Illustration by Diana Ejaita

That same year I returned from Baghdad as a medic, I saw her at my aunt’s house. All her teeth were gone, and her language had fallen out with them. At barely fifty, Ganny hardly looked human. Frustrated and afraid, I fled; seeing her that way made me feel like some helpless kid again, banging my head against the wall of troubles much larger than just us, always too much to triage on any given day. After she was killed, it took some time before the accused, James Mears, was brought into custody. According to early reports, James—and I’ll call him James because we’re around the same age and he looks like somebody I played ball with—walked into that house on the 4700 block of Vista Street and shot Ganny’s friend Dollie Evans in the head. He then ran upstairs to strangle Ganny with a cord, before shooting her in the head, too. This was in Mayfair, no less, a part of Philly that, when I was a young boul, we called the “good” neighborhood, because they had nets on their basketball hoops and fewer shards of glass between the paint and the three-point line. James, it was said, made five hundred dollars in cash for his trouble, and took a few hundred dollars’ worth of crack.^* Insofar as I can tell, no one involved was on the path to sobriety or the redemptive tropes of the straight and narrow. An uncle—who died swathed in bedbugs as I was working on this essay—called for justice; not vengeance, just justice. But we’re far from a world that might take such a demand seriously.

Men cried at Ganny’s funeral, cried for a dead woman whom everyone had either raped, abused, or ignored. I was annoyed by the theater of it, how not one of us implicated ourselves in what led her here. The formulaic lines like: “How did this happen?!” and “Oh God, no!” were more painful than her passing. And God was a stretch, anyway. There were real reasons that, if only we would skip the sentimentality for a single day, might better explain how we got here: chattel slavery, birth, ass beatings, Barney, backseat groping, shame, babies and steel-toed boots, moon landings, ice-cream trucks and fire hydrants, broken windows and the smiling Teletubbies’ sun—not Mos Def’s “UMI”—casting an ugly green light upon centuries of torture masquerading as accomplishment.

My mother and sister were bawling their eyes out, burrowed against me. I couldn’t see their faces and didn’t want to. I was all pragmatics and ashamed of being the atheist in a family like mine, in a community like mine, where historically the church was all we had, or rather, all we were permitted to hold on to in public. Prayer, much like the shallow pretenses of political reform, always felt like a way to avoid people like Ganny indefinitely. Ganny’s murder was no mystery or accident, and I needed to convince all attendees specifically of their true proximity to her open casket. How could I say that turning all the milk cartons upside down will definitely spill the milk, and crying over it would not unspill the milk, and you have to try twice as hard to lose half as much milk if your history and your government and your family and your neighbors and your lovers are all pouring your milk out, too. And then you still a nigga, so you find out the milk was poisoned anyway and spend your whole life searching for something else that you probably can’t afford. And then you splatter an elderly woman’s brains on her floral bedspread. Or the brains are yours.

Everyone was obsessed with James, as if his punishment would revive Ganny’s corpse, or better yet, improve what had been her quality of life. Besides, he was an overly familiar kind of national villain. Dollie, whom I don’t remember meeting, was more interesting; I’m told that she was the sweet old lady on the block who opened her door to some of this world’s many needy strangers; some say she also sold crack. Either way meant trouble: her own grandson was shot in the face out front, and so was another man, over a separate argument. But what mattered most to my family, after the fact of James, was that Ganny “must have tried to fight him off.”

She “resisted,” to use the ready-made expression. They were proud of her, and she was dead. We sat in the old wooden pews, shoulder to shoulder and as far apart as we ever were, everyone slotting themselves into the volatile role of mother or uncle, cousin or sibling. My mother and sister remained inconsolable, but I couldn’t cry, despite doing so sporadically most days. I needed a response that others could tolerate, not a truer expression of thought or feeling, but a stock phrase or platitude, some out-of-context quote, something that would allow me to be part of a community, basking in the purity of our own innocence, never to dwell on our collective abandonment of this woman, never to raise a question whose answer might prove difficult; we needed a distraction, a button to press, a symbol to point to or look away from at our convenience, and in this we were all so grossly American. I squeezed my mother as if our relationship could still be different, pulling her too close, though we hardly ever touched. Her kiss, ever since I was young, would turn me away, and by my adolescence she’d given up trying; it’s not that being raped by adult women had produced some schism in me, an aversion to touch altogether, but it is true that I hated not having the choice, as a child, of when and how to be touched, having people drunk or high with their fingers on my flesh, and the constant smell of booze and crack turned me, perhaps too harshly, against them.

My other grandmother, Dottie, my grandfather Earl’s first and third wife, is “not one of ya little fuckin’ friends,” nor some empathy engine, nor is she the cuddly cooking comforter of mythological grandmothers past, nor, to have her tell it, was she ever even a girl; she came out big-tittied and fat-assed and lusted after, and lusting herself after old niggas like my grandfather Earl, who at a moment’s notice would dick her down proper and threaten anybody unwilling to respect what was “his” to an inch of the whole neighborhood’s life. Dottie, who stood in for blood because we needed her to, is so unlike Ganny in the extremity of her beauty: the Jessica Rabbit–red lipstick and brutally straightened hair, the pierced dimples and belly ring, those short white skirts and thongs in which she’d prance around like Betty Boop past the open fire hydrant singing “Milkshake” or sayin’ how her body was better than Ciara’s goodies despite the decades between them, smiling, always smiling with them Crest-white teeth at the ogling young bucks, who’d say, “Damn, Dottie, you fine as hell,” before she turned to informing everybody, especially those who did not inquire, about what her pussy would do to the bodily schema of any nigga lucky enough to get a taste.

Dottie, who yet lives, and who cussed out Earl at his own funeral, drunk and angry, both for his dying and for that man’s outstanding meanness, should never be confused with Dollie, Ganny’s friend who, like Ganny, will never breathe another breath.

Ganny, my ganny by blood, who called Earl her man between the eras of Dottie, looked like another Ganny in her coffin: Ganondorf Dragmire, the king of darkness from The Legend of Zelda. As a child, I had liked Ganondorf more than my real-life Ganny because he was a boss character, with power; he could fight against me, and I him, without any guilt or repercussions. His was a defeat I could be proud of, the way my country prided itself in defeating my Ganny and making it her fault, or the way a chorus of liberals would pride themselves in loving her from afar, even when what they really cathected to were versions of Beyoncé: black women whose job it was to entertain them, who were always spectacular at that job; they also loved the comforts of their own mothers as mothers, who were good at those jobs, as mothers, as entertainment, as forms of labor. My own life, inescapably tied to those who fail or refuse such positions, is a problem for thought. And culpability—the very American notion that those who fail or refuse such roles are the progenitors of all dysfunction—is one of many pernicious mythologies we all depend on, but can never eliminate under the pretense of affiliative progress, or by grafting Ganny’s body onto those of the literally enslaved.

They looked remarkably similar, Ganny in his castle, Ganny in her casket: cold and bruised deep purple with splices of green, hardly obscured by a little red blush. And still, her expression seemed happier than in life, where at her healthiest people likened her to Whitney Houston, a comparison I loved and held on to, loving how Whitney Houston’s voice made me feel, loving Ganny especially hard when she was sober, despite knowing what men and drugs did to both women. My family seemed to think her open casket a political act, but I found comfort in thinking silently what no one would: When was the last time the bereaved shared a pipe with Ganny, or better, kicked her out of our homes?

This is what I thought at the funeral, as I was struck by that familiar, too-self-righteous feeling, fury. A fury I’d imagined to be clear-eyed at the time, one I could cut my teeth on and use pedagogically. My mother kept calling me handsome and saying how proud she was of me while standing right next to the box in which Ganny’s body lay so blatant and predictable. She misunderstands, my mother: your pride is no good to me when we all end up like this. In the church, the pews didn’t have cushions, so I sat on a Bible instead. The view was reminiscent of a Dark Souls boss fight. Despite the smiling and hugging, any minute now a black dragon would slither out from behind the podium and I’d rend its neck with a flaming blade in one hand, a shield in the other, before collapsing into death myself. I wanted to be close to Dottie then, and her mimicry of power, not standing over the dead Ganny I’d spent most of my childhood with.

It is both naïve and not to think of Dottie as powerful. The Players Club’s mantra of usin’ what you got to get what you want, where what you want, mine and hers, yours and Boogie’s “Nigga Needs,” though needs nonetheless, is circumscribed by unrelenting punishment and other people’s pleasure. Compared with Ganny, Dottie—who, last I saw her between funerals (my cousin Lee Lee this time, shot alongside what the news called a “33 year-old Black man” this past Christmas Eve), kicked me and my sons out of her house for being “faggots”—was incredibly shrewd about what power she did and did not have.

Dottie’s force and presence made her easy to love, but never truly embrace. But she cleansed me, I think, of a normative imposition: the idea that elderly women, particularly black women, could not, or should not, want or be wanted. And I wanted Ganny to be like Dottie, and for Dollie to be like Dottie, too; but beyond their basic relationships to power, they were not.

Ganny I’d embraced even less than Dottie. Dirty. Filthy. Weak. When I was young, I felt that too much proximity would transform me into her—a person with no choices and the most beleaguered destiny. I was nine when I understood the slim chance of my ever moving out of the apartment we lived in together, and I refused to risk my future on her. I couldn’t remember any of us, the funeral’s mourners, stepping in when Ganny was beaten bloody by Earl, when she was homeless come winter, selling food stamps for cash, giving head for crack. And there were of course those moments when she refused what we decided were her own best interests in ways that mirror my mother every day. As an adult, I’d rarely sought her out. And even as I knew that all the video games she stole from me might eventually be replaced, I held on to each infraction because it gave me a logic for maintaining distance, helped make rational my own inaction.

On the other hand, it was easy to articulate my grandfather as a problem: the patriarch, loud and mean and suffocating. So I avoided thinking seriously about Ganny most all my life. Complaints about Earl were rewarding, and safe for the new friends I’d make later, outside, in college, and sliding my way into the other America alone. Abandonment of such a man, like my notations on the reach of his abuse, was not just a mandate for my generation, but a signal of virtue to be doled out at writing festivals and in classrooms; if I were to be an artist of any conscionable sort, I needed to make clear that his very existence was an irredeemable terror. Before writing a memoir, I hadn’t considered how selfish or silly this was, how the uncomplicated hatred of him, from the perspective of these enlightened people, so naturally spread to how they thought about me and my sons. And perhaps I was still stuck in that hatred, watching him die sad and alone from AIDS complications and feeling very little, till his heart gave out and his brother found him rank and stiff on the bedroom floor.

All throughout the eulogy, I kept thinking about that time when I was on the No. 5 bus coming home from high school. Earl had kicked Ganny out of the house for some time, and I hadn’t seen or thought about her for a while. But there she was, in the back of the bus, with a window seat. She wanted company, and she gestured toward me.

“Joey,” she whispered.

I shook my head. There were kids from school there, and I was building a persona, according to which no one had a right to my inner life, and I was determined to keep it that way. This new Joey knew nothing about cockroaches or crackheads, pissing himself or bad haircuts; he never got beat the fuck up, and most importantly, never displayed a single modicum of tenderness or fear; he didn’t get slapped by random niggas no more, because he wasn’t weak. I’d finally constructed a thin barrier between myself and the world’s venom. I’d had sex with a girl from my school, and liked it, had two serious friendships, and even a whole girlfriend, whose touch felt like what some people call love. I was on casual joking terms with some of the more dangerous kids, and none of them suspected anything about my family, even though I knew damn well about some of theirs. I would not risk being seen near Ganny. I could no longer abide the grade-school tribulations of getting stomped out and piled on, pistol-whipped and followed home by a volley of lobbed rocks. So I got up and jumped out the back exit, three stops before my own, squeezing out the door while it was only half open to avoid all that even just acknowledging Ganny might do to my newfound reputation. I’d never felt so safe and so whole as I did jumping off that bus.

My avoidance of her does not feel absolved by the fact that I was a child in a difficult situation. I sensed that she wanted to do more, be better, unlike any of my other part-time caretakers, but I had a palpable fear that sympathizing with her too much would turn my grandfather further against me. I directed my rage at the person who was most able to receive it. Until, of course, I learned to make her physical self less visible, to allow her almost-ness to blend into the furniture, to regard her pain as a casual quirk of the neighborhood, just a small puzzle piece of the widespread suffering that was life.

Still, I thought if I could cry at the funeral it might change something. I needed to prove to my family that I could feel, even if that feeling was restricted to certain scripts, roles we had been trained for our entire lives. Some of these people, more than I wanted to admit, seemed to be crying for real—wringing out snot and sobbing and yelling—and I wanted that kind of clarity, to be so damn simple and clean. Would crying finally make me a part of the family? And not just some traitor who finished high school and went to college, who argued that the world was even worse than they believed, and yet claimed that this was just more reason to risk new ways of living. Between the naïveté of most social reform and the mundanity of white supremacy, between the respectable Negroes who also despise or envy us without their knowing and the droll failures of our faux democracy, I struggled to make and be something else, and failed in front of my family; yet they called me a success. Desperate, I begged folks in private to get jobs, stop smoking or drinking so much, consider getting their GEDs, or at the very least keep their hands to themselves, because under no circumstances was anyone coming to help; I would never have enough time or money to change all our fates on my own, nor could I convince anyone to come to the rescue. As everyone cried, I thought about the time, as a teenager, when I had catalogued all my complaints and planned to fill the house with them on blue Post-it notes: above the plastic bag filled with trash and maggots, against the patio door, on the bathroom mirror above the clogged sink. But I never did. And I never stopped wanting to. So at the funeral, I got angry all over again.

I had abandoned them all for a life of the mind and a lifetime of guilt. I’d also failed to start a new, healthier family myself, failed in kinships with people of every type for whom terms like “mom” and “dad” and “college” were stable signifiers, people for whom funerals were rare and weddings were plenty, who claimed that social relationships were inherently positive, who could even describe their elders by professional legacy.

Ganny’s legacy would be her police record, which I’ve refused to transcribe; a list of all of the PlayStations and Segas and jewelry she’d taken to that pawnshop by Arrott Terminal. Her legacy was being beaten on schedule for more than twenty years by a man who cleaned up nice and came to her funeral late, his sins absolved by his capacity as breadwinner. Her legacy was the only one I knew, and it would be the legacy of my mother and that of my brother and maybe even my little sister, too. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could tell them, a damn thing I could do. They were long since through with secular admonition or praise; my support was worth shit if it didn’t come in the form of money and silence, and this pissed me off more than I could ever cry for. The repetition. The expectation. The constant lack of freedom and the forced celebration when a single one of us—who would never be us—made it onto television, and things got worse down here. As long as I’d known Ganny, she’d never lived a tolerable life. Never had a career, never knew romance, never saw the world, never drove a car, rode in a boat or on a plane, never imagined independence or social bliss, and never would. Few if any of the mourners ever would. Ganny cried, bled, and stole, and took blame for the crying, bleeding, and stealing of others. I wanted to be proud of her, but I never saw the virtue in getting beaten—whether on or off camera—and I knew the meek didn’t inherit shit. If she paved the way for anyone or anything with her own body, I wished she hadn’t. Sitting there, worn down by the fact that I still couldn’t cry, I was most relieved that Ganny would never take another beating.

And then we all rose to look at her for the last time. It was abundantly clear that my grandmother’s life—or at least the twenty-seven years of it that I could attest to—had been bereft of nearly all simple and complex pleasure. Drug addiction and domestic abuse had warped her, like wood left out in a lifetime of rain, into a speechless husk. Last I talked to her, she could still walk, but only stiffly, and she looked twice her age. The bullet in her skull didn’t make her look any better now. She was green. Not the beautiful green of moss on the Icelandic plains in the summer, but the green of bile. As if there were nothing else that could burst from her bloated features. That isn’t to say there’s no external script (insert sweet old lady on the block) in which she might fit and be hailed as a champion of the kitchen, a homemaker, a child-loving guru who, despite all odds, sacrificed everything so that her children and grandchildren could flourish. But that script, much like my envy of people who actually had those mothers and grandmothers, has failed to save us from anything. It has taken great strength not to impose this romance on my own family, despite the suggestions of MFA colleagues and white magazine editors and the increasing pressure by other black people to write what is good and easy even when it is not at all good or easy.

Perhaps seeing my grandmother as she actually was, rather than the way I want to feel about her now, helps me avoid all the lying that would make me a good subject and this a good essay. What I want to say, what I want to think, is how Ganny’s lack of fit should have made us love her more while she was alive.

Ganny’s sweet-potato pie was average, and her other food was pretty bad, especially the baked macaroni and cheese. But she never forced me to eat it. Ganny was mostly neglectful and self-interested, the way most Americans seem to me. But I don’t ever recall her beating me as hard as others in our home, while telling me to “be a man.” Ganny was addicted to crack, like everybody else. But she never brandished her pipe or fucked johns in front of us kids or our friends. And while none of this is heroic, it is also not entirely abject, given her options, and it most certainly ain’t nowhere near freedom. I do not mean freedom as I might relish it, nor do I mean the simple oppositions between freedom from and freedom to, but any position from which she might come to control her own destiny. But maybe this desire exists only because it feels so out of reach. Pleasant memories of my grandmother vanish as soon as they appear. I am stuck on the time Earl beat her with his work boots because I had cut elementary school and was home all day without her noticing. The way her voice broke when she screamed for him to stop that day snatched my entire heart out through my mouth. And in her casket, Ganny lay there just as still and quiet as she had that night. As I backed away from this memory, my mother was crying even harder, and most of the mourners were squeezing me to death, and all I could think was, You’re next.

They would all share a fate so obvious, so well-paved, that it would be easier to travel down than not. No amount of family therapy, money, convincing, cajoling, voting, friendly parole officers, social workers, social theory, bank loans, boyfriends, girlfriends, twelve-step programs, I love yous, hospitals, psychiatric wards, good jobs, or good intentions would change that. And through the years, they haven’t. Every conversation, every fight, every counselor, every prescription drug, every psychiatrist has thus far been for naught. But in spite of this, all I’ve done is push for a different future that never comes, getting more frustrated every time, as we lost time with one another. And then I was crying so hard I shook, both at the thought of more pushing and my inability to quit the world, or give up on my family altogether.

I considered my siblings trailing my mother in a hurry, both already dropped out of high school.

My sister clutching the photo of her stillborn child, and the way men would always treat her.

My brother having a new baby but no new job and smoking weed alone in the dark.

My fist tight and one arm around mother’s shoulder.

My mother trying to soothe me as I wished she’d done when I needed it.

“It’s okay, Joey,” she said. “She’s better off now.”

But maybe I finally agreed. We all sat there, just listening, falling apart as my cousin sang “Amazing Grace.” And we kept crying long after it was over.