Fire Shut Up in My Bones Page 14

  Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22: Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

  I wasn’t lying with anyone, particularly not other boys, but I wanted the part of me that was conjuring the male figures gone, forever. It wouldn’t go. Even when I found myself most attracted to girls, I knew that the male figures were still there, lurking somewhere behind consciousness, and would soon return. Hovering. Present.

  I was sure that the thing happening in my head was covered by Leviticus, even if the verse’s literal language didn’t apply. I also believed that thinking something was as bad as doing it. And, since there was no way for me to entirely control something so evanescent, the way it came and went on a whim, I believed there was no way for me not to sin. And, by extension, that there was nowhere for me to go but hell. “Abomination.”

  I decided that if my mind wouldn’t fully follow chapter 18, verse 22, I’d force my body to follow all the other rules in that chapter. Surely God would give me credit.

  I read the book of Leviticus from front to back and started to follow every rule I saw as best I could. The change most notable to my family was that I no longer ate pork and catfish. Leviticus 11. This went on for months, and I felt a strange sense of pride in my accomplishment, my ability to change my behavior. But my mother grew worried, so much so that she had a local preacher’s wife, a fellow teacher, call me to explain that I didn’t have to follow all those rules in that way, something about what Jesus had done, fulfilling the laws or some such.

  So I stopped. But still I was proud. I felt that I’d done something positive, even if I’d been misguided, and I believed that God appreciated the effort. But I still wasn’t a born-again Christian. One evening I decided to change that.

  I remembered a simple prayer that I’d heard a televangelist recite, and I got down on my knees and recited it myself. I confessed my sins, admitted that I could no longer handle my life on my own, and asked Jesus to step in to guide me. That was it. Then I got up and walked outside and watched the light stoop down behind the hills. It was the time of day when the orange glow of the setting sun brushed the tips of the tallest trees, a few lonesome rays finding openings in the thicket and falling on lucky spots in the grass. It was the time of day when the lightning bugs were just beginning to sparkle against the velvet stretches of long shadows. I felt something move through me, taking with it all the pain and the questions and depositing peace in its wake.

  From that moment on, my eyes were often closed in prayer, lost in the dark serenity of my mind, luxuriating in the comfort of God’s power, willingly subjugating myself to His will.

  I had heard or read somewhere that Christians were supposed to meditate in the spirit. I didn’t know what that meant, so I devised my own method. I’d take my bath early each night, go to my room, tune the radio to the classical music station—the way I imagined heaven must sound—and slip under the covers. I’d lie flat on my back, legs and ankles together and hands crossed over my body, like the image of the man seared on the Shroud of Turin.

  I focused on clearing my mind, thinking about nothing but elemental things—air as it moved through my body, images of moving water, the stillness of peace. When I had cleared my mind, I’d imagine my spirit floating up and out of my body, above the bed, then above the house and out into a clear, serene place in the dark of space. There I would come into the presence of Jesus, not white Jesus with the stringy hair and the blue eyes, but a glowing presence, emanating light but taking no form. And there I would hover, meditating, in the presence of the spirit, waiting for instructions—not actual words but revelations. Sometimes they came, sometimes they didn’t. But I was content either way.

  Every day I grew stronger in my “communion with God,” every day I lost more interest in the concerns of the world. No more death, no more predation, no more poverty, no more powerlessness—it all receded, all insignificant in the expanse of eternity and the immensity of God’s grace. He had given me perspective and lifted my burdens. I had been set free.

  I had started up with a new girlfriend just before all this happened, a cheerleader two years my junior, who sent the basketball game crowds into a frenzy when she danced the cabbage patch on the sidelines. She was a pretty girl with a graceful neck, full cheeks, and a husky singing voice.

  I was afraid to tell her about my transformation, scared that she would tease me and leave me. But one of the revelations that came to me was that I must tell her. So I did. And she didn’t react negatively. She was relieved. She too had recently had a similar experience and was afraid to tell me. Now we had each other, and Jesus.

  I prayed everywhere. I prayed in class by putting my head on my desk and pretending to rest when my work was done. I prayed on the school bus by pretending to be asleep. I even prayed when I was playing sports, like the time I won the basketball game with my eyes closed in devotion.

  I was a sophomore, on the varsity basketball team. My brother Robert was co-captain, and played center. I was a second-string point guard. The first-string point guard had fouled out, and the coach, an intense, skinny man with a little round belly and black-dyed hair that was white at the roots, put me in with just a few seconds left to play.

  The fouled player from the opposing team was preparing to shoot free throws. The game was tied. I lined up on the lane, closed my eyes, and drowned out the crowd. The only sound now was the soft thud of the basketball against the hardwood. One, two, three, four—four bounces, evenly spaced.

  I should have been hoping for the rebound, hoping that we could regain possession, hoping that we could score a final, winning shot or at least send the game into overtime. But I wasn’t. I was praying. I was praying for God to remove from me any desire to win. I was praying for Him to help me remember that His glory and His will were all that mattered.

  As I prayed, the ball bounced—one, two, three, four. There was a pause. Then swoosh. Score! Now the other team was up by one point. I didn’t let it bother me; I intensified my prayers. “Your will be done. Your will be done.”

  Again came the bounces—four, evenly spaced. Then the pause, but this time a bang, then a thud. I opened my eyes to realize that the ball hadn’t gone in the basket but bounced off the rim and landed right in front of me. I grabbed it and took off like a shot toward our basket. Fans jumped to their feet. The floor pounded with the weight of players in pursuit. Just as I crossed the top of the key on our end of the court, I closed my eyes again. “Your will be done. Your will be done.” I released all care, all fear, all wanting. I allowed God to guide. Nothing else mattered—not the ball, not the basket. The prayers were working. I felt my soul glide away—out of my body and into the heart of God.

  I have no memory of opening my eyes again, but I do remember the stretch of my body, leaping for the lay-up just as the buzzer sounded, the pebbled leather of the ball as it rolled off my fingertips. As I landed, still running, I opened my eyes and looked back over my shoulder. The ball had fallen through the basket. Score! We had won. The crowd went crazy. I smiled. I hadn’t done it, He had. “All glory be to God.”

  I didn’t just pray for me, though. I prayed for others, too.

  Big Mama came to stay with us because she had fallen ill. She passed her days in my mother’s bed, unable to draw the strength to rise and walk. It wasn’t clear to me how serious it was—if she might cough up lots of blood like Jed and that would be it, or if one day the bed would be made without even a wrinkle and life would be gone from the room. All I knew was that this house was running out of spaces for people to die.

  I brought her case before God. While Paul was in the field cutting and burning the weeds, I slipped into his room, where I was least likely to be discovered. I walked behind the bed and fell to my knees, where my feet had landed when I’d climbed down from the bed on the night Paul’s hand had moved like a snake.

  In that narrow space between the bed and the wall I began to pray and moan and meditate. I stayed there for more than an hour, wai
ting on a word from God, a revelation. Eventually, it came. I felt God was telling me to lay my hands on Big Mama. Without questioning, I rose with stars in my eyes—they’d been held too tight for too long. I walked into my mother’s room and sat on the bed. I pretended that I had simply come to talk, and I gently laid my hand on my grandmother’s leg.

  The next day she was up and about. In my mind, there was no doubt that God had done it. God, using my faith and my hand, had raised her. I was excited and in awe, but most of all, encouraged and affirmed in my faith.

  Soon I came to believe not only that I could change the present, but that I could see the future. I knew religious folks called this ability prophecy, and superstitious folks called it “born with the veil.” I would dream of a person on a deathbed with folks crowded around, the way we had crowded around Mam’ Grace’s bed—not a particular person, a faceless one—and soon after, whether days or weeks, someone would always die. I refused to accept this as coincidence, so submerged was I in faith and the spirit. I became so convinced that I was foretelling folks’ demise in my dreams that I grew wary of going to sleep.

  I became an usher at Shiloh Baptist so that I’d have an excuse to be there every time the doors opened, and I began to watch the religious channel on television. One day there was an on-air food drive to help starving children somewhere in the world. The suggested pledge was $10. Just $10 could do so much good. I had $10. In fact, $10 was all I had. I felt moved to call in and pledge it. So I did. I had heard in church that if you gave cheerfully, God would return it to you tenfold. Within a week, I had gotten nearly $100 in gifts. It was my birthday. Again, I gave God credit.

  But the thing that I prayed most fervently for didn’t happen. I prayed to God, the primary male figure in my mind, to remove the others, the ones that so offended Him and me. But they didn’t go away, not completely. Love of God had the same effect as love of girls: it pushed them down but not out. Not even God could do what I wanted done.

  I felt the spirit was telling me to go even further in my devotion, to do something I wasn’t prepared to do—become a preacher. That, I decided, wasn’t going to happen. As powerful an influence as religion had become in my life, I was still ashamed to acknowledge it in public. My prayers were held fiercely private. Going public as a preacher was a bit beyond.

  That year I was selected as the single delegate from my school to attend the regional Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership seminar, a cultish-feeling assembly of high achievers, big smiles, and constant affirmations, founded by an actor most famous for playing Wyatt Earp on TV. I had been elected president of my class since we started electing officers in the sixth grade—as well as being president of every club I was in—so in Gibsland, I was synonymous with leadership. This was one of the long-lasting effects of having been anointed by Russell and accepted by Alphonso.

  The youth seminar convened over a weekend at a hotel near the airport in Shreveport. This was the first time I had ever been in a hotel, but I tried not to let on. Still, the rooms smelled funny, the way new things smelled, like starch and glue and paint and Kmart. And it felt sealed like the inside of a Mason jar. The air didn’t move, like you could use it all up and die—no draft to flutter the curtains, no whistle as it slid between window and sill. I stayed up most of the first night paying attention to my own breathing, ready to run outside if it became labored.

  We met each morning in a large conference hall to hear speakers who seemed just a little too excited, and whose job it was to stir our excitement. We had to repeat more times than I can remember: “To be enthusiastic, you must act enthusiastic!”

  One day we boarded a bus and drove to Baton Rouge, the state capital.

  The trip, from the hill country in the north of the state to the Cajun country in the south, came as a culture shock to me. Things looked different—cypress trees rising from black swamps and draped in Spanish moss. Folks sounded different—like they had arrived from a foreign place and only recently adopted English. Some even looked different—not black or white or mixed race as I knew it, but something else altogether: apricot-colored.

  In Baton Rouge we toured the capitol, where the guide told us about Huey Long, the popular governor from a small north Louisiana town that was about as far south of Shreveport as Gibsland was east of it. He was assassinated on the eve of a presidential bid, shot in this very building. The guide pointed out the place where the bullets hit the wall. The guide also told us about Huey Long’s brother Earl, also a Louisiana governor, who had once been committed by his wife to an insane asylum while he still held the office. The New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling described Earl Long as being “as full of hubris as a dog of ticks in spring.”

  Then we were taken to the governor’s mansion to meet the current occupant. We filed into one of the house’s receiving rooms, and shortly afterward in strode the diminutive, cocksure Edwin Edwards, our corrupt, philandering, gambling governor. Two years before, on the verge of one of his comeback elections, he had boasted, “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” His flamboyance, his flouting of authority, and his “can’t catch me” gingerbread-man act fit with the state’s legacy of good-hearted, bad-boy governors and endeared him to voters, who had a long love affair with impudence. Edwards thought himself untouchable, and his swagger conveyed as much.

  My mother was a huge Edwards fan. He was a rascal and a fighter. I had learned long ago that she was partial to tilted men, those with a bit of devilment, those like my father and hers. I knew from the moment I saw Edwards that I wanted to be him, the kind of man my mother admired.

  In fact, part of me felt that fate may have been aiming me in that direction all along. Even with all my class and club presidencies, I had never thought of leadership as a viable career. In Gibsland, being an elected official was something people did on the side, in addition to their day job. But that day, in that moment, something just clicked: I was going to be the governor of Louisiana.

  That afternoon we sat on the fresh-cut grass under tall trees near the mansion. As we ate jambalaya a Creole caterer had made in a vat in the back of his truck, I thought about the future in a way I had never done before, confident that I had finally figured out what I wanted to do with my life, what I was meant to do with it.

  This was the first time I was forced to think critically about the choices my family had made—the shooting, the scavenging, and the bad thing that Uncle Henry had done, whatever it was—the many choices that would not reflect well on a boy who wanted to be a better person and a public figure. I knew then that I would have to separate the bad bits from the good, like debris from dry beans, and hold on only to the parts that I found agreeable. My love for my family would have to live separately from what I was sure would be other folks’ judgments about them.

  I knew that I probably wasn’t suited to be a preacher who forever enforced the rules, but was more suited to be like the governor who occasionally bent them. But having political aspirations meant I needed to tell the spirit in my head “No.” After that, it vacated, the revelations ceased, and the peace lifted. In fact, all feeling went with it. I stopped dreaming entirely. When I closed my eyes I met the darkness uninterrupted until daylight came again, completing the journey from drowsiness to wakefulness, all through a tunnel of nothingness, emerging not truly rested, only aware that time had passed. No mysteries to ponder or decipher. Nothing. Just doing as my body dictated, feeling that I existed apart from it.

  Perhaps the most unsettling change for me was that I could no longer cry, at least not for the most part. My tears had been taken from me once before, in the wake of Chester’s betrayal, and now it happened again. I was bottoming out, emotionally, all over again.

  This became most apparent during two funerals I attended, back to back, at which I thought that I would collapse in tears, but none came. The first was the funeral of four children murdered by their mother.

  Their father was a local boy who ha
d lived down past the segregated cemetery and just shy of the hill where Bonnie and Clyde were killed. He had married the woman and moved to South Carolina. But there was a darkness in the woman. As a child, she was convinced that her own mother, who died of heart failure, had killed herself because the mother’s heart wasn’t big enough to love her. This sent her careening from mental institutions to foster homes. When she grew up and became a mother herself, she became convinced that she too was about to die. So, to protect her children from the pain she had felt when her mother died, she drugged the children, put them in an upstairs bedroom, wired the door shut, and burned the house down. The oldest child was six years old. The youngest was eight months.

  The woman showed up for her arraignment in a trance, the magistrate said. She muttered only two words, in the weak voice of a woman who’d done a truly bad thing: “I’m tired.” The forensic psychologist testified, “She protected her children by putting them to sleep and in the hands of God.” God brought the babies home to Gibsland to be sent on to glory.

  The funeral was held near my house, in a municipal building across a vacant lot from the house where the eczema-covered girl’s father had tried to induct me into the cult that conspired to kill white people. The building was relatively new and built like a church—wheat-colored brick on a concrete slab, with pews, a pulpit, a choir stand, and a baptismal pool. But the only times it was used was for weddings and funerals when the person’s home church was too small to hold the crowd, and by an elderly music teacher who organized an annual spring play there, until she was killed when her car was hit by a train at the crossing.