First, Body: Stories

I’d tell her, The blues scare everybody. They make you remember things that didn’t happen to you, make you feel your bones aren’t yours only — they’ve been splintered a thousand times; the blood has poured out of you your whole life; the rabbitman’s skin is your skin and the body you share is on fire. Or it’s simpler than that, and you’re just your own daddy, or your own mama sitting beside him. Then you wish you didn’t have to feel what they feel, and you get your wish, and you’re nobody but your own self, watching.

Every beat I played was a step closer to my uncle’s house, where I listened to my cousins breathe in the bed above me, where I slept on the floor because Daddy was blind in our house, Daddy’s legs were swollen twice their size and stinking, Daddy was cut loose on his own poison and Mama was there, alone, with him — giving him whiskey, washing him, no matter what he said, no matter who he cursed.

My cousins take me to the woods — Lucy and Louise, one older, one younger. They say, Touch me here, and here. They dare me, they giggle. They touch me and make me forget what’s happening across the field, in my house; then they run away and I hear the grasshoppers chirping all around me, buzzing — frantic, invisible — and then, I remember.

But smack, it makes you forget, it makes you not care, just like Rita said. It promises, There’s nothing more you need to know. So I didn’t have to see my father’s never-clean clothes snapping on the line. I didn’t have to remember Mama bent over the washtub in the yard, flesh of her arm quivering like she wanted to wash out evil as well as filth. I didn’t have to go in the truck with Daddy that morning when he said it was time I saw my future. I didn’t have to swing the sledgehammer with my boy’s arms or see the bull’s eyes, mad with disbelief.

But now I remember everything, how I struck the head but too close to the nose, so there was the crack and blood spouting from the mouth but no crumpling, and Daddy said, Hold the place in your mind. I swung a second time, grazed the face, and the bull swelled with his own breath, filling the stall. Three strikes in all before my father grabbed the hammer: one blow, and the animal folded, knees bending, neck sagging, the whole huge beast collapsing on itself.

Then the others came, sawed off head and legs, slit skin from flesh, peeled the animal — strange fruit — and there was blood, a river of it, hot, and there was blood, swirling at my feet. The body opened and there was blood weeping from the walls and the rabbitman ran so fast he ran out of his own skin and the bowels spilled, an endless rope, thick and heavy, full, and the smell, but the men work in the heat of the animal: kidneys, bladder, balls — saved, and the blood spatters them: faces, hands, thighs; they are soaked with it, I am soaked, I will never be clean, and even the ceiling is dripping until at last the carcass is hung on a hook in the cold room full of bodies without legs or heads or hearts.

But I am washed clean and I do forgive my father and my father dies and my grandparents forgive my mother for her bad marriage. I am fifteen. It’s November, still warm in Virginia but not in Boston, which is where we’re going, on the train, with my grandfather, who is kind enough but doesn’t know us, who won’t come inside our house, who’s brought a suitcase full of clothes we have to wear and shoes that hurt our feet. He and Gra

I remember my father crying. It frightened me more than anything, more than the bull, more than the water where I thought I’d drown. And this is all it was: scarecrow on a fence. He must have been going blind even then. He thought it was another one, body tangled in barbed wire. But it was only clothes stuffed with rags, pillowcase head tied off at the neck, straw hat and empty sleeves blowing in hot wind.

In prison I learned that my body itself is the enemy, my skin so black it reflects you. You want to take it from me. I terrify. Even when I am one and you are twenty. Even when I am cuffed and you have clubs. Even when I show you my empty hands and you show me your guns. I alarm you. I do what any animal will do: no matter how many times you strike, I try to stand. I mean to stay alive.

Which is why the girl in the street scared me. I thought, Maybe she’s not a crackhead. Maybe she’s just a woman from the other side, lost in another country, ru

And the old men like me sit in the bars, drinking whiskey, going numb, talking about snatch and getting even all in the same breath, and we sound just like our own pitiful mamas, saying, Judgment Day go