Brothers (and Me)

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Introduction

The moment I saw him, I wanted him.

Lithe, black, and muscular, he was the handsomest fellow in the room. We hadn't been introduced, but he walked right up to me and looked me in the eye—so boldly you would have thought he was alone rather than accompanied by a clearly enthralled companion. He wanted me, too.

Then his companion nudged him. Turning, he strolled away, not bothering to look back. His cockiness reminded me of a saying: "All men are dogs."

If this one hadn't been an actual cocker spaniel, I might have been crushed.

It started a few weeks earlier, when it became painfully obvious that our fourteen-year-old American Eskimo was dying. Particularly stricken was my youngest son, Skye, ten. Recalling the loss of my own childhood pet—a squat cocker beagle named Taffy—I contacted a local cocker spaniel rescue and learned that adoptable dogs were being shown that weekend at a nearby pet store.

Entering the shop, Skye and I instantly spotted Woofer, whose black fur shone like just-poured tar and who made a tail-wagging beeline for us. But an elderly man had him firmly leashed; clearly he meant to adopt him. So Skye and I checked out several females, among them Millie, a blond nine-year-old as blasé as an aging movie star, and Penny, a jet-colored cocker, who, like many black females, stood to lose a few pounds. But our eyes kept returning to Woofer. If the adoption doesn't work out, I told staffers, let us know.

Woofer's unavailability, I decided, was a sign: I didn't need another black male—even a four-legged one—in my life. Finally, fate had said, "Enough."

I'd grown up as the only daughter of a father whose specialties were bricklaying and simmering silences; I'd spent years commiserating and exchanging barbs with my three brothers. At eighteen, I left for college, where lunchtime at my historically black university found me the lone female at a table full of secret-sharing guys who reveled in the encouragement, neck rubs, and advice I was only too accustomed to offering. After years of dating, I went on to marry—twice—and looked to motherhood to redress my lifelong gender imbalance. Destined for daughters, I gave birth to three sons. If that weren't enough, my second husband and I for years opened our home to the troubled male friend of one of our boys.

Even our soon-to-be euthanized dog was an alpha male.

For decades, I'd been surrounded by men. Unable to recall a time when I wasn't outnumbered, outgunned, and certainly outmanned, I craved female energy, if only from a pet. I needed a bitch.

Guess what I got.

Woofer's would-be master took the pooch home, where his pet cat hissed and spat its disapproval. Another unjustly persecuted black male, Woofer became ours, the latest penis-bearer in a house overrun with them.

Hilarious.

Know what's really funny? I should have been as wary of Woofer—another male demanding my time and energy—as that snooty cat had been. Yet I adored him, just like all the others.

Why wouldn't I? The Divine Prankster who plopped me down at birth in Blackmanland had invested me with a compulsive desire to help anyone in need within a ten-foot radius, and an unquestioned, though hardly unquestioning, love of brothers: Brothers in the familial sense, as in my siblings. Brothers in the cultural sense, as in my African-American male friends, kin, lovers, and guys I've never met. Brothers as in a lifetime's worth of men and boys whose desires and demands often eclipsed whatever I wanted.

I'm hardly unusual in offering the men in my life whatever they need. Women are the world's most reliable, and underappreciated, givers. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh and a mother of five, wrote achingly about the tendency more than a half century ago in her brilliant 1955 classic, Gift from the Sea: "All her instinct as a woman—the eternal nourisher of children, of men, of society—demands that she give. Her time, her energy, her creativeness drain out into these channels if there is any chance, any leak. Traditionally we are taught, and instinctively we long, to give where it is needed—and immediately."

Yes, some men are geniuses at generosity. Just as surely, some women are stingy and unaccommodating. But women are much more likely to deplete themselves by noticing—and then offering—what's needed by those whom they love. Long ago, I decided that the desire—make that the need—to nurture is as much a part of women's essential makeup as our DNA, as the uterus, ovaries, and other uniquely female organs that allow us, not men, to give birth.

Why wouldn't a brilliant God provide us with this survival insurance? Though men, too, give hugely to their children, sad statistics prove how much more often they turn away from giving.

No wonder my black male cocker became a metaphor for black men to whom I'd given. Instantly drawn to Woofer, I wasn't supposed to have him—yet he can daily be found begging for belly rubs and demanding a portion of whatever I'm eating.

The inevitable way Woofer came to me—and that I didn't run screaming when I learned he was available—symbolizes the countless times I've longed to flee black men but never could.

Over the years, I've fantasized about escaping: from black men's chilling complexity, from the gripping grace that ever pulls me in. Frustrated by brothers' troubled relationship with a world enamored of and repelled by them, I've responded by fiercely defending them, while occasionally agreeing with society's harshest judgments. Over and over, some black man's behavior—public or private, that of an intimate or an imperfect stranger—has made me want to scream. Hide. Conjure some way to make him, no, every freaking one of them, disappear long enough for me to catch my breath.

And still they can saunter right up to me, corral my heart.

White women—and brown and yellow and red ones, too—also give abundantly to men who may not appreciate it or even notice. Nobody makes us bestow so much upon the men in our lives, but we do it—even as we kick ourselves for it, even as we kick them for it, responding to a need greater than we or the men whom we both nurture and push away can articulate.

In one way, it's worse for black women. In a nation in which black men die younger and more often than any other group of men, black women fear for the brothers in their lives, and for themselves at the prospect of losing them. Our fear is often as unthinking as our love. But certain terrors are earned the hard way.

In 1977, when grad school was my life and being a wife and a mother were faraway dreams, my beloved brother Darrell was killed. He was twenty-six. Did I fear for black men before I lost him? Was I anywhere near as driven to give to them? I wish I could be sure.

But I do know this: Too many black women have loved and lost—to violence or drugs or prison or any of a dozen other horrors that especially haunt blackfolk—someone like Darrell. Someone who taught them that loving black men is particularly risky in a world in which love itself seems perilous. Yet still we offer our hearts to brothers—as if we had no other choice, as if a black woman today didn't have a Crayola-box array of men from which to choose.

Over and over, we choose them: The good ones, the bad ones, the conflicted ones, the ones who are clearly up to no good. Even the ones who are, well, dogs.

It's a woman thing, really. Over and over, whether we're black or white or brown or yellow, whether we're Friedan-fed feminists or Betty Crocker conservatives, women forgive, support, and prop up the men in their lives. Over and over, we choose them. Even—unless my experience is unique, and I know damn well it isn't—over ourselves.

Missing in Action

Skye jokingly shushing his mom, 2003.

From my seat in the fundraiser audience, I couldn't help admiring the woman before me. With her serene smile and hands carefully folded in her lap, this stylish woman, whom I was told is a lawyer, looked oddly familiar as she stared adoringly at her candidate husband during his stump speech. It occurred to me that this liberal Democrat was gazing as beatifically at her man as Nancy Reagan ever did at hers. So I was stunned after the speech when—upon learning I was writing a book about how women's giving often goes unnoticed by men—the lawyer's pleasant features morphed into an infuriated mask. "Will you explain why men like him"—she nodded bitterly toward the man she'd just beamed at—"can't see how much we do for them and our kids?" As I wondered, How can one calm-looking woman feel so much love mixed with resentment?, I realized why she looked familiar. I'd seen her everywhere.

Especially in the mirror.

It's a typical late summer Monday morning, so I'm a breathless blur as I dash around in the room where I so often find myself: the kitchen. Rinsing grapes and arranging sliced turkey on wheat for Skye's chess camp lunch, I flit about as the boy himself chews a scrambled egg while contemplating the relative benefits of different superpowers.

"Mom," he says, his ten-year-old voice heartbreaking in its boyish-but-how-long-can-it-last sweetness. "Which superpower would you want?"

Smiling, I duck my head in the fridge for juice.

"Would you like to be able to eat anything you want without gaining weight?" he asks. With vats of vanilla Häagen-Dazs dancing in my head, I think, Buddy, you can stop right there. But Skye isn't finished.

"Or, would you like to be able to do things at lightning speed?" Pouring his orange juice, I envision how efficient it would be—frying his egg, fixing coffee, walking Woofer, starting a load of laundry, getting dressed, and yelling "Hurry up!" to Skye eight times—in two minutes, not twenty-five.

"Sounds cool," I admit, shoving grapes into his lunchbox and thinking, No wonder this kid's doing so well at chess camp.

"Or," Skye says, winding up for his big finish, "would you like to travel through time?"

When I stop moving, he knows he's got me.

"You could save your brother!" he adds triumphantly. And though there are a dozen other things to do before I take him to camp, I'm glued to the dingy kitchen floor. Silently wondering why the words "Sure, I'd go back and change every bad thing that happened" won't come.

It's a fantasy, I scold myself. Just tell him you'd travel back in time and save Darrell, and by extension, yourself.

But I can't. As agonizing as my brother's death was, it contributed so hugely to who I am that the thought of obliterating it is literally paralyzing.

If a button existed that could undo Darrell's death, I'd instantaneously mash it. But Skye's supposition is a game. Games involve risk. So I'm allowed to risk wondering:

Was there an invisible reason for Darrell's leaving that I'd be wrong to undo?

No life is just one life. Each is an amalgam, a wildly textured bolt of cloth woven unconsciously by a weaver whose creation minute by minute intertwines with, seeps into, or is ripped apart by other lives.

But mine is a woman's life, a perpetual-motion cartoon with countless hours passed in kitchens like the one where Skye has immobilized me. If a woman stopped moving long enough, she might notice her life is like a challenging recipe. Each day, she's frustrated: by her limited preparation time, the unpredictability of her equipment, her ingredients' maddening inconsistency. At times, her creation looks and smells wonderful, hints at perfection. Until without warning, it dissolves into disaster.

Somehow she salvages the mess. Again she works it; again she dares to think it might turn out nicely. Again it's a mess.

At some point, the cook realizes: She has dedicated herself to the one dish that never "turns out." Her unstable ingredients, the preparation's highs and lows, the recipe's uncertain outcome, aren't problems. They're the point. What matters is that she's tasting everything, discovering new ingredients in her cupboard, incorporating whatever tumbles unexpectedly into the mix.

By dying, Darrell overturned the bowl. It took years, but I cleaned up the mess, scraped up what could be salvaged, found exciting new elements to add. Most days, the resulting dish looks impressive—at least on the surface.

What would it look like if Darrell had never left?

Standing motionless in the kitchen, I got a glimpse. A life constructed without Darrell's death would look more like me—a truer, more authentic me. Who, I wondered, would that be? My brother, I realized, wasn't the only one who'd vanished. I was missing in action in my own life.

The questions sparked by Skye's game had actually begun weeks earlier. Days after my fiftieth birthday, I realized that virtually every time I see, hear of, or suspect a need in one of the men in my life, a thought so hushed and fleeting as to barely register flits through me. For decades, I had no awareness of it—until the morning its message became clear during a routine meditation: You must do whatever's needed for the men in your life. You must.

Someone could die if you don't. And you'll regret it forever.

I'm reasonably self-aware. I understood Darrell had died at a juncture at which we'd drifted apart in ways that siblings in their twenties inevitably do. Yet it took thirty years for me to realize part of me still believed that if I'd stayed closer to him, had been more supportive with my time and attention, he'd still be alive.

The thought makes no rational sense. But the evidence that I believed it was played out every day.

I had given and given and given. To my sons, my husbands, my brothers, to the notion of black men as bruised, threatened, and worth sacrificing for—not always as a demonstration of my love for them, but for love of a man long lost to me, and out of terror of what could yet be snatched away. No wonder I'd dreamed of escaping from black men. Facing what my giving had cost me—not just in opportunities but in resentment and regret—was tough, but no tougher than my next questions:

How could I stop giving, an act as natural and unpremeditated to me as a sneeze? Should I rein in a behavior that was helpful, felt good, and was an essential spiritual imperative? Had it taken decades for me to notice my over-giving because so many other women with backgrounds quite different from mine behaved similarly?

Historically, martyrs have been appreciated in war zones and medieval villages. In daily twenty-first century life, self-sacrificers are a bore; my revelations could emit an ugly whiff of self-pity. That didn't change certain facts: I was naturally generous; it was a trait of which I was proud. Yet there was nothing admirable about the lengths to which I—like millions of other women—sometimes took my must-give impulse. Darrell's death was tragic enough. I'd multiplied its awfulness by letting it coax me to offer out of fear rather than love. It gave me unconscious permission to stay boxed inside my terror: of risking failure, of letting "my" men and boys be fully responsible for themselves.

Over the years, I'd puzzled myself by clinging to failed relationships and a spectacularly bad marriage, by being reluctant to speak up for my needs when challenged by insistent brothers, by rejecting lucrative job opportunities because I "knew" the men in my life needed me more. That such behavior could partly be traced to a whispered voice born of a decades-ago death seemed absurd.

If only that had kept it from being true.

Giving too much isn't limited to black women. My automatic behavior wasn't that different from women's of every color, nationality, education level, and income. Women want to give their time, their passion, their bodies, their wide-open hearts, to men. (We give to other women, too, but they're more likely to give back in kind.) We enjoy bestowing our stuff on the guys in our lives.

The problem is when our offerings aren't appreciated, rewarded, or even noticed. When we discover few men harbor the same impulse. When we don't get back nearly what we put out. When it pisses us off.

White, Latina, and Asian women, being women, also have issues with over-giving. Yet there's a special dynamic among black females. My friend Wendi Kovar, a Washington-based life coach, told me that several of her female clients' experiences suggest that women with serious weight problems have a hidden need to protect themselves. Her favorite example: A client whose son, fourteen, died tragically. Virtually overnight, this slim woman became obese. For a decade, she fought to lose weight, even visiting a spa whose Spartan cuisine guaranteed it. Her scale didn't budge. She finally told Kovar her extra pounds were "protective armor" that she'd never lose before making peace with her son's death.

Kovar's client was white. But the notion of excess weight as a form of protection seems particularly relevant to black women, the nation's heaviest group. African-American women grapple with the terrifying knowledge that their fathers, brothers, sons, lovers, husbands, and friends tend to die earlier than other men, and are more likely to be lost to incarceration, addiction, and alienation. Yet the popular image of African-American women is one of toughness, independence, and rage toward black men.

So why is it that among all American women, sisters are the least likely to seek lovers outside their race? Why wouldn't it devastate us to hear black men's rap-video and real-life bluster about black "bitches" and "hos" when we know almost every brother has had a mother, lover, and/or grandmother who gave her all for him? Why wouldn't we look for comfort in food—or in anything that looks or smells the least bit like love?

Now, in the kitchen, I'm equally clueless. Cemented to the floor, I feel Skye's curious eyes on me. Finally I say, "I think I would choose to travel through time, but I'm not sure what I would change."

Nodding, Skye says, "I knew it." He's satisfied.

I'm anything but.

I know I should explore the questions raised by Skye's game and my revelation about my brother. I'm just as certain I have little desire to probe tender, bruised places I've hidden for good reason. I'm wary of examining how the woman I've become intersects with her past, her men, her forgotten selves. But how else can I learn why I give so much and am so confused by the giving?

Traveling through time—Skye, you do know your mommy—I could examine when the girl whose life was all about her books, her brothers, and herself became so much about everyone else. Was my transformation the result of Darrell's death? Or were other factors—including growing up as a woman, my blackness and the vulnerability it bequeathed—as important?

Prying open doors sealed shut a quarter of a century ago would be excruciating. But I had to try.

Even without superpowers.

Darrell, Disappeared

Clockwise from the top: Steve, Darrell, Bruce, and Donna Britt, 1962.

Over and over after he left, I asked myself: Are the dead really dead? Could those who've "passed on" move so freely, speak so clearly, occupy so much pulsing space within us if they were indeed gone? Magnified to its subatomic essence, the pebble I unthinkingly kick away becomes a seething universe. Maybe all of life is a matter of level—the level on which any being or object vibrates. If a stone can whisper its truth, what might the dead be saying to us? What does my life, as rote as the kick that sends the pebble flying, tell the lingering departed?

If he's dead, why am I still trying so hard to save him?

Nothing in the world is more elusive than memory.

As someone who misremembers details of conversations I had yesterday, I harbored few illusions about precisely recalling the distant past about anything. Why trust memory when I'm unsure why certain events linger and others drop away until a phrase or a snatch of song rivets me in a moment long lost to me?

To this day, I have no idea why I lost my stalagmites.

I was about four when I noticed that whenever I closed my eyes for more than a few seconds, God gave me a gift: a mesmerizing and uplifting light show.

On my eyelids.

Sliding into bed, I'd shut my eyes and there they'd be: massive, free-floating forms in shades of smoke, tar, and midnight. Like jagged mountaintops that had broken free from some new-formed earth, they were humongous, yet floated weightlessly in slow motion across my mind. Night after night, I felt comforted by the constellations' presence, dazzled by their gleaming, prismed surfaces.

Sometimes I wondered: Do other people see such things? Suspecting they didn't, I told no one—not even Darrell—about my private panorama. If no one else had such visions, if watching these nightly sojourns made me weird, I didn't want to know. It was too wonderful, feeling like a small satellite to their immenseness, being the spaciousness through which they drifted.

It wasn't until third grade that I read about stalagmites and stalactites. Formations that occur in limestone caves, they're created when acidic water dissolves the limestone, dripping tiny fragments toward the cave's floor. When the water evaporates, the limestone solidifies, forming an icicle-like stalactite. Continued dripping creates a second structure—a stalagmite—beneath the original. As decades pass, the floor-bound and the suspended sections draw closer together. Decade after decade, each half reaches for the other—until finally, they meet, forming a column.

Something about the pale green shapes in my textbook felt instantly familiar. Their spikiness, slow growth, and presence in sheltering havens were like my nightly visitors'. The color was off and they were much too thin, yet I knew: my free-floating formations were stalagmites and stalactites, searching for their other halves.

Of course, I'd already found mine. The one who was separate, but part of me. Who always reached for me, to whom I unfailingly reached back.

When someone you love shifts from the firmness of flesh to the squishiness of memory, even powerful remembrances may be lost to you. Yet some stuff you never lose—like the memory of staring at a newspaper headline viewed a dozen times before, and feeling like you're seeing it for the first time:

Gary Man Shot by Police.

I was twenty-three. Sitting at the table in my mother's kitchen, I'd been called home to Gary, Indiana, from grad school by an event that could not have happened. The headline in the Gary Post-Tribune was supposed to make it real, so I read it over and over, repeating the words in my mind. Gary Man Shot by Police. I'd read them too often in my hometown newspaper not to know what they signified: a no-thought headline announcing the shooting of an anonymous thug. Such a headline couldn't possibly refer to my brother Darrell. Important people's violent passing warranted outrage, regret, astonishment—and nobody in the world was more important than the brother who loved me. Gary Man Shot by Police? It hit me: To most of the world, my life's most shattering event was no big deal. Because Darrell had been mistaken for ordinary.

Not the average Joe–ordinary that nearly every white guy is assumed to be. Even in Gary, the former murder capital of the United States, the shooting of the most undistinguished white man usually warranted more than a newsprint shrug. But Darrell was black ordinary, which meant his life didn't matter much: Not to the police who shot him. Not to the reporter who wrote the terse, six-paragraph report of yet another brother getting himself killed. Certainly not to the copy editor who took all of three seconds to compose "Gary Man Shot by Police."

Ordinary.

Well, in some ways he was. Darrell wasn't short and he wasn't tall; he was neither linebacker-thick nor tap-dancer wiry. His eyes were warm and dark and kind—but no more so than millions of other young men's eyes. At five ten he was exactly the average height for an American male. He was quietly good-looking, as tender, volatile, and doomed young men often are.

He was just Darrell. And all that he was not—striking, brilliant, wildly successful—hardly mattered to those who couldn't imagine life without him. A regular man, he was, like regular men everywhere, loved by his little sister with unremarkable completeness. My parents produced four smart, lively children—but only Darrell seemed likely to lead a typical and uneventful life, productive in the usual, unexciting ways: a stable marriage, a couple of kids, a decent job with a modest pension.

Is it surprising that he died what increasingly has become a typical black-guy's death?

Growing up, I hadn't the slightest sense that black males—my brothers, my schoolmates, my father—were more vulnerable than other boys or men. Daddy had been too formidable to be afraid for; the most dangerous thing I envisioned my brothers facing was a schoolyard beat-down.

Staring at the headline in Mom's kitchen, I examined the "facts"—Mom's torrential tears, the ashen corpse at a local funeral parlor, a familiar phone number now belonging to no one—of what surely had to be fiction. Darrell was dead. Like the headline, two Gary cops had mistaken him for something he'd never been. They'd received a call that a black man was trying to steal a truck in his lakeside neighborhood. Investigating, they'd found Darrell crouched in a ditch. They claimed he'd attacked them. That they had to shoot him. Darrell? Whom I'd never known to steal anything? Who was among the kindest people I knew?

If such an absurd mistake could be made about him, it could be made about any black man. The policemen's claims and my brother's dead body proved that the value and the safety of the people I loved most were in question. I wasn't sure I could live with that.

Perhaps it was then, as I sat dumbfounded at Mom's dinette, staring blankly at her kitchen's cheery yellow walls, that I began pushing Darrell into my mind's dimmest corner. I did it so well that today it's easier to remember what my favorite brother wasn't than what he was. He wasn't, like my sibling Steven, older than me by five years, so taken with his own giftedness that he couldn't see my drawing, hear my singing, ponder my opinions as if they mattered. He wasn't four years younger like Bruce, whose age deficit meant I could take his admiration for granted. Sandwiched with me between them, Darrell didn't stroke or scream at people like Steve did to get his way, or seem malleable while doing exactly as he pleased like Bruce. He was something else entirely.

Remembering what he was means stepping into a bleak, little-used room inside me. Flipping the light switch, I squint and discover that my eyes don't quite focus. Feeling my way around, I bump into unresolved emotions, slip on scattered memories, prick myself on sharp-edged regrets.

I don't go in there often. As the years have passed, the light inside has grown dimmer and dimmer.

Most of my memories of Darrell take place in my childhood home, a streamlined redbrick ranch built in 1963 by my mason father. A Michelangelo when it came to laying stone and brick, Daddy designed our house's curved driveway and the balcony that hovered over my brothers' favorite hangout: the cement patio and basketball court.