Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

Before she was more gone than here. Before she started snorting crushed pills. Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.

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.

The dream of her was the glow of a spent fire on a cold night: warm and welcoming. It was the only way I could untether my spirit from myself, let it fly high as a kite in them fields. I had to, or being in jail for them five years woulda made me drop in that dirt and die.

Why y’all give me this name? Given? It don’t make no sense. And Mama squatted down and rubbed his ears, and said: Given because it rhymes with your papa’s name: River. And Given because I was forty when I had you. Your papa was fifty. We thought we couldn’t have no kids, but then you was Given to us. He was three years older than me, and when him and Camo boy went flipping and swinging over the seat, I swung my book bag at Camo and hit him in the back of the head.

Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants.

Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.

Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that 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.”

Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.

“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 you won’t be no ghost, huh, Mam?” I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her.

“Can’t say for sure. But I don’t think so. I think that only happens when the dying’s bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it’s so awful even God can’t bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.”

“That don’t mean I won’t be here, Jojo. I’ll be on the other side of the door. With everybody else that’s gone before. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop’s mama and daddy.”

Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.