I was the absolute nosiest child in all of South Carolina.
My parents weren’t the typical Southern Christian Black Conservative parents of the 80s in many ways. On the outside, they didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and went to church multiple times a week. I didn’t realize it until I was much older, but inside our house they were more progressive in the way they thought about family and the roles we play. There was no Man’s Work or Woman’s Work in our house really. My mom cut grass, because she liked to be outside. My dad did most of the laundry, because he liked to fold and iron clothes on Sundays watching sports.
As for me, I didn’t really get treated like a child who should be seen and not heard. I watched the news with my parents every night, so if they were talking about missiles in Iraq over dinner and I had something to say, they let me say it. Other parents left their kids at home when they went out to dinner with their friends, but mine took me along. I usually brought a book to read, but I was always eavesdropping, and on the car ride back to the house, they treated me like an equal third in the gossip.
I was the nosiest child in all of South Carolina because my parents loved to gossip and let me participate. Being nosey also meant I was a snoop and I was always going through my sister’s stuff. She was already out of the house, in college, and married hundreds of miles away, but you know how it is when you’re first starting out. You leave a lot of stuff at home in your old bedroom, and I felt it was my right, as a nosey child and younger brother, to go through all that stuff. I stole her CDs, tried on her heels and her prom dress, read her diaries from high school, and I also borrowed her books.
Shel Silverstein was my first favorite author. I don’t remember how I came across him, but I had read a lot of his stuff by second grade and A Light In The Attic was the first hardcover book I ever owned.
My sister kept most of her CD collection (she had multiple 300-disc binders because she bought new music every Tuesday) in a big trunk that also had some of her college books. I saw a book that reminded me of Shel Silverstein.
Obviously these books have nothing to do with each other and looking at them as an adult, it’s so strange that I would link them at all. Maybe I thought the house by Shel looked like a drawing of the house by Ernest. Whatever the reason that I’ve forgotten decades later, I still remember thinking of Shel when I took the book and started reading it.
Without giving away the entire plot of A Lesson Before Dying if you haven’t read it, it’s a story about race in Louisiana in the 1940s. A Black man is on trial for capital murder, and his white defense lawyer argues against the death penalty by comparing the accused to a hog: there’s no point in executing such a stupid, simple beast incapable of higher thought. It would be a waste of the state’s time and resources since the accused could no better plan a murder/robbery than a pig could. He was sentenced to death and the rest of the book mostly consists of conversations between the convict and a Black teacher who has been tasked with helping this man understand his humanity so he can walk to the electric chair as a man.
It’s very light reading for a seven-year-old!
I don’t know what I thought the first time I read it, because I’ve read it too many times since. I was about two-thirds through before my mom took it upon herself to read the book jacket. She’d seen me with the book, but she always saw me reading stuff. She used to drop me off at the library while she ran errands and she never much bothered with what I might be reading. But she read the book jacket and took it away from me because of the subject matter. She said it was way too mature (which it was), but I told her I wanted to know how it ended. I tried to negotiate when she said no, and in the end she decided we’d finish it together so we could discuss it and she could explain it to me.
You can’t explain all the nuances of racism to a second grader. You can barely explain the nuances of racism to an adult white person. It’s just something you have to live, but she did her best. The next year, we read it again, and I knew a little more. We read it again the next year, and we had more things to discuss. We read A Lesson Before Dying seven or eight times before I went off to boarding school. Ernest J. Gaines was the third author I could call a favorite (in the interim, I had discovered the trashy pulp fiction of Stuart Woods, which was full of guns and polite descriptions of oral sex, but my mom never read any of those book jackets).
Years pass. Life goes on. Our relationships with our parents change. After I was outed to my mom in middle school, ours was irreparably damaged and I lost my best friend forever. I spent the next ten years or so watching her descend further into Christian Desperation around why I couldn’t shake my homosexual demons, so I just gave up and stopped speaking to her. I didn’t deserve the guilt trip she laid on me every time I called to check on her from my home in NYC, so the last time I called her for her birthday over a decade ago, I made the decision it would be the last time I would speak to her until she came to her senses. When my birthday rolled around, my sister convinced me to at least reach out to her by e-mail and really explain to her how I was feeling, so I did that. I didn’t get a response, but I hadn’t expected one.
My mom died suddenly a few weeks after I sent my birthday e-mail. I was having dinner with a friend when my brother-in-law called to say she had been flown by helicopter to the nearest metropolitan hospital. She was dead before my flight arrived. The next couple of weeks were mostly spent making sure my dad was okay (my mom was the second wife he’d lost), and making sure he had access to all of her financials and password-locked accounts. In the sent folder of her e-mail account, there was one to me. My mom didn’t reply to the birthday e-mail I’d sent her, but after it sat in her inbox for a few days, she typed up a brand new one and sent it to me. I never got it because she sent it to an e-mail address that I don’t check anymore. I opened it and the first line said “I’m sorry…” so I started crying and closed the message. Later I printed it out and took it back with me to New York where it sat in a notebook that I opened once a year to try to finish it. It took me years and years of therapy to actually be able to read it, but I finally did. I can tell it was just as hard for her to write as it was for me to read.
That was much later though. And you might be wondering what this has to do with Ernest J. Gaines. I flew back to New York, “I’m sorry…” e-mail in tow, and one of my best friends randomly decided we should get tattoos. I’d wanted one before and never made the commitment because I wasn’t sure what to get, but I finally knew. I dug out an old birthday card my mom had sent, and I took it with me to a tattoo shop in the East Village with my friend. I asked the guy if he had a script that looked close to her handwriting, and he did. And this was my first tattoo:
Everyone says it looks like “a leckon” which it does, but I didn’t want it touched up, because her handwriting was imperfect too. She was imperfect. She did the best she could with the lessons that had been taught to her in the church, but when I read that she was sorry, I knew she had learned one more lesson before dying. It would be years before I could get past the first line of her e-mail, but I saw all I needed. I didn’t get to talk to her about it, but when I look down, I see her handwriting of my favorite book as a child, back when our relationship was idyllic and progressive and gossipy. I remember the lessons she taught me every year about being a Black man, and I’m happy to have known her.
(*This post was inspired by a tweet that asked “What is a work of fiction (novel, comic, TV show, movie, what have you) that changed the way you thought about the real world?” I hadn’t thought anything about race at all before A Lesson Before Dying so it pretty much served as my first introduction to injustice and inhumanity.)
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