First, Body Read online

  Then later that night I’m looking at my own dark hand on her thin white neck and it scares me, the difference, the color of me, the size, and she says, What color is the inside of your mouth, the inside of your chest? She says, Open me — do I bleed, do my bones break? She says, Kiss me, we’re the same. And I do. And we are. When we’re alone, we are.

  She came to see me once. Cried, said she was sorry, and I sat there looking like I had stones in my stomach, ashes in my chest, like I didn’t want to put my hands around her neck to touch that damp place under her hair. I told myself, She’s not so pretty anymore. She looked old. The way white women do. Too skinny. Cigarettes and sun making her skin crack. Purple marks dark as bruises under her green eyes. I said, Look, baby, I’m tired, you get on home. I’m acting like I can’t wait to get back to my cell, like I’m looking forward to the next three thousand nights smelling nothing but my own rotten self, like I’ve got some desire to spend nine years looking at the bodies of men, like I haven’t already wondered how long it’s gonna be before I want them. She says she didn’t know, she didn’t mean to make it worse for me, and I say, Where you been living, girl? What country? She’s not crying then, she’s pissed. She says, You know what they did to me when I came in here? You know where they touched me? And I say, One day. One friggin’ hour of your life. I live here, baby. They touch me all the time. Whenever they want. Wherever.

  I’m not saying she stuck the needle in my arm and turned me into a thief. I’m saying I wasn’t alone. Plenty of things I did I shouldn’t have. I paid for those. Three burglaries, nine years, you figure. So yeah, I paid for a dozen crimes they never slapped on me, a hundred petty thefts. But the man don’t mind about your grandfather’s gold pocket watch; he don’t worry when the ten-dollar bill flies out of your mama’s purse and floats into your hand. He don’t bother you much if he sees you shoving weed on your own street. But that was different. Back when I was peddling for Leo I had a purpose, doing what I had to do to get what I needed. Then things turned upside down with Rita, and I was robbing my own mama, stealing to buy the dope instead of selling it, smack instead of grass. Rita said, Just once — you won’t get hooked, and it’s fine, so fine, better than the music, because it’s inside. She was right — it was better than the music, and it was inside: it made me forget the sound and the need.

  Now my mama is singing me to sleep, humming near my ear, Bless the child, and I’m waking as a man twenty-one years old, and I’m going to Walpole till I’m thirty. Sweet-faced Rita has scrubbed herself clean for the trial. She says it was all my idea and she was afraid, who wouldn’t be? Seven men see their own wives, their own daughters, and pray no man like me ever touches their pretty white things. They think they can put me away. They think locked doors and steel bars keep them safe. Five women see their own good selves and swear they’d never do what Rita did if not by force.

  I want to tell them how different she can be, how she looks when she’s strung out, too jittery to talk, when her jaw goes so tight the tendons pop in her neck. I want to tell them how she begged me, Please Jimmy please, how she said it was so easy, her old neighborhood, her own people, habits she could predict, dogs she could calm. I want to ask them, Do black men drive your streets alone? I want to tell them, I was in the back, on the floor, covered by a blanket. She drove. She waited in the car, watching you, while I broke windows, emptied jewelry boxes, hunted furs.

  Next thing I know I’m in prison and she’s on probation and Mama’s telling me, You got to stay alive. Ninety-two times she says it. Once a month for eight years, then one month she doesn’t show, and the next week Bernice comes, says Mama’s sick and aren’t I ashamed. Then Mama comes again, three more times, but she’s looking yellowish, not her high yellow but some new dirty yellow that even fills her eyes. She’s not losing her weight but it’s slipping down around her in strange ways, hanging heavy and low, so when she walks toward me, she looks like a woman dragging her own body. My baby. That’s all she says. But I know the rest. Then Bernice is there again, shaking her head, telling me one more time how Mama gave up her life to give us a decent chance and she’s got reason to be proud — little Leroy a schoolteacher, Bernice a nurse. I mean to remind her, You feed mashed-up peas to old ladies with no teeth. You slip bedpans under wrinkled white asses. Wearing a uniform don’t make you no nurse, Bernice. But I just say, Lucky for Mama the two of you turned out so fine. I grin but Bernice isn’t smiling; Bernice is crossing her big arms over her big chest. I see her fall to her knees as if her body is folding under her. I see her face crumple as if she’s just been struck. And I’m not in prison. I’m free, but just barely, and I see my own dark hands in too-small white gloves, five other men like me, lifting the box and Mama in it, the light through stained glass glowing above us and that terrible wailing, the women crying but not Mama, the women singing as if they still believe in their all-merciful God, as if they’ve forgotten their sons: sacrificed, dead, in solitary, on the street, rotting in a jungle, needles in their arms, fans tied around their necks, as if they don’t look up at Jesus and say, What a waste.

  I remembered my own small hands in the other white gloves; I thought my skin would stain them. I would never be washed clean. But I was, baptized and redeemed. The white robes swirled, dragged me down, blinded me, and I thought, I can’t swim, I’m going to die, and this is why my father wouldn’t come to church today — the preacher in black is letting me die, is holding my head under, he wants me to die, it’s necessary. I remember the stories my mother and I read, forbidden stories, our secret: cities crumbling, land scorched, plagues of frogs and gnats, plagues of boils and hail, seas and rivers turned to blood, and then, suddenly, I am rising and I am alive, spared by grace. The whole church trembles around me, women singing, telling Moses to let their people go, sweet low voices urging the children to wade in the water, but I know it’s too deep, too dark, and I wasn’t wading, I was drowning, but the voices are triumphant, the walls are tumbling down. Easter morning light blazes through colored glass; John baptizes Jesus above the water where we are baptized. I am shivering, cold, crying. Mama is sobbing too; I hear her voice above the others, but I know she’s happy. I know that Jesus is alive again just as I am alive, and I have never been this clean, and I am going to be good forever, and I am going to love Jesus who has saved me through his suffering, and I am going to forgive my father who has forsaken me. I am high and righteous and without doubt. I am ten years old.

  These same women are still singing about that same damn river, like this time they’re really going to cross it, when everybody knows they’re stuck here just like me and not one of us can swim; the only river we see is thick as oil and just as black, so what’s the point of even trying when you’d be frozen stiff in two minutes and sinking like the bag of sticks and bones you are, and still they won’t stop swaying, as if they have no bones, as if the air is water and they are under it, and they are swimming, and they cannot be drowned, as if women have a way of breathing that men don’t. I’m choking. I look at Leroy to see if he’s drowning too, to see if he’s gasping, remembering Mama, our love for her, our guilt, but he’s not guilty, he’s a good clean boy, a teacher, clever little Leroy making numbers split in pieces, making them all come together right again. Nothing can be lost, he says, and he believes it. I say, Didn’t you ever want anything? And he looks at me like I’m talking shit, which I suppose I am, but I still wonder, Why didn’t you feel it, that buzz in your veins, the music playing; why didn’t you ever close your eyes and forget who it was Mama told you not to touch? Didn’t we have the same blind father? Didn’t you ever wonder where Mama got her gold eyes? Didn’t the rabbitman ever fly through your open window?

  Twenty years now and I still want to ask my brother the same questions. Twenty years and I still want to tell our mama I’m sorry — but I know there are times sorry don’t mean a thing. I want to ask her, Do you blame me? And I want to ask her, Should I go out in the snow? I almost hear her answer, but I don’t go. />
  Digging graves, hauling garbage, snaking sewers — I’ve done every filthy job, and now, two years, something halfway decent, graveyard shift but no graves. It’s good work, steady, because there are always broken windows, busted doors. Fires burst glass; cars jump curbs; bullets tear through locks; police crack wood — always — so I don’t have to worry, and Mama would be proud.

  I’m alone with it, boards and nails, the hammer pounding. I strike straight, hold the place in my mind, like Daddy said. It’s winter. My bare hands split at the knuckles, my bare hands bleed in the cold. Wind burns my ears, but I don’t mind. I don’t want anything — not money, not music, not a woman. I know how desires come, one hooked to the other, and I’m glad my heart is a fist, shattered on a prison wall, so I don’t have to think I might still play — because I can’t, and it’s not just the bones broken. But sometimes I hear the sound underneath the sound: it’s summer, it’s hot, the radios are blasting — brothers rapping, Spanish boys pleading, bad girls bitching — nobody knows a love song — then the gun goes off, far away, and I hear that too, and later, sirens wailing. There’s an argument downstairs, the Puerto Rican girl and her Anglo boyfriend, cursing in different languages. All those sounds are the song, pieces of it, but I’m listening for the one sound below it all, the one that pulls us down, the one that keeps us safe. Then I catch it: it’s the rain that’s stopped — it’s the cars passing on the wet street — it’s the soft hiss of tires through water, and it almost breaks me.

  If I could find Rita now I’d tell her she was right: junk is better than jazz. It’s fast and it doesn’t hurt you the way the music does. It’s easy. It takes you and you don’t have to do anything. It holds you tighter than you’ve ever been held. You think it loves you. It knows where to lick and when to stop. When it hums in your veins, it says, Don’t worry, I’m with you now.

  I’d tell her, The blues scare everybody. They make you remember things that didn’t happen to you, make you feel your bones aren’t yours only — they’ve been splintered a thousand times; the blood has poured out of you your whole life; the rabbitman’s skin is your skin and the body you share is on fire. Or it’s simpler than that, and you’re just your own daddy, or your own mama sitting beside him. Then you wish you didn’t have to feel what they feel, and you get your wish, and you’re nobody but your own self, watching.

  Every beat I played was a step closer to my uncle’s house, where I listened to my cousins breathe in the bed above me, where I slept on the floor because Daddy was blind in our house, Daddy’s legs were swollen twice their size and stinking, Daddy was cut loose on his own poison and Mama was there, alone, with him — giving him whiskey, washing him, no matter what he said, no matter who he cursed.

  My cousins take me to the woods — Lucy and Louise, one older, one younger. They say, Touch me here, and here. They dare me, they giggle. They touch me and make me forget what’s happening across the field, in my house; then they run away and I hear the grasshoppers chirping all around me, buzzing — frantic, invisible — and then, I remember.

  But smack, it makes you forget, it makes you not care, just like Rita said. It promises, There’s nothing more you need to know. So I didn’t have to see my father’s never-clean clothes snapping on the line. I didn’t have to remember Mama bent over the washtub in the yard, flesh of her arm quivering like she wanted to wash out evil as well as filth. I didn’t have to go in the truck with Daddy that morning when he said it was time I saw my future. I didn’t have to swing the sledgehammer with my boy’s arms or see the bull’s eyes, mad with disbelief.

  But now I remember everything, how I struck the head but too close to the nose, so there was the crack and blood spouting from the mouth but no crumpling, and Daddy said, Hold the place in your mind. I swung a second time, grazed the face, and the bull swelled with his own breath, filling the stall. Three strikes in all before my father grabbed the hammer: one blow, and the animal folded, knees bending, neck sagging, the whole huge beast collapsing on itself.

  Then the others came, sawed off head and legs, slit skin from flesh, peeled the animal — strange fruit — and there was blood, a river of it, hot, and there was blood, swirling at my feet. The body opened and there was blood weeping from the walls and the rabbitman ran so fast he ran out of his own skin and the bowels spilled, an endless rope, thick and heavy, full, and the smell, but the men work in the heat of the animal: kidneys, bladder, balls — saved, and the blood spatters them: faces, hands, thighs; they are soaked with it, I am soaked, I will never be clean, and even the ceiling is dripping until at last the carcass is hung on a hook in the cold room full of bodies without legs or heads or hearts.

  But I am washed clean and I do forgive my father and my father dies and my grandparents forgive my mother for her bad marriage. I am fifteen. It’s November, still warm in Virginia but not in Boston, which is where we’re going, on the train, with my grandfather, who is kind enough but doesn’t know us, who won’t come inside our house, who’s brought a suitcase full of clothes we have to wear and shoes that hurt our feet. He and Granny Booker mean to save us, mean to compensate. They say we can be anything. But all I want to be is the music, all I want to hear is the sound. Doctor Booker means I can be like him, and I think about that, the sharp razor’s edge of his scalpel, all his delicate knives. I feel his clamps. I touch speculum and forceps, imagining how precisely he opens the body, what he finds there when he does. I see the familiar brown spatters on shirt cuffs and pants legs, his never-clean clothes, and I think, For all your pride, you’re no better than my father, no different, and the distance from his house to yours is only the space in which a man turns around.

  I remember my father crying. It frightened me more than anything, more than the bull, more than the water where I thought I’d drown. And this is all it was: scarecrow on a fence. He must have been going blind even then. He thought it was another one, body tangled in barbed wire. But it was only clothes stuffed with rags, pillowcase head tied off at the neck, straw hat and empty sleeves blowing in hot wind.

  In prison I learned that my body itself is the enemy, my skin so black it reflects you. You want to take it from me. I terrify. Even when I am one and you are twenty. Even when I am cuffed and you have clubs. Even when I show you my empty hands and you show me your guns. I alarm you. I do what any animal will do: no matter how many times you strike, I try to stand. I mean to stay alive.

  Which is why the girl in the street scared me. I thought, Maybe she’s not a crackhead. Maybe she’s just a woman from the other side, lost in another country, running deeper into it because once you’re here you can’t see your way out. Cross a road, walk under a bridge; that’s how far. No signs, no stone wall, but the line’s as tight as a border crossing. If you close your eyes it glitters like broken glass, pale and blue, a thousand shattered windshields. Here, every gesture is a code. Boys patrol their turf, four square blocks, pretend they own something. They travel in packs and arm themselves because they’re more afraid than any of us, because every time they look up the sky is falling, so they’re rapping about the cops they’re gonna dust, the cities they’re gonna torch. The little brothers are spinning on their heads, like this is some dance, some game — their bodies twist in ways they were never meant to bend, and then everybody in the street just falls down dead.

  And the old men like me sit in the bars, drinking whiskey, going numb, talking about snatch and getting even all in the same breath, and we sound just like our own pitiful mamas, saying, Judgment Day gonna come, righteous gonna be raised up, and the wicked gonna suffer, rich or poor, don’t make no difference. Except the men, the justice they’re talking don’t have nothing to do with God. They’re full of the old words, saying, We can’t come in the house we’re gonna knock it down; then they sound just like the boys in the street, only tired and slurred, and the boys out there, they’re quick, they got matches and gasoline, they talk fast as spit and don’t ever need to sleep. But the flames burst at their backs, and they’
re the ones on fire.

  We know the rules. Mess with white folks, you pay. Kill a white man, you hang. Kill a black man? That’s just one more nigger off the street. So when I think about that girl, when I think, If she’s still out there, she’s in trouble, when I think even my mama would tell me I should go, I remind myself, I already done enough time for a white girl. I know how they are, how she’d be scared of me even if I said, I just want to help you. And I know how it would look in the alley — big black man’s got his hands on a skinny white girl. Just my luck the boyfriend would come looking, shoot me dead. Nobody’d ask him why.