Sing, Unburied, Sing

by Jesmyn Ward

The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. —from One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty

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.

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.

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.”

“Everything got power.”

“Said there’s spirit in everything. In the trees, in the moon, in the sun, in the animals.

But you need all of them, all of that spirit in everything, to have balance. So the crops will grow, the animals breed and get fat for food.”

“You need a balance of spirit. A body, he told me, is the same way.”

No waste. Waste rots. Too much either way breaks the balance.”

Everybody got a line—something to break them, he said.

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

This the kind of world, Mama told me when I got my period when I was twelve, that makes fools of the living and saints of them once they dead. And devils them throughout.

and that she was holding me like the goddess, her arms all the life-giving waters of the world.

and that gun, black as rot, as pregnant with dread.

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”

“Home ain’t always about a place.

“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.”

Like he’s sorry for me, for what I got to learn.

“Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”

“Let me leave with something of myself. Please.”

now I feel it: her chest packed tight with wood and charcoal, drenched in lighter fluid, empty no longer—the pain the great blaze, immolating all.

I can’t speak. Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.