“Brotherhood,” an excerpt from Man Made by Steve Majors

JIM

My search for a father figure begins long before I realize my father isn’t related to me. The man I call Pops, I learn too late, is just my mother’s husband. He’s also emotionally distant and physically unavailable to me—passed out drunk at home, locked up in jail, or out of town with a secret second family. That leaves my big brother, Jim, or Jim-Jim, to fill in. Unlike Pops, Jim-Jim can be counted on to do dad-like things. He mows our huge crabgrass-filled lawn and rakes the leaves into a pile, then burns them with kerosene. Ma depends on him to carry in the groceries when she can afford to buy them and takes on odd jobs when she can’t.

Because I’m little, Jim and I share a bed. I love the way the entire bed sinks under his football player body. At night, zipped into my footie pajamas, I roll toward him from the high outer banks of the mattress into the middle trench where he lies sleeping. I keep trying to skitter myself out of that hollow and toward the side of the bed that hugs the wall, but it’s no use. I always end up next to his body, a hot, heaving mass that feels like a furnace.  

We are both mama’s boys. But we couldn’t be more different. I want to curl up on my mother’s lap for hours, stroking her face and twirling her hair. I lay my head into the crook of her neck, where I smell the talcum powder on her body and the mix of Juicy Fruit, Viceroy cigarettes, and black coffee on her breath. “Get down,” Jim yells when he sees me this way. Ma tells him to leave me be. Jim eyes me with suspicion. He knows I like burrowing my face into small spaces and sniffing hard. All little kids have their tics. But mine are odd. For a year, I line up everyone’s shoes near the kitchen door and go down the line, pulling the dark, dank shoe openings to my nose. I place my tongue across the roof of my mouth and then inhale hard. The snore-snorting sound makes everyone laugh at first.

But Jim only rolls his eyes at me. At least until I place my nose in one spot that finally earns my first punch from him. We are in the basement that day. The few bare bulbs on the ceiling throw weak pools of yellow light across the cement floor. The big kids play ping pong on a table Pops has impulsively and drunkenly bought with most of Ma’s work check.

I grow bored watching the back and forth, so I jump off the bottom step and walk toward a duffel bag in the corner. I recognize it. Every day, at the end of football practice, Jim throws it down the stairs leading to the basement so his sweaty gym clothes are closer to the washing machine. As the big kids follow the ping pong ball, I tug the duffel bag’s zipper back and forth on the bag making my own rhythmic sound. Finally, on the sound of “zuht,” the teeth lay open, and I plunge my tiny hand into the bag. I pull Jim’s cold and wet football jersey out and lift it to my nose and inhale deeply. It smells familiar, just like Jim-Jim after practice. My hands plunge in again and pull out some kind of slingshot. I hold the pouch of damp cloth in one hand and pull two elastic loops back with the other, stretching it like a rubber band. I’m confused by it. I place it back in the bag and pluck up an oval piece of white plastic. It’s shaped like a mask—narrow at the top for my nose and wider at the bottom for my mouth. Without a second thought, I place it over my nose and mouth, then inhale. I hear the paddle slam on the table. Jim-Jim is storming across the basement like a bear, and his fists are curled tight at his side. He snatches the mask off, whips it across the room, and places his face inches from mine. “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?” He punches my shoulder hard, and the other kids burst out laughing. For the first time in my life, Jim-Jim is mad at me, really mad. I feel I’m supposed to be embarrassed by what I’ve done. 

Still, he still refuses to let my siblings or anyone else make fun of me. On the following Saturday, he decides I need to understand football. He carries me on his shoulders while I hold his duffle bag, and we stalk across the practice field. He plunks me on a bench, where I shade my eyes against the sun. I swing my legs back and forth, watching him do drills and scrimmages with his high school football squad. At the end of one practice, a gaggle of white boys follows him to get their water bottles and bags. I sit with my little legs crossed at the knee. One boy sweeps his long, shoulder-length brown hair out of his eyes and looks me up and down. “This your brother?” he asks Jim. “What did you do, dunk him in bleach or something?”

Jim grits his teeth, then slams the helmet in his hand really against the boy’s shoulder pad. “Shut your fucking mouth,” he growls.  

As I grow older, Jim begins to demand something for his protection. He tells me I need to defend myself and throws punches at me. “Clench your fists, goddammit.” I cover my face and cower. Boxing lessons are soon followed by sports practice. He drags me out to the front yard after school and hurls footballs at my chest over and over again. As they slam into my fingertips or right into my chest, I yell in pain and drop them. I back away from his pitched baseballs and wiggle ineffectively beneath his high school wrestling moves. I think back on the days his body cocooned me in sleep, but now it just tries to cow, crush, or suffocate me.

Jim gives up on his athletic dreams for me as the years pass. But he continues his goal of making me a man. There are constant offers to sip his beer, take a drag on his cigarette, have a hit of his reefer, or steer his muscle car from the passenger seat. Each time I fail, but I know better than to cry.  

Decades go by, and our lives grow increasingly apart until we come together to watch our mother die. We are both still mama’s boys, wanting to please and protect her. But this time, we know we have failed. While we have grown over the years, she has shrunken under the weight of an abusive marriage, a demanding job, and far too many Viceroys and cups of black coffee to count. When she dies, I cry like a baby.  

I sit down next to Jim at her funeral and we are shoulder to shoulder, closer than we have been in years. He takes a deep breath and grabs my arm hard enough for it to hurt. “Stop crying,” he demands. “Jesus Christ, be a man.”

In his eyes, thirty-three is too old to sob like a baby. At that moment, I am reminded of the differences between our definitions of manhood. I cry for the boyhood that I have lost. He doesn’t because of the man he has become.

RICK

Childhood declarations of “I wish you’d never been born” mature to teenage threats of “I’ll kill you,” and finally, adulthood vows of “you’re dead to me.” Hate is not too strong of a word to describe my feelings for my brother, Rick, and the man he eventually becomes. Now that he’s dead, I fear how much I might be like him.

There’s no saying what he thinks of me beyond the grave. But his feelings about me as a kid are fresh in my mind. In contrast to my darker-skinned brothers, I have white-looking skin and fine, straight hair.

Rick believes I am an outsider in our Black family. Even I must concede that. Before I was born, he and the rest of my older siblings had survived years of beatings with fists and belts by their father. I had been conceived during a separation in my mother’s marriage and a reprieve from the violence. During that time, she had a fleeting relationship with a white man and got pregnant with a baby who looked just as white as him.

My earliest memories are of Rick sneering at me, making snarky remarks about my effeminate mannerisms, and pointing out the favored status he perceived I was getting because my skin looked white.

Though he is ten years older and we have other siblings, he sets just the two of us up as lifelong rivals for the attention and affection of our mother. I win because his actions make him hard to love. Stolen money. Crashed cars. Run-ins at school. Drug and alcohol abuse. And angry words that cut my mother too deeply.  

Slowly, he grows more and more estranged from our family. But I watch him from afar and strangely envy him. I am in awe of his good looks and masculinity. He stands well over six feet with a smooth, chocolate complexion, straight white teeth, and a sharp jawline.

I watch with fascination how he uses his good looks and charm to make others like him. There are multiple marriages. First, there is the shy, quiet country girl who follows him everywhere in high school until he marries her and gets her pregnant. Then it’s the brash, bawdy party girl who pursues him until one day he even leaves her to raise their daughter by herself. Finally, it’s the pious, devoted Christian woman who sets out to save his soul only to have him abandon her and their children. He says he outgrew them all, although I believe it’s always because someone else has found him more attractive. New women are always ready to fall at his feet and into his bed. Even his male best buddy drunkenly professes a desire to sleep with him. As a kid, I am confused. How can this strange thing be true? How can a man desire another man?

The answer becomes clearer to me months later when I discover a framed photo of Rick in his apartment. He stands in tiny black posing trunks with legs spread shoulder-length apart, biceps flexed to the size of baseballs and chest glistening with oil. A bodybuilding trophy sits at his feet. I am proud to see my brother like this but also ashamed, embarrassed, and strangely intrigued.

I think of him many years later as I stand in front of a full-length mirror. I am shirtless and flex my biceps. Softball-sized, I note. Bigger than Rick’s. Years of dieting, weightlifting, and taking supplements have given me a body like his. I revel in how my muscled body can catch someone’s eye and lure them into my bedroom. There is power in being wanted, and for the first time in my life, I understood how addictive the feeling can be. For years, we rarely speak and see each other less. He is off looking for someone, anyone to admire him, and admittedly, so am I.

The final time I see him, he lies dying in the hospital of hepatitis—the result, doctors say, of the excesses of sex, drugs, and alcohol. His eyes and teeth are yellowed, and his frame is now shrunken to just bones under his skin.

But I cannot acknowledge to him how much we might be alike. Where once he had seen my privilege in the world and standing in our family, and I had seen his status as a good-looking man, we now see something else mirrored. We are living reflections of one another. In seeking to be desired, all we had ever really wanted was to be loved for who we were.

MIKE

There are no recovered memories, no flashbacks, no bad dreams, no hard-to-pin-down feelings when I think of my childhood relationship with my brother, Mike. But now that I know his history as a sex offender, a small suspicion emerges in the back of my head. It’s one I fight to grow into certainty. That fear is I may be one of his victims.

There is also no hard evidence leading me to this awful possibility, only the truth of what he’s done to other kids. Mike abuses our younger cousin when he is a teen and then, as an adult, his stepchild. Perhaps there are more victims, including me.  

But all I can summon are a few childhood stories hinting at his interest in the young, the vulnerable, and anyone with low self-esteem.

Though we are eight years apart, we are evenly matched in interests and immaturity when I am seven and he is fifteen. We ride our broken-down bikes in front of our house, watch cartoons together, and build forts out of tents and chairs in the living room. We lie on our grubby bedroom carpet that smells like dirty sneakers and sweaty clothes for hours, thumbing through his comic books. It is here that I first see behind his eyes. Batman, Superman, and his favorite, Aquaman, consume his attention. He tells me they are bigger, stronger, and cleverer than everyone else. My eyes linger over their rippling muscles beneath skin-tight costumes and bulging metallic codpieces while I imagine that Mike pays the most attention to their interactions with women in distress and the masks they use to hide their identities. I wonder now if he saw in himself broken or misunderstood men who learn how to shape people and events to their will.

Soon, I see that these stories disappoint him. Something is missing. I find him hunched over his desk, writing his own fantasies. This time, I’m not allowed to read them. He tears pages of numbered notebook paper out and tries to hide them. I dig them out from the back of his dresser drawer, sounding out the big words and trying to follow the plots. There are heroes, villains, monsters, space aliens, and lots of young girls in peril. The superheroes of these stories want more than just a peck on the cheek in gratitude for rescue. These “do-gooders” want the women to take their clothes off and do things that sound strange to me. It’s only years later that I am old enough to understand these anti-heroes are really my brother in disguise.

As Mike grows more secretive, I grow more suspicious. I rifle through his duffel bag, closets, drawers, and even the case where he stores his band instrument. The magazine pictures are familiar yet alien to me. Women and girls with no clothes. Men with no clothes. And then men and women together naked. I puzzle over them before stuffing them back into their hiding places. One is a ripped-out picture of a man’s huge thing. I repeatedly go back to his hiding place to stare at it, though I’m unsure why. Finally, when I’ve grown tired of it, I take it to my mother.

She calls it dirty and nasty and makes me show her where I found it. I do more than that and take her to all his hiding places so she can burn all the magazines, ripped-out photos, and stacks of notebook paper that he’s been secreting away.

Later, he takes me aside privately to take both my arms and shake me furiously. His face contorts with rage. Looking into his eyes, I see that I’m no longer his little buddy but instead a dangerous enemy. My childhood hero’s mask slips for a moment, and I see his dual nature.

Other memories paint a picture of Mike. I am laying belly down on the floor to watch the TV while Mike holds our cousin, the same age as me, on his lap. I hear him say, “You’re going to be a looker when you grow up.” He tickles her all over, and she giggles and then makes odd noises. I scooch closer to the TV and then turn up the volume. I yell over my shoulder, “What are you guys doing?” Mike barks shut up and tells me I’m too young to understand.

Years pass, and my brother finally moves out on his own. 

Then the mask slips again and we learn he’s abused one of his girlfriend’s daughters. In court, he casts his eyes down and takes a plea, agreeing to spare the victim the shame of testifying.

From prison, Mike sends me a book of essays written by prisoners and published by a criminal justice professor. Inside is the story he’s written about himself. I recognize his writing style, but the tone and topic are different. In this story, Mike toggles between victim and hero. He admits abusing his stepdaughter but laments how he is treated in prison. Expressions of remorse for his crimes are coupled with declarations of pride for how he has endured incarceration.

But his personal story ends in a shocking finale. Mike relays in a matter-of-fact way that my mother has told him he was abused as a child—rented out by his father to other men.

Mike is dead now, and along with him, the stories he would have told himself about his childhood and even mine. Without them, there is no one to cast as my possible villain and no way to know if I’m a victim of him or of Pops. For that, I’m strangely grateful. I supposed I’d rather live with the uncertainty than know the truth. After all, some things are better left at rest in the darkness.

Adapted from Man Made: Searching for Dads, Daddies, Father Figures, and Fatherhood by Steve Majors. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2025 by Steve Majors. All rights reserved.