Chapter 49
New Orleans heat was the heavy kind. To hear Joel tell it, it was like “wrapping a wet towel around your head and ducking inside an oven.” This heat took him out the first time he went with his father in the fields.
It wasn’t unusual for a seven-year-old to help their parents at work then, but Joel was sickly (asthma), and his lungs betrayed him.
His knees buckled, his head went limp, he fell into the grass.
His father would spank him later, but he was never taken into the fields again.
Joel had the kind of rough childhood that didn’t feel so rough; it was the texture of the time.
Being taught with tattered textbooks but not learning a thing.
Being turned away from ice cream shops in the summer, sulking back into that heavy heat.
Beat by bored white boys, beat by a bitter father. That’s just how things were.
His ninth-grade teacher Mrs. Maisie saw his potential. “You got to apply yourself,” she said. “Put your head down, focus on your studies.”
It was good advice. He was accepted to Xavier his senior year of high school. It was nothing like the commands from white bosses to “put his head down” working in an office in Baton Rouge years later.
Some alcoholics recall their first drink. Joel didn’t. He just knew he somehow became the kind of person who drank when he was sad, and he was sad all the time.
He was drunk when he met Dorinda. He’d never have grabbed her otherwise. She walked past, curls pulled tightly back, a woman with class. He stumbled over himself to get to her. When she gritted her teeth at him, he thought of his mother.
His mother, Catherine, had been his father’s third wife.
Her beauty was mythic. So was her attitude.
She’d eluded marriage until that no-good knothead Cassius boy up the street, the one with the sleepy eye, returned from service banging on her door.
He’d told her that thing she hated being told, One day you gone be my wife.
She thought him arrogant, but he’d seen something she hadn’t and that was the future.
Cassius knew that Catherine’s threats had no teeth.
He’d successfully leashed the kind of woman who swore she’d never get close enough.
But this wasn’t the mother Joel was thinking of when he named his daughter.
He was thinking of the Creole banjee bitch from Louisiana who pointed a rifle at his father and spat, “Touch my baby again and this bullet gone straight through that lazy eye.”
When Joel held his baby for the first time and felt this same feral love, it undid him. She stirred, hiccupping, her body the length of his forearm. How fragile her little life was when life was fragile enough. That’s why he had to give her a strong name.
For years, Dori had struggled to get pregnant. “Drinking can impact male fertility,” the doctor had told them. After that appointment, Joel drank four beers and slept for hours. Dorinda cried, begging him to get up, to do something. But what could he do?
He swore off drinking when he discovered Dorinda was pregnant. He hadn’t drank in months, but when he saw his baby girl, he drank that night, waking up sicker than ever. Sometimes you were done with stuff, but it wasn’t done with you.
“Stop all that negative talking,” Dorinda said when he confided in her. It wasn’t negative, he thought, if that’s how things were.
He never felt understood by anyone, not even his wife, but understanding wasn’t everyone’s fate.
He could live with that. What he couldn’t live with: his little girl pulling away from his hugs when he stunk of Maker’s, his wife crashing empty beer bottles on the kitchen floor just to sweep up the glass.
He quit for good when Catherine turned twelve. He wanted his family back. He hadn’t known being sober wasn’t enough. His wife was still fleeing into another man’s arms. His daughter still saw him as a burden.
Maybe they could see that the hole with the sadness inside was still there. Maybe they understood him better than he thought.