Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel by Jesmyn Ward

Author:Jesmyn Ward [Ward, Jesmyn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2017-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Jojo

I can’t look at him straight. Not with him sitting on the floor of the car, squeezed between Kayla’s car seat and the front, facing me. He don’t say nothing, just got his arms over his knees, his mouth on his wrists. One hand balled into a fist. I ain’t never seen knees like his: big dusty beat-up tennis balls. Even though he’s skinny, arms and legs racket-thin, he should be too big to fit in the space he done folded himself into. He’s sharp at the edges, but there’s too much of him, so all I can think when I look at him is Something’s wrong. The phrase keeps flying around in my head like a bat, fluttering and flapping and slapping at the corners of an attic. I don’t know I’ve fallen asleep until I wake up to the car stopping, to the lights flashing, to the policeman in the window telling Leonie to step out of the car and the boy on the floor sinking farther down, covering his ears with his hands.

“They going to chain you,” he says.

When the officer comes around to the back door and says, “Step out of the car, young man,” the boy curls up smaller into himself, like a roly-poly, and he grimaces.

“I told you,” he says.

It’s my first time being questioned by the police. Kayla is screaming and reaching for me, and Misty is complaining, her shirt sliding farther down her shoulder, showing the tops of her breasts. I don’t have eyes for that. All I have eyes for is Kayla, fighting. The man telling me sit, like I’m a dog. “Sit.” So I do, but then I feel guilty for not fighting, for not doing what Kayla is, but then I think about Richie and then I feel Pop’s bag in my shorts, and I reach for it. Figure if I could feel the tooth, the feather, the note, maybe I could feel those things running through me. Maybe I wouldn’t cry. Maybe my heart wouldn’t feel like it was a bird, ricocheted off a car midflight, stunned and reeling. But then the cop has his gun out, pointing at me. Kicking me. Yelling at me to get down in the grass. Cuffing me. Asking me, “What you got in your pocket, boy?” as he reaches for Pop’s bag. But Kayla moves so fast, small and fierce, to jump on my back. I should soothe Kayla, should tell her to run back to Misty, to get down and let me go, but I can’t speak. The bird crawling up into my throat, wings spasming. What if he shoot her? I think. What if he shoot both of us? And then I notice Richie looking out of the car window, even though the cuffs are grinding into my wrists. He distracts me from the warm close day, from Misty pulling Kayla away, but only for a second because I can’t help but return to this: Kayla’s brown arms and that gun, black as rot, as pregnant with dread.

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