that. Roseanne was the younger sister of a stocky boy in my class named Arthur. She was a bit taller than me, and I was going steady with her. Our relationship had come out of nowhere—the result of eyes winked, notes passed, and urges obeyed. She was very fair and a little plump and known to be sexually active—“fast,” folks called it—which was a large part of my attraction to her. Roseanne was a bit dispassionate, even cold, unplugged to protect her most basic self from the poor choices she was making. I didn’t mind, though. In fact, I preferred it. I, too, knew what it meant to unplug. I needed just what she was offering—the primal comfort of physical closeness without the emotional complexity of true connection. Her coldness gave me succor, the way pressing a cheek to a cold window can draw down a headache or relieve anxiety.

  Her scent was an intriguing blend of hormones, sweat, and cheap perfume, and her forwardness was like a beacon. She had full lips, the color of Ruby Red grapefruit, with which she taught me to French kiss without ever taking the gum out of her mouth. It was my first real kiss. It made something explode inside me, every nerve going tingly, like being tickled and fed ice cream and having the back of your neck rubbed where the head meets the muscle, all at the same time—the manifestation of “more!”

  On bus rides home from school, Roseanne and I sat together like the other couples who “went together,” kissing and groping, while other kids joked and laughed, teased and harassed, tried to nail the lines to “Rapper’s Delight,” and sung their own wry rhymes.

  What’s da matta wit yo’ Afro, niggero?

  Dat stuff will neva grow.

  Look at mine, it’s so fine,

  I comb it all the time.

  Afro sheen and Vaseline

  Dat stuff won’t do a thing.

  Gitta rake, gitta rake,

  Gitta rake, gitta rake.

  I got off the bus at Roseanne’s house. Her parents never seemed to be home, which gave her and Arthur time and space to experiment. Arthur was often in the company of a small girl with a toothy grin and a glint of devilment who seemed incessantly entertained by her own promiscuity, much like Arthur himself. The girl bragged and laughed about her many sex acts, but each explicit tale and each cackle seemed to me laced with sadness, the kind that haunts you when night falls and you are alone with yourself.

  Roseanne and Arthur’s lack of supervision was more the rule than the exception. Since there were few jobs in Gibsland, most parents worked in neighboring towns and most kids had no parents at home after school. Which meant that in the afternoons Gibsland was almost entirely populated by handfuls of old people and hordes of restless young ones.

  Little boys with bare feet and scraped knees scooped crawdads from the red-silt bottoms of tiny streams, the same streams that crawled over their banks and into the streets when a thunderstorm came calling, dropping rain faster than the earth could drink it. Other boys zipped through the streets on pieced-together bicycles, drawing adrenaline from fear in order to outrun vicious dogs that sprang from beneath rotting steps. Sandlot basketball games stretched from afternoon into night, played by glistening boys in grass-worn yards, clouds of orange dust at their feet, shots falling through warped bicycle rims nailed to leaning trees.

  Pretty girls, precisely groomed in short-shorts and tight shirts, posed in cool places, showcasing an awareness, but not a command, of budding sexuality. They had just begun to use makeup—“painting,” folks called it—so they still applied it with a heavy hand: too much blue on the lids, too much pink in the cheeks.

  Young men perched over oily motors under open hoods, trying to resuscitate hot rods, with the ghosts of skid marks, speeding tickets, and back-seat romps still exciting the imagination. Silky young women floated about in cotton dresses that caught the sun but released the heat.

  The culture we were all adrift in was steeped in a kind of premature sexualization. From the time a boy was old enough to leave home on his own and get out of earshot of womenfolk he was peppered with questions: Who’s your girlfriend? How many girlfriends do you have? Are you “gittin’ some”? If you had no girlfriend or weren’t getting any, the old men under the shade trees were quick to offer their assessment: “There’s something wrong with that boy.”

  One day after school, Roseanne and I sat in her living room. It was hot, so she left the front door open. She asked what I wanted to do. I knew she was asking about sex. Unable to muster the courage to speak the words, I pointed to a poster of the rock band KISS on the wall. Soon we were locked in an embrace, kissing and sliding off the sofa and onto the floor in front of the open door. She stopped, got up, and led me to her bedroom. The room was tiny and smelled like her. I was nervous and excited.

  She lay on the bed and pulled down her pants. I pulled down my pants and lay on top of her. I had no idea what I was doing—how to get the parts to where they were supposed to be or how to move when they got there. I had only seen sex as still images in the mold-filled magazines in the House of the Drowned Children and at the back of the upholstery shop, where one cousin hid from his family and another came to talk slick. My body never entered Roseanne’s. She stared up at me with a look of disappointment and disapproval. She was accustomed to boys who knew what they were doing.

  Before I could figure things out, the phone rang and she got up and answered it. It may have been her mother. Still nervous and excited, I didn’t even wait for her to return. I pulled up my pants and left. I ran home, skipping, drawing one knee up high while stretching the opposite arm toward the sky like I was about to take flight, switching to the other knee and arm every time gravity pulled me down.

  Little did I know that my lack of know-how meant that the relationship was over. The next day, Roseanne and her friends sneered and laughed at me. I was eleven years old and didn’t even know how to “do it.” That was pathetic.

  I lost the girl, but I learned a lesson—about myself. The impulses within me were not of equal weight and didn’t share space. Attraction for me seemed to be a zero-sum game. The more I was into a girl, the less often the male images came. Those images weren’t completel
y gone, however. They were still there, floating around in the back of my mind, light and loose, like the seeds of a dandelion. But they were diminished and seemed of less consequence.

  Learning this was both blessing and curse. It clouded things, this idea that love could be not only an ephemeral opiate but also a practical tool. It could amplify some impulses and tamp down others. From now on I would question my affections: Was I truly falling in love or manufacturing it? Was I allowing myself to be used by love or using love? Would all the great loves of my life be the whole truth or half a lie?

  6

  Change

  The next year, seventh grade, was marked by a torrent of change in my life.

  I was now on the Coleman campus, which had begun its life in 1887 not as a high school but as Coleman College, the first black college in the region, founded to educate the children of freed slaves.

  In 1915, a few months before he died, Booker T. Washington visited Coleman and held a public rally. At the rally, the white mayor of Gibsland at the time, a man with the family name Lazarus, summarized the mission of the school and its founder: “There has never been any race trouble since Coleman came to this community. Coleman is to us all a guarantee of peace between the two races. Coleman has taken raw, gawky, unpromising country boys and made men of them.”

  The school I knew, without ever articulating it as such, seemed still to be in that business—mitigating racial strife among grown folks and raising character in young ones—although it wasn’t nearly as impressive in appearance as it had once been. The original Victorian study halls and dormitories, built in part with money from salaries the staff refused to take, had long since vanished. Our incarnation was a sprawling, uninspired building made of painted cinderblock.

  The school did, however, occupy its original imposing site, stretched along a horseshoe-shaped ridge on top of a hill. A historian once described the ridge as being “made by the hand of nature’s God” on “one of the most picturesque hills in the state.” And, traditionally, there was a certain elegance in the way “Coleman kids” comported themselves, a dignity and restraint in the way they dressed and acted, a holdover from the school’s college days.

  But not only had my school changed, my perception of the culture around me and my view of myself within it were changing too. People who looked like me—chocolate brown—began to vanish from popular black culture, and I lost some of the pride I had been taught, in ways both explicit and implicit, to have in myself.

  Maybe it was the defiant Afro succumbing to the greasy Jheri curl, or the debut of the racially ambiguous, girl-crush juggernaut R&B band Debarge, or the beginning of the improbable metamorphosis of Michael Jackson from a black boy into what looked like a white man. Maybe it was the end of the shows my mother watched with us when we shucked corn and shelled peas—Sanford and Son, Good Times, and What’s Happening!!—everyday-struggle sitcoms starring everyday-looking black people.

  The cultural currency of skin tone had shifted. The pendulum had swung back from the black-is-beautiful 1970s. “Bright” skin. Light eyes. “Good” hair. Having any one of those was now a plus. Having two was better. Having all three was the color-struck trifecta. Black, as I knew it, and as I was, no longer seemed beautiful. I had mostly dodged the racial war, but now found myself in an intraracial one. No one wanted sugar from Chocolate anymore. This was a new day, an age of more lightening cream and less Afrosheen. The Black Power of the 1960s and ’70s was being crushed into a beige powder.

  Whenever dark-skinned blacks appeared on television, they were assimilators, cast in fish-out-of-water sitcoms as back-talking butlers and maids (Benson and Gimme a Break!), irascible orphans (Diff’rent Strokes and Webster), and new-money up-from-nothings (The Jeffersons). And they were surrounded by all-white casts, like bubble wrap, I assumed to cushion the impact of their presence.

  But as I grew less confident in my skin, I grew more confident in my intelligence. The school district sent a man to give IQ tests to the smartest children at our school. It turned out that, far from being “slow,” as the teachers at Ringgold had labeled me, I was “gifted.” Another boy, one grade up, and I tested so high that the district sent a teacher to our school once a week to teach just the two of us.

  Meanwhile, in my family, Big Mama slowly eased back into herself, becoming less explosive, as time soothed the pain of losing Jed. Grandpa Bill moved on from his marriage to his young wife and moved into a new house.

  My mother was also changing. She was settling down. She still took night classes avidly, but the gun learned to stay home and the brass knuckles disappeared from the glove box. And she found a man, the father of one of my classmates, a long-haul trucker who treated her well and didn’t ask for much. There was no more scavenging. People could still push her buttons, but there were no more car chases and no more shooting.

  Even my father was trying to be a better man. He slacked off carousing and skirt-chasing. Instead of coming in the night to deliver false promises on liquored breath, he came to leave penance, food my mother would sort through when morning came. A load of melons. A basket of tomatoes. A few bushels of greens. Anything he’d come by. It was an interesting act of compensation, leaving nourishment for children starved of his affection. It was the way of a man who needed to say something simple that he couldn’t say simply: I’m sorry.

  It was during this period that I finally found something I would be able to cling to as evidence of my father’s love.

  When the Commodore 64 computer debuted in 1982, I convinced myself that I had to have it. A few years passed, the price fell, and Kmart marked it down, but it was still out of my mother’s price range. I decided to earn the money myself. I mowed every yard I could find that summer, for $10 to $15 each, but it still wasn’t enough—the grass just didn’t grow that fast. So my dad agreed to help me raise the rest of the money by taking me to one of the watermelon farms in Saline—“the Watermelon Capital of the World,” near where my great-grandfather landed after he ran from the Alabama white tops—to load up his truck with wholesale melons and drive me around to sell them.

  He came for me before daybreak. I climbed into the truck, littered with months-old coffee cups, dirty papers, and random tools, and reeking of cigar smoke and motor oil. We made small talk, nothing much, but it didn’t matter. The fact that he was talking to me was all that mattered. We arrived at the farm, negotiated a price for a truckload, and fussed over the melons we’d take. We loaded them, each one seemingly heavier than the last, and we were off.

  I had never before spent time alone with my father. It felt great. We drove north to Arcadia, where we spent the afternoon selling watermelons to his friends. I got to see a small slice of his life—poolrooms, liquor stores, and loose women’s houses. People smiled when he drove up. They made jokes, many at his expense. He smiled and laughed and repeatedly introduced me as “my boy,” a phrase he relayed with a palpable sense of pride. We didn’t get back home until dark. It was one of the best days of my life. Although my father had never told me he loved me, I would cling to this day as the best evidence of that love.

  I was now old enough to know that he had never intended me any wrong. He just didn’t know how to love me right. He wasn’t a mean man. I never once saw him angry. I don’t even think that he was angry the night he and my mother fought. His crime and his cruelty were the withholding of affection, not out of malice but by blind indifference, which I suspected grew out of his own brokenness. In a way we were not so different, he and I, both stumbling through life trying to find our footing.

  So I took the random episodes of engagement—especially this day—and held them safe like a thing most precious, squirreling them away for the long stretches of coldness when a warm memory would prove most useful. I did with his affection what Aunt Odessa had done with the money in the Wonder Bread bags.

  “My boy.”

  Perhaps the greatest change in my life was that I was coming to better understand what was happening within me
. Time was adding flesh to the male apparitions that sometimes came in the night. They now had faces. Not distinct bodies, but faces. They were not men I knew personally, or even men as I knew them to look—leather-faced and wrinkle-etched, a look that bespoke a life filled with cold beer, devoted women, and grueling work. Instead, they were men from TV or magazines—slight, sedate, a tad too pretty, with gentle eyes and wide smiles, nonthreatening and not entirely unlike the women.

  And the timing of the visits became more predictable. The male figures came when my world slowed down—when school was out or basketball season was over—and when I was most lonely, either between girlfriends or squabbling with a male friend.

  It was now clear that some part of this male presence, however small, was sexual. Not explicit, not intercourse, but sexual in the broadest, most ambiguous sense—affection. But how much so I couldn’t measure. There was no way to appraise such an amorphous thing. It was like trying to isolate a plume of smoke in a bank of fog—impossible. But this new understanding of the male figures’ meaning brought fear and frustration.

  How could this be? The thing that I thought had caused the most pain, done the most damage to my spirit, was now a thing that haunted and beckoned me. I believed that, against my will, my brain was braiding together the real remnant of pain with the vaporous possibility of pleasure—or was it comfort?—like two strands of the same rope.

  Some nights, when everyone was asleep, I’d slide out of bed, get the well-thumbed family Bible from the bookshelf that held my beloved encyclopedias, and turn to the index. I’d find the word, under H: homosexual. It was a word not used by anyone I knew, but one that found its way to me on a wave of television hysteria about a mysterious new “homosexual cancer”: AIDS—a strange name, I thought, for such a scary thing. I didn’t know any big words to describe the whole of me, only small ones: torn, cloven, split like the hooves of a hog. So I looked up the big word I knew, the one of which I was most afraid, and I followed the page number to the passage.