Men We Reaped Read Free Page B

back from his wide, short forehead, his nose wide and prominent, his cheekbones even then like large rocks in his face. He may have been wearing an eye patch. His older cousin shot him in the left eye with a BB gun by accident when he was six, and the eye shriveled in his face and turned gray. It would be some time before it was removed and a false eye put in its place, so my father spent much of his childhood and teenage years wearing a patch. Like all children, they were the children of history and place, of southern Mississippi and Louisiana, both their family lines mixed with African, French, Spanish, and Native ancestry all smoothed to the defining
Black
in the American South, but even though they would have seen that history bearing fruit in each other, they would not have been thinking about that.
    My mother would have been looking at the dead eye in my father’s face, maybe seeing that the dry gray marble made the rest of him all the more terribly beautiful, and my father would have looked at my mother’s small, slender arms and legs and been reminded of a doe. The pines would have reached up and away on both sides of the road, and my parents would not have said hello when they first met eachother. My father would have kicked dirt into the ditch. My mother would have picked up a rock. They knew kids in common, their cousins, and other friends. This was and still is a small town.
    In 1969, when my father was thirteen and my mother eleven, Hurricane Camille hit. It flattened everything, wiped away the landscape with an indomitable hand. I imagine everyone in south Mississippi must have thought the world was at an end. Camille was only one in a staccato succession of tragedies in those days. Southern Mississippi boys, Black and White, died in Vietnam, cities all over the United States imploded in riots, and churches were bombed. Crosses burned. Freedom Riders tried to register folks to vote, and in Mississippi, the rivers and bayous were watery graveyards. Locally, Black men and women were demonstrating on public beaches where they were not allowed to sunbathe and swim. In return, they were being attacked by dogs and policemen. They must have thought the end times had come when Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, bore down on them, killing more than 250 people, drowning a family of thirteen who’d searched out shelter in a Catholic church in Pass Christian. The hobbled authorities put families in tent cities. After my grandmother Celestine’s house was lifted from its foundation and displaced by the storm surge that leveled Pass Christian, my father and his sisters and mother stayed in one such tent city. My grandmother Dorothy’s house was spared, since it sits farther up in DeLisle in a part that we call the Chaneaux, which is distant enough from the DeLisle Bayou to escapethe surge. My mother’s family provided water for the entire town when people learned that there was an artesian spring in their yard.
    After Hurricane Camille hit, the government also offered hurricane survivors the chance to relocate elsewhere. My father’s family was given the option of moving from Pass Christian to Oakland, California, so they left. This same trend of relocating those affected by major hurricanes would occur decades later, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and instead of being given the tools they needed to help rebuild home, families were offered one option: relocation. Escape. My father and his mother and siblings fled from the memory of their house rocking off its foundation while they swam to say alive in the attic. In Oakland, the Black Panthers fed him breakfast before school, and during the summers his family drove to Mississippi for visits. For all of us, the pull home is an inexorable thing. During his Mississippi summers, my father hung out with his cousins and extended family, and sometimes, I’m sure, with my mother.
    My father grew solid and his pectorals