My father said that she was shaped like a Coke bottle, and that she was beautiful. I have seen pictures of her from those days, and she was beautifuclass="underline" sharp cheekbones and nose, large eyes, long silky hair that ran over her shoulders and down her back like water, and a tiny mole at the corner of her mouth. When she brought me to the grocery store, people complimented her on her beauty, on me, her adorable baby boy. She’s a girl, my mother said. Eventually, she heard me called a boy so much that she stopped correcting admiring strangers.
I was walking by then. I was two. I had a fat belly, short legs, large dark eyes. The silken cap of hair. My father and mother had a party, the kind of party one has for no other reason than to share a good time with loved ones. My mother put me in a green jumper, and I toddled around my father’s legs, his cousins’ legs, my mother’s, my fathers’ sisters’. They picked me up, a miracle baby, and kissed me on my cheeks, which were still fat as ripe peaches. I walked to my room, pulled on a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat my mother bought for me.
“What you doing, Mimi?” That was my nickname. The upstairs neighbor in our apartment complex called her daughter that, and my mother liked the name so much she stole it for me. I jumped on my steel rocking horse, set up in the corner, careful to not pinch my legs in the springs, and I began rocking back and forth, squeaking against the chatter of the drinking and smoking adults. They laughed. As the party wore on, I picked up cans when the adults weren’t looking, sometimes when they were, and sipped the dregs of their beer before they took the cans from me with a No, Mimi. My mother took a picture of me while I held a can to my belly, beer dribbling from my chin, the can half the length of my torso, before taking it away. In the picture, I’m grinning, my feet planted wide, almost proud. I was part of the party.
My father remembers those days better than my mother, or he is more open about them, or he is more nostalgic for them, which is why he talks about them with me and my mother doesn’t. Despite his pleasant memories, when we lived in California he missed home, he said. My mother didn’t. She wanted to stay in California. She’s told me less about that time, but she says she liked the freedom of it, the vista of the cities rolling themselves out over the hills. There were no vistas in Mississippi, only dense thickets of trees all around. You could only see the closest house, the dog chained to a tree, your brother riding his bike by on the dirt road. At night, perhaps, a snatch of stars: in the day time, the leaden rain-heavy clouds closed in. But in California, my mother could look out over the horizon and watch the sun rise in the east, and then she could watch it set out over the mammoth Pacific in the west. In California, my family sat at the center of those hills, and my mother could tend to her husband and her child only, free of family and the South.
When I attended college in the Bay Area, I missed the Mississippi air. I wonder if my father felt the same, if the steady cold of the bay made him miss the close heat of Mississippi. When my father brought up the idea of moving back home, my mother balked. They argued over it. But eventually my mother relented because she loved my father. She was also pregnant with my brother by then, and perhaps she wanted the support of her family if she was to have a second child. It was 1980. I was three.
My father and mother packed all of their possessions into their cars, a station wagon and a lowrider Riviera, and we made the long drive down California to L.A. on I-5, then crossed the desert Southwest on I-10. Somewhere in Arizona, my mother, big with my brother, walked into a grocery store and fainted. Our cars had no air-conditioning, yet she still drove those twenty-three hundred miles, her mouth set, my brother large and kicking in her stomach, his feet separated from the metal link of the Riviera’s chain steering wheel by the thin balloon of her fat and skin, windows down, wind blowing. I lay curled in the passenger seat in that car. As my mother drove through the burning desert, I slept, dreaming burning dreams. We sped through the long, seemingly endless stretch of Texas to the blooming green of Louisiana, and finally to DeLisle: home.
One day my brother wasn’t there, and the next day he was. He was born at Memorial Hospital in Gulfport, Mississippi. He was yellow and fat, his eyes large and liquid. His mouth gaped with gums. Sometimes my mother let me sit in a chair and hold him, his body stretching from my shoulder down and across my legs. I remember snippets of him as a baby, but not enough to grow him from infant to toddler in the narrative of his life. Joshua was born on time at nine months, but he wasn’t an easy delivery. My mother says he was born looking at a sky he could not yet see: sunny-side up, the doctor called it. The doctor turned Joshua facedown in my mother’s womb, three times. Every time, my mother said, she felt him turning to face the world again, as if he knew from the first that he wanted to see for himself. He was a beautiful baby: sandy skin, dark brown hair that later fell out and grew in blond. One day he isn’t there, and the next day he is. And just like that, I’m his big sister.
Once home, we moved often. We lived in a small white two-bedroom house in Pass Christian, but our life there is fuzzy in my memory. We then moved to a small blue house, this one a three-bedroom, built on my great-grandmother Ellen’s land in DeLisle where my father had played as a child and lost his eye. The house was built on cinder blocks, so the steps seemed impossibly high to me, and it was in a corner of the field. The field seemed immense. Mother Ellen’s house, small and faded gray, sat three hundred yards away, and the woods bordering the field clung closely to the back and sides of the house. There was a small chicken coop under the trees behind our house, and my father put two dog houses out on the other side for our dogs: one a black pit bull called Home-boy, and the other a short white pit bull mix called Mr. Cool.
I grew taller. My mother combed my hair up into multiple pigtails, secured them with large plastic bobs we called knockers. When I slept at night, they dug into my scalp. By the time I was five, my brother was three, and he came up to my waist. He wanted us to be a team, but when my mother had somewhere to go and my father stayed home and watched us, I left my brother and walked up the long drive that led to the road and played with my cousin Farrah. We played house and snuck to watch TV under the curtain that her father tacked in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Sometimes we played in the field that separated our houses, and one such day my brother came looking for me. He could walk easily now, and his blond afro bloomed. He wore a diaper and nothing else. He walked from one end of the railless front porch to the other, looking off into the grass. He stopped at the edge of the steps, turned around, angled one leg behind him until he found the top step, and then slid the rest of the way down so he stood on that step before turning in a circle to face the yard again.