In my search for words to tell this story, I found more statistics about what it means to be Black and poor in the South. Thirty-eight percent of Mississippi’s population is Black. It is one of six states where African Americans constitute at least a quarter of the population.2 In 2009, the poverty rate was greatest in the South, and in the South greatest in Mississippi, where 23.1 percent of the population lived below the poverty level.3 In 2001, a report by the United States Census Bureau indicated that Mississippi was the poorest state in the country, in part because there has been little money apportioned for rural development. The state has a median household income of $34,473.4 According to the American Human Development Project, Mississippi ranks dead last in the United States on the UN’s Human Development Index, a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living.5 About 35 percent of Black Mississippians live below the poverty level, compared with 11 percent of Whites, and “about one of every 12 Black Mississippi men in their 20s is an inmate in the Mississippi prison system.”6 Recently, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health found that poverty, lack of education, and poor social support contribute to as many deaths as heart attack, stroke, and lung cancer in the United States.7 These are the numbers that bear fruit in reality.
By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.
We inherit these things that breed despair and self-hatred, and tragedy multiplies. For years I carried the weight of that despair with me; it was heaviest right after Joshua died, when I lived and worked in New York City. In the morning I fought through crowds of people to get to the subway, to get a standing spot on the train, for my commute. I lived with rich White friends when I first arrived, slept on their antique sofa for five months, cleaned their apartment like a maid because I felt beholden, and walked their dog, which hated me. Next I moved in with my then-boyfriend, who charged me rent to sleep in the bed with him for the three months I stayed there. After that I moved in with an actor for nine months, and then with two girls I met through a friend.
And as I moved from place to place, I was wandering around the city, bewildered and depressed as I tried to find the basics: Laundromat, grocery store, subway station. In the evenings, I commuted home in empty, rattling train cars and daydreamed or fell asleep, missing my stop and getting lost in dirty tiled mazes. I was hurrying past boys bleeding to death on sidewalks from neck stabbings outside movie theaters off Times Square. I was walking past homeless women with knotty dreads, women who held cardboard signs that read: AIDS HOMELESS PLEASE HELP. I was fainting on the F train. I was riding the subway at midnight to nightclubs with my friends, where I drank until I stumbled into taxis at four in the morning: deliriously, wretchedly, wonderfully, blackout drunk. I was buying liters of Brazilian rum and dumping tablespoons of sugar in glasses and topping with ice and drinking the rum straight, fancying myself a connoisseur of the caipirinha, three nights a week. I was smoking weed with Jamaicans until I was stupid.
And every day I was eyeing the tracks, the coming train, the third rail with its protective wooden shield, and wondering why I was alive and my brother was a year, two years dead. Each day I descended into the belly of the city, eyeing those tracks. And I thought about my family and how they would feel to lose me and Joshua, but they were so far away and my misery and grief and loneliness were so close. It slept with me. It walked with me down the crowded streets. I imagined my brother sometimes, when I was more lonely and desperate, imagined him walking to my right and slightly behind me, throwing an arm across my shoulders, and it would comfort me until I realized I was still alone and he was still dead, that he could not walk with me through those building-shadowed streets, through the garbage-stinking heat and the insidious icy snow, that he could not pull a coat over my head and protect me.
Sometimes I eyed my wrists, thought of how easy it would be to take a razor across the left one by wielding the blade with my right hand, and wondered if I could bleed out from just managing one cut. So I got a tattoo of my brother’s signature on the inside of my left wrist so that it seemed like my brother had signed his name on me before he died, had made his mark across the cutting line. I did it because I knew that I could never make that fatal cut across Joshua’s name. And when I fought through the crowds in Grand Central Station while trying to find a place to eat, a place where I could sit in a corner alone and disappear into the wall behind me, while I walked and fumbled past woman after man, felt all these people touching and crowding me while making me realize that I had never been so lonely, so alone, even though I was surrounded by young men in suits and older women in black woolen coats and sticky-faced children, I fantasized about cutting the right wrist with my left hand, so I got another tattoo in my brother’s handwriting across the other cutting line on the inside of my right wrist. Love brother is how he signed the one letter he wrote me while I was in college. Love brother is what the tattoo says.
After I left New York, I found the adage about time healing all wounds to be false: grief doesn’t fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief. We are never free from the feeling that we have failed. We are never free from self-loathing. We are never free from the feeling that something is wrong with us, not with the world that made this mess.
Death spreads, eating away at the root of our community like a fungus. In 2008, a seventeen-year-old girl named Dariane attempted to cross the tracks in Pass Christian and was hit by a train. A few winters ago, Rog’s sister Rhea died of septicemia from pneumonia, seven years after her brother died. A couple of years ago, a boy named Matt, who’d been like a younger brother to C. J., was shot; he crawled into the woods next to the road and died. Less than a year ago, a young woman named Shabree was stabbed to death by her boyfriend and left nude and bloody in the bed they shared; when relatives finally found their way to her house and her six-year-old let them in the door, she told them her mother was asleep and covered in ketchup. This is why I choose the option of a life insurance plan at every job I work. This is why I hate answering my phone. This is why fear roots through me when I think of my nephew, who is funny and even-shouldered and quiet, when I think of what waits for him in the world.
Yet I’ve returned home, to this place that birthed me and kills me at once. I’ve turned down more-lucrative jobs, with more potential for advancement, to move back to Mississippi. I wake up every morning hoping to have dreamed of my brother. I carry the weight of grief even as I struggle to live. I understand what it feels like to be under siege.
It is an awful weight. As the years pass, I find my memory shrinking and adhering to photos. I look at a picture of Joshua on his last birthday with a coconut cake bearing one burning candle and my brother a crooked smile, and I think: I remember that day. I look at another photo of him with his arm in the air, posing for me with all the other boys from the neighborhood in the middle of the street, and I remember the way he complained about my big camera and called me a tourist when I told them to stop for a picture on our walk down to the park. When I see him in profile, his eyes closed, wearing a red shirt, I think of the day I took the photo, how I had to look up to him to take it and the sun shone on him, blurred his edges, and I’d said to him: Look at my brother! He’s so cute. Just look at him!
It is more awful when I see him in motion on old videotapes after not having seen him, except in dreams, for years. My mother found an old VHS tape and called me and Nerissa and Charine to watch it. She popped the video in the machine and sat back, her face impassive. I perched on the front of the bed, closest to the TV, and my sisters scooted behind me. On the screen, my brother walked through the living room of our old trailer, with its maroon carpet and cream walls, wearing light-colored jeans and a gray T-shirt. I had forgotten he was so tall. My nephew is one year old in the video, and he is wearing a diaper and nothing else. My sisters and I are in the corner of the frame. Charine presses play on a radio, and rap music sounds. My nephew throws his head back, bounces, tries to catch the beat. Dance, a voice says. Dance, nephew.
“Who is that?” Charine asked. “Who’s talking?”
Come on, nephew. Dance.
I knew who it was. The voice sounded like mine, but deeper. Harder.
“It’s Josh,” Nerissa said.
I’d forgotten.
Do this, Josh says, and he is bouncing like my nephew, dancing. On the video, we laugh. I leaned forward, my eyes eating up my brother like a great hungry mouth, my body: a starved stomach. I would never be full. I rocked, sobbed.
Look at him, my brother says.
“I just miss him so much,” I said. I could not help saying it: the words came out of me wet and ragged, and I could not stop for the hunger in me.
He’s dancing, Josh says.
Behind me, my mother and sisters’ faces were wet.
Dance, my brother says.
Every year on the day he died, I wake up to the dread of another year passing. I lock myself in my room, wherever I am living, and I cry until my eyes swell shut. And at the edge of the longing, the terror that I will forget who he was and forget our lives together immobilizes me, pulls me down further, until I am like someone in those cartoons from our youth, stuck in a quagmire of quicksand, mired in the cold, liquid crush, and then: drowning. After Joshua died, my father stopped working, lived on Top Ramen and hot dogs by working odd jobs, and watched television on two different sets at the same time for hours a day. My mother cleans my brother’s grave every few weeks, picking stray grass, brushing the sand to an even smoothness. Every death anniversary, she takes to her room, closes her blinds, wraps herself in silence and darkness. Every year on his birthday, she buys mums for his grave and cleans the small ceramic figures of angels and teddy bears she’s placed around it, while Nerissa and Charine attach balloons, one for every birthday year, this year thirty-three, to his headstone. “I only dream of him as a child,” my mother says. “He’s always my little boy.”
This is grief.
But this grief, for all its awful weight, insists that he matters. What we carry of Roger and Demond and C. J. and Ronald says that they matter. I have written only the nuggets of my friends’ lives. This story is only a hint of what my brother’s life was worth, more than the nineteen years he lived, more than the thirteen years he’s been dead. It is worth more than I can say. And there’s my dilemma, because all I can do in the end is say.
We were at McCloud State Park once, the only group of Black people there among a crowd of Whites. My aunt had arranged the trip to the park, and we sat in our own little segregated crowd in the shallows, me and Nerissa and Charine and Joshua, our cousins Rufus and Dornell, and a few other boys from the neighborhood, Duck and Hilton and Oscar and C. J., and we drank beer, tossing the brown and gold bottles back toward the shore, where we would collect them in a garbage bag. The day was hot, the beach small, Black and White studiously ignoring each other. There were high, fluffy clouds in the sky, and we swam in the amber-dark river, sat on the red clay dirt shore and brushed sand from our shoulders. When a white boat chugged up the river, flat and topless, with a gathering of men and one woman, all White and mottled red from the sun, feathered hair bleached in the light, the other White people on the bank cheered. A Confederate flag flew from a staff at the prow, and one of the men on the bank with us lifted his arms above his head, crossing them at mid-elbow so that they made an X, and howled. He’s making the bars, I thought, and suddenly I wanted to leave these White people to their beach, their stars and bars, their glances, the howl that said what so many of the White politicians in Mississippi have said in coded language, one time or another: You’re nothing.
Josh was standing near the front of his parked Cutlass, which was blue and dull in the heavy light. His girlfriend Tasha stood before him, small and pale. There hadn’t been enough sun that day to tan. His hair snaked over his head and down his forehead, sandy and alive. He tossed his head back so that he could see us all clearly.
“I don’t know what y’all looking so surprised for,” he said. He addressed us all, but he looked at me when he said it. “White people got gangs just like us.”
Joshua made sense of the world in his own way. Or at least he was trying to for the short time that he was here. He was attempting to see the patterns, to find the story behind the statistics that I would write about years later. He wanted meaning. There was an older Black man who set up shop with a card table and a folding chair outside the doors of the local supermarket in Pass Christian, a supermarket that would disappear after Hurricane Katrina, its steel beams bent to look like twisted, spindly trees. The man fashioned crosses from plastic and string, wove intricate designs into the crucifixes, and sold them. Sometimes at night, on one of his rides, Josh would stop and sit with the man, talk to him, ask him questions: What do you know about God? Why are we here? And the man, who had maybe sold one cross earlier in the night for a few dollars, happier at the fact it was bought than by the money it gave him, was pleased at having this tall young olive-skinned man sitting there with him asking him questions instead of swaggering by, pants low on his hips, wife-beater not quite meeting his shorts at the waist, flashing underwear, smelling of smoke and deodorant and salt; this older gentleman would have smiled and said—
I do not know what answers this Black man gave my brother, nor if they made sense to Joshua. Perhaps Josh thought about the churchman’s answers when he stood at the edge of a crowd, his brindle pit bull on a tight leash, and watched the rest of us talking and laughing with each other in clusters in the street after the Easter Sunday ballgame. Perhaps he thought about the churchman’s answers one winter night when we were at Hilton’s house: Joshua, Duck, Nerissa, C. J., Rob, Aldon, Charine, Hilton, Dornell, Pot, Deandre, Tasha, and I. I was sitting in a chair at a table in the kitchen and holding a can of beer in my hand. A case of Budweiser sat before me, and we were all drinking. Hilton’s mother was absent; she didn’t care what we did, and she let us have the run of the house. She was somewhere out in that chilly night, a night so cold it seeped through the floorboards. I was so drunk that I could not sit upright in my chair. I slid down so that the back of the chair was at my neck and my head rested on it. I felt better that way. My brother walked in from the living room and stood before me with his beer. He was more sober than I, and often serious, drunk or sober.
“What are you doing?” he asked. I gulped down my beer.
I felt good, which didn’t happen often; I was often unhappy, depressed and homesick. After my brother and my friends died, I would learn I’d known less of unhappiness than I thought. On that cold night, I was proud of myself because I was home for Christmas break and I was keeping up with my brother. I was happy we were hanging out. I was drinking as much as he was, and I was only five foot three and 110 pounds while he was six foot one and around 190 pounds, and I was not sick yet. I wanted him to know what I thought of him, that I loved him and admired him, that I wanted to grow up and be like him, so I opened my mouth and raised my can to him and said, “I’m rolling with the big dogs. I’m rolling with the big dogs!” in tribute. I was too drunk for eloquence. I was his sister. He looked at me, his eyes soft. I wonder if he thought about the fact he’d have to carry me to his car and slide me into the backseat, about the moment, which neither of us remembered, when he’d become the big brother, the protector, the one who walked through the door first, and I’d become his little sister.
“She’s crazy,” Tasha said.
“She’s drunk,” Joshua laughed.
Joshua would have thought about his questions, the answers the world had given him about his place in it, every time he walked into the room I shared with Nerissa while I was home from college for a few days, a week, a month, and during those six months I lived at home before he died. On those nights, he said: “Come take a ride with me.”
I was a bitch to him often during the summer, snapping at him and fighting with him over small things, like him not wanting to watch our nephew De’Sean while I was on babysitting duty, or him heating up buckets of chitterlings in the microwave so the stink pervaded the house, but I never told Josh no when he asked me to ride. We argued and forgot we argued. Each time he invited me to come along with him, I felt special that he’d asked, pleased that he wanted to spend time with me. After he died, I wonder if he’d known it. The last time we rode is the one I remember most clearly: he wore jean shorts and a wifebeater, and his hair was uncombed. I followed him out of the front door. It was night, and the air was wet and warm, and when we got into the car, the seats felt damp. When Josh cranked the car, it scratched and rumbled to life, and we both rolled down the windows, manually; the knobs were slick. Immediately his radio sounded. He played songs on the stereo for me that beat obscenely because his speakers were so loud. Years later, I can only remember one of the songs, and it was the last: Ghostface Killah’s “All I Got Is You.”
“I got something I want to play for you,” Joshua said.
He turned up the music, blasted it. This is for all the families, Ghostface said. This is for yours, I heard. The trunk rattled. Thinking about the past, when he was young, Ghostface said. The bats spastically caught their dinners. They were poor, Ghostface said. Armadillos crept along ditches and froze in the headlights. His father left him at the age of six, and after his mother packed his father’s shit and kicked him out, she cried, Ghostface said. The pines waved to the dark. The trees fell away like great waves. Sometimes I look up at the stars and analyze the sky, and ask myself was I meant to be here … why? Ghostface spat, like he could not wait to get it out of him, could not bear keeping it inside any longer.
“This reminds me of us,” Josh said.
We rode away from St. Stephen’s, away from the house, away from the cluster of houses of our Black neighborhood, out into the White outskirts of DeLisle, toward the bayou and over the bridges, the water shimmering silver in the night, the grass black. My brother played the song over and over again, and all that we’d been and become sat with us like another sibling in the passenger seat. We rode through Pass Christian, down to the beach, along Scenic Avenue, where he would die months later, so we could see the Gulf stretching out over the horizon, the sands white as tombstones. I looked away from Josh and out of the window so he couldn’t see my face, and I cried as we rode, thinking of our mother, our father, Charine and Nerissa and him. I wiped my face and was ashamed, but Josh didn’t say anything. He drove us away from the beach and back up through Pass Christian, through the bayou, past St. Stephen’s, and up into the country, away from all the houses, all the lights, so we rode alone under the black bowl of the sky, the stars’ fire so cold, so far away. Here, a dark horse and a white horse fed on grass at the side of the road, and when we passed them, they were dim and ghostly, hardly there. Vines grew over the limbs of trees and over the power lines, hung down into the street lamps, so the leaves of the vines gleamed like Christmas lights. The wind pushed our chests with a firm hand into the seats of the car. We rode like we could drive far and long enough to out-run our story, what Ghostface said: To all the families that went through the struggle. But in the end, we could not.
I don’t ride with anyone like that anymore. When I hang out with my male cousins, with Rufus or Broderick or Donnie or Rhett or Aldon, or with my friend Mark, I do ask them to drive, but it’s not the same. When we ride through the roads that cut through the forests of DeLisle, sometimes I close my eyes and take another drink and feel the wind again like a hand on my face, and I think about Joshua, and then the man who drives, who could be my brother, tall and solemn in the driver’s seat, right hand looped casually over the steering wheel, becomes him, and for a moment my brother is there next to me, navigating, leading. And then the wind buffets my eyes open, and the trees shiver darkly at both sides of the road and the air smells of burning pine needles, and I open my eyes to what is.
When Joshua died, he took so many of our stories with him. My sisters are too young to remember them. They cannot see the full enormity of what happened because they did not live what we did. I write these words to find Joshua, to assert that what happened happened, in a vain attempt to find meaning. And in the end, I know little, some small facts: I love Joshua. He was here. He lived. Something vast and large took him, took all of my friends: Roger, Demond, C. J., and Ronald. Once, they lived. We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.
We who still live do what we must. Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.
When I was twelve years old, I looked in the mirror and I saw what I perceived to be my faults and my mother’s faults. These coalesced into a dark mark that I would carry through my life, a loathing of what I saw, which came from others’ hatred of me, and all this fostered a hatred of myself. I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother’s legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity and of our country’s history and identity, enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts. My mother had the courage to look at four hungry children and find a way to fill them. My mother had the strength to work her body to its breaking point to provide for herself and her children. My mother had the resilience to cobble together a family from the broken bits of another. And my mother’s example teaches me other things: This is how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human beings sleep and wake and fight and survive. In the end, this is how a mother teaches her daughter to have courage, to have strength, to be resilient, to open her eyes to what is, and to make something of it. As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and having just borne a daughter, I hope to teach my child these lessons, to pass on my mother’s gifts.
Without my mother’s legacy, I would never have been able to look at this history of loss, this future where I will surely lose more, and write the narrative that remembers, write the narrative that says: Hello. We are here. Listen. It is not easy. I continue. Sometimes I am tireless. And sometimes I am weary. And when I am weary, I imagine this: After the moment I die, I will find myself standing on the side of a long, pitted asphalt road flanked on both sides by murmuring pine trees, under a hot, high sun in a blue sky. In the distance, I will hear a rumbling thumping, a bass beat. A dull blue ’85 Cutlass will cut the horizon, come growling down the road before stopping in front of me. It will stop so quickly the gravel will crunch, and then my brother will swing the passenger door wide with one long tattooed arm, the other on the wheel. He will look at me with his large dark liquid eyes, his face soft. He will know that I have been waiting. He will say: Come. Come take a ride with me. I will, brother. I’m here.