Excerpt from the novella I Surrender
It was our sixteenth birthday, and all I wanted was a slice of yellow cake. Homemade, like Mama made it, piled three stacks high, each layer split apart by melted pellets of semi-sweet chocolate chips, dressed on top with my personal favorite, buttercream icing, that Mama enriched with two handfuls of fresh strawberries she reduced in the skillet and drizzled over and onto the side. Instead, I found myself biking like a bullet home to see about Tomorrow.
I’d stayed up the night before to finish my AP American history presentation on the Civil War. Each student had to present on one battle and Daddy made me choose Fort Pillow.
“Your great-great grandfather was murdered in that battle when your great grandfather was two. You know they have a statue of that psychopathic bastard Nathan Bedford Forrest up in Memphis. We pass by it every time we go to see your cousins for Christmas. No one talks about that battle. So I want you to. You need to get this right. Tell the truth up there. This is your history. And theirs too.”
Tomorrow and I were two of only a handful of Black students in the entire school. Daddy was intent that we represent ourselves and the family well. “You have to work twice as hard for half the glory,” he would always say. He rode me extra hard that night, breathing down my neck the first half of the night about the presentation—checking my facts, berating me on what he said was my “timid delivery,” and rearranging the slides in my presentation. When my eyes would flutter and my head would hang low, heavy with sleep, Daddy would finger thump me in the back of the head. “Wake up, girl!” he would say and continue onward with his notes.
The remainder of the night, I was stressing over the details, re- organizing my thoughts into a cohesive presentation I could call my own, and practicing my speech over and over again. So, when the alarm went off, I slept right through it. Mama’s repeated attempts to wake me didn’t work: the gentle, then aggressive nudges, drawing back the curtain from the window to let the sun in, turning on the bedroom lights. When nothing worked, she dropped a washcloth saturated in ice-cold water flat onto my face, shocking me awake with only twenty minutes to get to school. I was running to the door in a wrinkled uniform, my hair half in, half out of the bun I imagined I’d carefully pinned back, and my elbows and knees ashy like clawed cobblestone. When Mama saw me like that, she refused to let me leave until I was presentable. After I finally got myself together, I was making us so late. I called to Tomorrow while rushing towards the door.
I stopped myself mid-yell when I caught sight of him, out of the corner of my eye, sitting as still as an assassin on the couch, dressed and pressed to the nines. He gazed at me with such a pool of warmth and tenderness, my agitation was momentarily paused. I was taken aback. He’d always been tender, but he effused it that morning. This I remember. I also remember the brevity of this moment, the momentary swell of his tenderness being eclipsed by my confusion, then frustration about why he wasn’t concerned about the time. I recall saying something like “Tomorrow, snap out of it. What are you doing? We have to go.” He stood slowly and met me at the door. He reached up to embrace me, wrapping his arms tightly around my neck. He whispered, “I’ll meet you there. I love you. And happy birthday.” His thin, slight frame melted against my tall, large one. He kissed the top of my ear. I pushed him away and rolled my eyes, rushing out the house without looking back or returning birthday wishes.
I felt it during my presentation, that something some experts say happens to twins. It started like an itch in a hard-to-reach place, faint at first, then raging like sandpaper over the skin. I had to fight the urge to scratch during my presentation—my scalp, my face, under my arms, between my legs, my hands, behind my knees. Ten minutes before lunch, it was torture. I excused myself from biology because I had an inexplicable urge to see about Tomorrow. I made the twenty-minute journey home in ten, Halloween decorations on houses and street signs bending away from me as I flew past on my bicycle.
When I arrived, there he was hanging from the large oak in front of our home. I don’t remember screaming. I don’t remember calling for help. I don’t remember anything from that part. I try hard not to remember his face angled at such an unnatural position, neck crushed by the rope. We later learned, he’d been there all morning, shortly after I rushed out and Mama and Daddy left for work. The neighbors and passersby thought he was a macabre Halloween prank—seeing, watching, walking, driving past my five minutes older brother swing from that tree for hours.
After Tomorrow passed, Daddy started to have spells. He’d just sit and stare. Or stand and stare at nothing in particular. He got lost inside himself until he eventually found his way back, hours or days later. Everybody was troubled but compassionate about his spells at work. His boss told him to come back whenever he felt ready. Daddy never cried, that was Mama’s job. For a year or so afterward, when Daddy found his way out of his spells, he would sometimes look at me and say “Get your brother. It’s time to eat” or “Where’s your brother? I haven’t seen him all day?” And then I would have to carefully, gently remind him that Tomorrow was gone. He only had me, Yesterday.
Courtney Carliss Young is a writer and entrepreneur based in both New York City and southwest Louisiana. She is the founder of a boutique media company called Think Young Media Group. She is currently working on a collection of short stories called Scar Tissue of the Extraordinary. She is a graduate of Spelman College and New York University. She can be found @cocacy & @ThinkYoungMedia on Twitter & @ThinkYoungMedia on Instagram.
