How many times Uncle Henry had warned me about the undercurrent, how you could never tell just by looking at the surface, I couldn’t count. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. My heart wanted to explode into a million pieces, but something inside wouldn’t let me. It was that feeling of not allowing myself to cry, because I was sure that if I started I’d never stop. So I took all that emotion, that weight of the world hanging over me in the shape of a massive question mark, and dragged it deep down below, into a dangerous undercurrent of my own.

After attending so many funerals with TT, I thought that I’d know what to expect from Uncle Henry’s funeral. But of course I was very young then, and we didn’t really know any of the people from church who died. I was unprepared for the finality of his loss, as if I’d been waiting to hear that it was a mistake or even a trick so he could take off and have a foreign adventure without having to say goodbye. More than that, I was completely unprepared to see Momma there, the first time I’d seen her in almost a year.

Every time I tried to move toward her, various relatives blocked my path. We couldn’t hug. She couldn’t tell me where she was staying, what had happened, when and if she was coming back. The atmosphere was surreal enough with all the weeping and wailing, but to see Momma, real and in front of me, yet beyond my reach, was enough to put me in a grave next to Uncle Henry. Maybe because she knew it would have hurt too much, she didn’t even make eye contact or try to speak to me. My only consoling thought was that she was glancing over when I wasn’t looking. I wanted Momma to see that I was starting to get tall, that I was composed, strong, being a mostly good kid. Every time I looked over at her, hoping for some sign that she had seen me, all I saw was the pain of losing her baby brother and not being able to talk to her children. She kept her gaze down at the earth where they put Uncle Henry’s casket.

When it hit me that the woman standing next to my mother was a female prison guard—the only white person at the funeral, dressed in a navy-colored uniform—it came down like a thunderbolt where she had gone. But as one monumental question was answered, a whole batch of confusing new ones were born. Why was she in prison? When was she coming back? Was she coming back?

Only much later would I piece together that this was her second imprisonment. But even that day my gut told me that Freddie was responsible. Though he was the one who should have done time for his abuse, Freddie told the authorities that she had attempted to burn the house down with him in it, thereby breaking her parole. Not surprisingly, he did it without an ounce of concern for what it would do to us kids.