Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Page B

cigarette?”
    â€œYes,” I said, miserable.
    â€œI heard everything from the bathroom window,” Aldon’s mother said. “Why did y’all do it?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I saw it and I picked it up.”
    â€œWell, don’t ever do it again,” she said. “Y’all don’t need to smoke.”
    â€œIf y’all promise not to ever do it again, we won’t tell your mama.”
    â€œOkay.” We all nodded.
    They sent us back out to play. I was relieved, knowing that we’d escaped a terrible punishment. Later that night, as Mama was drying Joshua off after giving him a bath, he told her, “Mimi and Aldon were smoking a cigarette.” My mother called me into the bathroom and confronted me. I told her what my aunts had said. She was angry they hadn’t told her about our escapade. I wished my father were there, but he was out. My aunts told my mother the truth. My mother’s work was never done. She whipped Joshua and me and punished us by confining us to our bunk beds in the back bedroom, dark as a cave in the middle of the summer, for a weekend. We came out to eat and use the bathroom. We slept and whispered to each other: I read, sometimes to him. While we suffered, Aldon giggled and played outside: our aunt wasmore lenient with him. Joshua and I watched his shadow waver across the screen, behind the curtains, with the pecan and pine trees. I was bitter: even in punishment, some boys had it easier.
    But on most Saturday mornings, we were free from adult worries. The house was ours, since we woke at 6:00 A.M. to sneak to the living room, where we turned on the TV for Saturday morning cartoons. We lay for hours on the living room floor, recently carpeted in dark blue, to watch the Smurfs, the Snorks, Tom and Jerry, the Ewoks, the Looney Tunes. Our favorite show was
Popeye
. They broadcast the show out of a studio in New Orleans: the Popeye’s fast-food chain invited White kids to the studio to sit in bleachers to balance small, greasy cartons of fried chicken and biscuits on their laps while a host introduced all the cartoons. I was so hungry then my stomach burned and hurt in sharp, little pains.
    â€œI’m going to make us something to eat,” I said. Every Saturday, I scaled counters to reach in cabinets, took out the WIC-issued cornflakes and powdered milk. I mixed the powdered milk by the instructions in a half-gallon pitcher, fixed us all bowls of cereals that we ate standing in the doorway so we could watch cartoons and eat. We would be whipped if we ate and spilled anything in the living room. The cereal—no, the milk—didn’t taste right. It didn’t taste like the store-bought milk I remembered having before we moved to my grandmother’s, when my father had a good joband could afford milk that came wet and cold in gallons. He’d lost his job at the glass plant after he mislabeled boxes, and was moving from job to job. Some Saturdays I added cups of sugar to the powdered milk because I thought it would make it taste like the real thing. It didn’t, but at least it was sweet. Joshua and Aldon and Nerissa and I ate the clumpy, watery mess over our cornflakes, and we were still hungry. Every Saturday we stared at those fair-haired children on
Popeye
, healthy and plump and pink, who got to cup their hands to their eyes like binoculars and screech “Roll ’em!” before each cartoon while their laps turned splotchy from the grease leaking from their chicken boxes. We ate everything in our bowls, scraped the bottoms with our spoons, drank the last milky sugar from the bowl, and I, with the cereal disintegrating to silt in my spiteful stomach, hated them.
    Between jobs, my father spent some time with us.
The Last Dragon
was my father’s favorite movie, so we watched it over and over until we knew all the words. We acted it out in the dining room turned bedroom; he was