🕯️🕯️"Goliath" by Tochi Onyebuchi

[May 17th, 20—, 5:25 p.m.]

Fires and floods, baby. Story of my life. Fires and floods. [Laughter.]

I don’t remember much of Little Rock, we moved to New Orleans before I could make memories, really. That’s where a lot of the extended family was. You could say my parents being in Little Rock was their little experiment or rebellion, before they came back. But some of my kid years were spent there, in Arkansas. I can barely remember it, but yeah. But, even as a kid, I was always thinking about past iterations of myself. Not in any reincarnation type of way, but … so, like, my grandparents had the Times-Picayune, right? That was the only real news where they were, and I used to wonder if an earlier me woulda been able to afford something like The New York Times. Could I ever get around or behind its paywall. I don’t know why I was so concentrated on that, this idea that the news, or access to the news, could separate a group into two: those who could afford it and those who couldn’t. It’s even weirder when you remember how we grew up. The Internet was everywhere. People walkin’ around with whole galaxies in their pockets. No blind spots, no black areas. No information silos, really. Not like it is now with shit closed off. It can feel like you got access to everything, but it just means you’re seeing more of what the world’s like, you know? I mean, I’m a little nigga, so I can’t quite articulate it that way, but it’s what I was feelin’ at the time, know what I mean? They always said I was gifted as a kid, that I saw things I wasn’t supposed to see. And it wasn’t like I was peeking under the stairs or walking out past the city limits. It was more like I was lifting the curtain on the world a little bit. NOLA was the most European and the most African city in America at the time, and I had an idea of what that meant even if I didn’t know it completely, know what I mean? Slave pens, bacchanal, the music. I saw a girl dance on her grandma’s coffin once. Can you believe that shit? [Laughing.] Now, to look at that from the outside, you’d think that was the highest disrespect, right? You talk about dancin’ on someone’s grave, you must have some real spite in your heart for that person. But this girl was cuttin’ up, bright green dress with a white ribbon in her hand, twirling on the wood soon as they set her grandmama’s casket on the ground. She was a sight. I mean, look at her move. I can’t find the video now but it was on Twitter for a bit waaay back in the day and there was this whole back-and-forth about whether or not that was an actual tradition, whether she hated her grandmama or whether this was all outta love, some celebration of the older woman’s life. The tweet’s long gone, but here’s a little clip of my dad and grandma gettin’ into it about that girl and the coffin. You gotta toggle a little bit to about the two-minute mark. Storage space on this thing is small, so I don’t got too many of Grandma’s memories on here. But, yeah, I can’t say either way whether that girl was dancin’ out of respect or disrespect, but it looked like she was moving out of love. You know how sometimes you do things that look damn near inscrutable from the outside as a way to deal with your grief? Maybe you’re even a mystery to yourself. But your mind gets out of the way and you just let your body move. Most times, people just collapse, like all their bones disintegrated at the same time, but sometimes you do the opposite. Grief sets you on fire. Sometimes, you see bursts of that where I’m from or where I been in my life. Enough people dying and someone’s bound to dance on a casket. One cat I knew had an interesting spin on it. He mighta been an Exoduster, so, when I knew him, he was always on some spiritual tip. But one day I told him about that girl and that coffin, and we’re grown by now and a lot of life’s happened to us in the meantime, but for some reason, that day, I’m remembering the girl and the coffin and he tells me that maybe they’re tappin’ into something going far back, you know? Past the slave ships to the shores of West Africa. Tells me, you look at the soil in, say, Uniontown in ’Bama and you see black and red earth, tough as shit. The type that old, old, old ladies used to chew to make their blood stronger. And you head back to the shores of West Africa, you see the same stuff. And you start to wonder if the old, old, old ladies there chewed it too, to strengthen weak blood. Maybe they just didn’t need to. You ever listen to Sun Ra? My folks were heavy into his stuff, and he named an album after Birmingham. Magic City. I think he was tryna say something about the future. You know, how the South has the past, is the past, but is also the future, you know? Like, if you wanted to know which way the country was headed, look no further than the Black Belt. All of this was coming. The devastation, the ruin. All you had to do was look at the way our graves got put up against the landfill. Look at where they put the chemical plants. You were gonna see where they put the nuclear reactors. Then you were gonna see where they put the water walls and then you were gonna see where they put the domes that filtered the poisoned air. I dunno, I’m starting to ramble, aren’t I. You ain’t ask me about Alabama.

We moved to Reserve when I was a little bit older, but it was still in what was called Cancer Alley, which runs up along the Mississippi River. Louisiana had some of the most toxic air in the whole United States. I mean, you look at the levels around the country now and you probably start asking what were we even complainin’ about back then, especially since now nowhere’s safe to breathe unless you’re in a Domed City. But, you look at a map of Cancer Alley, and Reserve is nestled right there in the middle. Highest rates of cancer in the whole country at the time. Fifty times the national average. People wanted to try to call it Resurrection City much later on when they were trying to make things better, but when we moved there, it was a ghost town. Everybody knew somebody who’d died of cancer. Maybe you lost a whole family to it. It’s a riverside town, and I remember there was one woman and you stand on her porch and look left, there’s her brother’s house, he died of cancer. You look right, another brother’s home. Empty. Him and his wife got it. ’Cross the street, neighbor fighting cancer. You know how, with jail and prison and shit, you walk down some blocks and everybody knows somebody who’s been locked up? It was like that with us and cancer. And no matter who it take, it’s the same sort of thing. You gotta watch them lay in that bed, whether they was guidance counselor or gangbanger. Coulda been healthy as an ox a year or two earlier or maybe they was born to the poisoned air and the poisoned earth, but no matter how they was before, this was how they were now and you couldn’t do nothin’ about it. It could change you just like that. Shit would straight-up gentrify your insides. [Laughing.] No, but tell me that’s not what it looks like, though! Some juice shop shows up like a tumor in your ’hood, then you got a Whole Foods and a yoga spot, and you turn around, the whole cancer’s metastasized. Lungs, liver, pancreas. Whole neighborhood gone while your back was turned. I seen a whole neighborhood gone in eight months. Tell me I’m lyin’. Anyway! What was I sayin’? [Laughing.]

Right. Reserve.

I SLEPT through all of it. Corpse at my side, I slept through the entire slaughter.

My understanding was that when the Specials had fired on our carriages and sliced open the remaining fabric of our coach, they’d seen me wrapped in the same blanket as the corpse of my war buddy and taken us both as deceased. Which explains how I managed to keep my ears.

But when I woke, I was by myself on a stretch of dirt with a twisting trail of blood behind me. Crowder wasn’t far, tangled as he was in his blanket. And when I waited long enough and had gathered enough strength and courage to hazard a glance at my surroundings, which smelled thickly of charnel and tasted of smoke and copper, I saw that Crowder and I had fallen down the side of a ridge, and we had both lain together in darkness. How many nights had we spent fighting the Spooks in precisely that posture?

I don’t remember any of the attack or why what was torched was torched and what was spared was left for the buzzards. I don’t remember anyone screaming for help or begging for their lives or anyone shooting back or anyone pawing the air by their head where their ears once were. I don’t remember the warnings.

But I know it all happened.

I remember climbing that ridge and seeing what remained of the caravan on the plain and wishing I could unsee it, unremember it forever, whispering to myself the whole time, “God in heaven, God in heaven, God in heaven.” Some of the bodies had white kerchiefs around their faces, ensanguined, some with hoods over their heads and holes for their eyes, looking less like men and more like crippled ghosts.

I’m sure they came how they always did, the Specials. Black bodies practically descending out of thin air, landing in your midst, and you’ve got a moment’s worth of life left before a single shot from the cannons fitted to their bodies craters your insides or bursts your head open or guts you or brings the building you stand in down on top of your head. Then they’re gone. Just like now.

The desert is littered with dead things.

Beetles on their backs no longer struggling for purchase and having given up the ghost, leathered coyote skins, sun-polished bones of whatever the coyotes had eaten before they’d died, dog cactus and prickly pear flanking my path. Spanish dagger and catclaw and lechuguilla punishing me where patches in my clothes leave exposed flesh.

With the creosote bush and the mesquite and the blackbrush, I wonder how often it’s rained since I was last here. Whether this flora saw any hint of relief in the clouds. Whether they will provide me shade when I collapse from thirst and hunger and debility.

I hear the thundering of many hooves.

I turn and see clouds rushing toward me. Massive, ominous walls of dirt and dust and detritus. Through the brown, I spy white cloth. Were I to squint harder, I’d probably see white skin under all that dirt and mud. Skin-folk. My rescue. I bet someone’s even got a horse for their fallen comrade.

I look around and all the Specials are gone. There coulda been twenty involved in this skirmish. There coulda been two. You can never tell anymore. Deaths in this part of the country don’t get more mindless than this. Still, I should count myself blessed even now, for having ears to hear my deliverance rumbling toward me on the desert winds. Pregnant with promise.

The War is over, and this is what we’re reduced to. White men on horses forever looking over our shoulders for the spook about to whisper our end in our ear.

[May 17th, 20—, 5:48 p.m.]

At night’s when you really see the Pontchartrain Works chemical plant. You hear it during the day. Sometimes it’s a hum and sometimes it’s a roar. And you always smelled it, day or night, that’s how close we all lived to it. It was practically our backyards. But night was when you really saw it. When I was younger, a bunch of us would climb up onto our roofs, even though our parents wanted us all inside with the windows closed—on account of the smoke coming out of the plant and all—but we would get up on the roofs and in the summers when the days were as long as possible, we’d sit up there on those roofs and watch the chemicals fuck up the sunset. There was purple and there was gold and there was green and you know how little boys get with their jokes. All fart noises and vomiting and jokes about poop and sex and all that. And we’d say some of those things about the sky. How sometimes the clouds looked like spoilt milk, all chunky and discolored. Or sometimes the smoke would make the clouds look like they boo-boo’d on theyselves. You didn’t think nothing of it at the time, just figured it was like those summer thunderstorms where you get the dirty lightning forking sideways through the sky. This was just what happened. But then you spend enough nights sleeping with your window open next to a chemical plant, and one day you wake up and you fall out of bed holding your chest, tryin’ to tell your mama that you can’t breathe you can’t breathe, but all that comes out is gasping like you some kinda fish washed up on shore.

They took me to the hospital and the doctor told me and my parents that I had asthma and even as a kid you can tell that this isn’t like when you get a cold, you know, something that comes to you then goes away. No, this is a permanent thing. This is a thing you’re gonna have to live with for the rest of your life. This thing on your back don’t ever go away. You just hunch your shoulders to fit it, then you forget that there was ever a time when you didn’t have trouble breathing. So you got your asthma and, of course, you got the lead poisoning from the lead paint they used in the homes. And then I’m in high school when the fuckin’ respiratory pandemic hit? [Laughing.] When I tell you that Reserve was built on the site of an old plantation, would you believe me? Feels a bit on the nose, but I ain’t even a little bit lyin’.

DuPont didn’t get there till like the 1960s, I think. So we’re talkin’ almost a century ago. Way before I was born, but it always felt recent to the generation before, like one day the grass was green and the air was clean then the very next day kids are dropping like flies from asthma and you’ve had to bury half your block from cancer. I’m sure it was more gradual than that. What’s the word? [snapping his fingers] Hyperobject? Yeah, nonlocal hyperobject. It’s a living thing, but you can’t touch it. It’s so massively spread out over time and space that you can barely perceive it. That’s what global warming was. You look around now, and you’re like duh, but back then, growin’ up, nobody who could do nothin’ about it seemed to care much. Anyway, so DuPont arrives and Pontchartrain goes up, and it’s a rubber factory. They made neoprene. You know, the stuff that they use to make tires, wetsuits, all that stuff. You got slavery, then Jim Crow and a whole lot of white folk pushing the place down economically, then suddenly this factory comes to town and it’s got jobs and it ain’t goin’ nowhere—because nobody else wants it—so of course you’re gonna work for the place and make it work for you. What choice you got?

Mom and Dad weren’t tryna have no kids die early, so they got me up out of there pretty quick when they saw how bad it was in Reserve. I knew they was tryna protect me, but all I felt at the time was loss, you see what I’m saying? Lost my friends, lost the little nooks we would play in, lost the grass we would run around on. Lost them damn beautiful chemical sunsets. And when I got up north to live with my auntie and uncle, all there was was trees. Blocked out the whole entire sky. Just green everywhere. But the air was cleaner. You could feel your lungs expanding with it, like the cage around them done rusted and fell apart.

They actually lived in Connecticut. Go figure! But it was weird. It’s strange thinking about the place now before there were domes and before all the white folk went off to space. It really does feel like a whole other planet. But there was all type of person there. Where we lived, you had working-class people, like cops, teachers, people who did, like, roofing work, that sort of thing. You had that, you had Black folk and Puerto Ricans in some of the big cities. And you had some refugee communities too. And you had fuckin’ farmland up north in the state. Cows and tobacco and all of that. And then in the southwest, the part that was closest to New York City, that was all the waterfront property and all the rich Republicans and all that shit. But to be honest, the place was kinda emptyin’ out by the time I went to live there. We lived in one of those working-class neighborhoods. Mostly white folk, and super defensive about it, but at that age—what, twelve? thirteen?—I’m online most hours of the day anyway. Okay, post your little conspiracy theories or whatever on Facebook, I got a video dance challenge I’m doin’ with my followers. But you also gotta remember too that there was a big movement at the time and a lotta people were being made hip to racism and all that that might not’ve cared before. Don’t get me wrong. White people are still white people. No offense. But at least some more of them were marching or even organizing protests and stuff. And that was the thing about the Internet back then. Like, a cop pulls a Black dude over and then shoots him while his baby’s mama and their child are in the car with him and that video is everywhere. And when you got the video like that, and the cops haven’t touched or edited it or anything like that, it’s … I dunno. Evidence? Shit. But I’m a kid seein’ this shit. Whole generation. The shit that happened in Minneapolis that kicked off that whole round of shit, that was when Mom and Dad were maybe teenagers or had like just met. So it’s ‘look on your phone,’ racism. Look outside your window, racism. [Laughing.]

But, growing up, it wasn’t a whole, like, staring at my phone type of deal the whole time. That’s what we had too. They could be the same size as a Flex, but they couldn’t hold nearly as much data. Like, you couldn’t hold actual neural data in them. It was all videos and pictures and music and stuff. It was all copies of stuff or experiences or whatever, not like you got now. And certainly not no holos. But yeah I did actually spend some time outdoors as a kid.

I have this one memory of a possum corpse rustling inside a plastic grocery bag.

Uncle’s driving this turquoise Ford sedan, and we’re on the way to school, and he’s pulled over to the side of the road where these huuuuuge columns of grass are just bent under this breeze by the abandoned Stanley Works factory. And I’m a kid so the building just reaches so high over me its top vanishes in the clouds. It’s morning, and, in my head, Uncle, he’s more of a moving shadow, bending light around him, than a real flesh-and-blood man. However old I am in the memory, I know he’s gonna die in less than five years. Like a premonition. Anyway, I’m watching Uncle Jim exit the car and he’s got this possum in this plastic bag in his hands. And I hear the shuffle of movement. I don’t see him get out and throw the thing over the fence, and I don’t see him get back in. I just hear the car door creak open and then thud shut. Uncle’s back in. He smiles at me, and then he drives me to school.

That was a weird summer with the possums. They always came for the trash. But our backyard was huge, though. Had a green chain-link fence all the way around, and we had a swing set we never used, but there was this big tree in the back. Musta been like a oak or something, I don’t know. But I’d take some of the rocks at the base of the tree and crack them open and you could see these rings on the inside. The iridescence ringing their cores.

I remember the night Uncle killed the possum, actually. They’d been at us and our trash for a while now. So, one night, Uncle grabs this massive tree branch and walks outside, and [inaudible]. Then, later, he comes back with his shoulders slumped, and he’s tired, and I knew he’d just beaten the thing to death. Never saw the process, only this massive, powerful … I dunno, demigod who’d gone out, murdered a thing, and came back pretty much unscathed. But yeah, Uncle died probably a year or two later. Cancer.

THIS musta been what it felt like to be a Confederate soldier after the Civil War. Almost two hundred years later, history don’t repeat itself, but it sure as hell rhymes.

Negroes, shackled at the ankles, bang out another stretch of railway. I think of when I’d seen those self-same silhouettes pockmarking the green vistas of corn and soybean that stretched for miles further south. I’d shredded my Whiteland militia coat and used it for fire at nights during my ride home and what patches I couldn’t bear to burn, I sewed into a blanket I never ended up using. They would see me, the recently victorious, the new ruling class. Moon-white eyes staring out from night-black faces, little kids hiding in the forest, taking shelter under heavy-leafed branches, maybe running about them just like Sam and I had done in our Kentucky youth, pausing when they heard the hoofbeats of my passage and staring, faces absent of judgment, of fury, of anything. The impenetrability of expression cultivated after hundreds of years of a white man’s boot on their neck, an opaqueness that frustrated police and school principals and scholars and camp guards who could not divine the Nigger’s hopes and wishes and fears beyond those endemic to all humans, who could therefore not manipulate them. Those children that followed me with their eyes would probably never unlearn that skill.

Later, I see their fathers working the fields and I wonder what’s changed. What the hell did I shoot at all those gene-fucks after the Cataclysm for?

My horse takes me on the main road cutting by the tracks of timber the family used to work and a part of me expects desolation while another part expects to see more Blacks working the plot, but I squint and, burrowed into the mountainside, calling up a chain of commands and shout-backs, is a familiar band of whites, some of whom turn around and wave at me as I ride by. I can’t tell whether it’s because they remember me or because they can tell what I’ve been up to these past few years.

This swath of the country belongs to white folk once again. Those Blacks with devil-bequeathed ambition came, then there was war, then Occupation, then more war, then this simulacrum of peace. But whatever’s happening in Charleston and Washington, it’s quiet here, and there are more white faces than not. Which is solace enough.

I’m home, but I feel like it was my life’s work getting away from this place. Like it’s repelling me and pulling me further in all at the same time. Nothing has changed.

Before I know it, I’m in front of the bar and I’m hitching my horse and in my head is that time when Virginia came in and caught my eye and was smelling of gin and juniper and that time when two Hetlund boys stumbled in already drunk and wound up facedown in the river and that other time when Uncle Al was behind the bar and couldn’t get me to stop drinking because Virginia was gone and Sam had gotten himself hurt by a falling tree he hadn’t paid attention to while logging.

And I try to think of how I could’ve stayed away so long from the comfortable burn of whiskey passing down the throat, how I could’ve gone through that many years of warring against those negroid abominations without tasting a drop, what horrible discipline must have powered me. And even as I think it—that the drink never helped nothing and that believing that, even when it wasn’t true, had kept me alive—I find myself walking in, catching lazy sunlit dust motes against my face, and taking a seat across from a bartender I don’t recognize.

I wonder, fleetingly, if Pa is still alive.

The bartender pours me a double shot, turns to go.