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notorious for using drugs, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, drove up in his Cutlass. Parked. Walked up and said: “What’s up?”
    Some knew that Rog was snorting cocaine, and others didn’t. In Mississippi, cocaine was a party drug in the late seventies and early to mid-eighties. People in my parents’ generation snorted it, or they smoked it with weed. They did it secretly, casually. For some the habit stuck, and for others it didn’t. And then came crack, a terrible development for those with a coke habit: it was a cheaper, more addictive high. Those who couldn’t stop changed from partiers to addicts. They stole from their families, from strangers, to support their habit.
    There is a story that I like to tell about the close-knit nature of DeLisle and the Black enclave of Pass Christian. When you wake up and find that, say, your car stereo is missing from your car, you’re pissed off about it. You call your cousins and tell them about it, mention it to a few friends. You suspect who may have stolen it. By noon, one of your cousins or friends has called you with news, told you that someone saw someone else walking through the woods or loping along the street with your stuff under their arm. That afternoon, you show up at the thief’s house, which is small, a little worn, but neat. You get loud. You demand your radio back. They are shamefaced as you berate them, and they may even curse you back or smile nervously, but they will return what they stole. This is how stealing was handled when I was growing up through the eighties and the beginning of the crack epidemic in the nineties. This is not what happens today. By the time you get to the thief’s house in the afternoon, a house that has no electricity and a rotting floor, they will have pawned your radio, and they will have smoked it, and their eyes, jittery in the skull, will slide past you to the red dirt ground, to the sky, to the trees waving overhead, and they will lie until you give up to follow the trail elsewhere, until you leave.
    There is a stigma associated with coke among the young in DeLisle and Pass Christian because it is too close a cousin to crack. Kids will take shots of white strong liquor, they will smoke weed wrapped in thick blunts, they will even take Ecstasy or prescription pain pills, but they will not casually pull out an eight-ball of coke and push it across the tableat a house party. Why? Because the specter of the cousin or the uncle or aunt or the mother or father who couldn’t stop partying, whose teeth are burned brown from the pipe, sits next to them at that table. Young people who do coke lie about it, attempt to hide it, and often fight it. Rog hid it and fought it.
    Some of my relatives, on my mother’s side and my father’s, have abused crack, on and off, for years.
I can’t fault them for it
, Charine always says when we talk about it,
that’s just their high that they like. Fuck it. It helps them cope
. And then:
They’re grown
. I understand her now, but I did not understand her point in the summer of 2004. Did not see the way liquor had been my drug for years. Was not connecting the relief I felt when I drank with the drugs others were using, or even thinking that it could be the same for my relatives, the same for my siblings, or the same for Rog. I knew that I lived in a place where hope and a sense of possibility were as ephemeral as morning fog, but I did not see the despair at the heart of our drug use.
    The last time that I remember seeing Rog in the summer of 2004 was at a gas station. I don’t remember whom I was with, but we’d stopped to get gas at the BP on the beach in Pass Christian, the BP that would disappear a year later when Hurricane Katrina swept in and decimated the coastline. The pumps buzzed, and I jumped out of the car when I saw Rog lope by with his beer, his face long, his mouth closed, no teeth this time. He was so skinny. His eyes were