How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(2)
Uncle Jimmy, that warning was you.
On July 4, you threw down your crack pipe, scrubbed yourself clean, and bought my grandma some meat. “This Mama’s meat,” you wrote in loopy black letters on a bloody paper sack. When your sister, my mama, called me in my office at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, she had no idea that the Fourth of July would be the last day she would see you alive.
You joked with your sisters before taking little Tre to get more bottle rockets. Reeking of that familiar mix of sour scalp and Jordan cologne, you probably blinked those huge webbed eyes more than usual and actually asked questions of our family.
As with many of Mama’s stories, you weren’t the star, but you were the precocious, literally paroled man on whom our family’s emotional stability truly rested. There was a terrible clarity in Mama’s voice when she told me the story of July 4. Mama’s voice sounded like this any time you followed a crack binge or a run-in with the police with something graceful like leading a Sunday school session or using your pension to buy that house over off Highway 35.
“You driving my sister crazy now,” Aunt Sue told me, more than twenty years ago, the night I drove my mama into a nervous breakdown. “You heading down that same road as Jimmy.”
I learned that night that the Uncle Jimmy road ran adjacent to the refined, curbed avenues that nearly all sisters, aunts, mamas, and grandmas want their black boys to travel. Aunt Sue and Mama wanted me to know, without a doubt, that whatever consumed you would eventually consume me unless I prayed diligently, obeyed the law, remained clean, and got out of Mississippi by any means necessary. But even as I sprinted away from Mississippi to Ohio, then Indiana, and now New York, if I looked down I could never really distinguish your footprints from my own.
That’s what I felt before July 7.
On July 7, three days after you toted that bag of meat to Grandma’s house, I got a call. Grandma was looking for you. She drove over to your house because you wouldn’t answer the phone. Grandma opened the screen and pounded on your door that evening. She yelled your name over and over again, but you didn’t answer.
You couldn’t.
On July 12, eight days after you brought Grandma her bloody meat, your sisters walked into Mapp Funeral Home and readied your body, the body of Grandma’s first child, and their only brother, for public viewing. My mama made the funeral director change your shirt.
Your sister, Sue, the most mesmerizing preacher in Mississippi, eulogized you in Concord Baptist Church. We were all baptized there. At the core of Sue’s eulogy were three ideas: 1) “Niggers” do not exist. 2) Perfectly sanitized, wholly responsible black people do not exist. 3) You, Jimmy Alexander, were equally wicked and wonderful and had far more in common with us than we wanted to admit.
Aunt Sue made the church know that you lived a life of bad; not bad meaning good, or bad meaning evil, but bad meaning bad at being human. In traditional Old Testament style, she explored justice and recreated in you someone who had prepared himself for death by finally accepting and earning life in the days before your passing. Sue told the church the story of your bringing that meat to Grandma’s house. She told us that you had gotten your finances in order.
“Jimmy wasn’t that different from anyone in this church,” she told us. “No better or no worse. And that’s what we have to accept. He was racing toward death, but he was a part of our family. He was all of our brother.”
While Sue stood in the pulpit teaching us about acceptance of our badness, I realized that you were the only child of Grandma’s who did not become a teacher. If you had taught for a living, you might not have been any physically or emotionally healthier, since we know that occupations are never shields from reckless sex, drug abuse, cowardice, deceptiveness, and desperation. But Grandma would have found far more peace on the day of your funeral if she knew her oldest child, a big-eyed black boy born in the late 1940s, taught somebody somewhere something before he died.
As Grandma’s youngest daughter gave the church words to lean on, your mother, our teacher, the thickest, most present human being either of us has known, folded up at the end of the pew. Grandma cried herself breathless as your bloodless body lay right over the site of your baptism. I held Grandma, though, Uncle Jimmy. I held her just like she would have wanted you to hold her if I were stretched out in that casket.
I needed you, Uncle Jimmy. I needed you the day of your funeral. And when we were both alive, I needed you to be better than you were, but I never loved you enough to tell you. I could have shown you by calling you more, or walking with you down Old Morton Road when I visited during the summer and at Christmas. We could have wondered about the widened roads and the huge dying trees we both imagined fighting off Godzilla and Starscream. We could have joked and tossed ironic jabs back and forth as some nephews and uncles do.
Then, if we really cared, we could have harnessed the courage to knock each other’s hustles.
I could have finally said, “Uncle Jimmy, you drowning yourself with that crack and all that hate. Ain’t nothing really behind your smile, man. I love you and I need you to live.” And you could have told me, “There’s more than one way to drown, nephew. You looking pretty wet yourself. I know I’m under that water. You know where you at?”
But those words were never said. We talked, but we didn’t reckon with each other. Hence, all of our communication created no meaningful reverberation outside our speculations about each other. The last thing you said to me the Christmas before you died was, “No matter how much right you try to do, white folks do everything they can to make a nigga remember they owned us.” There was a silence after that sentence, and I filled that silence with a mechanical nod of my head and a weak, “Yeah. I hear that.”