Where the Line Bleeds

by Jesmyn Ward

Genres: African American; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A stunning debut novel from Jesmyn Ward, Where the Line Bleeds is a rich tale of twins raised by their grandmother in a stiflingly poor rural community on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Upon graduating from high school, growing tensions between brothers Joshua and Christophe test their loyalties—and a violent altercation forever changes their lives.

Release date: January 16, 2018

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 256

Sample

Where the Line Bleeds

1

IN THE CAR, JOSHUA PLUCKED a Waterlogged Twig, Limp as a Shoe-string, from Christophe’s wet hair. Dunny drove slowly on the pebbled gray asphalt back roads to Bois Sauvage, encountering a house, a trailer, another car once every mile in the wilderness of woods, red dirt ditches, and stretches of swampy undergrowth. Joshua watched Dunny blow smoke from his mouth and attempt to pass the blunt he’d rolled on the river beach to Christophe. Christophe shook his head no. Shrugging and sucking on the blunt, Dunny turned the music up so Pastor Troy’s voice rasped from the speakers, calling God and the Devil, conjuring angels and demons, and blasting them out. Christophe had taken off his shirt and lumped it into a wet ball in his lap. His bare feet, like Joshua’s, were caked with sand.

Joshua stretched across the backseat, shirtless also, and tossed the twig on the carpet. He lay with his cheek on the upholstery of the door, his head halfway out the window. Joshua loved the country; he loved the undulating land they moved through, the trees that overhung the back roads to create green tunnels that fractured sunlight. He and Christophe had played basketball through junior high and high school, and after traveling on basketball trips to Jackson, to Hattiesburg, to Greenwood, and to New Orleans for tournaments, he knew that most of the south looked like this: pines and dirt interrupted by small towns. He knew that there shouldn’t be anything special about Bois Sauvage, but there was: he knew every copse of trees, every stray dog, every bend of every half-paved road, every uneven plane of each warped, dilapidated house, every hidden swimming hole. While the other towns of the coast shared boundaries and melted into each other so that he could only tell he was leaving one and arriving in the other by some landmark, like a Circle K or a Catholic church, Bois Sauvage dug in small on the back of the bay, isolated. Natural boundaries surrounded it on three sides. To the south, east, and west, a bayou bordered it, the same bayou that the Wolf River emptied into before it pooled into the Bay of Angels and then out to the Gulf of Mexico. There were only two roads that crossed the bayou and led out of Bois Sauvage to St. Catherine, the next town over. To the north, the interstate capped the small town like a ruler, beyond which a thick bristle of pine forest stretched off and away into the horizon. It was beautiful.

Joshua could understand why Ma-mee’s and Papa’s families had migrated here from New Orleans, had struggled to domesticate the low-lying, sandy earth that reeked of rotten eggs in a dry summer and washed away easily in a wet one. Land had been cheaper along the Mississippi gulf, and black Creoles had spread along the coastline. They’d bargained in broken English and French to buy tens of acres of land. Still, they and their poor white neighbors were dependent on the rich for their livelihood, just as they had been in New Orleans: they built weekend mansions along the beach for wealthy New Orleans expatriates, cleaned them, did their yard work, and fished, shrimped, and harvested oysters. Yet here, they had space and earth.

They developed their own small, self-contained communities: they intermarried with others like themselves, raised small, uneven houses from the red mud. They planted and harvested small crops. They kept horses and chickens and pigs. They built tiny stills in the wood behind their houses that were renowned for the clarity of the liquor, the strong oily consistency of it, the way it bore a hole down the throat raw. They parceled out their acres to their children, to their passels of seven and twelve. They taught their children to shoot and to drive young, and sent them to one-room schoolhouses that only advanced to the seventh grade. Their children built small, uneven houses, married at seventeen and fourteen, and started families. They called Bois Sauvage God’s country.

Their children’s children grew, the government desegregated the schools, and they sent them to the public schools in St. Catherine to sit for the first time next to white people. Their children’s children could walk along the beaches, could walk through the park in St. Catherine without the caretakers chasing them away, hollering nigger. Their children’s children graduated from high school and got jobs at the docks, at convenience stores, at restaurants, as maids and carpenters and landscapers like their mothers and fathers, and they stayed. Like the oyster shell foundation upon which the county workers packed sand to pave the roads, the communities of Bois Sauvage, both black and white, embedded themselves in the red clay and remained. Every time Joshua returned from a school trip and the bus crossed the bayou or took the exit for Bois Sauvage from the highway, he felt that he could breathe again. Even seeing the small, green metal exit sign made something ease in his chest. Joshua rubbed his feet together and the sand slid away from his skin in small, wet clumps that reminded him of lukewarm grits.

When Joshua and Christophe talked about what they wanted to do with their lives, it never included leaving Bois Sauvage, even though they could have joined their mother, Cille, who lived in Atlanta. She sent Ma-mee money by Western Union once a month to help with groceries and clothing. Cille had still been living with Ma-mee when she had the twins, and when she decided to go to Atlanta to make something of herself when the boys were five, she left them. She told Ma-mee she was tired of accompanying her on jobs, of cleaning messes she didn’t make, of dusting the undersides of tabletops, of mopping wooden living room floors that stretched the entire length of Ma-mee’s house, of feeling invisible when she was in the same room with women who always smelled of refined roses. She told Ma-mee she’d send for the twins once she found an apartment and a job, but she didn’t. Ma-mee said that one day after Cille had been gone for eleven months, she stood in the doorway of their room and watched them sleep in their twin beds. She gazed at their curly, rough red-brown hair, their small bunched limbs, their skin the color of amber, and she decided to never ask Cille if she was ready to take them again. That was the summer their hair had turned deep red, the same color as Cille’s, before it turned to brown, like a flame fading to ash, Ma-mee said.

Three weeks after that morning, Cille visited. She didn’t broach the subject of them coming back to Atlanta with her. She and Ma-mee had sat on the porch, and Ma-mee told her to send $200 a month: the boys would remain in Bois Sauvage, with her. Cille had assented as the sound of the twins chasing Ma-mee’s chickens, whooping and squealing, drifted onto the screened porch from the yard. Ma-mee said it was common to apportion the raising of children to different family members in Bois Sauvage. It was the rule when she was a little girl; in the 1940s, medicine and food had been scarce, and it was normal for those with eleven or twelve children to give one or two away to childless couples, and even more normal for children to be shuffled around within the family, she said. Joshua knew plenty of people at school who had been raised by grandparents or an aunt or a cousin. Even so, he wished he hadn’t been torturing the chickens; he wished that he’d been able to see them talking, to see Cille’s face, to see if it hurt her to leave them.

Now Cille was working as a manager at a beauty supply store. She had green eyes she’d inherited from Papa and long, kinky hair, and Joshua didn’t know how he felt about her. He thought he had the kind of feelings for her that he had for her sisters, his aunts, but sometimes he thought he loved her most, and other times not at all. When she visited them twice a year, she went out to nightclubs and restaurants, and shopped with her friends. Joshua and Christophe talked about it, and Joshua thought they shared a distanced affection for her, but he wasn’t sure. Christophe never stayed on the phone with Cille longer than five minutes, while Joshua would drag the conversation out, ask her questions until she would beg off the phone.

But once when she’d come home during the summer of their sophomore year, a kid named Rook from St. Catherine’s had said something dirty about her at the basketball court down at the park while they were playing a game, something about how fine her ass was. Christophe had told Joshua later the particulars of what Rook had said, how the words had come out of Rook’s mouth all breathy and hot because he was panting, and to Christophe, it had sounded so dirty. Joshua hadn’t heard it because he was under the net, digging his elbow into Dunny’s ribs, because he was the bigger man of the two. Christophe was at the edge of the court with the ball, trying to shake Rook, because he was smaller and faster, when Rook said it. Christophe had turned red in the face, pushed Rook away, brought the ball up, and with the sudden violence of a piston had fired the ball straight at Rook’s face. It hit him squarely in the nose. There was blood everywhere and Christophe was yelling and calling Rook a bitch and Rook had his hand under his eyes and there was blood seeping through the cracks of his fingers, and Dunny was running to stand between them and laughing, telling Rook if he wouldn’t have said shit about his aunt Cille, then maybe he wouldn’t have gotten fucked up. Joshua was surprised because he felt his face burn and his hands twitch into fists and he realized he wanted to whip the shit out of dark little Rook, Rook with the nose that all the girls liked because it was fine and sharp as a crow’s beak but that now was swollen fat and gorged with blood. Even now Joshua swallowed at the thought, and realized he was digging his fingers into his sides. Rook, little bitch.

Joshua felt the wind flatten his eyelids and wondered if Cille would be at the school. He knew she knew they were graduating: he’d addressed the graduation invitations himself, and hers was the first he’d done. He thought of her last visit. She’d come down for a week at Christmas, had given him and Christophe money and two gold rope chains. He and Christophe had drunk moonshine and ate fried turkey with the uncles on Christmas night in Uncle Paul’s yard, and he’d listened as his uncles talked about Cille as she left the house after midnight. She’d sparkled in the dark when the light caught her jewelry and lit it like a cool, clean metal chain.

“Where you going, girl?” Uncle Paul had yelled at her outline.

“None of your damn business!” she’d yelled back.

“That’s Cille,” Paul had said. “Never could stay still.”

“That’s ’cause she spoiled,” Uncle Julian, short and dark with baby-fine black hair, had said over the mouth of his bottle. “She the baby girl: Papa’s favorite. Plus, she look just like Mama.”

“Stop hogging the bottle, Jule,” Uncle Paul had said.

Joshua and Christophe had come in later that night to find Cille back in the house. She was asleep at the kitchen table with her head on her arms, breathing softly into the tablecloth. When they carried her to bed, she smelled sweetly, of alcohol and perfume. The last Joshua remembered seeing of her was on New Year’s morning; she’d been bleary and puffy eyed from driving an hour and a half to New Orleans the night before and partying on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. He and Christophe had walked into the kitchen in the same clothes from the previous day, fresh from the party up on the Hill at Remy’s house that had ended when the sun rose, to see Cille eating greens and corn bread and black-eyed peas with Ma-mee. Ma-mee had wished them a Happy New Year and told them they stank and needed to take a bath. They had stopped to kiss and hug her, and after he embraced Ma-mee, Joshua had moved to hug Cille. She stopped him with a raised arm, and spoke words he could still hear.

“What a way to start off the New Year.”

He had known she was talking about his smell, his hangover, his dirt. He had given her a small, thin smile and backed away. Christophe left the room without trying to hug her, and Joshua followed. After they both took showers, Cille came to their room and embraced them both. Joshua had followed her back to the kitchen, wistfully, and saw her hand a small bank envelope filled with money to Ma-mee. She left. Joshua thought that on average now, she talked to them less and gave them more.

He couldn’t help it, but a small part of him wished she would be there when they got home, that she had come in late last night while he and Christophe were out celebrating with Dunny at a pre-graduation party in the middle of a field up further in the country in a smattering of cars and music under the full stars. Wrapped in the somnolent thump of the bass, Joshua closed his eyes, the sun through the leaves of the trees hot on his face, and fell asleep. When he woke up, they were pulling into the yard, Dunny was turning down the music, and there was no rental car in the dirt driveway of the small gray house surrounded by azalea bushes and old reaching oaks. Something dropped in his chest, and he decided not to think about it.

Ma-mee heard the car pull into the yard: a loud, rough motor and the whine of an old steel body. Rap music: muffled men yelling and thumping bass. That was Dunny’s car. The twins were home, and judging by the warmth of the air on her skin that made her housedress stick, the rising drone of the crickets, and the absence of what little traffic there was along the road in front of her house, they were late. She’d pressed their gowns and hung them with wire hangers over the front door. She thought to fuss, but didn’t. They were boys, and they were grown; they took her to her doctor’s appointments, cooked for her, spoke to her with respect. They kept her company sometimes in the evenings, and over the wooing of the cicadas coming through the open windows in the summer or the buzzing of the electric space heater in the winter in the living room, described the action on TV shows for her: Oprah and reruns of The Cosby Show and nature shows about crocodiles and snakes, which she loved. They called her ma’am, like they were children still, and never talked back. They were good boys.

The front screen door squealed open and she heard them walk across the porch. She heard Dunny step heavily behind them and the sound of wet jeans pant legs rubbing together. The twins’ light tread advanced from the front porch and through the door. The smell of outside: sun-baked skin and sweat and freshwater and the juice of green growing things bloomed in her nose. From her recliner seat, she saw their shadows dimly against the walls she’d had them paint blue, after she found out she was blind: the old whitewash that had coated the walls and the low, white ceiling had made her feel like she was lost in an indefinite space. She liked the idea of the blue mirroring the air outside, and the white ceiling like the clouds. When she walked down the narrow, dim hallway, she’d run her fingers over the pine paneling there and imagined she was in her own private grove of young pines, as most of Bois Sauvage had been when she was younger. She’d breathe in the hot piney smell and imagine herself slim-hipped and fierce, before she’d married and born her children, before she started cleaning for rich white folks, when she filled as many sacks as her brothers did with sweet potatoes, melons, and corn. She spoke over the tiny sound of the old radio in the window of the kitchen that was playing midday blues: Clarence Carter.

“Y’all been swimming, huh?”

Christophe bent to kiss her.

“And drinking, huh? You smell like a still.”

Joshua laughed and brushed her other cheek.

“You, too!” She swatted him with her hand. “Y’all stink like all outside! We going to be late. Go take a shower. Laila came over here to braid y’all’s hair, but left ’cause y’all wasn’t here, your uncle Paul coming in an hour to take us to the ceremony, and y’all know y’all worse than women—take forever to take a bath. Go on!” Under the smell of the worn sofa upholstery, mothballs, pine sol, and potpourri, she smelled something harsh and heavy. Something that caressed the back of her throat. “That Dunny on the porch smoking?”

“Hey, Grandma Ma-mee,” Dunny said.

“Don’t ‘hey Grandma Ma-mee’ me. You dressed for the service?”

“I ain’t going.” His voice echoed from the porch. The sweet, warm smell of his cigarillo grew stronger.

“Yeah, right, you ain’t going. You better get off my porch smoking . . .”

“Aaaw, Ma-mee.”

“And take your ass down the street and get cleaned up. You going to watch my boys graduate. And tell your mama that I told Marianne and Lilly and them to be over at her house at around six for the cookout, so I hope she got everything ready.” His feet hit the grass with a wet crunch. “And don’t you throw that butt in my yard. Them boys’ll have to clean it up.”

“Yes, Ma-mee.”

“Hurry up, Dunny.”

“Yes, Ma-mee.”

From a bedroom deep in the house, she heard Joshua laughing, high and full, more soprano for a boy than she expected, and as usual, it reminded her vaguely of the cartoon with the singing chipmunks in it. It made her smile.

“I don’t know what you laughing for,” she yelled.

Joshua’s laugh was joined by his brother’s muffled guffawing from the shower. One couldn’t laugh without the other. She pulled her dress away from her front so as to cool some of the sweat there: she wanted to be fresh and cool for the service. She’d bought a dress from Sears for Cille’s graduation; where this one was shapeless, the other had fit tighter, and had itched. It was polyester. Ma-mee had given Cille a bougainvillea flower to wear. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back into the sofa cushion, and she could see Cille at eighteen, her skin lovely and glowing as a ripe scopanine as she walked to collect her diploma. She had just fallen in love with the twins’ father then, and it showed. Cille bore the twins two years later, and by then her face had changed; it looked as if it had been glazed with a hard candy.

Joshua replied; it sounded as if he was speaking through clothing. Probably pulling a shirt over his head, she thought.

“Yes, Ma-mee.”

In the shower, Christophe soaped the rag, stood with the slimy, shimmering cloth in his hand, and let the water, so cold it made his nipples pebble, hit him across the face. In the bottom of the tub, he saw sand, tiny brown grains, traced in thin rivulets on the porcelain. He washed his stomach first, as he had done since he was small: it was the way Ma-mee had taught him when they’d first started bathing themselves when they were seven. That was when she had first learned that she had diabetes.

It wasn’t until Christophe was fifteen that her vision really started going: that he noticed that she was reaching for pots and pillows and papers without turning her face to look for them, and that sometimes when he was talking to her and she looked at him, she wouldn’t focus on his face. She scaled back on the housekeeping jobs she’d been doing. She said that some of her clients had started complaining that she was missing spots, which she’d denied: she said the richer they got, the lazier and pickier they became. She hated going to the doctor, and so she had hidden it from them until he’d noticed these things. Late one night after they’d come back from riding with Dunny, he lay in the twin bed across the room from Joshua, and told him what he suspected. He’d heard of people with diabetes going blind, but he never thought it would happen to Ma-mee.

After Joshua had fallen asleep, Christophe had turned to the wall and cried: breathing through his mouth, swallowing the mucus brought up by the tears, his heart burned bitter and pulled small at the thought of her not being able to see them ever again, at the thought of her stumbling around the house. He’d talked to his aunt Rita, Dunny’s mother, and she’d forced Ma-mee to go to the doctor. He’d confirmed she was legally blind. While Rita sat in a chair next to Ma-mee holding her hand, Christophe and Joshua stood behind them, half-leaning against the wall, their heads empty with air and disbelief, as the doctor told them that if they had caught it earlier, they could have done laser surgery on her eyes to stop the blindness from progressing. So then, too late, she’d had the operation. Afterward, she sat pale and quiet in the living room that she’d had them empty of most of the porcelain knick-knacks and small, cheap plastic vases and shelves so she’d have less to clean and worry about breaking or banging into. The bandages were a blankness on her face. When the doctor took them off and proclaimed her healed, she said she could see blobs of color, nothing else, but Christophe felt a little better in knowing that at least she wouldn’t be closed in total darkness, that at least she could still see the color of his skin, the circle of his head.

He dried himself off, wiped the mirror clear, and tried not to, but thought of his father. Their father: the one who gave them these noses and these bodies quick to muscle. Before their mother left them, he was someone the twins saw twice or three times a month. They were happiest when he would stay over for days at Ma-mee’s house: the twins would stay awake and listen to him and Cille talk in the kitchen, and later the muffled laughter that came from Cille’s room. Inevitably, he and Cille would fight, and he would leave, only to come back a week or two later. Ma-mee had told them that their father refused to go to Atlanta with Cille, and that he liked living in Bois Sauvage just fine; that had caused the final break between them.

After Cille went to Atlanta, he became scarce. His visits tapered off until a day came when Christophe saw him from the school bus on the way home and realized his father hadn’t visited them in months. His father was filling the tank of his car with gas at a corner store, and Christophe jumped. Christophe had nudged his brother, and Joshua had joined him in looking out the window, in watching their father shrink until he was small and unreal-looking as a plastic toy soldier stuck in one position: right hand on the roof of the car, the left on the hose, his head down. Suddenly trees obscured their view, and Christophe had turned around in his seat to face the front of the bus, and Joshua, who had been leaning over him in his seat, straightened up and faced forward. Both of them stared at the sweating green plastic upholstery of the seat before them: they were so short they could not see over it.

Christophe wiped a rag over his face and bore down on his nose. Over the years, Christophe and Joshua would see their father around Bois Sauvage when they were riding their bikes and doing wheelies in and out of the ditches, or when they were stealing pears from Mudda Ma’am’s pear tree and carting them down the road in their red wagon, and later when they were older, walking with their friends and sneaking blunts. His name was Samuel, and while the boys grew up calling Cille by her name instead of calling her mother, they didn’t call Samuel by his name because he didn’t talk to them, and because they felt more abandoned by him than by their mother, who at least had the excuse of being “far away.” Whenever they saw Samuel, he was always with his friends, and had a red-and-white Budweiser can in his hands. When they talked about him, they called him “Him” and “He,” and any questions or comments about him from others they ignored, or stared hard at the asker, silently, until the question evaporated in the air. As they grew older, when he came up in conversation with others, they called him what everyone in the neighborhood called him: Sandman. When they were thirteen, they began to hear rumors filtered from the neighborhood drug dealers, who had just discovered crack cocaine, and were learning how to cook it from cousins who were visiting from New Orleans, from Chicago, from Florida: these rumors explained why he seemed to be skinnier each time they saw him, why he never drove a better car than his old beat-up, rust-laced Ford pickup, and why he hung out in his friends’ yards so much.

Sandman was an addict. Fresh told it to Christophe one day down at the park. While Christophe sat on the picnic table bench and watched Fresh count his money into neat piles of hundreds and twenties and re-bag his crumbs of crack and stash them according to size and price in different pockets on his carpenter’s pants, Fresh had said to him, “Boy, except for your nose, you look just like your mama.” He’d paused while he folded his wad of bills, had looked up and stared at Christophe, weighing him like a pit he was thinking about buying, and then said, “You know he on this shit, right?” And in that moment, Christophe knew by Fresh’s look who he was talking about. Everything had clicked into order in his head like a stack of dominoes falling in a line. “All of them older ones that used to snort powder when they was young for fun, all of them doing it now. This take them to that other level.” Fresh had glared at Christophe. “Don’t never do that shit. I keep my shit clean, still got all the hair in my nose.” Christophe had looked away from Fresh’s diamond-studded gold tooth gleaming in his mouth and had shrugged his small thirteen-year-old shoulders, bony and broad under his too-big jersey top, and looked away across the park to the basketball court, the baseball diamond, the trees bristling green and rising on all sides. Christophe watched a crow circle and land at the top of a pine and join about a dozen more so that they looked like dark flowers blooming in the blowsy needles, and thought of the last time he’d seen him. He hadn’t even so much as nodded at Christophe: Sandman was sitting on the tail of his pickup in Mr. Joe’s yard and was so drunk he hadn’t even known Christophe was the preteen walking past him.

Now, Christophe swiped his hand through his hair and curled it backward. According to what Fresh had told him about six months ago, Sandman was in Alabama, where he’d gone to stay with his brother and enter rehab. Christophe put on lotion and walked in a towel to the bedroom. He passed Joshua and punched him in his shoulder as Joshua brushed against him in the narrow hall on the way to the bathroom.

“Hope you left some cold water for me.”

“Ha.”

Christophe shut the door and began to dress, pulling on jeans, a Polo shirt, his new Reeboks, and greased his hair with pink oil moisturizer so that it curled close to his scalp. He’d be clean, look nice for his aunt and uncles so they could watch him cross the stage, grab his diploma, and throw his tassel across the cap. He wanted to hug Ma-mee with his diploma in his hand and smell good for her, smell clean with soap and cologne. He sprayed a little on himself from the bottle he shared with Joshua, and then went out to the living room to sit next to Ma-mee on the sofa, to move as little as possible to guard himself from sweating unduly, to talk to her about the day, about the cookout at his aunt Rita’s, about whether she cared if he had a beer once they were there even though he knew he’d probably drink regardless of what she said: he’d just hide it. Christophe fleetingly thought that Sandman might show up, but then he told himself that he didn’t give a damn if he showed up or not. Crackheads were known for taking credit where none was due. Most of them were a little crazy. Christophe would rather that he didn’t show up. Christophe decided that if he did appear out of some misplaced sense of pride or because he was trying to fulfill some stupid rehab self-help shit, Joshua would have to stop him from punching Sandman in his face.

On the way to the graduation, Ma-mee sat in the front seat with one arm out the window. While her fingers felt at the seam of the glass, her unseeing eyes turned to blink watery and half-closed at the