Fire Shut Up in My Bones (2 page)

Theirs was the only bedroom in the house with a television, up on a chest of drawers between twin beds. That meant that their room served as a den by default. We had pillow fights and tickle fights in that room. We draped sheets over box fans to make inflated tents. We watched
Soul Train,
lighting up at the dancers getting down, joining in as they ended the show: “Love, peace, and soooouuul!” There was a hole in the wall that joined our closets, just big enough for me to squeeze through and make repeated “surprise!” entries into William and Robert’s room. To do so, I had to crawl over a bunch of old guitars that littered the closet floors like limbs blown down by a heavy storm.

Nathan told me that they belonged to my father, that he had been in a band, that one night after a gig and a little too much liquor my father and his bandmates had a car wreck. My father was driving. Someone in the band was killed in the crash. My father did a stint in prison for his part in it. When he got out, he never played again. That’s when he took up construction.

After my parents married, my mother was pregnant every couple of years, and perpetually recovering from or falling victim to illness. She was so sick when I was born that my maternal grandmother, whom we called Big Mama, took me to live with her and her fourth husband, Jed, in Arkansas, until my mother got better. Big Mama had also taken in my middle brother, James, before me. I stayed with them in Arkansas for three years before coming home. James never came home.

So, two or three times a month, my parents, my brothers, and I piled into our battered Volkswagen Beetle for the hourlong drive to visit them. Everyone else found a seat. I curled up in the package tray under the back window, the engine buzzing beneath me as I stared up at silent congregations of clouds floating across the skies.

On the way to the interstate we passed what folks called Boogie Woogie Road, the first road past the city limits on the west side of town. My mother told us that the road was named for the white man black folks called Boogie Woogie, who had run the now-abandoned, dirt-floor store at the junction where the road met the highway. But there were other reasons for the name that my mother refused to relay. Boogie Woogie was a long, straight road that descended a hill with several drops and as many plateaus, but only a few houses. It was perfect for racing hot rods by day and parking with a sweetheart by night. Boogie Woogie.

Just past Boogie Woogie Road was Martin’s Pond. It was the pond my mother insisted was bottomless, because she had always been told it was, even though the stump of a cypress tree rose from the center of it. “Mama, it cain’t be bottomless,” we’d say, giggling. “Yes it is,” she’d insist, only half jokingly.

When we reached Interstate 20 we took it for as long as we could. The road cut a path over rolling hills, which in spots were blanketed by stands of farmed pines, spaced like soldiers—in perfect rows, same age, same height. In other spots, virgin forest was being consumed by kudzu, a big-leafed, invasive weed from East Asia enveloping whole swaths of the American South, growing so fast that folks called it the mile-a-minute vine, blanketing acres of shrubs and trees.

When we turned off the interstate, we took winding roads through small towns with sweet names like Dixie Inn and Plain Dealing; through stretches devoid of people, save an occasional farmhouse set far back from the road or a country café like the one called Ho-Made; and through vast landscapes of cotton fields—endless rows of brown plants stippled by hypnotic flecks of white.

My mother told us stories of the black folk who used to work the fields before machines pushed them out, the pickers dragging long, teardrop-shaped bags they filled with one hundred pounds of featherweight cotton fibers plucked from unforgiving bolls that shredded the fingers by day’s end.

She seemed to relish telling such stories—their power to educate and evoke, to turn our minds, to divert them from our own harsh realities.

We rarely stopped along the way, but if we did, it was for gas, or a Coke, or a rummage sale, which my mother scoured compulsively.

Occasionally we burst into song when a favorite tune came on the radio.

Bad, bad, Leroy Brown

The baddest man in the whole damn town . . .

These were good times, family times—all crammed together in that tiny car, with no choice but to talk and sing and bind ourselves to one another.

Soon we were pulling into Big Mama and Jed’s yard, while they stood on the porch to greet us, smiling and waving.

Their Arkansas community was even smaller than Gibsland. For reasons unknown, it was called Kiblah, a name derived from the Arabic
Kaaba,
the cube structure at the center of the mosque in Mecca, the holiest place, the House of God.

Kiblah was that for me, my place apart from the traumas of struggle and the need of things. There my spirit floated, without weight or worry, like a leaf upon a still water. It was home, in a way, my first home, and Jed, Big Mama, and James were my first family. It was there that I learned the meaning of love from Jed, the man I counted as my first father, although he was neither my father nor blood family.

The house itself was tiny, with five rooms. It was set on a small patch of land perilously close to Highway 71 and between a forest on one side and the expansive cow pasture of a white farmer on the other. My brothers and I played in the dusty front yard. Traffic whizzed by just a few feet away from our ball games and bike riding.

There was no gas heat or running water and no bathroom. For washing, cooking, and drinking, we drew water from the well in the front yard, and heated it on the wood-burning stove. Clothes were hand-washed in a number 2 washtub on the back porch. We bathed out there in that same washtub, sometimes in the laundry water.

Big Mama was a big woman with a big laugh. Everything about her seemed to be outsized—big hips, big bosom, big heart, big voice. Everything big. But she was aging. Her top molars were missing and her short hair was thinning.

Jed was a chain smoker with a strong back and soft eyes. It was those eyes that struck you—brown, maple-syrup sweet, a hint of gray around the edges, sunrise yellow where the whites should be; deep enough to get lost in, bottomless like Martin’s Pond; damp like the beginning of a good cry or the end of a good laugh. They were the kind of eyes that saw down into the dark of you and drew up the light; the kind that melted worry like a stick of butter near a warm stove; the kind that forgave secret shame before it scarred the throat on the way out.

It would take a man with eyes like that to make Big Mama move to the middle of nowhere and bathe outside.

In fact, this was my grandmother’s second stint in Arkansas. She had moved there once before, to marry another man after she and my grandfather, her first husband, broke up. My mother didn’t follow. She stayed behind in Louisiana with Mam’ Grace. But soon the man died and Big Mama was back in Louisiana, living with my mother and my great-uncle Paul at Mam’ Grace and Papa Joe’s house.

Then she married for a third time. Again, it didn’t last long. He left her one day after realizing that she’d been spending the car-note money on clothes and shoes. He only became aware of the deceit when a man came to repossess the car. He was outraged. There must be some misunderstanding, he said to the man; his wife had paid the bill every month, on time. He had the receipts to prove it. Unfortunately, he could only find one—an old one.

Big Mama had been giving her husband the same receipt every month, claiming it was evidence of a new payment and stealing it back from him when he put it away. He was illiterate, and he trusted her. Now he was furious, and done. He grabbed two bags of stuff he had been storing in the smokehouse, “rats and all” was the family joke, and that was the end.

But that woman existed a world away from the grandmother I knew, the one now married to Jed.

The only remnant of Big Mama’s past was a water-damaged, hand-tinted portrait of her and a man I didn’t recognize, both sugar-sharp, sitting on a bench in front of a painted backdrop. He was sitting up tall and strong. She was laughing, legs crossed, her head resting delicately on his shoulder. There was a power in his pose, but there was more in hers, a feminine power, the kind that lights a room and buckles a knee, the kind that makes men do things they know they shouldn’t—sneak in through open windows, lie to loved ones, give more than they have.

I often stared at that picture, trying to connect that woman—young, thin, radiant, dangerously alluring—with the woman I knew now as Big Mama. I couldn’t do it.

She was different now. Jed had made her different because he was more powerful than she was. He drew his power from a different source—not from hollowness but from wholeness. It was a grand, simple kind of power. It came from the knowing and accepting and loving of self that made the knowing and accepting and loving of everything else possible. It didn’t crush, but accommodated. He hadn’t taken away Big Mama’s power but given her a peaceful place to harness and transform it, to calm down and grow up, to move out of the woman she had been and into the woman she could be.

She was like a river—always running, never still, wanting to be somewhere other than where it was—that had finally reached the ocean—vast and deep and exactly where it was always meant to be.

He did the same for all of us—made us feel that we had finally made it to where we were always meant to be, the place where we could stop running and just relax. He made us all better than we had been, not so much by any one thing I remember him doing, but by the gentle, calming spirit that seemed to emanate from his being. That was the kind of father I wished I had.

And James was the brother I felt closest to, even though he lived far away. Maybe it was because we had been raised together, just the two of us, when I was a baby. Maybe it was because he too was now a bit of a loner, being raised as an only child in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe it was because I thought him the smartest of my brothers. Whatever it was, he seemed to me special and different.

He was lighter-skinned that the rest of us, the recipient of a recessive gene, I suppose, and he had his own room and more toys than us, new toys bought from a store, not come across at a rummage sale. And most of all he had Jed, all the time.

But in the summer of 1974 Jed built the house that he would die in—a death that would drain away the specialness from my special place, a death that would leave a crater in the part of my life where a father should be.

The new house was built from lumber recovered from a partially burned house nearby. It was a modest ranch-style house with a covered carport. Jed painted it buttercup yellow with brown shutters, and my grandmother decorated the yard by stabbing synthetic flowers into the soil among real ones in the centers of discarded tires repurposed as flower beds.

The house was a stone’s throw from Jed and Big Mama’s other house, down a dirt road on the other side of the highway, set on a small parcel notched out of a white farmer’s field. It was directly across the road from a kind old widow who had a sprawling yard with a pomegranate tree on one side, its branches straining from the weight of the fruit, and a field on the other side, where Jed and Big Mama grew cucumbers to be sold at the market. There was a butane tank in the yard for fuel, and pungent, metallic-tasting water was drawn from the well in the yard of the widow woman across the street.

The dirt road led into the Bend, a backwater of black families sandwiched between the highway and a bend in the Red River. The Bend had been homesteaded by ex-slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation. When the man who had enslaved them died, his son deeded the ex-slaves that part of the plantation, about a hundred acres.

The families who lived there, many of them direct descendants of those slaves, were tightly bonded but widely scattered—connected by the meandering dirt road and a stubborn devotion to the land that flanked it. We drove into the Bend almost every time we visited—through lush valleys and across wooden bridges spanning rippling brooks, some full of fallen branches, some teeming with cottonmouth snakes. In other spots, the road formed a virtual tunnel through the overgrown leafy canopy. Traffic was so rare in these parts that whenever we came upon a house, which could be miles from its neighbor, everyone in the yard would stop, stand, and wave.

We sometimes drove to the Red River, where we took the ferry to the other side and back again for the sheer slow-motion thrill of it. We stopped at roadside tangles of blackberry bushes or thickets of wild plum trees and gorged ourselves to the point of sickness.

We visited good-natured boys with the quiet charm of people shielded from the world. We visited pretty girls with pretty skin, made so by yard play, homegrown food, and constant sweating. Everywhere we stopped, people came out smiling, genuinely happy to see us, particularly James, whose name they always said in whole, as if it were one word—Jame’Blow—without the
s,
the way folks in Gibsland said Char’esBaby without the
l,
all stretched out like the first notes of a favorite song.

Everyone took to James that way.

In fact, when we visited I didn’t get much time with James because everyone else was doting on him. My two oldest brothers seemed to idolize him even though he was younger. William clung to him like a treasured thing once lost but now found. They had been born only nine months apart—Irish twins.

So in Kiblah I often played alone, which I enjoyed, lining up the menagerie of finger-length ceramic animals my grandmother collected on a bric-a-brac shelf, talking to the animals and pretending they talked back to me. The moment that would slice my life into two parts—before and after—was still several years away, but already I was slipping into the isolation that would prime me for it.

About twice a year we’d visit my mother’s father, Grandpa Bill, in Houston. He was a handsome, gregarious man—showy but genial—with a broad, toothy smile that forever pinched a half-smoked cigar.