Years after Ronald’s death, I learned that his girlfriend did love him, although the night of his death she was too frustrated with him to say so. She was a curvy pale girl with brownish blond hair and light eyes. She’d been adopted and lived out in DeLisle north of the interstate. They’d gotten into a bad fight during the weeks before he died, and she’d felt threatened; at the time he died, she was attempting to distance herself from him. She was trying to avoid his phone calls, and when she did pick up the phone and talk to him, the conversation was strained.
“He called me,” she said. Charine and I were in her car in our mother’s driveway. Her car was green, and so wide across that all of us were sitting in the front seat. We were high. Charine nodded and I stared at the numbers on the digital clock, which were neon blue. It was 3:00 A.M.
“He told me he loved me.”
The numbers glowed so brightly they seemed fuzzy at the edges.
“He said it right before he got off the phone. He said: ‘I love you.’”
The minute changed.
“And I didn’t say it back to him. I didn’t. I was mad at him.”
I bumped Charine’s arm with mine, just so I could feel her next to me.
“But I did love him.”
Charine chewed her gum, looked down at our arms.
“I did.”
Later that night, after she’d left and Charine and I had gone inside to escape the sunrise, Charine told me she often had this conversation with his girlfriend. She said the first time his girlfriend had told the story about what happened before his death, the story about their last conversation, she’d cried. She sobbed at the end of that story, her voice breaking. But I did love him, Charine, she’d said. I did love him. I did I did I did I did. She’d said it over and over again, as if Charine doubted her, as if Charine were someone she had to convince, when Charine knew all too well the regret that comes with a lover’s death, the regret that says: You failed him.
We all think we could have done something to save them. Something to pull them from death’s maw, to have said: I love you. You are mine. We dream of speaking when we lack the gift of oratory, when we lack the vision to see the stage, the lights, the audience, the endless rigging and ropes and set pieces behind us, manipulated by many hands. Ronald saw it all, and it buried him.
We Are Learning, 1991–1995
I prayed. At night, as the house clicked and ticked around us, I prayed that we would move back to DeLisle. I didn’t want to be afraid to go outside, to be afraid of Thomas, who lurked, to fear what he would see in me and call me, to dread the hole in the woods. My mother heard me. After living in the seedy subdivision where every year the houses seemed smaller and shabbier, crumbling at the corners, ringed by weeds, we left Gulfport. After my mother cleared her narrow bit of land in DeLisle, she set a single-wide trailer on it. The property was on the top of a hill, surrounded on three sides by pines dense with undergrowth, and when we walked out of the front door, we only saw one neighbor’s house. My mother aligned the trailer lengthwise on the property, which meant the left side of the trailer sat atop the hill, on the ground, and the right side of the trailer was elevated, supported on cement bricks, leaving enough room to drag chairs under and sit between the cement pillars. In the evening, little lean brown rabbits fed on the patchy grass that announced the interruption of the yard from the surrounding woods. In the evening, bats fluttered through the narrow gap in the trees above our heads, feeding on the mosquitoes that swarmed there, mosquitoes that bred in a hidden, shallow pond, dry during the winter, tucked away in the pine woods to the near west of our house. We were home, in our community again.
When we moved to DeLisle, my father moved to New Orleans. He thought there would be more job opportunities there, and he wanted to live closer to his brothers. After leaving us in Gulfport, my father lived with his teenage love, then moved out and lived in one small, dark apartment after another, of which there were plenty along the coast, sometimes with roommates, sometimes without. He stopped paying his child support and moved from job to job so quickly there was no way for the authorities to garnish his wages. In New Orleans, he lived in the small yellow ghost-haunted house with barred windows, where the wind echoed through the industrial yard behind it at night, bidding the metal to speak. Then he moved to a small two-story apartment complex with only six one- or two-bedroom apartments. The rent was cheaper there. The building was gray wood and red brick, and my father’s oldest brother, Dwight, lived on the first floor. We would spend our weekend and summer visits there when I was in high school.
I’d been the only Black girl in the private Episcopalian elementary school during my sixth-grade year, and on my first day at the corresponding high school, I learned that this would be the case for high school, too. What I didn’t know is that I would remain the only Black girl in the school for five years: in my senior year, another Black girl enrolled, but we never spoke. The one other Black kid in the school when I was a seventh grader was a senior, and he acknowledged me sometimes with a nod, but most often ignored me. He was comfortable with the boys in the school, would hang out with them in the hallways looking like a clone of them: polo shirts, khaki shorts, slide-on boat shoes. I heard rumors that they snuck him into the local yacht club to sail with them, because he was unofficially not allowed because he was half Black, which meant that according to the yacht club he was Black. Today, I understand class also complicated my developing a relationship with either of them: both of these Black students came from two-parent, solidly upper-middle- or middle-class families. They lived in exclusive neighborhoods with pools and gyms and golf clubs and yearly homeowners’ association fees, and that culture was totally alien to my own, one of government assistance and poverty and broken homes. We had nothing to talk about. Most of the other Black boys who enrolled in the school later, when I was in ninth grade and until I graduated, were basketball recruits. They all came from backgrounds that were closer to mine, and our relationships were easier. I joked with them in the hallways between classes whenever I had the chance, and during those years those moments of camaraderie gave me some respite, some illusion of community. But it was an illusion: because of my distaste for team sports and my love of books, I was still an outsider. I had friends, friends who were outsiders like me in different ways: kids that were artists or writers or loved pottery or punk music or theater, but they were never my color. Overall, there were never more than eight Black students in the school at one time. During my time there, there were only three other students of color: there was one Chinese American girl, and later two Hispanic students, all three of whom came from moneyed families. At its largest, the high school contained no more than 180 students, and at its smallest, no fewer than 100.
Most of the students who attended the school were middle- to upper-class. Even though the school was flush with moneyed students, this was not reflected in the buildings. While the private elementary Episcopalian school I’d attended as a scholarship student in sixth grade was in a building much like the public schools I attended, redbrick with open airy rooms, the corresponding Episcopalian high school was nothing like this. Before 1969, the board of directors had purchased a mansion on the beach in Pass Christian to house the school, but Hurricane Camille hit and swept away the building. So the board built a big warehouse further north in Pass Christian, divided it into classrooms using thin walls and partitions, installed lockers in the hallways, and eventually built another, taller warehouse behind the school with spray-on yellow insulation that resembled dried snot. It was disconcerting to walk into the building, as industrial as it looked from the outside, and see all the students, who bore all the hallmarks of wealth and good health: braces, shiny thick hair, tans, and collared shirts. Some of the students were so rich they drove luxury cars especially tailored to their whims: Lexuses and BMWs outfitted for racing. Some of them slept on plantation-era beds that required small ladders to ascend at night. None of them lived in trailers. And throughout my school years, my mother cleaned for them. Sometimes she brought home huge garbage bags of their hand-me-down clothes after cleaning their houses. Joshua, Nerissa, and Charine refused their castoffs. I sifted through them, picking out what would fit, what I thought was reasonably fashionable, and prayed that when I wore it to school, whoever had owned it first would not see me in it. I assembled a ragtag wardrobe gleaned from my schoolmates in the hope that when worn together, my clothes would function as a camouflage, would allow me to be one of the group. I joined their religious youth groups too, became adept in the lexicon of organized religion, all in the hopes of being considered a little less of a perpetual other. But for some students, I could not escape our differences.