The land that the community park is built on, I recently learned, is designated to be used as burial sites so the graveyard can expand as we die; one day our graves will swallow up our playground. Where we live becomes where we sleep. Could anything we do make that accretion of graves a little slower? Our waking moments a little longer? The grief we bear, along with all the other burdens of our lives, all our other losses, sinks us, until we find ourselves in a red, sandy grave. In the end, our lives are our deaths. Instinctually C. J. knew this. I have no words.
We Are Watching, 1987–1991
After my father left, we headed to Orange Grove, a neighborhood in Gulfport, Mississippi, a small city a few towns over from DeLisle. Even though Gulfport was within spitting distance of DeLisle, it afforded my mother a certain sense of freedom. She felt smothered in DeLisle, where she knew everyone, and everyone knew her; worse, they were witness to my father’s faithlessness. She thought the women of the community gloried in her misfortune, delighted in the way the dissolution of her family became grist for gossip, and judged her for having four children with a fickle man. Gulfport offered anonymity: especially in the many newer subdivisions in the north of the city that were developed in the spare space between new strip malls and grocery stores, neighbors were transient strangers. I was ten, Joshua was seven, Nerissa was five, and Charine was three when we packed our things, boxes of kitchen utensils, our clothes, a few books, and toys, and moved from the home of our extended family into the new house we would live in with our mother, without our father.
Gulfport was not the wilderness we’d been born to in DeLisle. The suburb was off the main highway running north and south through Gulfport. A big wooden sign at the corner of the neighborhood read BEL-AIR. To the west, and closer to the highway, was one of only two undeveloped areas in that section of the city. It was wooded and bordered by baseball fields, cut with a creek, and there were rough trails through it where families sometimes walked on weekends. My mother never allowed us to walk to that park alone for fear that some deranged person would kidnap us. The other undeveloped tract in the area was directly behind our house, which was on the northern edge of the subdivision. It was a rough rectangle, probably a square mile in size, and bordered on all sides by subdivisions filled with small two- and three-bedroom ranch-style houses built in the seventies, all variations on the same three prototypes.
Our house was chocolate-brown brick. There was an anemic tree in the front yard, and a tall deciduous tree in the back that fluttered purple and gray in the light of the city night sky. The backyard was small and surrounded by a metal chain-link fence, like most of the rest in the neighborhood. The houses were so close together we found shade on hot days by sitting in the grassy spots between them.
Moving into the new house that day felt alien and strange. I would be switching schools, and the community of extended family that I knew in DeLisle felt distant in Gulfport. For the first time, we would be a nuclear family, and we would be a nuclear family without a father. The world seemed new and dangerous; I was an animal seeking shelter away from its burrow.
Both my parents had been raised without fathers in their homes, and neither of them wanted that for their children. But as children and as adults, a two-parent family eluded them. This tradition of men leaving their families here seems systemic, fostered by endemic poverty. Sometimes color seems an accidental factor, but then it doesn’t, especially when one thinks of the forced fracturing of families that the earliest African Americans endured under the yoke of slavery. Like for many of the young Black men in my community across generations, the role of being a father and a husband was difficult for my father to assume. He saw a world of possibility outside the confines of the family, and he could not resist the romance of that. But like many of the young Black women in her generation, my mother understood that she had to forget the meaning of possibility, the tender heat of romance, the lure of the vistas of the world. My mother understood that her vistas were the walls of her home, her children’s bony backs, their open mouths. Like the women in my family before her, my mother knew the family was her burden to bear. She could not leave. So she did what her mother did before her, what her sisters did, what her aunts did: she worked and set about the business of raising her children. She did not know it then, but she would be the sole financial provider for us until we reached adulthood.
My mother didn’t have many options regarding work: she had a high school diploma, but she had to find jobs that would allow her to be home with her children in the afternoon to ensure we did our homework, took baths, went to bed on time, and got back out the door for school in the morning. If she could have done shift work at one of the vanishing factories, she’d have had access to jobs that paid better, but she couldn’t. She had family who would help, but she felt the responsibility of her and my father’s choice to have four children keenly; she wouldn’t foist the burden of raising us on her extended family, and she wouldn’t depend on institutional child care even if she could afford it. She was our mother. So she found jobs that would allow her to raise us. Just before my father left, she worked as a laundress at a hotel in Diamondhead. She carpooled with her cousins to work because she didn’t own a car; my father had taken his car and his motorcycle. Before we moved to Gulfport, my mother saved and bought a blue Caprice from the seventies, so old the paint was matte and closing the doors took both hands. This is how she commuted to work at her next job, which was as a housekeeper for a rich White family who lived in an antebellum house on the beach in Pass Christian.
When I was older, she would tell me stories about how she raised her brothers and sisters. She would tell me her father left her family, too, and that she and my father had promised each other when I was born that they would raise their children with both parents. My grandmother worked hard to support her seven children, so it was my mother, the eldest of seven, who rose early in the morning, woke her siblings before school, and made sure they were dressed. She wrangled her sisters’ hair into precise pigtails, and when they grew older, she disciplined her brothers and sisters like a mother.
When my parents were together, I thought they were both disciplinarians. My father disciplined my brother, while my mother disciplined all of us. When we moved to Gulfport, I realized that my mother had actually been the disciplinarian all along. Before he left, my father posed us in silly pictures while we held his kung fu weapons and wore bandanas with cryptic kanji characters tied around our skulls. He was the one for riding his bike to the elementary school, parking it out front, and wowing our classmates when we climbed on the back to ride home. My mother cooked the meals, cleaned the house, set us to small chores like emptying the litter box when we had a cat, making our beds, cleaning our rooms, and vacuuming. My father brought in the income, and my mother worked low-paying jobs and kept the household together.
When we moved to Gulfport that summer, my mother taught me that I had a new responsibility in the family: I was the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, and I had to do as she had done and help keep the household together. Mama bought home a spool of green plastic cording. She dug a hole at the opposite end of the backyard from the tree and slid a wooden cross into the ground. She unspooled the cord and tied it tightly around one side of the cross, and then stretched the cord across the yard and knotted it where a low branch met the trunk of the lone tree. Then she tied another cord to another low branch, and stretched it across the yard to the other side of the cross. She had hung two clotheslines. She unloaded a fresh basket of clothes from the washing machine, walked through the kitchen, and said, “Mimi, come here.”