Every spring my brother’s body is taken up by soldiers and nailed to a cross. The sound of hammering ricochets throughout the church. Chosen to play Jesus in the annual Passion Play because of his tangle of wild hair, he struggles with his one line: Eli Eli lama sabachthani? (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?)
After he’s crucified, my brother rises again and returns to the fatherless neighborhood filled with other boys like him—boys who stand on porches in open shirts, hands balled into pockets, boys whose muscles begin to bud just as the lilacs produce their tight-fisted spikes.
The bodies of poor boys are white and black and very often brown. They stand on East Main Street on South Lauderdale on county roads edged by fields of cabbage and cotton and cow corn, looking for ways to spend themselves. They hop onto old bicycles and city buses and souped-up grocery carts. They play Chase and Kick-the-Can and street hockey when sticks and pucks can be found (NB: anything can be a puck). They long to ride horses and motorcycles and sometimes do, but such rides are stolen and rare. More common is climbing onto sheds and rooftops. More common is leaping from fences and second-story overhangs. More common is a football launched high into the air, spiraling over broken railings and tar shingles and gutters jammed with last year’s leaves.
A poor boy surprises bystanders with his virtue. He drags a Christmas tree a mile in the snow without mittens when his mother has no car. He does not bother her when she’s tired, which means always, and learns to slap pieces of bologna between slices of bread for supper. He rescues kittens from overgrown lots and hides his tenderness when he’s told to take them back. He wonders about his father but is considerate enough not to try and track him down.
But a poor boy’s righteousness can last only so long. He plucks the legs from skittering spiders and uses them to make his sisters cry. He steals loose change from his mother’s purse. He cuts school and plays lookout as older boys strip copper pipes from vacant houses. He takes his first hit, his first puff, his very first snort. He listens hard, learns to spin silk, survives some days solely by charm. (NB: sweet talk is a poor boy’s art.)
The bodies of poor boys begin to evaporate in high school. They’re sent to basements and off-site buildings to lace wire through two-by-fours, to empty motor oil into drains to wear safety glasses and welding gloves while the rest of us conjugate verbs in French:
I live Je vis
You take Tu prends
He serves Il sert
Poor boys are absent from pep rallies and physics class. They’re more likely to have court dates than prom dates. They steer clear of the guidance office hung with posters of crew teams on wide, clean rivers and professors in ivy-drenched buildings lecturing on Ovid, Mendelian genetics, and theories of class stratification.
You’ll find poor boys at the McDonald’s near East High. They slide into booths across from recruiters who sniff them out of shop class or spy their aimless shuffles in the hall. Recruiters sound like older brothers, long-gone fathers, and the answer to a question that’s been writing itself under their skin for a long time. The boy is given french fries and double cheeseburgers in exchange for his signature on a line (NB: he is named William. He is named Jose Jr. He is named John Anthony). He’s rounded up with other boys and sent to boot camp. At Camp LeJeune, he makes his hands into a cup and chugs water laced with dry-cleaning solvent, degreaser, and benzene. He practices shooting near a radioactive dump. Even as the boy is armed and taught to execute a proper chokehold, he doesn’t stand a fighting chance.
Back home, there is crack. There is crystal, there is acid, and bottles of Old Crow. There’s the lightning smack sizzle euphoric firing-up of every last cell and the price he will pay for one more high. He is called animal. He is called trash and scum and total waste of space. All of this, and his heart remains smooth and pink inside its weathered hold (NB: some might call this mystery, some might call this paradox, some might call this God).
When they survive, the bodies of poor boys bend like faded farmhouses and collapse slowly into the earth. They occupy medians in Albuquerque, in Memphis, in Buffalo. They hold cardboard signs with scribbled missives:
Spare Change Please
Hungry, God Bless
Anything Helps
The bodies of poor boys are on the front lines on probation, on dialysis, on Medicaid, on suicide watch. They are shot up, locked down, held without bail, looted and sacked. They are strung up, strung out, lifted from rivers, cut into, shooed away from porches, vestibules, and unlocked cars.
You pivot your eyes. Of course you pivot your eyes. To look too hard into poverty’s face and you must concede the randomness of its hold. Come too close and risk getting caught in its unrelenting undertow. In this way, the body of a poor boy is a rope connected to the underside of everything else.
When a poor boy is your brother (NB: they are all our brothers), his body returns like clockwork every spring. You can surround yourself with early-blooming jasmine, gather lilies-of-the-valley, and bring the clean white bells to your nose. You can trace the path of golden songbirds to the greening branches of cypress trees, admiring the world you’ve so carefully constructed—and still the soldiers will arrive in their red capes to take up his body. Still there will come the sound of hammering and the pounding of his words:
My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
