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.