“What did you do to them?” I asked.
“I talked to them,” my father said, “and told them it was wrong.” This approach, coming from my black-belt martial-artist father, disappointed me, but I didn’t understand that this was exactly what his martial arts training had taught him. Violence should be the last resort. The music my father listened to reinforced that; there were other ways to resolve conflict. And in handling the situation the way he did, my father was trying to teach my brother to avoid the violence that plagued the Black community he lived in. Perhaps he thought he could raise a different young man, one resolute against the deluge of racism and socioeconomic inequality and history, and the self-loathing and destructive behavior that engendered. Maybe he wanted a son who could foment change like a Panther. At the time, I didn’t see this, and all I knew was that I wanted to find the boys who had hit Joshua and fight them. I wanted to take up for my brother in the way I almost never took up for myself at school. He doesn’t need your hood, I would have told them. When I saw Josh, he told me that the roaches were still on patrol, and he was still terrified of them. He made me laugh. Even though we were living in different households, we were still as close as ever. I wanted him to tell me about the boys, the bike, the blow, hoped that he would come to me the way a little brother would to an older sister. And even though we talked about mostly everything, he never did. He knew there was nothing I could do for him.
At the end of our last weekend of the summer, we returned to Mississippi and the beginning of another school year. On occasion, if my mother was not yet done with her duties for the day, she would pick me up at the end of the school day before returning with me in tow, while Josh watched Nerissa and Charine at home. The family my mother worked for lived in a large old mansion on the beach, which was painted dark blue and had a two-story guest cottage that had been servants’ quarters in the near past. On days like these, I sat off the kitchen with the wife, and as the children of the family, who were several years younger than me, watched television, we talked. I watched my mother clean; she was such a formidable presence at home that I couldn’t stop looking at her, and this meant I had trouble paying attention to the wife. Why was my mother so silent? Why did she seem so meek? I’d never seen any of that in her. My attention was split between two worlds.
“What language are you taking in school?” the wife asked. She was tall and healthy and blond, robust and gregarious.
“French,” I said. I watched my mother shoo the cat from the counter and spray the tile with Lysol before wiping it down.
“It’s a hard language to learn.”
I nodded. My mother rinsed dishes, began loading the dishwasher.
“It’s difficult to hear the words, to tell where one ends and the next starts.”
I nodded again. My hands felt wrong in my lap. I felt I should be at the counter, helping my mother, handing her dishes.
“Spanish is much easier,” the wife said.
My mother bent, poured powder into the dishwasher. When she closed the machine’s door and stood, she straightened like it hurt her. My mother grabbed a broom and began sweeping.
“Well, our family used to speak French,” I said. “Creole French. So that’s why I want to learn it.” My voice sounded strange. My mother continued to sweep the kitchen, worked her way around the counter. The entire house had wooden floors, upstairs and down, and my mother cleaned all of them by hand.
“The best way to learn is to travel. Immerse yourself,” the wife said. The family’s parrot, which was as large as their cat and kept in a four-foot-high cage in a corner of the sitting room, squawked and spread its wings. Birdseed littered the floor. My mother patiently worked her way around the cage and continued sweeping. The parrot stretched its wings wide again, raising its beak to the air, stretching as if it would fly, but it settled. My mother pushed and the broom shushed its way around the cage. I nodded.
Years later, in college, I would encounter W. E. B. Du Bois and the term double consciousness. When I read it, I thought about sitting in my mother’s employer’s family room, watching my mother clean while I waited for her to finish so we could go home. I thought of how it felt to witness my mother at work, of how I saw her in a broader context, as a Black cleaning woman, almost cowed, and of how I was very conscious in that moment of my dark skin, my overbite, my irascible hair, the way my hands itched to help my mother. How my legs tingled as I sat and looked at my mother as she worked, and how I was aware that the wife was talking to me like an intellectual equal, engaging me, asking me about my college plans. How the privilege of my education, my eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands. How unfair it all seemed.
When my father moved back to Mississippi from New Orleans, my mother decided my brother should live with him full-time. My brother was still struggling in school, and my mother thought perhaps he’d do better with my father. My father moved into a long, low one-story redbrick house in Gulfport. The house was in a historically Black neighborhood, Turkey Creek, which was a community that had been established by freed slaves after the Civil War in 1866 and was still a mostly Black neighborhood of narrow streets, modest wooden-sided houses, and small, neat yards with immaculate grass, surrounded by woods on all sides. In some ways, it felt like DeLisle, except it was encircled by Gulfport’s sprawling development. The creek they named the neighborhood after was notable mostly because it cut a large ditch and warranted a small bridge, and sometimes swelled when it rained. The woman my father’d had an affair with while he was living with us in the seedy subdivision had had a child for him by that time, so she and her child moved in, as did my brother. My brother wanted to live with my father, even though it was hard for him to change schools, make new friends, and leave DeLisle. When Joshua moved in with Daddy, he had his own room again, which he decorated with movies and kung fu weapons he took from my father, or things that he stole.
When Joshua was fourteen, he was a good thief. This was something that he’d never done when he was living with us, and it marked a new turn in him, one of the first that I saw in an ascent to manhood. To be a man meant one should be self-sufficient; he had to provide for himself. He was the same height as my father, and he’d lost his fat-boy belly, but the meat on his bones was evenly centered, proportioned in his long arms and legs, and would solidify to even leaner muscle. He wore big clothes that he didn’t fill, and when he walked to the local Walmart with his new friends he’d met in the neighborhood, their large shirts and their oversize jean shorts were what they stuffed their booty in. They stole stupid things like boxers, candy, and Dickies pants, which he told me about when Nerissa, Charine, and I visited one weekend.