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 animaclass="underline" 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.