The Furrows

by Namwali Serpell

…people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were travelling abroad.

I felt him soften and something inside him came into me then—ssth, ssth, ssth—came into me in little waves. More and more ripples until it was done and my insides felt full up—his body swept clean of him, mine filled to bursting.

No matter what, I thought, I had been brave. And just thinking the word brave made my chest expand. The feeling grew inside me like a giant soap bubble, colors sliding on its surface as it spun. Brave. I think I imagined—laughable now—that there would be comfort and admiration and a kind of awe awaiting me.

I was more twelve years old when I was with her than when I was with anyone else. I got salty. I didn’t know how to impress her. The precocity I’d honed for other adults disappeared into a swell of indignation.

The windows rattled in the storm. Out there, thunder bellowed, clouds churned, lightning clattered, and the sky theatrically wrung itself of rain. I wouldn’t have described it in those words then but that’s how I remember it—the original storm, the only storm of my life, the truest one.

But only now that the woman in uniform had asked me a version of “Where’s Wayne?” did I feel the implication of this question thrill through me: my brother was somewhere to be found.

Here’s the thing: It isn’t just that what has been done can be undone. It’s also that an undoing can reconstitute. Dead matter can gather itself together. The knitting of hair or bramble or sand breathes life into the inanimate. These bunches, these groupings, these tangles of nothing that turn into something—sandcastles, tumbleweed, dustbunnies—have always disgusted me. Why should lifeless particles join like this into discrete forms? What do they want from us? To my mind, they are needy creatures, grotesquely dependent.

His questions were always about the living Wayne, about the years before he died. For a long time, I thought the man was stupid—my little brother had barely lived before he’d died—until I realized that there might have been a method in making Wayne present, or a mercy. Because at home, the world was tilted now and Wayne’s absence in our lives had become the drain toward which everything ran.

when she wasn’t weeping to “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” she would sit and stare at the window and say, “The sky is weeping, too.” I felt I was seeing her truly for the first time—not only the way we all come to see our parents as fallible humans, but also the particularities of her whiteness, the way she seemed to seek expression of her feelings only through black art.

It would take years for these memories to cohere, to take form and take on life, to become things that needed attention.

So, in our family, there was a story, there was this lore, but it split in two where Wayne had left it. It split, then circled around the empty space where he should have been, and joined back together at the point when I walked into the house without him. The lore was a loop at the end of a rope, a lasso endlessly tossed, catching nothing.

I know now that she was beside herself with grief, that she had slipped into some other groove, some other reality. But I felt betrayed. I will be honest with you. I cried more for my mother’s betrayal than I ever cried for my brother’s death. It wasn’t clear if guilt or hope was prompting her theories, her hypotheses, which varied depending on the time of day, on the day of the month, on moods that orbited a moon of her own. Though her inconsistency was precisely her weakness, the fact that she refused my account embittered me.

No matter the details, it ended the same way: “I felt him die. He was dead.” You have to understand: I didn’t want to believe this. My mind, in fact, seemed to refuse it. How many times did I undo it? How many times did I dream, with relief, that my brother was alive, then wake to the crisis of him dead?

He taught me that grief doesn’t choose its timing well: you never know when it’ll grip your neck.

On the verge of her twenties, she’s too smart and not pretty enough. You’re supposed to be pretty if you’re mixed race—some sort of averaging out of the stronger features of each side—but sometimes you just come out looking jumbled. I feel a twinge of pity for her and rehearse a lighthearted greeting, but my irritation soon swamps my fondness.

He’s so attractive, he can assume the kindness of strangers.

Nothing is real anyway. It’s all just electrical signals in the mind. That’s why it feels odd to run into someone you had an unexpected sex dream about. The sharpness of the memory, the remainder of lust, the paranoid need to keep it secret: all just signals, each as strong as your awareness that it never actually happened. Different kinds of desire can seem interchangeable, I think, like how the familiarity of this man feels a bit like the intimacy of having dream-fucked a friend.

“C?” he says. I look into his eyes and the light there twists. And I know. It’s Wayne.

But I was in that spell—too old, not old enough—when it was embarrassing to embrace my love of learning.

thinking of the gaps between people and between memories, how everything we do is a leap across them.

often did this—called myself an Oreo or a halfrican or a mulatta or a lightskinned, just to get it out of the way, to take control over a difference that could be wielded to hurt me. I didn’t feel tortured about it. It was kind of a power move.

I kicked myself later for taking the precaution—a protective measure I use to this day—of saying that someone else had told me the joke. Watching J take pleasure in a joke I’d conjured had been ruined by not being able to claim it as my own.

I didn’t know how to “accept death,” though. I still don’t and I don’t really care to. Death is quite literally unacceptable, unreasonable, unimaginable. Imagining death would presuppose a consciousness that death itself would negate.

It’s like swimming. You stroke and kick to get to the outermost edge of the wave. You feel the momentum: go on go on go on. But always, something tugs you back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless grooves. This is the incomplete, repeated shape of it: sail into the brim of life, sink back into the cave of death, again and again.

I conjure two alternative lives for myself. In one, his comment offends me enough that I tell him to fuck off. In the other, I flirt back until we achieve a delicious camaraderie. Instead, in this life, I smile stiffly and turn away. I always picture these forking paths of transgression but I can never rise to the occasion of slipping into one. My deviance is too buried, too inwardly directed.

Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It’s as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now.

(Her permissiveness had the arbitrary rules of the white middle class: tattoos were cool, piercings trashy; bras were oppressive, miniskirts slutty.)

“Don’t you see?” she shouted. “If he’s still alive, it means you didn’t kill him!”

I wondered if, all this time, my mother had thought that she was the one saving me, not from guilt, but from the blame that she secretly held under her tongue, and that, if uttered, would cast me out completely, put me in a place where she could no longer love me. The world is never what you think it is. It can turn over and expose itself to be the exact opposite.

Watching him now, I was in awe of his unbotheredness. He had left us in the pit of death and gone on to conquer life. He had left behind our terrible itching urgency.

Some kind of justice. I had always thought my father was on my side in the war between me and my mother. He had been fighting another war completely.

To joke about race was to show how above it—how past it—you were. It was to defuse its offense in the name of a humor that nevertheless depended on that offense. And now I had broken the youthful pact, the one that swore that being edgy was better than being earnest. Worse, I had reminded them that I was not in fact one of them.

They formed a chiming chorus of misery and warning: Never fall in love, but if you do, never commit, but if you do, never marry, but if you do, never have a kid, but if you do, have only one, no matter what, you must absolutely never have more than one.

I generally don’t speak to people on planes. I’m the unfriendly woman gazing out the window, the wearer of earplugs, the bearer of novels, willful dozer, spurner of all contact.

He thought that eye-for-an-eye wasn’t a weapon to use against people, it was a scale. He always said, “Not retribution, restitution.” Eventually, eye-for-an-eye became an inside thing, his heart eating itself.

and had a heart so broken it was always leaking love.

So, yeah, I started usin. Mix that with the blood I come into this world with? I was, like, on the brink, all the time. Man, that shit made me feel ready. Amped. Made me feel like a free man—even though I was still in and out the joint all the time, like a gotdamn yo-yo.

That’s how this shit gets you. Haunts you. Everything that ever happened to me started back then, with him. I aint got no reason to lie. Why would I lie? What’s a man like me, in here for life, gain from tellin a story like this? I just don’t want no misunderstandings on me fore I die. Sometimes I feel like I’m already dead. Sometimes I tell myself: You won. You got him. But sometimes I’m like Man, you aint got nobody but yourself.

Sometimes when I’m driving, I think, Did I just die? I’ll change lanes without checking my blind spot and it’s like what if I just…skipped the collision part? What if I died back there but immediately moved into a parallel existence, in the next lane, without even knowing it?”

Time’s got grooves in it. A moment is a needle and time can skip like a record. I mean, listen, he was kinda nuts. He said things like, Time is like the ground, and when something big happens, it’s an earthquake, and when it’s little, it’s ripples, like those rows on a farm.”

and there’s laughter in my chest, but I can’t let it out, its corners are too sharp and my throat’s too tight, already choked with what I thought I knew, and with what I now know that C doesn’t know about what calling the cops would mean for somebody like me, like us.

stare hard at her instead, this black woman who has somehow never learned the cardinal rules of blackness. It’s too late. It was almost over but C’s cuss has flipped a switch and a kind of static swarms in over us now.

Men so weak that I have to break up with myself for them. Sperm on crutches, Grandma Rose would’ve said.

And now death is here—not the death of my brother, not the death of my love for my mother, but the death of her doubt. And now whatever hope that doubt has kept lodged inside me for all these years, lurking, down in the silt, emerges, breaks through, hits the surface, and vanishes. I never even knew it was there.

“It’s incredible, you have to go all the way around, it’s unreasonable, you could slip a groove, we’re on the edge of the world, the blooming and dying, it’s pointless, you love, it’s hard to love, it’s endless, love me, keep me. Where have you been? I’ve never felt this way, don’t let go, don’t go, I love you, I’m in love with you, I’m madly in love with you, I fought the pinch, I hated his tricks, but there’s a kind of hate that has tenderness built into it, I made him stay quiet, I hunted him down, but all this time, I never thought to ask, ‘How are you, little man?’ I never thought to ask, ‘Hey brother, how’ve you been?’ Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, fall on us, and to the hills, cover us, I don’t want to die alone, I love you to death, I will love you till the end of time, but how will we know if it’s the end? What if it happens when we’re not paying attention? What will we do if this is it? God! Incredible, isn’t it? Magnificent, and just think, the bridge is swaying all the time.”