Free Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Page A

carpenter even though he had few of those skills. For a longer amount of time he worked at a clothing factory; everyone from DeLisle called it the “T-shirt factory.” They didn’t only manufacture T-shirts there but also acid-washed jeans that were too big in the crotch and too tight in the legs. It was hot in the building, made hotter by fans circulating the dense air. His last job would be in the pharmaceutical factory his mother worked in. The factory was cavernous: long assembly lines snaked through the space, carrying bottles of Pepto-Bismol and capsules of Alka-Seltzer past the workers, who covered their hair with plastic caps and wore thick plastic glasses and face masks. Their jobs were tedious and repetitive, and consisted of bottling the product, screwing caps on, loading the bottles in boxes and onto pallets. This was one of the last good factory jobs on the coast, since the glass bottling company next door had closed years before. The economy of the Gulf Coast had changed drasticallyin the late eighties and early nineties; many factories had closed, and the seafood industry offered fewer opportunities for employment. As the economy ailed, the Mississippi legislature passed gaming laws that introduced casinos on barges. In general, there was a move from manufacturing and making things to service and tourism. And Black people in the region, who historically did not have the resources to attend college and so did not qualify for the administrative positions, were limited to jobs as cocktail waitresses, valet attendants, and food preparers. Demond was lucky to have his job. At the pharmaceutical plant in Gulfport, he worked different shifts: sometimes overnight, sometimes during the morning and into the afternoon, and sometimes during the afternoon and into the early evening. Most of the time when I saw him he was in throwaway tees, work pants, boots, with a bandana tied around his dreads to hold them away from his face, to protect them from whatever machines he worked over in that factory. He wore his work jumpsuits and his boots like a badge of honor, and when I saw him in them, dusted with whatever compound he packaged in that factory, he looked so much like my brother when he’d flitted from factory job to factory job that it was hard to keep my gaze on him.
    Demond lived in a seafoam-green house. It had belonged to his grandmother; her husband had probably built it for her, as was the custom in DeLisle in those days. When his girlfriend gave birth to their child when he was in his late twenties, his mother gave him the house for them to live in. It was like most of the older houses in DeLisle: perched up on cinderblocks, two or three, in case of flood; low ceilings, wood paneling, small corner kitchen. Demond’s house was set at the rear of a long, roomy piece of corner property. His yard was mostly grass with a few trees clustered closer near the front of the house: an old spreading oak, pecan, a crape myrtle gone to seed. The house was fronted by a wood-framed, screened-in porch. The living room was always dark, lit only by the neon play of the television across the walls, our faces. The dining room was usually empty except for domino and spades games on the older wooden table, the kitchen brown as the rest of the house. The bathroom was shoved behind the kitchen in a weird, diagonally placed nook off his child’s bedroom. The rest of the house, which included two more bedrooms, was designed like a shotgun house, each room opening onto another.
    I never went through the door in his child’s bedroom wall into the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend, through that door to the extra bedroom in the back where sometimes his girlfriend’s twin slept. I wondered about those rooms often, wondered if they were as dark as the rooms in the front, if they seemed as sealed, as insular, and I imagined them stretching off into a great distance, room after room, each one more cavelike than its