When a Person Goes Missing (Excerpt)

When my brother was a teenager and I was in grade school, he let some bullying kids from his high school convince him to skip the day and invited them over to our house. The boys refused to leave after being asked, so my brother grabbed our father’s shotgun and corralled them into the bathroom, the barrel pointed in the boys’ direction. The bathroom door now locked, my brother held the rifle, luckily, up toward the ceiling so that when his finger slipped and the mechanism went off, the bullet, with its massive force, went through the second-floor ceiling, the attic, and then out the roof of the house into the sky. How the rest of the family received the details of the incident, I can’t recall. But to travel home now is to walk beneath the hole in the ceiling stuffed with newspaper from 1978. To return is also to encounter the past lurking behind me, contorting its face so I can really feel it—its truncated force, whispering a ghost voice into my ear.

If I believed in omens, I’d say the shotgun incident was the worst of omens, literary in its foreshadowing. We can smell a hint of devastation, can’t we, a scent you can’t quite recognize upon first whiff, but you turn your nose away knowingly. Where will our characters end up? Our armed protagonist? The girl who tells the story? When I began working on this essay I wanted it to be about fate—how two black kids raised by the same working class parents could have radically different life outcomes because, as fate would have it, divergent occurrences compelled divergent paths. Bruce never went back to the high school with the bullying boys. He dropped out. It’s around this time when my parents get a call in the middle of the night that Bruce is in custody at the local precinct for being caught in a stolen car. It’s the 1970s and no charges are pressed. Boys being boys. That night, my father beats my brother mercilessly with a washing machine hose in the dank basement of our house. The chaos of a violence like that is astonishing. The cacophonous screaming. The inability for anyone to stop it. The cold pallor that hangs in the air afterward. A chasm emerged between us—me, floating off like some wandering balloon; my brother tethered tightly to a familiar story of trouble and poverty, like most of the kids in our neighborhood.

The question of fate was a fake question. It was a refusal to see how the good daughter is a part of the problem. As a kid, I was the exception, the one who would make it out of the ghetto, the one bussed out of town for school. I liked being the exception. I loved the ways people’s eyes would glimmer when I told them any little thing about my life, or when I, simply said anything aloud. “So well-spoken,” the middle class blacks would say. I basked, annoyingly, in their glow. I didn’t mind either when my brother failed because his failure meant my light shone even brighter. When Bruce is 17, already dropped out of high school, and I am 11, I’m allowed to go on ski vacations with the white families whose children I go to school with. I cannot ski, but they are patient. I don’t notice that I’m the only black face on the Vermont slopes. On the first trip, I’ve brought with me my beloved copy of Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, not that I could understand much of it. I loved it anyway, however, for its mysteriousness, and for how its “I” stands so solidly in the wilderness.

What Money Can’t Buy (Excerpt) 

If, in William Penn’s words, ‘America was a good poor Man’s country’ and remained the dream of a promised land for Europe’s impoverished up to the beginning of the twentieth century, it is no less true that this goodness depended to a considerable degree on black misery. —Hannah Arendt.

On a steamy August day, I return to the city of my birth—Hartford, CT—to take my two youngest nieces on a back-to-school shopping trip they haven’t asked for. Both their parents—my brother and his ex-wife—are undereducated and poor, and my youngest niece, Taj, who’s 12, lives with my brother who lives in my mother’s house. My mother told me that she was kicked out of her own mother’s house for threatening to hit her mother. I’m not sure what the truth is about that. It occurred to me, however, given money problems and her displacement, that no one would buy her new underwear and bras and $100 sneakers, and I wanted her to feel like a normal kid, one in that space between excitement and anxiety about the new school year.  For fairness’s sake, I take her slightly older sister, Nara, too, who does not live at my mother’s house. I’m nervous about the whole thing never having taken kids shopping for anything ever. And, I’ve never spent hours of alone time with my nieces. I’ve witnessed their conflict and treachery when my nieces all visit my brother on weekends and holidays—there are four of them total—and the chaos of yelling and fighting that ensures between the girls and the adults trying to control them. Beyond that, my nervousness is about the fact that I will have to visit my mother’s house, the place I escaped from at 18 and rarely looked back.

Also, I’m trying to wrangle something unwrangleable. I’m channeling my savoir complex toward this one kid, the youngest one, in an effort to give her a boost so that she might be able to catapult herself up and out, and toward some bright future. I’m not optimistic. She cannot see that future from inside of the house where she’s been cocooned all summer. She’s been sitting in front of the old fashioned no-cable TV set in my mother’s living room. Her eyesight is bad, so she sits up close to not squint. My friends’ children all have soccer, overnight camp, days of frolicking in the ocean, drawing classes, trips abroad, movie outings, trips to the aquarium or natural history museum, friend sleepovers and the like. Taj, though, has no one to pay for, enroll her, or take her to any activity outside the house. My mother, now 86, would have been that person a few years ago, but her arthritis and other inexplicable pain has made her crippled and feeble so it’s difficult for her to walk more than a few paces. My brother works most of the time as a motel janitor, but even when he’s not working, his inclination is not to parent in the ways of outside exposure. His way is smallness and enclosure. He doesn’t want Taj to explore the neighborhood on her bicycle. He won’t let her walk the 6 blocks to school alone. Up until a few weeks ago, she slept on a cot in his bedroom instead of inhabiting the empty bedroom next door, which used to be mine. And, my mother’s way is shame and religion. She believes that girls must be modest as to not invite male attention, and that God will take care of things beyond our control.