Fire Shut Up in My Bones Read Free Page B

folks in Gibsland said Char’esBaby without the
l,
all stretched out like the first notes of a favorite song.
    Everyone took to James that way.
    In fact, when we visited I didn’t get much time with James because everyone else was doting on him. My two oldest brothers seemed to idolize him even though he was younger. William clung to him like a treasured thing once lost but now found. They had been born only nine months apart—Irish twins.
    So in Kiblah I often played alone, which I enjoyed, lining up the menagerie of finger-length ceramic animals my grandmother collected on a bric-a-brac shelf, talking to the animals and pretending they talked back to me. The moment that would slice my life into two parts—before and after—was still several years away, but already I was slipping into the isolation that would prime me for it.
     
    About twice a year we’d visit my mother’s father, Grandpa Bill, in Houston. He was a handsome, gregarious man—showy but genial—with a broad, toothy smile that forever pinched a half-smoked cigar.
    Grandpa Bill was Big Mama’s first husband. They had married on Valentine’s Day in 1942, a month and a half after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Big Mama got pregnant with my mother right away, but before she was born Grandpa Bill joined the army, serving in the 92nd Infantry Division, the so-called Buffalo Soldiers. His division was eventually whisked off to Italy, becoming the only all-black division to see combat on the ground in Europe. Grandpa Bill never spoke of his service, but
Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II
recounts Grandpa Bill’s valor:
     
On 16 November, while proceeding towards the front at night, Sergeant Rhodes’s motorized patrol was advanced upon near a village by a lone enemy soldier. Sergeant Rhodes jumped from the truck and as a group of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared, intent upon capturing the truck and patrol intact, he opened fire from his exposed position on the road. His fire forced the enemy to scatter while the patrol dismounted and took cover with light casualties. Sergeant Rhodes then moved toward a nearby building where, still exposed, his fire on the enemy was responsible for the successful evacuation of the wounded patrol members by newly arrived medical personnel. Sergeant Rhodes was then hit by enemy shell fragments, but in spite of his wounds he exhausted his own supply of ammunition then obtaining an enemy automatic weapon, exhausted its supply inflicting three certain casualties on the enemy. He spent the rest of the night in a nearby field and returned, unaided, to his unit the next afternoon.
     
    Rhodes was Grandpa Bill’s family name.
    He was the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. That recommendation was declined, like all the recommendations for the Buffalo Soldiers. But his bravery and his injury did earn him a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, an honorable discharge, and a lifelong limp.
    When he came home from the war, he and Big Mama made a go of it for a while, first in Louisiana, then in Houston. But after they broke up and got a divorce, Grandpa Bill stayed on in Houston. He married a strikingly beautiful woman only a few years older than my mother who was a bit rough around the edges. They had two daughters, about the ages of my oldest brothers, daughters that my mother could never quite bring herself to call her sisters.
    When I was growing up, Grandpa Bill’s family lived in a small brick house on a cul-de-sac in a working-class neighborhood in northeast Houston. A large black velvet painting of a curvaceous woman, kneeling with her hands in her hair, breasts exposed, nipples erect, hung in their living room. It looked to me like a painting of Grandpa Bill’s young wife, but I dared not ask.
    The entire house seemed to be charged with eroticism and wantonness. Grandpa Bill and his pretty young bride openly gambled and drank.