“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.