How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(4)
I never questioned your love for me or for the family. I knew you loved us, but I was never sure if you loved yourself. Life has a way of rewinding itself.
You once said to me from your hospital bed that it wasn’t so much the crack as the sex that kept you getting high. My life had not trained my mind to understand or accept your logic. I left the hospital after midnight out of frustration and disappointment at how you did not value your life. I said to you, “If you don’t care about you, why should I?” I walked out of the hospital wondering what I could do to help my brother. God gave me the answer. “Love him,” He said. “Demand greatness of him and give him to me.” I learned another lesson from you that night. Love requires forgiveness, truth, high expectations, and patience.
You taught me something very important that night. You taught me that love without acceptance and understanding isn’t love. I told you the next morning that I would not give you money under any circumstance. If you were hungry, I would feed you. If you were lonely, I would share scriptures and words of encouragement. But I would not cast my pearls to the swine. I would not give you my hard-earned cash to purchase drugs.
You fought your demons, Jimmy, and I’ve fought mine. This young lady called me crying a little past midnight. She wanted me to know about you. She told me that while you were getting high you encouraged her to reclaim her life and her children. She said, “Mr. Jimmy was a good man. He tried to help people. Often people took his kindness as a weakness.” She told me of how you gave her money to buy her children clothes and how you counseled her about the importance of raising her children and setting a good example for them.
I want you to know she took your advice. She is now off crack and her children are living with her. Life is a struggle at times but she is determined to make it. You made a difference in her life. You made a difference in mine.
I was so glad that the last time that we spoke, you told me you didn’t hate white people anymore. For the first time in my life, you seemed to be at peace. Peace with yourself, Mama, the family, and peace with your God.
You didn’t look like the man who had grown old too soon, with the stressors of life written in every wrinkle in your face. You did not look like a man with less than 90 percent lung and heart capacity. Somehow, some way, your youth had returned. Your dignity was restored and you had become the man you wanted to be all your life. You looked like the handsome brother of your youth. Mary commented as we waved goodbye on that Fourth of July, “Do you think Jimmy is about to die?” I did not respond but I knew that life as you knew it had come to its final hours.
One day when I was leaving the VA Hospital, you told me you wanted me to preach at your funeral. I told you that you were crazy and that was one thing that I would never do. Well, you never ever know what love and God makes possible.
On July 12, I stood looking into a casket that belonged to my brother. I stepped from the clothes of being your sister and put on the robes of an ambassador for God. I shared the hope of a man who struggled, won, and lost, who was often too lonely to face life while married to a pipe filled with crack. While cleaning out your home, I found your journal. I read your words and I felt your pain in ways that I will never be able to express. What you could not articulate in life you spoke to us from your journals. You wrote, “I have stolen from my mother, hurt my sisters and I want to stop but I don’t know how.” On another page you wrote, “I don’t know the person I have become. God help me.”
Your heart was good but you forgot to guard it. You killed yourself slowly because of this. The heart is the true measure of a man or woman. I loved you and I know that you knew I loved you. We all have addictions. Some are just more obvious to the eye. We are all dying, but we are all living. The key is to live with as much dignity as you can and never ever bring other people down because you’ve given up on life. Your work is finished but your worth is still being revealed. Your life was not in vain, Jimmy. You made a difference. You helped our mother find the strength and the courage to fight another day and your words inspired her to change her life. I think that is the true measure of our worth and why God put us on the earth. Have we made life better for others by lending a hand, a heart, a word, a song, hope for despair—and always, always shared the gift of love? We may be broken, but God knows how to mend broken hearts and spirits. I have been made better by knowing you, brother, and I thank you for the lessons along the way.
Love always,
Your sister Sue
The Worst of White Folks
WAY BACK IN THE DAY, WHEN TWITTER WAS A bootleg reindeer name, David Rozier invented farting during Mass. A few minutes before we marveled at the six Catholics at Holy Family Catholic School sipping out of one gold goblet, and right after Father Joe suggested we offer each other “a sign of peace,” David tapped me on my shoulder, swung his right arm around his back and farted in his hand. Father Joe rolled his eyes from the pulpit as David proceeded to shake the hands of Ms. Bockman, Ms. Raphael, and all the other sixth-and seventh-graders in our row.
Side by side, David and I looked as different as two Mississippi black boys could look. He reminded me of a shorter version of my cousin Jermaine, who lived up in Chicago. David had the forearms and calves of a wiry point guard, with the teeniest head you’d ever seen in your life. He had bright, curious, clear eyes, a voice that was octaves deeper than you’d expect, and these elephant ears that Angela Williams would pluck on field trips. David wasn’t the flyest dresser in the seventh grade, but he—like our boy Lerthon—came to school fabric-softener fresh with just a whiff of fried eggs and canned biscuits. I, on the other hand, was slightly less husky than the Human Beat Box and smelled like stale sweat and off-brand dishwashing soap.