Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

“Is it always like that?” I ask Pop. I’ve seen horses rearing and mounting each other, seen pigs rutting in the mud, heard wildcats at night shrieking and snarling as they make kittens.

But it scared me to understand them, to hear them. Because Stag did that, too;

the shaggy black neighborhood dog. But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once.

Said his maman and daddy avoided them census takers, never answered their questions right, changed the number of kids they had, never registered none of they births. Said them people came around sniffing out that information to control them, to cage them like livestock.

No one but Kayla looks young. Pop is standing too far out of the light. Mam’s eyes have closed to slits in her chalky face, and Leonie’s teeth look black at the seams. There’s no happiness here.

I don’t look at Pop and see the years bending and creasing him: I see him with white teeth and a straight back and eyes as black and bright as his hair.

With my mama panting in the other room, Marie-Therese took her time, put her hand on my heart, and prayed to the Mothers, to Mami Wata and to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, that I would live long enough to see whatever it was I was meant to see.”

Given said he was going up to the Kill to party with his White teammates, and Pop cautioned him against it: They look at you and see difference, son. Don’t matter what you see. It’s about what they do, Pop had said,

He said: He old—a old head. And I knew what he meant without him having to say more. He would hate that I’m out here with you, that before the night’s through, I’m going to kiss you. Or, in fewer words: He believes in niggers. And I swallowed the fact of his father’s bile and let it pass through me, because the father was not the son, I thought.

“A dollar thirty,” she says, and I have to lean toward her to hear because thunder booms, a great clacking split, and the sky dumps water on the tin roof of the building: a tumble of sound.

There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true.

getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.”

I find a white feather smaller than my pinkie finger, tipped with blue and a slash of black. Something that at first looks like a small chip of white candy, but when I pick it up and hold it close to my face, it’s some kind of animal tooth, lined with black in the chewing grooves, sharp like a canine.

His blond hair sticks to his head, curls into his eyes like worms. “Pow pow,” he says. He is shooting at us.

Her body broke down over the years until she took to her bed, permanently, and I forgot so much of what she taught me. I let her ideas drain from me so that the truth could pool instead. Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.

He’s the whitest White man I’ve ever seen.

“Is the young man sick too?” I already like him better, even though when he looks at me, I see something like sadness in his face, and I don’t know why.

I look out at the fields but I don’t see birds. I squint and for a second I see men bent at the waist, row after row of them, picking at the ground, looking like a great murder of crows landed and chattering and picking for bugs in the ground. One, shorter than the rest, stands and looks straight at me.

and a dark skinny boy with a patchy afro and a long neck is standing on my side of the car, looking at Kayla and then looking at me.

So when I saw a white snake, thick and long as my arm, slither out of the shadows beneath the trees, I knelt before It. You are here, It said. The needles dug into my knees. Do you want to leave? It asked. I shrugged. I can take you away, It said. But you have to want it.

“Sometimes I think it done changed. And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none.” It’s like the cuffs cut all the way down to the bone. “It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

but I look back at Kayla and she has her two middle fingers in her mouth,

“Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone. Ain’t nothing but a field and some woods, but even if the house was still there, it ain’t about that.”

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived . . . it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”

But when I thought about the way Riv admonished Sunshine Woman, how he stepped away from her to protect me, I began to understand love. I began to understand that what Riv and Sunshine Woman did wasn’t an expression of love, but Riv’s standing in the sun for me was.

When I saw Jojo and Kayla in the parking lot, the snake transformed to a bird on my shoulder before flying away on a wave of wind, speeding south on a lonely migration. As Kayla whines in her sleep and Jojo rubs her back to quiet her, a shadow alights and crosses over them. Up in the sky, the scaly bird drifts, shining a dark light.

“No, boy. No,” Given says. I sweep the cemetery rocks from the floor where they’ve fallen, dumping them on the altar to join the rest of it I’ve already gathered. From the bathroom: cotton balls. From the cupboard: cornmeal. From my trip to the liquor store yesterday: rum.

“What did you say?” I can’t speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.

And the branches are full. They are full with ghosts, two or three, all the way up to the top, to the feathered leaves. There are women and men and boys and girls. Some of them near to babies. They crouch, looking at me. Black and brown and the closest near baby, smoke white. None of them reveal their deaths, but I see it in their eyes, their great black eyes. They perch like birds, but look as people.

like she’s trying to soothe Casper, but the ghosts don’t still, don’t rise, don’t ascend and disappear. They stay. So Kayla begins to sing, a song of mismatched, half-garbled words, nothing that I can understand.