Since I Laid My Burden Down Read online

  Perhaps it could be followed by a shot of ten little black bodies (himself, his cousins, his two youngest uncles, one being the dead one) walking the gravel roads, the oldest among them no more than thirteen or fourteen years old.

  He thought about his nephew sleeping in the back room of his grandmother’s house, and his second cousins playing in the yard. These children went to day care, something unheard of when DeShawn was a field rat running through the cotton with his cousins.

  These new children had perhaps not spent more than twenty minutes outside of the confines of adult supervision. It was a lack of adult supervision that characterized DeShawn’s upbringing, and this revealed itself in adulthood in some not-so-surprising ways, namely a resistance to supervision, particularly over himself. He tried to get out of his head about it.

  He thought about memory and time and how some years can all run together into one giant stream.

  DeShawn was just old enough to pinpoint when the No Shoes, No Shirts, No Service signs started going up at grocery stores all around northern Alabama: it was some time around the late eighties. DeShawn’s childhood was defined by going nearly everywhere barefoot; he remembered going with his youngest aunt (in her teens) to the Piggly Wiggly to buy Oreos and they were both barefoot.

  DeShawn had six aunts and five uncles. None of them he referred to by name, they were all simply “Uncle” or “Auntie.” His uncle who died was the next youngest to DeShawn’s youngest aunt, who babysat him the most. One day there was a fight over who would use the one car that was shared among all the youth in the house. DeShawn watched Uncle drag the youngest aunt out of the car by her hair and punch her in the face. DeShawn’s aunt, not to be outdone, uppercut his uncle in the stomach, causing him to crouch on his knees in the brown gravel road, where she proceeded to kick him in the head until he bum-rushed her from the ground. More of a struggle ensued: she broke free and he chased her around the house; being much faster than him, she ran the full circumference of the place and caught up to him while his back was turned. She did a running, twenty-foot-long, WWE-style dropkick that landed on the back of his head and he was down for the count. DeShawn’s aunt then took him to Piggly Wiggly to buy Oreos and pick up a girlfriend of hers, and then they all took the car to the river. She cut the arms off his little baby shirt, and he watched as his aunt and her girlfriend picked up boys, making mental notes.

  DeShawn chuckled at this recollection. Reclining at his grandmother’s house after church, he looked across the room at his maternal grandmother. He saw the tired look in Granny’s eyes. It was the look of a woman who had been raising children for three goddamn generations. Her children, her children’s children, and now her great-grands were infesting the house like little roaches. “Well goddamn, Grammy, when you gon’ retire, girl?!” DeShawn poked at her.

  “Shit, man, I guess never,” she chuckled under a deadpan expression. She’d had this dry sense of humor for as long as he could remember. He went to the back room to check on his sleeping nephew; he was still out cold and had been that way since the church service. He went outside to check on his smaller second cousins playing church on the front porch, singing “This Little Light of Mine” together.

  Well, I don’t like this Christian business one bit, but at least they’re having fun, DeShawn thought.

  Some twenty-five years ago he sat on those same steps and did the same thing. Cousin so-and-so would preach and wear a sheet as a robe. He prefaced every sentence with, “And my Bible tells me . . .,” just like the annoying preacher at the church. Then he would get the spirit, throw off his robe, and the “congregation” (whatever cousins were around) would fan him, get him some water, help him back into his robe, and carry him back to the pulpit. His cousins were enacting the same game as if it were coded in their goddamn DNA. Nothing changes, DeShawn thought.

  He scanned the yard—past his grandfather’s broken down ’67 Dodge truck, and past the marigolds and sunflowers in his grandmother’s garden.

  A dead kitten was found past the flower garden when DeShawn was five, and he was accused of killing it, as he was seen in the yard earlier that day with a baseball bat. His grandfather was somewhat of a dramatist, and when DeShawn or any of his cousins did anything bad, he set up a mock court in the living room, with a jury consisting of whatever peers and adults were on hand. This time five cousins and his youngest aunt and uncle were the jury. At five years old he had to plead his case to a jury that didn’t believe him. “It had to be you,” they kept telling him. By the end of the trial he really believed he’d killed that kitten. The jury unanimously found him guilty. His mother was fond of the saying “Truth crushed to earth will rise again,” and sure enough, at a family Christmas dinner many years later, a drunk cousin of his (out of fucking nowhere) casually remarked, mid-dinner and laughing, “You know, it was actually me who killed that cat.”

  DeShawn was constantly pulled back into stories like this. He knew his grandmother’s face so well; there was history and memory running through it. Whatever was in her was in him. This was how lineage worked.

  DeShawn had known some things.

  He knew his maternal great-great-grandmother. He remembered kissing her on the cheek once, and her remarking that he was a “sweet boy”; she was nearing one hundred and had been bedridden for years at that point. DeShawn’s mother knew a different woman, a woman who, in her youth, had cleared acres of tree stumps and farmed the land once it was cleared.

  He had heard his mother’s version of the family’s history often, and how he, DeShawn, had indirectly come into being.

  DeShawn’s great-great-grandmother’s parents were born slaves in Virginia—how they got to Alabama was anybody’s guess—and they had his great-great-nan who in turn had five children. One of her kids, Earnestine (DeShawn’s great-grandmother, whom DeShawn’s mother was named after) turned fifteen and became a servant in the house of a local bluesman, Hard Rock Jones. Hard Rock didn’t like field work too much, so he learned to play guitar and played the blues along the Chitlin Circuit on up to Chicago and back. Hard Rock had a wife and two kids when he impregnated DeShawn’s future great-grandmother, the aforementioned servant girl, who then gave birth to DeShawn’s nan. His grandmother was raised in a house with only her mother and grandmother and had no contact with her father or her father’s side of the family for some thirty-odd years, until one day her half brother came speeding into the cotton field in a Cadillac. He had moved to California in the sixties, and by the seventies was co-owner of a blues club in Oakland, the same club DeShawn would live four blocks away from some thirty years after that.

  DeShawn’s mother often reminded him, in times of stress, that he came from strong women and therefore could never fail. He thought about their lives, his great- and great-great-nans, as single women in the forties on that little patch of grass in the cotton field, fending off winters, fresh men, and cheats. It was said that people from up north would travel through the South and sell bunk insurance to poor blacks; the women soon learned to never give their money away to anyone.

  DeShawn looked at his grandmother’s face and understood it as his own.

  He looked past the yard with his younger cousins playing church. He looked past the sunflowers and marigolds, the cotton field, the memories of dead kittens, and memory itself. This was Alabama. It shook him a bit. It was the first time in his life that he ever recalled this place feeling like home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In DeShawn’s life there was another death of grave importance. DeShawn flipped through a dusty photo album, so old it still had that adhesive cellophane sheet on top.

  There was a picture of a young man from the early seventies, sitting on a black Cadillac parked on a brown gravel road somewhere in rural Arkansas. The man was very handsome, dark skinned, smiling brighter than the sun, wearing bell-bottoms, a white T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and a denim newsboy cap that matched the bell-bottoms. He was on his way to the army. That young man, DeShawn’s future st
epfather, was Big Daddy.

  DeShawn was now a good deal older than the boy in that picture. The thought made him shudder inside.

  His mother had not been married to Big Daddy very long—just four years, divorcing when DeShawn was eight. The marriage was short, yet felt like an eternity. Violent. It would mark DeShawn the rest of his life. It also produced DeShawn’s little brother.

  It was hot the day DeShawn, his younger brother, Carl, and his nephew, William, all drove up the highway in Carl’s air-conditioned car to make it to the veteran’s cemetery to put flowers on Big Daddy’s grave.

  DeShawn looked at Carl with the same envy with which he always had. DeShawn’s biological father flew the coop when he was two, leaving him in the care of his mother, who met his stepfather a short bit afterward. DeShawn always wondered how much of that house’s trouble Carl remembered; DeShawn was sure he was too young to remember much of it. Carl’s father paid all the bills, leaving DeShawn to feel like a ward of his mother. He grew up feeling like he never had a real say in anything; he was just sort of this appendage that would shrink away to avoid conflict. DeShawn also wondered if Carl remembered him sneaking out of the house to meet Jatius McClansy at night, leaving Carl alone in his little bed.

  Ignorance is surely bliss. Carl did not seem to have DeShawn’s maladjusted tendencies, and he was sure his younger brother’s age and status as the biological son of Big Daddy, the alpha male of the house, had protected him from the evil. It also helped that his stepfather wasn’t jealous of Carl.

  DeShawn’s mother would often tell him Big Daddy would say shit like, “I’m jealous of DeShawn—I always wanted a young mother.” Big Daddy’s mother had abandoned him. When Big Daddy waltzed into DeShawn and his mother’s life, the two were living in the projects. All the older man saw was a single woman and a little boy, and when he looked at the little boy, all he saw was himself. It was a situation he wanted to solve. Problem was, the older man had not checked all of his problems first, and this is how it all got blown to hell. It was a fucked-up (though perhaps common) situation of a young boy competing for the attention of his mother with an older man who never really had one.

  “You always paying more attention to that boy than me,” Big Daddy would say. He made DeShawn pay a hard price for what he saw as the boy’s “privilege.”

  Big Daddy grew up in Arkansas, the oldest of four boys, each with different dads. His father was a womanizer with a whole nother family altogether. One day, Big Daddy’s father moved to California with his other family, leaving lil’ Big Daddy behind. Later that year his mother took all of Big Daddy’s brothers to Chicago, and left him behind because he had the darkest skin.

  Big Daddy was raised by his maternal aunt, Josephine, a Rosie the Riveter woman—she had worked in the Oakland shipyards in the forties before coming back to Arkansas in the late fifties to buy land and build a farm.

  DeShawn had seen the black-and-white pictures of Big Daddy and his Aunt Jo in the yard together. In one, Big Daddy was playing with some baby chickens and his Aunt Jo was patting the young boy on the head. This picture always made DeShawn cry because he saw Big Daddy as a child and knew how his life ended. Big Daddy had started off like DeShawn, an innocent little boy who was about to have the world descend upon him.

  Big Daddy did what every man of his generation who wanted to leave the Delta did—he joined the military. There were mountains of pictures from his military days. Big Daddy as a young man in Korea, Germany, Panama, and other places a boy from Arkansas probably never expected himself to be.

  DeShawn had known much about the black body versus the prison industrial complex, but no one ever seemed to talk about the military industrial complex and the lives it rearranged—not always for the better. DeShawn thought too long and too often about a young Big Daddy, just shy of twenty, a young man with no father figure to speak of being raised by captains and sergeants. It was frightening.

  His stepfather would sometimes tell the story of a bunk partner from basic training, some white boy from the Ozarks who would look at him like he was a ghost. Big Daddy asked the young man what the problem was, to which he remarked, “Man, I ain’t being funny, but I just done ain’t never seen no colored man before.” Big Daddy would laugh his ass off every time he told this story.

  But these were all things DeShawn learned later. There were still the first, vivid memories of Big Daddy, the ones DeShawn couldn’t unsee.

  DeShawn and his mother moved into Big Daddy’s house. That had been a mistake from day damn one. DeShawn’s earliest memory was of being awoken by a fight, lots of screaming and things crashing about. Barely five, young DeShawn walked past the bathroom and saw his mother’s clothes on the floor, soaking wet. He slowly walked into the living room of the tiny apartment and saw his stepfather in his underwear, hitting his mother in the face and tossing her out the front door in only her underwear.

  DeShawn’s soul saw this and went on a journey inside of itself; he held on to the feeling for life—hate. He hated Big Daddy. It would be the first of many such scenes to play out in front of the young boy for years and years.

  “The only reason you’re here is because I feel like being nice to you,” Big Daddy would say. Or, “You think I’m low down, boy? What about your father who sits his ass in southern Alabama and leaves me to take care of you?”

  DeShawn fought back the only way he could: he stayed quiet. He learned that the only way to beat an enemy bigger than you is to survive them. It’s hard. It warps the soul. But it is a strategy, and the only one for a boy who could not fight back. Big Daddy was the first of a hundred men DeShawn felt he had no power over, who were merely obstacles to be survived. He felt tired of just surviving all the time.

  Every time he had a fight with DeShawn’s mother, the man’s favorite trick to quiet the house was to sit in the back room for hours and clean his guns. DeShawn remembered walking on eggshells, his heart palpitating. He could hear the guns clicking all through the house. With each click his little heart would stop. Is this man going to kill us? That day of carnage never came, though; the only person Big Daddy would kill was himself.

  DeShawn grew up one day, same way all little boys do. His mom had long since divorced Big Daddy, but DeShawn, just shy of eighteen, had escaped to California, putting as much distance as possible between himself and his childhood home. To go any farther you had to start swimming.

  DeShawn had not been five months in the sunny state before he got a frantic call; it was early March and he was stoned in the punk warehouse where he was living. His mother was on the other end: “Big Daddy is dead, baby. You have to come home.”

  During his time in the army Big Daddy had picked up a hellified coke problem, which at its crescendo turned to crack. DeShawn didn’t know his stepfather was addicted to crack his entire childhood, but this explained a lot. Why the man was so goddamn erratic all the time; why, even though he had a decent-paying job, violent fights about money dominated the household. The dead man maintained a desk job some thirty-plus years while nursing a crack cocaine addiction. Years down the line, DeShawn himself would learn the particular dance of being a high-functioning substance abuser.

  They found Big Daddy’s body next to his bed. He had been smoking crack, and a blood vessel in his neck clogged and exploded. There was a spray of blood on the wall where he fell. He was fifty-two.

  DeShawn remembered watching Big Daddy’s parents—two people in their late sixties—get into an argument and almost come to blows some five feet away from their dead son’s body while the preacher was reciting the burial rites. They had to be separated. He began to understand the hell that was Big Daddy’s life.

  DeShawn stood six feet above what was left of the man he knew to be his father. It was his job to make sure whatever it was that killed Big Daddy on the inside would not be passed on to his nephew. That was the charge of the living.

  DeShawn looked at Carl raising William by himself. William’s mother was a heroin addict and in ja
il. Much like their mother before them, DeShawn and his brother loved drug addicts and other forms of dubious company.

  Despite his reluctance to do so, DeShawn eventually came to peace with Big Daddy. This man who lived a short, bitter, intense, uneven, and unfair life. DeShawn could not help but tear up about it from time to time—on buses, in the middle of class, sometimes while talking to people. There was nothing that he wouldn’t give for one last conversation with Big Daddy. He left flowers on the grave and retreated to the car with his brother and nephew.

  DeShawn remembered Big Daddy’s prophetic words to him: “One day, when you’re a man, you’ll understand what I’m mad about, boy.”

  This much became true—a lot truer than DeShawn was ready for.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lately, DeShawn’s thoughts were haunted by dead lovers and, strangely enough, polar bears. The night before, his mother confirmed a memory DeShawn thought he made up.

  Every summer young DeShawn would drive with his mother and cousins to Birmingham. They would always visit the church where the four little black girls died in a bombing, and then go to the zoo to see the polar bears. In July.

  “Mama,” asked DeShawn, very inquisitively, “Would we really see polar bears, in Alabama, in July?”

  “Yes, baby! You used to love the polar bears,” she said, three seconds before the epiphany struck. “Wait a minute, you’re right! That’s fucked-up! Oh, those poor bears!”

  There were always harder truths to dig through. DeShawn also didn’t trust his memory of the man in the pink suit.

  His mother’s older sister and her teenage daughter lived up the way; they were his caretakers. When DeShawn rifled through his earliest memories, the man with a pink suit was always in the background. He was an older black man and had on sunglasses, a pink suit, and a fedora. In the boy’s mind he looked like Panama Jack from the shirts that were popular in the eighties. The man walked with a cane, and his aunt and cousin didn’t mumble a word to him. DeShawn’s memory of the man’s specter-like presence creeped him the fuck out, and he finally asked his great aunt about the man. “Oh, that was Arnold Jackson,” she explained in a kind of cool voice. “We never talked to him because he was a rapist and a child molester. He attacked some girls in the neighborhood and was after your cousin for years.” His aunt spoke in a surprisingly disinterested, matter-of-fact tone as she continued crocheting.