Fire Shut Up in My Bones

Blow’s first memory is the death of his great-grandmother—although, as a boy, he imagines the gathering is for a birthday celebration. When she passes away surrounded by her family, Blow is confused, thinking she’s searching for a gift that’s not there.

Growing up, Blow is relatively accustomed to death, attending more funerals than birthday parties. He is the youngest of five boys, and by the time he is born, his mother Billie is “dead-ass tired of working on a dead-end marriage and a dead-end job” (7). His father Spinner is a construction worker but also a pool hustler and a philanderer.

Blow grows up in Gibsland, Louisiana, “right in the middle of nowhere” (7). Gibsland is a segregated town, with most of the black families living on the west side and the white families on the east. Blow, the youngest child in the neighborhood, is known affectionately as “Char’esBaby.” He shares a room with the family’s eldest son, Nathan, while the middle two, William and Robert, share the other room. James, the third boy, lives with his grandmother Big Mama in Arkansas. William and Robert’s closet is filled with old guitars. Spinner once played in a band, but one night after a gig and too much to drink, he has a car accident and one of the band members dies. After that—and some prison time—Spinner quits music and takes up construction work.

When his mother is ill or when they visit James, Blow spends time with Big Mama and her fourth and current husband Jeb. Jeb is a loving father figure and more of a father to Blow than Spinner. As a young woman, Big Mama had been deceitful, stealing money from a previous husband, but Jeb has transformed her into a calmer, more joyful version of herself.

Jeb builds a new house on a dirt road leading into The Bend, a hundred-acre stretch of former plantation land deeded to formerly enslaved people. It is a tight-knit community that supports and watches out for one another. Blow, a loner, plays alone.

His grandfather Bill Rhodes—Big Mama’s first husband—lives in Houston. A former decorated Buffalo Soldier who served in an African American cavalry unit, Rhodes is gregarious but prone to violence, openly brandishing a loaded gun at a neighbor in front of his grandchildren.

When Blow’s mother gets a secretarial job, he spends his days with his uncle Paul, a fifty-year-old, illiterate man-child who becomes Blow’s babysitter and best friend. Along the way, Blow catalogues an extensive list of uncles, aunts, cousins, and family acquaintances, many of them older men and women from the neighborhood who instill in him a sense of calm fatalism.

When Blow is five, his mother, a recent college graduate, lands a teaching job at a high school 30 miles away. Now financially independent, she refuses to tolerate Spinner’s cheating, and she confronts him late one evening when he comes home drunk. They fight, and she nearly pushes him through a window. Blow writes, “In that moment, the power in their relationship shifted, in my mind, from him to her: she was strong, he was weak” (25). Soon after, his parents divorce, and Blow, his mother, and his siblings move in with his grandparents.

The move is difficult for Blow. Removed from the nurturing environment of his old neighborhood, he feels isolated and adrift. Despite his mother’s punishing work schedule, she always reads the newspaper, The Shreveport Times, a habit that instills in young Charles a love of newspapers. Still, he is consumed by loneliness, even asking for a ventriloquist’s dummy one Christmas so he would have someone to talk to.

Now on the desperate end of poverty, Blow and his brothers root through the town dump, searching for anything of value. During one of these scavenger hunts, Blow is attacked by a stray German Shepherd who “carved a wound deep into the part of me that trusted things” (30).

With food a top priority, they pick fruit from nearby trees and grow vegetables on a strip of land in front of their house, canning and pickling the produce for winter. These communal times—picking and preparing the food—are the moments he most feels like part of the family, and his mother is a master of stretching meager portions into full, sumptuous meals. After the harvest, however—as well as after Hog Killing Day during which he has the job of roasting the chunks of pork skin—Blow returns to his usual solitude.

Another source of food and goods is overturned cargo trucks whose contents are left by the side of the road. One evening, a cattle truck upends only a mile from their house, leaving the wounded cattle behind: Blow recalls, “Jackpot!” In the dead of night, the family climbs into the car with loaded shotguns. Driving past the wreckage, one of Blow’s brothers shoots a cow from the moving car. They load the carcass onto a truck and drive to an out-of-the-way relative’s house to quickly carve up the cow before daylight. Because of his mother’s dogged determination to feed her family in any way possible, they never want for food.

Blow’s estranged father occasionally sleeps over, and one night, asleep in his mother’s bed, he wakes to his parents having sex—although he doesn’t know exactly what is happening. Seeing them together in this way confuses him since he has grown used to his mother as independent from his father. The next morning, a boy calls the house and asks for Blow’s father, instructing him to meet his mother at West End, “a slant-roofed juke joint just off the highway” (41). To Billie, the woman is obviously “lazy, frivolous, [and] loose” (42), and her gall at calling Spinner at his wife’s house enrages her. She grabs a pistol and chases Spinner out of the house, firing at him—and missing—as he runs for the woods. Blow suspects she misses on purpose, but Spinner never sees the inside of Billie’s house again. He does, however, sometimes appear at the doorstep, drunk and full of false promises for his sons. Over time, Blow learns to distrust everything his father says, though he never learns to stop caring for him.

Blow then recounts a bit of family history. His great-grandfather is an ex-enslaved man named Columbus who, after buying his freedom, runs afoul of some white people in Alabama and flees to Louisiana where he starts sharecropping a large cotton farm. When he buys the farm, local white people threaten him. His wife and children flee, and he eventually joins them in Bienville, LA. Columbus’s son—Blow’s grandfather—was light-skinned and married “the most beautiful dark-skinned woman [Billie] had ever seen” (48), a social taboo in some circles. Blow learns the lesson that the lighter the skin, the more valuable the life, in society’s view. Spinner inherits his mother’s dark skin, and he never shares the family history with his sons.

Blow’s brothers are physical and tactile, always breaking and fixing things. Blow, on the other hand, is intellectual, and as a result of his feeling different, he withdraws into books. Not understanding his son’s cerebral nature, Spinner simply ignores him, spending more time with his other sons who share a love of the tangible world. Spinner’s itinerant attempts at bonding are rare and halfhearted, and after a short visit he returns to his “sewer of booze and women” (50).

Still, Billie wants her sons to maintain contact with their father, so she takes them for visits sometimes to the house Spinner shares with his two sisters—one, a liar, and the other, overly pleasant—and their husbands. Spinner’s sisters don’t approve of Billie, and so these visits are particularly unpleasant for Blow. Meanwhile, Jed, Big Mama’s husband, dies of lung cancer, and young Charles is grief-stricken, feeling the pain of death acutely for the first time. Jed’s death brings out Big Mama’s cruel streak, and she begins spanking and beating her grandchildren, much to Billie’s consternation. Although Billie spanks occasionally, it’s generally a line she doesn’t cross.

One Thanksgiving when Blow is six, one of Spinner’s “women” stalks him outside the house, calling and repeatedly driving past. Furious, Billie sends Charles to fetch her pistol, “and don’t let nobody see you” (58). With her son in the car, they pursue the woman, racing through the town and on to the interstate. After realizing that Charles has been caught up in her rage—a potential victim of her recklessness—she gives up the chase and frees herself from the weight of Spinner’s indiscretions. Later that day, Charles’s grandfather Bill takes the boys to a shooting range. The deadly power of his grandfather’s .45 leaves a deep and terrifying impression regarding the ease and finality with which a life can be taken. Blow vows never to shoot another person—a vow “that wouldn’t last always” (60).