Free Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Page B

predecessor, each holding what would later become treasure: a picture of Demond grinning and holding his child, his Enyce fits, his Timberland boots, still smelling faintly of the sweat of his feet. I never imagined people in those rooms since all the living seemed to be done in the front.
    We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead andthe new. I wondered about Demond’s grandmother and her kids, and wondered what their lives in Demond’s house had been like. Had they lived with the dead as we did? Had they quaffed shine the way we did beer and weed and pills, and then stare at each other in the dim light, glassy-eyed, hoping for a sea change? Even though Demond’s parents had remained married and both had good jobs, his family wasn’t so different from my family, his reality the same, death stalking us all. If Demond’s family history wasn’t so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
    That same summer, we decided to have a crawfish boil at Nerissa’s apartment. Rob borrowed a gas burner and a huge silver pot from a friend in the neighborhood. He set it at the edge of Nerissa’s small concrete back patio, pulled out a plastic table, set six chairs around it. It was a bright, warm day; the grass was tough with water because it was summer. It had been raining at least every other day for the past month. Rob set out with two empty coolers and went to a seafood shop that specialized in crawfish during the season, and returned with them full and crawling with mud-green crawfish. He and Nerissa chopped seasonings, dumped them in the heavy silver pot so large an infant could fit inside, and began boiling the sides. Charine and her boyfriend, C. J., cuddled on the sofa, demanded that the rest of us watch the Bruce Lee biopic
Dragon
over and over again. People arrived one byone, in pairs, in carfuls, Rog and Demond among them. Once there, Demond took a seat at the table where a dominoes game was in mid-slap. A cooler of beer appeared, a few bottles of Crown, some fruity malt beverages for the girls. We spread newspaper over the kitchen table inside the house, dumped the boiled crawfish, now blood red, on the table. We peeled, sucked, and ate. My lips began to burn and I noticed that everyone who was eating crawfish was sniffing, eyes watery, lips red and puffy as pickled pig’s lips in a jar. Demond sat at the table with Nerissa and me and Charine, passed us drinks, asked me questions about what I did.
    â€œSo what you doing up there?”
    â€œI’m trying to be a writer.”
    â€œWhat you want to write?”
    â€œBooks about home. About the hood.”
    â€œShe writing about real shit,” Charine said.
    â€œWhat you mean?” Demond asked.
    â€œThey be selling drugs in the book,” Charine said.
    â€œFor real?” Demond asked, took a swig of his beer.
    â€œYeah,” I said. Laughed, drank a third of my bottle.
    â€œI told you she be writing about the hood,” Charine said.
    â€œYou should write about my life,” Demond said.
    â€œI should, huh?” I laughed again. I heard this often at home. Most of the men in my life thought their stories, whether they were drug dealers or straight-laced, were worthy of being written about. Then, I laughed it off. Now, as I write these stories, I see the truth in their claims.
    â€œIt’d be a bestseller,” Demond said.
    â€œI don’t write real-life stuff,” I said. It was my stock response for that suggestion, but even as I said it, I experienceda sort of dissonance. I knew the boys in my first novel, which I was writing at that time, weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t
real
. I knew they were failing as characters