A Little Boy

I know that face. The mouth shows a slight frown. His jaws are tight. And he stares at the camera. Glares really. The eyes betray an intensity and sadness or, maybe, anger. Underneath them are signs of a sleepless night or exhaustion from too much play. I don’t know. I can’t remember.

I think this is around 1975 or so. School pictures at Kreole Elementary when we lived on the East Side of Moss Point, on Rose Drive, off Frederick Street, in the three-bedroom house my dad had built on the land given to him by my grandfather while he served in the Navy during Vietnam.

The red, white, and blue striped pants with circle designs, along with the belt and its silver buckle pulled to the hole that wasn’t there before someone put it there, and the shirt with its orange, rust, and blue rings around a collar that will soon be stretched to never touch fully any neck again, scream the 1970s and show that what I had on once belonged to my older brother.

My head tilts a tad to the side. I sit stiffly with my hands – those clearly identifiable Glaude hands – resting on my thighs. Someone has told me to be still. My little afro is a bit unkempt. I was a somewhat active child. You can tell by the slight discoloration on my forehead. I was forever bumping my head on something back then.

“Be still.” “You look like a little badass.” The kid who often smelled like outside, who was told “in or out” during hot summer days when the heat waves danced in the street. The child who was frightened by a stern look, by the darkness full of sound and ghosts, whose vivid nightmares made him scream, and who laughed and dreamed of beautiful, fantastical things for which he had no language, that child glared at the camera and refused to smile.

After all these years of looking at this photograph, I never noticed that refusal. Never looked into my own eyes and saw what I now see: the beginnings of the loss of innocence (death would soon rear its head) as well as that of defiance and of sadness that I recognize in a stare that isn’t focused on the camera lens or the person taking the photograph, but on something else. Something not yet. Or something that was.

As I prepare to go home for the holidays, to eat some good gumbo, and drink warm eggnog spiked with whiskey, to revel in the love that is family, and to spoil my parents rotten, I think about that little boy and the man that I have become.

Trying to hold off the crass materialism of the holiday season and using this moment when turbulent seas grind down rock as a time for reflection. Going deep inside where the wounds remain. Thinking about the choices and experiences that have made me who I am, and the people who have loved me hard and left their marks. Knowing that if I am to be a better person, to be more loving and decent, that I need to understand, as best as I can, that face that is so familiar and, yet so hidden.

Descending into the eyes of that little boy, forced to be still, with his red, white, and blue striped pants, accepting him and saying, finally, Amen.