Fire Shut Up in My Bones (21 page)

The first time I held the baby my heart melted: her writhing and cooing in the cradle of my arms, my knees weak and trembling, my elbows locked for fear that I might drop her. I fell instantly into the deepest, most primal kind of love, the kind that makes a man willing to lay down his life or work himself to death. She was tiny and light and precious. Beautiful. And she smelled sweet, intoxicating even. But it was her innocence that moved me most: glassy eyes that had never seen death, soft feet that had never fled from fear, delicate hands that had never thumbed a Bible to hover a finger above the word “abomination.”

In mid-May, just before graduation, I flew to Knoxville, Tennessee. I had won my way to the international science fair, held there that year. I was trying to keep myself focused on my studies, to find a balance between being a good father and being a good student.

My science fair project was about why the so-called Star Wars anti–ballistic missile system, proposed by President Reagan, wouldn’t succeed. I built a big wooden board with an inserted section for a diorama of the earth and the sky to illustrate how the system was supposed to work, and made cutouts for a television and a VCR so that I could play a videotape of a documentary I had recorded showing why it wouldn’t work. It looked impressive, but I had violated one of the basic rules of science fair projects: I hadn’t actually done an experiment. My project was basically a research project. Still, I’d won the district fair.

I wanted to be impressive at the international science fair, so in the weeks leading up to it I went to the parish library and checked out every etiquette book I could find. I read those books front to back. I felt I had uncovered a trove of secrets that had been withheld from me.

The flight to Knoxville was my first time in an airplane. I saw the world from above, the way God saw it: dotted with ponds and crossed by rivers. In spots it looked to me like the quilts Mama and Big Mama made—parcels of tan, khaki, and ecru; lime, emerald, and kelly green; squares, rectangles, and trapezoids. I drew comfort from that thought as turbulence jostled the plane, and I resisted the urge to throw up.

I arrived in Knoxville, but my project did not. The airline said they’d lost it. I suspected that, being heavy and wooden as it was, the thing had in fact been mishandled, probably badly damaged, and they were simply covering it up. While all the other students stood proudly before their projects in the large convention hall, I would stand before an empty space where my project should have been, explaining to the baffled judges that it had been “lost” in transit.

At the first dinner in Knoxville, I sat at a table with some other students. As I silently reveled in the fact that I now knew what all the spoons and forks were for and what to do if food fell on the floor, an older man approached and asked if a vacant seat was taken. It wasn’t, so he sat. He was a distinguished-looking man with kind eyes. He was very polite and engaging, asking each of us about our projects, commenting on each one as if he were truly interested.

He said that he had been one of the scientists on the Manhattan Project, information he relayed with the kind of pride that’s saddled with sadness. I didn’t know what it was until he explained it, but I knew from the way he had said the words—Manhattan Project—that it weighed on him, and that he was conflicted about his role in it.

The juxtaposition of this dinner with the rest of my life was striking. Just days before, I had been in our living room with Paul, trying to explain to him that the cartoon characters on television that flummoxed him so were not people dressed up in costumes but thousands of drawings. I had gone from talking to a man who didn’t understand, nor had ever seen, the world, to sitting with a man who had helped make a weapon that could destroy it.

The next day, I realized that one of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners was around the corner from my position in the exhibition hall. He had also done a project on the Star Wars program, although his seemed to be a rigorous computer simulation of the laser system. I walked past, scoping it out from afar, as if sizing up all the competition on the row. I was in awe, and I shrank with embarrassment, tucking my head into my shoulders the way Uncle Paul often did. The boy’s board was extraordinarily tall and covered in theories and mathematical equations that I couldn’t make heads or tails of—hieroglyphs to me. I stared at the marks the way Uncle Paul stared at the cartoons—flummoxed. The boy stood before the board, modest, bookish, and confident. I knew then that the competition in life was not at home, not in a little segregated town divided by a shallow ditch. This was the competition—the bookish boy and his extra-tall board.

I told myself that I would never underestimate the competition again, now that I had gotten a gander at it. No one would cut me slack because I was a small-town boy. No one would show pity because I had messed up and made a baby. I would have to rise above.

I got back to Gibsland on a Saturday. Graduation was that Sunday. I walked across the stage several times, not only accepting my diploma but being honored as valedictorian and receiving several scholarships.

The week after graduation, I was visiting Evelyn and the baby at her grandmother’s apartment when my cousin Faith, who was a friend of Evelyn’s, came to visit. Papa Joe was also Faith’s great-grandfather, because Papa Joe had stepped out on Mam’ Grace and had a child in sin. Faith and I were not close, but we tolerated each other.

That day, she walked into the apartment, spoke to us all, and then asked to hold the baby. Then she said the words that snapped the sense back into me: “Charles, she don’t look nothin’ like you.” Maybe she was saying it to be mean, or maybe she was trying to awaken a cousin without losing a friend. Whatever the reason, she was right. The child bore absolutely no resemblance to me and only a passing resemblance to Evelyn. For some reason, I hadn’t allowed myself to notice that before.

My eyes went glassy like the baby’s, like I was seeing things for the first time.

Slowly, the uneasy feeling settled over me that I had been holding another boy’s baby. I had quieted the voices in my head that condemned me for my carelessness and resigned myself to fatherhood. A part of me had gotten used to the idea, comfortable with it. Part of me desperately wanted the baby to be mine, but in my heart, in that moment, I no longer believed she was.

For my science project I had counted the ways the multibillion-dollar Star Wars program wouldn’t work, but I had never allowed myself to count the months of Evelyn’s supposed gestation—six, maybe seven, from that time we’d had sex, not nine. And I had never allowed myself to question why Evelyn had swung so quickly from Baron to me—from a boy who had gone to prison to one who was going to college.

I could taste the acid on the back of my tongue like I was about to vomit, the lies she had fed me wanting to come back up.

I don’t know if Evelyn saw the truth settle over me that day Faith made her remark, but the next week she moved away with the baby. No notice. No new address. No phone number. Just gone. I never heard from her again.

After she left, people talked openly about how it had been Baron’s baby, not mine, and I felt like a fool. I thought I knew the pain of betrayal through and through, but in a way this deception was even more hurtful than the others. How exactly is a boy supposed to fall out of the deepest love he’s ever known with the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen?

I would never know what caused Evelyn to devise her plan or to abandon it, or even be absolutely sure that I was right and she had done wrong. All I knew was that in my heart, in my bones, I no longer believed. I figured that she had probably placed a safe bet after a bad one, and maybe after the fact she had thought better of it.

Whatever her reason, and whatever the truth, I now had another hole in my heart.

8

I didn’t go away to college as much as I ran away to it.

I needed to go somewhere not haunted by memories. I needed to find a place where no one had ever died—no old woman surrendering her life as a last act of beauty; no old man with syrup-colored eyes coughing up lots of blood; no dead children at the bottom of a pond. I needed a place where there had never been a betrayal—no one whispering, “It’s just a game”; no hand moving like a snake; no trapped girl whose laugh rained down like sugar and whose lies rose up like bile.

My dream of escape had centered on up north. Down south was too close for a boy who needed to run away. For no reason in particular, I had set my eyes on William and Mary, although being as it was in Virginia, it was still technically in the South. Maybe I would make it in, and maybe they would give me a basketball scholarship. But I never actually applied. In my heart I was convinced that I had no chance, that I was dreaming beyond my talents. Besides, my mother didn’t want me to go anywhere far, and couldn’t have paid for it if I did. But if I couldn’t escape north, I would escape farther south. I applied to Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. And because I was the valedictorian of my class, I was guaranteed a full scholarship. I decided to take it.

But from the beginning, my mother raised doubts and built an argument designed to keep me closer. She was scared and nervous for me. She still saw me as her baby, certainly not a man, and couldn’t imagine not being able to get to me if I needed her. But I was determined to go.

That is, until the recruiter at Grambling called me to his office to review the details of a scholarship his school would offer me.

Grambling State University was the black school in the region that had supplanted Gibsland’s Coleman College. It was the place where my mother had gone to learn to make things like the stuffed dog with the button eyes and to get her teaching certification; where Nathan had gone and met the roommate who looked at me like he was sucking candy; and where my brothers William and Robert, like most Gibsland students, went by default.

Still, I had never considered going to college there. In fact, I was hostile to the idea. It was too close for a boy who needed to run away.

Grambling had its share of smart kids and passionate professors, but with its “Where Everybody Is Somebody” motto and redemption sensibility, it also drew and admitted many otherwise unadmittable students, young people in need of a second chance and a fresh start. Many of them were from rough parts of big cities—refugees from urban warfare and bad schools, in search of a safe place. At Grambling they didn’t have to worry about what color they wore, about whose turf they were on, about catching a stray bullet shot wild and loose from a passing car. They could just breathe—thick, pine-scented air under big empty skies. They could read and learn, party and make friends, grow and become something. “Somebody.”

At our meeting, the recruiter—a white man—gave me the “Your People Need You” talk, which sounded a little odd coming from him. “LSU doesn’t
need
you! Louisiana Tech doesn’t
need
you! Grambling
needs
you!” And, at the time, I still believed that the baby needed me. So, after some deliberation, I submitted and accepted the call. I would go to Grambling and stay close to Gibsland.

I went to college before most other freshmen arrived, enrolling for the summer session that began in June. I declared a double major, in English—because I liked writing—and prelaw—because I figured being a lawyer would be the best route to becoming a politician. I took three classes that summer and got one of the most coveted work-study positions on campus—in the admissions office—because one of the women who worked there had grown up down the street from the House with No Steps. Like everyone else on that street, she even now called me Char’esBaby.

There were a few other students working in the office, including a boy named Al-David, though folks called him Chopper for some reason that I couldn’t figure. He was a golden boy—in both color and concept—whose hair was a surfeit of soft waves and whose eyes were those of a person the world had treated kindly. But there was something about him—in the smile that didn’t quite stretch to its full width or the gaze that stayed locked on you one beat too long—that hinted at a cruel streak.

The admissions office was in Adams Hall, the president’s building. Unbeknownst to me, this was where the cool local kids worked. Outwardly, I was a high-performing hick with a self-possessed manner—an underdog they didn’t mind rooting for. Inside was hiding the boy who dug “treasure” from junkyards, ate dirt, and was shadowed by betrayal.

Often, without being fully aware of it, I withdrew into myself, silence falling over me like the dark on a moonless night. Some folks read that silence as burgeoning conceit. I found this curious. I also realized that their misreading did the same thing to them that Alphonso’s looks had done to folks in elementary school: it caused them to search themselves for flaws because they assumed that’s what I was doing. In this way, a quirk became an armament. I began to pretend that these silent spells were purposeful.

And I began to suffer a common social climber’s delusion: feeling that I was from poverty but not of it, that I had been born out of sorts with my ambitions, that my struggle to correct the imbalance was a righteous pursuit—that I was not moving out of my element, but into it.

Chopper and I spent the days cracking jokes and talking basketball and getting food. He wasn’t just cool, he was smart. Exceedingly smart. Brilliant even. With him I enjoyed the experience of not only matching wits but being outwitted.

All I knew of Chopper outside the admissions office was that he was the older brother of a Grambling High School point guard I’d considered a rival—a boy named Brandon—and that he dated one of the most beautiful girls on campus. And that he was a member of one of the school’s four fraternities—the one everyone called the “Pretty Boys” because they seemed to attract and admit candidates who were boy-band handsome, the ones who dressed well and moved smoothly, the ones girls cooed over. The other fraternities hewed to similarly simplistic stereotypes: rowdy boys, nerdy boys, or country boys.