1984–1987
My mother, my father, Josh, Nerissa, and I moved from the small house in the big field to a cream and yellow single-wide trailer in DeLisle on a dead-end red-dirt road. The road was mostly wooded, but there was a cluster of houses near the dead end, and each of those houses contained boys whom I would be friends with for the rest of my life. I was seven then. Joshua and I and the boys spent our days swinging from my father’s punching bag, which he’d hung from a pecan tree in the front yard, having mud fights, running races down the middle of the road, picking unripe pears by the wagonful from my aunt’s house farther down the street and eating so many we grew sick. I thought my parents were mostly happy then, but now I know my own happiness blinded me.
One day my father came home with a motorcycle. It was a Kawasaki Ninja, new, red and black, glossy.
“Stay off of it,” my father said. “You can’t play on it.”
“It’s yours?” I asked.
“Yeah,” my father said. Then he squatted next to me, pointed to the silver parts on the machine near the steel bars where he rested his feet, and said, “You see them things there?”
I nodded.
“They get so hot that they can burn you. That’s why you can’t play on it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. My parents taught me and my siblings that we should address them that way, with polite deference, when they gave us commands.
My mother was quiet. She pushed her glasses, thick and wide in the style of the day, overpowering her small, beautiful face, up her nose. She sniffed, and a frown nicked the side of her mouth. She looked away and then walked back into the house, slamming the door. When we followed my father into the house after loitering around the bike, after watching my father rub it down with a cotton cloth, polish the metal, listening to the faint ticks the machine made as it cooled down, my mother was cooking. She said nothing to my father, but her back was a shut door. I was a child; there was much I did not know. I did not know my father had taken funds he’d been saving, at my mother’s insistence, to buy land, and had purchased his motorcycle with them. I did not know that his own father, my grandfather Big Jerry, who had been quite a playboy in his day but a devout caretaker to his children, had told my father: You can’t ride a wife and three kids on a goddamn motorcycle.
“Go take a bath,” my mother told us. We went.
After little more than a year, the neighbors we were renting the trailer from decided to rent it to their relative instead. We moved across DeLisle to live with my grandmother Dorothy. I was eight. This was the house my mother grew up in, the same house some of her siblings had been born in. It was long, finished with wood siding, and set low to the ground, elevated on two cinder blocks in the front and three in the back, as it was built on a hill. Originally it had had a sizeable living room, a narrow kitchen, a small dining room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. After my grandfather left my grandmother for another woman, she raised the seven children they’d had together on her own. She added two large bedrooms and a bathroom to the house. She took what my grandfather left her with, and she built it into something more, and she survived.
This is a common refrain in my community, and more specifically in my family. I have always thought of my family as something of a matriarchy, since the women of my mother’s side have held my nuclear family and my immediate family and my extended family together through so much. But our story is not special. Nor had it always been this way. It used to be that the Catholic Church was a strong presence in my community and divorce unheard of; men did not leave their women and shared children. But in my grandmother’s generation, this changed. In the sixties, men and women began to divorce, and women who’d grown up with the expectation that they’d have partners to help them raise their children found themselves with none. They worked like men then, and raised their children the best they could, while their former husbands had relationships with other women and married them and then left them also, perhaps searching for a sense of freedom or a sense of power that being a Black man in the South denied them. If they were not called “sir” in public, at least they could be respected and feared and wanted by the women and children who loved them. They were devalued everywhere except in the home, and this is the place where they turned the paradigm on its head and devalued those in their thrall. The result of this, of course, was that the women who were so devalued had to be inhumanly strong and foster a sense of family alone. This is what my grandmother did.
When we moved into her house, every one of my mother’s siblings, their children, and my own nuclear family lived there. There were thirteen of us: my four bachelor uncles, my two aunts, who each had one son at the time, my grandmother, my father, my mother, Nerissa, Joshua, and me. My uncles slept two to the two smaller bedrooms, and my grandmother kept the master bedroom in the back with the bathroom. My aunts slept in the other, larger, more recently added bedroom in the rear of the house; the room was so large there were two double beds there, so each aunt shared a bed with her child. My brother and I slept on bunk beds shoved into a corner of that room. I took the top bunk, and my brother took the bottom. My mother and father nailed a curtain over the dining room door, moved the dining table into storage, and moved their own double bed in, where they slept with Nerissa and, after she was born in 1985, Charine. For the next two years I would have most of the people I loved living in one house, which was mostly wonderful for us kids, and a horrible strain for all of the adults, driven as they were to my grandmother’s house by Reagan’s policies in the eighties, which undercut whatever shaky economic footing the poor had, and depressed the listless southern economy.
By the time we’d moved into that rambling, lopsided wooden house, I’d already fallen in love with reading. I think my love for books sprang from my need to escape the world I was born into, to slide into another where words were straightforward and honest, where there was clearly delineated good and evil, where I found girls who were strong and smart and creative and foolish enough to fight dragons, to run away from home to live in museums, to become child spies, to make new friends and build secret gardens. Perhaps it was easier for me to navigate that world than my home, where my parents were having heated, whispered arguments in the dining room turned bedroom, and my father was disappearing after those arguments for weeks at a time to live at his mother’s house in Pass Christian before coming back to us. Perhaps it was easier for me to sink into those worlds than to navigate a world that would not explain anything to me, where I could not delineate good and bad. My grandmother worked ten-hour-long shifts at the plant. My mother had a job as a maid at a hotel. My father still worked at the glass plant, and when he was living with us, he would often disappear on his motorcycle. My youngest uncle was in high school, but the other uncles worked, as did my aunts. There was often only me, Josh, Aldon, who slept in one of the double beds in that back bedroom with his mother, and a lone uncle who was off for the day in the living room, watching a movie on PBS, one of the two channels we had. Sometimes my two aunts were in the kitchen, sweating over pots the size of my torso filled with bubbling beans, making biscuits for the family from scratch. “Go outside and play,” we heard. So I put my books away for a moment and went outside to play with Joshua and Aldon.
I wanted to be my own heroine. Behind the houses in a row along Route 357, a forest stretched. I’d followed my older cousin Eddie back through those woods once to a barbed wire fence with signs posted intermittently along its length that read: DELISLE FOREST, PROPERTY OF DUPONT, NO TRESPASSING. This fenced property stretched from the Bay up behind our house, and then down all the way to my elementary school. Du Pont had put in a bid to build a factory in DeLisle in the seventies, promised lots of jobs to the community, and when approved, leased enough land for a plant but also enough to provide a buffer of woods between them and us. When I followed my cousin Eddie, who must have been twelve at the time, back to that fence, I watched him jump over it, a rifle in hand, and disappear into the dark. He was hunting rabbits, squirrel, anything wild and gamey that would yield a little meat after it fell to his bullet. Part of me wanted to go with him, the other was afraid. Those woods were lovely and menacing, all at once. And access to them was forbidden.
When I played with Joshua and Aldon, I wanted to lead them back into those woods, to explore them like the characters in Bridge to Terabithia did their forest, but I did not. Instead, Josh and Aldon and I wandered around the shed in the backyard, leapfrogging over the septic tank, sliding along the slippery slope where what had been an artesian well slowed to a slick trickle to create a bog in the middle of the yard. We explored behind my great-aunt’s house. She lived next door. There we found a good plot of pines. Hidden beneath their shade was straw-strewn earth, and sticky stumps and trunks, brown and flaky, felled by hurricanes.
“We are going to have our own place,” I said. “We need to come up with a name for it.”
“What we going to name it?” Aldon asked.
I looked down at them both. They were five, three years younger, and shorter than me. Their big heads seemed too big for their shoulders, their hair was a fine dusting, and their eyes were wide. Joshua was bright-skinned and Aldon was darker, but both wore cropped satin and net shirts that looked like football jerseys and khaki shorts with nasty metal zippers that hurt my fingers whenever I helped one of them get dressed. They were depending on me. Where one went, the other followed, and right now they were both following me. We’d find our place, our own little world.
“Kidsland,” I said. “We’ll call it Kidsland.”
“Kidsland?” Joshua asked. When he said it, it sounded like kizzland.
“Yeah, Kidsland, like kid’s … land. Because it’s our land. Our kingdom.”
“Yeah, that’s good,” said Aldon.
“I like that,” said Josh.
I led them out into the trees. Downed trunks became horses and castles. Branches became swords and enemies. We battled. We ran. Joshua collided with a tree and scraped himself purple. I clucked over it, wiped it clean with my shirt, blew on it.
“It hurts,” he said.
“It’s going to be okay,” I told him.
Joshua trusted me. His eyes, which had glazed wet, dried. He shrugged, hopped a little on his good leg, ready for more serious play. I was proud of him.
I was still dissatisfied with the name. It sounds so plain, I thought, not magical like Terabithia. But I was happy with Kidsland, our home, with Aldon, with Josh. Two good warriors, I thought. I was a little satisfied, as if I’d taken the first step to doing something momentous, to becoming one of those girls in the books I read.
In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren’t at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be. Even then I dimly knew there was some gendered difference between my brother and me, knew that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ. But for me, the reality of those differences was reduced to one tangible symbol: cigarettes.
I could read the packages, knew that my uncles smoked Kools. To me, they embodied just that, the leisure and cool that were the specific privilege of men. When Joshua and Aldon and my cousin Rhett and I collected enough loose change from the grown-ups, we’d jump on our bikes and ride them down the street, a mile or so, to a store built in a shed in a yard. The owners were White. I often felt like they were staring at us as we carefully picked our pack of gum, our potato chips, our one drink, our candy. Two dollars could buy us this, but if we had less, if we had only a dollar, our options were narrower. Joshua and Aldon would choose all candy, penny candy and Now and Laters, Rhett chips and drinks, and I’d buy candy and gum. My favorite candy was candy cigarettes. I’d smoke my candy cigarettes during the bike ride back to the house: my favorite brand had some sort of fine powder on the tip, so when I put my lips to the gummy candy filter and blew, a light smoke flew like sea spray.
One day, one of my uncles puffed his cigarette, sucked it down quickly, threw it down in the dirt with a quarter of it remaining, and then walked down the street. The porch was empty, my aunts in the house were quiet, and we were alone in the dirt yard. I slid under his car, plucked the cigarette from where he’d flicked it. It was still warm. I held it by the filter, the tip pointed to the ground, and walked over to Josh and Aldon.
“Come on, y’all,” I said.
They stood and followed me around the back of the house. I stopped between the back wall of the house and the concrete slab of the septic tank.
“We’re going to smoke this cigarette,” I said. I wanted some of my uncle’s autonomy, some of his freedom.
They nodded sagely, as only five-year-olds can do. I tried to puff the cigarette and got nothing. Before I could hand it to Aldon, Aldon’s mother heard us from the bathroom window, which I’d parked us right beneath.
“Mimi, Aldon, Josh: get in here!” she yelled.
We dropped the cigarette and filed into the house. Both of my aunts sat at the kitchen table.
I didn’t say anything.
“Y’all were smoking a cigarette?”
“No,” I said, suddenly panicky, my chest flushed hot.
“Don’t lie,” my other aunt said. “Was y’all trying to smoke a cigarette?”
“Yes,” I said, miserable.
“I heard everything from the bathroom window,” Aldon’s mother said. “Why did y’all do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw it and I picked it up.”
“Well, don’t ever do it again,” she said. “Y’all don’t need to smoke.”
“If y’all promise not to ever do it again, we won’t tell your mama.”
“Okay.” We all nodded.
They sent us back out to play. I was relieved, knowing that we’d escaped a terrible punishment. Later that night, as Mama was drying Joshua off after giving him a bath, he told her, “Mimi and Aldon were smoking a cigarette.” My mother called me into the bathroom and confronted me. I told her what my aunts had said. She was angry they hadn’t told her about our escapade. I wished my father were there, but he was out. My aunts told my mother the truth. My mother’s work was never done. She whipped Joshua and me and punished us by confining us to our bunk beds in the back bedroom, dark as a cave in the middle of the summer, for a weekend. We came out to eat and use the bathroom. We slept and whispered to each other: I read, sometimes to him. While we suffered, Aldon giggled and played outside: our aunt was more lenient with him. Joshua and I watched his shadow waver across the screen, behind the curtains, with the pecan and pine trees. I was bitter: even in punishment, some boys had it easier.
But on most Saturday mornings, we were free from adult worries. The house was ours, since we woke at 6:00 A.M. to sneak to the living room, where we turned on the TV for Saturday morning cartoons. We lay for hours on the living room floor, recently carpeted in dark blue, to watch the Smurfs, the Snorks, Tom and Jerry, the Ewoks, the Looney Tunes. Our favorite show was Popeye. They broadcast the show out of a studio in New Orleans: the Popeye’s fast-food chain invited White kids to the studio to sit in bleachers to balance small, greasy cartons of fried chicken and biscuits on their laps while a host introduced all the cartoons. I was so hungry then my stomach burned and hurt in sharp, little pains.
“I’m going to make us something to eat,” I said. Every Saturday, I scaled counters to reach in cabinets, took out the WIC-issued cornflakes and powdered milk. I mixed the powdered milk by the instructions in a half-gallon pitcher, fixed us all bowls of cereals that we ate standing in the doorway so we could watch cartoons and eat. We would be whipped if we ate and spilled anything in the living room. The cereal—no, the milk—didn’t taste right. It didn’t taste like the store-bought milk I remembered having before we moved to my grandmother’s, when my father had a good job and could afford milk that came wet and cold in gallons. He’d lost his job at the glass plant after he mislabeled boxes, and was moving from job to job. Some Saturdays I added cups of sugar to the powdered milk because I thought it would make it taste like the real thing. It didn’t, but at least it was sweet. Joshua and Aldon and Nerissa and I ate the clumpy, watery mess over our cornflakes, and we were still hungry. Every Saturday we stared at those fair-haired children on Popeye, healthy and plump and pink, who got to cup their hands to their eyes like binoculars and screech “Roll ’em!” before each cartoon while their laps turned splotchy from the grease leaking from their chicken boxes. We ate everything in our bowls, scraped the bottoms with our spoons, drank the last milky sugar from the bowl, and I, with the cereal disintegrating to silt in my spiteful stomach, hated them.
Between jobs, my father spent some time with us. The Last Dragon was my father’s favorite movie, so we watched it over and over until we knew all the words. We acted it out in the dining room turned bedroom; he was Sho’nuff, Josh was Leroy Green, and I was Laura Charles. When my father was home, it seemed that my mother wasn’t: I never saw them in the same room together. I knew something was wrong, but I could not articulate what it was. Sometimes my father strapped us to the back of his motorcycle, where my brother or I clung to his back like monkeys, and he rode us around DeLisle or Pass Christian, headphones smashed into our soft heads under the weight of the helmet. Prince’s “Purple Rain” blasted from the cassette player my father had strapped to his waist. Sometimes I think I should have known he was trying to tell me something, something like I am a man, I am young and handsome and alive, and I want to be free, but I did not. After a few weeks, my father got a job at an oyster factory in Pass Christian, which paid much less than the glass plant. On his hours off, he dressed in expensive leather riding suits he’d bought when he worked at the plant, combed his long black hair back into a braid, and rode the coast. What I did not know at the time was that he was riding to see his girlfriends, of which there were many, to strap them to the back of his motorcycle. I don’t think he told them that he was married or had a family, and I don’t know if he was thinking about them or us when he brought home five-gallon buckets of fresh oysters from his job still in the shell and stood out in the backyard shucking them. He still wore his long black rubber boots and work overalls, and ate the oysters raw while the sun set. Sheets, fresh on the line, billowed behind him.
“Can I have one?” I asked him.
“You’re not going to like it,” he said.
“I just want to try it.”
“They’re alive,” he said, “when they go down.”
“They see all the way down your throat?”
He nodded.
“You still want to try one?”
I wanted to do it because he said I couldn’t. I wanted him to be proud of me. I wanted it to be the two of us standing in the yard, eating oysters in the dusk, always.
He skewered the shell, popped it open with a flip of his wrist. The oyster meat was gray, streaked with silver, a purple trill at the center where my father cut it from the shell.
“Here,” he said, holding the oyster out to me flat on the blade, as if it were a spoon. “Open your mouth.”
I opened my mouth, sucked the oyster in. It was warm and salty and wet: I imagined it smothering in the pink insides of my mouth, staring at the dark tunnel of my throat in despair. I held it there, considering.
“Don’t spit it out,” my father said, and the burlap sack of oysters at his feet shifted, clinked. “Do not spit it out.”
It was too warm. It was alive.
“Swallow.”
I consigned the oyster to death and swallowed. My father looked pleased.
“You like it?”
I’d hated it. I shook my head. My father laughed, and his teeth were very white in his face, which became duskier and darker as the sun set. He stuck the knife in the seam of the oyster again, shucked again. He balanced the oyster delicately on the knife, brought the knife to his mouth, and sucked the oyster inside. I switched from foot to foot, scratching the inside of my calf with the thick skin on the bottom of my feet. I wondered how he never cut himself, how he could be so beautiful, so tall, so impressive.
On my eighth birthday, I didn’t have a party. The year before, my parents had thrown me an extravagant party at my grandmother’s house, where all my cousins came to sing “Happy Birthday” to me over a large pastel sheet cake, and I’d worn a fancy purple and white dress, and been given a brand-new bicycle with a lavender banana seat. The following year, money was tight. On this birthday, my parents walked me out the door off the kitchen of my grandmother’s house and unspooled a white and blue rope, thick as my neck, from the trunk of the family car. I was puzzled. My father laughed. The rope was long, twice as long as the driveway.
My father wrapped the rope around his shoulders and under his arms until he wore it like a great, thick coat, and then he climbed the live oak tree that shaded the side of the house and reached out its dark limbs over the roof. Once he reached the branch that overhung the roof, he inched his way along the limb until he was near the middle. He un-spooled the rope and tied one end of it in a massive knot, which he tugged and tested until he was sure it wouldn’t give. He tied the other end of the rope, tested that knot as well, before sliding down what was now a tall swing, at least thirty feet long, made of rope so thick a grown-up could sit on it and swing without a wooden seat and would still be comfortable.
“Happy birthday,” my mother said. She put one hand on the back of my neck; her hand was rough from constant rubbing against sheets and bedspreads and towels and from the industrial-grade cleansers that the hotel housekeepers used. Years later, she would tell me that she was miserable at that job, that the work was hard and endless, that the women that she worked with gossiped about her and my father’s relationship and were overtly mean and catty to her.
“Do you like it?” my mother said. Even at eight I knew she felt bad for not being able to give me more, for giving me, in its basic incarnation, a piece of rope for my birthday.
“I love it,” I said, and I meant it. I sat in the seat and my father pushed me for a few minutes before going inside. Then I grabbed it in both hands and pulled my way up it, holding tight with my legs, struggling with my whole body, until I got to the top, where I touched the underside of the branch my father had straddled minutes before. I was high, at least thirty feet in the air, and my heart tripped. I looked out over the roof of the house, the yard, the next door neighbors’ small maroon trailer, the street, the mysterious woods. I felt proud of myself for being able to climb, for being not afraid, so unafraid that I would spend hours during the summer and winter climbing the rope, gripping it with my thighs, and perching high on the swing, watching the world. And something about clinging to the top of that rope made me feel closer to my mother and father, even though, physically, I was as far away from my parents as I could get. Sometimes if I begged persistently and sweetly enough one of my uncles would pull the seat of the swing back, hold me above their heads, and let me go, and I would fly across the yard, white-knuckled as I gripped the swing, ecstatic.
My parents were trying to salvage their marriage. Sometimes on the weekends, my father and mother would make time for each other, and they’d leave us with one of their friends who lived in a cluster of apartment houses in the next town over. This friend babysat my brother and me often. From listening to adult conversation, I knew her husband beat her, and I knew that this was wrong. That was clearly delineated at least, and I knew this because once my mother’s entire family rode to Pass Christian with shotguns when my aunt’s boyfriend beat her: they stood out in the street in front of his house and told him if he ever touched her again, they would kill him, and he did not beat my aunt again.
Once, when I was nine and Joshua was six, my parents’ friend dared Joshua to drink from a bottle of hot sauce, and my brother, who always had a stomach of iron and had eaten dog food once when I dared him, drank it.
“Your booty going to be burning when you doo-doo,” she said.
He looked at her and smiled. His teeth were red. His breath was hot with Tabasco.
“No it’s not,” he piped up.
I was impressed. She tried to pass the bottle to me but I demurred. Sometimes he led and I followed. I realized that this time belonged to him. She made grilled cheese sandwiches for us and gave us small plastic cups of red Kool-Aid. My brother and I ate the sandwiches in big, breathless bites. Josh and I ran around barefoot in and out of the apartments, leaping from stairs, playing with stray cats, giving the Dumpsters in the parking lot a wide berth. They stank, and people sometimes missed the Dumpsters and left the garbage to rot next to them.
One day my parents’ friend left us downstairs, watching TV, while she visited her upstairs neighbors.
I was distracted. Maybe I wanted another grilled cheese sandwich, so I ascended the stairs to find the door to their apartment open. Their apartment was mostly dark, and pieces of art made of stretched velvet and glass etched with colored veins that made the glass look marbled hung from the walls. The couple was a white couple, and my parents’ friend and the man and woman sat in chairs around a smallish kitchen table. In the middle of the table, a mirror lay face up. The man was sliding a razor along the surface of the mirror, separating white powder into lines. He bent over and sniffed like he was sucking up his snot, like he was clearing his nose. His hair fell forward across his face. My parents’ friend looked up and saw me standing in the doorway and said, “Mimi, go downstairs.” I went. I did not know what it was. I did not know that I’d seen some of what grown-ups who were poor and felt cornered and at their wits’ end did to feel less like themselves for a time. I did not know this need would follow my generation to adulthood too.
Somehow my mother and father still scraped together enough for our Christmases. For days beforehand, my grandmother cooked, made big pots of seafood gumbo and homemade biscuits, pecan and sweet potato pies. The fire in the wood-burning stove in the living room ran so hot, the grownups went outside to feel the cool air and take turns pushing each other on my rope swing. My brother and I slept uneasily on Christmas Eve, Joshua because he was giddy about the prospect of presents, and me because I was nine and wanted a ten-speed with everything in me, and I was wondering if all the begging I’d done for one would pay off. If there would be a miracle. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed the county police had come to the house to take all my uncles and my father away to jail. In my dream, I cried, and when I woke up, my face was wet. I do not know why I had that dream that night; I wasn’t aware that my father or uncles were hustling or involved in criminal activities. Now, as an adult, I do not think they were. As an adult, I know they were men, rascals who loved to drink and smoke and raise hell on the weekends. But as a child, I listened to my grandmother when she worried about her sons, about them being stopped by the police and searched for no other reasons than they were Black and male, about them getting into fights with White men at bars and being arrested for assault while the White men they fought went free. And I saw the tight line of my mother’s mouth when my father was absent and couldn’t be accounted for, and heard her worry about him riding his motorcycle and getting into an accident and being taken to jail for it. To an impressionable nine-year-old, trouble for the Black men of my family meant police. It was easier and harder to be male; men were given more freedom but threatened with less freedom. But after I woke from that dream and woke Joshua, we crept into my parents’ room to wake them and beg them to let us open presents, and a red ten-speed was propped in the corner of the living room for me, and I nearly forgot that dream.
My mother must have sat Joshua and me down and told us, perhaps in the living room on the same sofa where five years earlier my father had asked for my mother’s hand in marriage. After having two children, my parents married; after having two more, they’d decided to divorce.
“Your daddy’s not coming home. He’s going away.”
She didn’t say divorce. We wouldn’t have understood that word. But the next day, our father still had not come home from leaving for work the day before, and Joshua and I understood in our narrow, bony chests. Daddy was not coming home. He was going away. No more trailing around after him in the yard asking to hold nails or pieces of wood as he built rabbit hutches, no more fighting my way to the top of the rope swing, touching the branch, yelling “See!” to him, trying to make him proud.
Later, I would learn that my mother had said he should leave after she found out about his latest girlfriend, his youngest, the daughter of a coworker from the glass plant, who was fourteen when they met. She had worked a summer job at the plant the year that my father was fired. After my father lost his job and began working at the oyster plant and my mother found out about this latest infidelity, my mother realized my father would never change and their love was doomed. When my mother found out, she was pregnant with my fourth and last full sibling, Charine, but Joshua and I didn’t know it yet.
After my mother told us this, I took to the room we shared with our aunts and curled in the bottom bunk, Joshua’s bed, and alternately cried and read the latest book I’d checked out from the school library, shocked by the rejection of my father’s leaving, which felt like a rejection not of his wife or his domestic life but of me. Children often blame themselves when a parent leaves, and I was no exception.
Joshua took to the yard. It was summer, and it was hot. He ran around the house, lap after lap, round after round, wailing, crying for Daddy. The uncles and aunts ran after him, caught him, held him squirming to them, told him to stop, but he sobbed louder and fought and squirmed in their arms. He was six now, longer, his once blond afro shaved short, and he was strong. They let him go and he hit the ground running and crying. He circled the house for hours, and he only stopped when he fell to his knees, his sobbing dying to hiccups and moans. He fell asleep like that, his head bowed, outside in the dirt. One of the uncles carried him inside, and I made room for him in his bed.
Soon after, my mother filed for Section 8, a government subsidy for housing, and found a house two towns over in Orange Grove, Mississippi, in a suburb going to seed, and told my grandmother we would be moving that summer. I turned ten. Before we left to set out on our own, and even though I suspected I was too old for it, I wandered around Kidsland again, tried to conjure some of the old magic, the belief, and could not.
That summer before we moved, I hustled Aldon and Joshua and now Nerissa, old enough to sit still and pay attention, to the swing on the long concrete porch facing the road, and we played our favorite game: That’s My Car. The rules were simple: as the oldest, I assigned each of us a number, and afterward, we sat and waited for our corresponding cars to drive by.
“I’m first and you’re second.” I put a calming hand on Nerissa, and she nodded.
“You’re third.”
“Okay,” Aldon replied.
“And you’re fourth,” I told Josh.
The first car that passed the house from the direction of Du Pont, perhaps heading home from shift work, was dark blue, fairly new, and boxy.
“That’s my car!” I yelled, and the others cheered.
A white two-door with a long, pointy hood zipped by.
“That’s your car,” I told Nerissa. We cheered dutifully. It was an okay draw.
We heard the next car before we saw it: a loud, syncopated clunking weighted by an ornery engine.
“Oooooohhhhh,” Josh crowed.
The car, gray and brown in patches, puttered across the street before us. The driver, as if he knew he drove a car he should be ashamed of, did not wave or blow his horn as a neighbor might, but instead looked straight ahead.
“That’s your car!” I pointed at Aldon, laughing.
“Hunk of junk!” Josh screamed.
“Why I had to get the junky car?” Aldon said.
We all laughed. Aldon stood and waved his arms at the offending car as it chugged down the street, as if he imagined he could shoo it away as we did raccoons sniffing around the garbage or possums creeping with their pink feet through the fetid swamp of the backyard to disappear in the endless woods.
“Go! Go!” Aldon said, and we laughed harder. Nerissa clapped.
Aldon sat.
“Now it’s Josh’s turn,” I said, and we faced forward on the swing, packed tightly one next to another, and watched the road. We listened intently for a whoosh, for a loud bang, for a flash of color, for anything that would signal our future.