We Are Not Like Them(36)

By the time Gigi starts talking again, my jaw has worked itself into a tight knot. “My daddy went to go about cutting Jimmy’s corpse down from the tree, but everyone said it was too dangerous. It was too dangerous for us to stay. I remember the adults sitting around the table. No one knew what to do. Everyone was so scared… and when you’re a kid and adults are scared, well, that’s the worst feeling. No one cared if we went to bed, so we stayed up all night. We packed what we could, left the next morning in two caravans. Early as it is right now, we set out, my father and uncle driving two cars, with all of us cousins and everything we owned that could fit in the back. We drove all the way to Philly without stopping. Aunt Mabel wailed the whole time. That’s what I remember most. And no one could make her stop. No one even tried. Aunt Mabel was never the same. You don’t recover from that. Losing a child. Especially like that. Hand me a tissue, will you?”

I jump to grab her a pack of Kleenex, happy to have something to do. I wish I didn’t know this story. It’s like I’m in sixth grade again. I want to hide my face in my arms on my desk.

“I don’t get it; why didn’t you ever tell us, Gigi?”

“What’s the point? My momma told me we should try to forget about it. The hurt was too much. It was easier to never speak his name again, Jimmy’s name, to block out the pain. Better to seal it off, like a room you stop goin’ into. And the shame. We all felt so much shame. Ain’t that something? We felt bad even though they’s the ones that strung him up and left him to die. And he didn’t rape that girl.”

Gigi dabs at her eyes some more.

“God help him, he loved that girl.”

Y’all need to stay away from those white girls, ya hear? All those times Gigi had said this to Shaun. To her it had been a matter of life and death—someone she loved had died because he loved a white woman. That kind of fear follows you for your entire life. I think of Shaun and Staci, and all the Stacis who came before. Every fiber in my body feels flush with adrenaline, a response to a threat I can’t quite pinpoint, thinking about all the ways my brother and dad are unsafe in this world. But deeper than that, bone-deep, there’s a dark hum, pain like a shadow, the ancestral trauma that lives in me. Meanwhile, Roger Wilcox probably has grandkids of his own walking around somewhere right now. I wonder if they know what their grandfather did, or if they’re oblivious to the fact that the sweet old man they remember for giving them crisp $2 bills for Christmas or for flirting with the nursing-home staff was a ruthless murderer.

“Do you know what happened to them? To Roger Wilcox? To the girl?” They’re probably long dead, and I wonder something else too: How the hell did they live with themselves?

Gigi only shakes her head slowly, full of weariness.

“We don’t know what happened to Jimmy either. I mean, where they put him. When we left, Mabel said she would never set foot in that state again until she died. She wanted to be buried near her son, even if she didn’t know exactly where that was. Uncle Donny too. He died before your time. I’m thinking that’s where I wanna be too.”

“Grandma, it’s not time—”

She cuts me off with a look. A Don’t even try it, so I don’t bother. I can give her that.

“I want to be buried in the family plot too—with them. Y’all make that happen, ya hear? And you bring Grandpa Leroy’s ashes and scatter some around me so he there too. God knows why that man wanted to be cremated. I want to be in the ground, dust to dust, like Jesus. Right where I was born. Sometimes you gotta go home. You promise you’ll take me there.”

“We will. I promise.” My heart is screaming.

“And when you talk to that boy’s momma today, you tell her I’ll take care of him. I’ll see him soon. I’ll take care of her baby. Me and Jimmy. We got him.”

Gigi lies back in bed as if she’s resolved something vital. Or maybe the weight of the story has taken something essential from her, as it did me. I never knew my cousin Jimmy, never even knew of him until five minutes ago, and yet Gigi has been carrying this grief all these years. And Aunt Mabel—to lose a child in that way. How many Mabels have there been? How many Tamaras?

It kills me how some people want so badly to believe racism is buried beneath layers and layers of history, “ancient history,” they say. But it’s not. It’s like an umpire brushing the thinnest layer of dirt off home plate: it’s right there. Only too often the trauma, the toll of it, remains unknown generation after generation. Like how Gigi kept her own awful secret, presumably to protect us from the ugly truth, and I’ve kept my own secrets, haunted by a similar shame.

I assume she’s nodded off, but then Gigi opens her eyes and looks up at the ceiling. “I want the world to be better, baby girl. We gotta do better.”

The washcloth is ice-cold now. I pick it up anyway, wipe the wet streaks from my own cheeks. Gigi’s nodded off again. I lean over and kiss her forehead, cool as silk. I need to leave—I only have about twenty minutes to get to my meeting with Wes—but I stay rooted anyway, listening to Gigi’s steady breathing. When I finally tear myself away and get to the door, I hear my grandmother’s voice behind me. “Tell my Jenny to come see me. Never mind all the troubles. I wanna see my firecracker.”

When I turn around, Gigi is fast asleep. But I heard it. I know I did.