How does an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved? By the time my mother came to stay with me in California, I had started to get a clearer picture of the answer to this question that I had been obsessing over for most of my graduate career, this test to which I had submitted many mice and many hours of my life. I’d found hints of the two different neural circuits mediating reward-seeking behavior, and I had looked at the neurons to see if there was any detectable difference in pattern. Once I’d confirmed a difference, I used calcium imaging to record the mice’s brain activity so that I could determine which of the two circuits was important to the behavior. Finally, at the end of all of this, I had almost enough information to write a paper that showed that if one were to use optogenetics to stimulate the mPFC→NAc risk-encoding cells, then, yes, it was possible to suppress reward seeking.

    All of this behavior manipulation, all of this tweaking and adjusting, injecting and imaging, to find out that restraint was possible, that it could, through arduous science, be done. All of this work to try to get to the bottom of the thing that had no bottom: Nana relapsed just fourteen hours after leaving rehab.

34

Opioids work on the reward circuits of the brain. The first time you take them, your brain is so flooded with dopamine that you are left thinking that, like food, like sex, opioids are good for you, necessary for the very survival of your species. “Do it again! Do it again!” your brain tells you, but every time you listen, the drugs work a little less and demand a little more, until finally you give them everything and get nothing in return—no rush, no surge of pleasure, just a momentary relief from the misery of withdrawal.

I attended a lecture Han was giving about the process of imaging cells involved with reward expectation. The lecture hall wasn’t packed, so Han spotted me as soon as I walked in. He shot me a little wave.

I took a seat in the back as Han got started. On the projector screen, dopamine neurons spun purple with small green flashes throughout.

“The green that you’re seeing up there are the active release sites on the dopamine neurons,” Han said, using his laser pointer to indicate the spots. “The mesocortical, mesolimbic, and nigrostriatal dopamine pathways are what we call the reward pathways, all right? They’re the ones that activate when we’re expecting or receiving a reward.”

    Han scanned the room, and I gave him a thumbs-up when his eyes landed on me. He grinned, then coughed to cover up the grin. He continued lecturing, and I looked around the room. Ambitious undergrads mostly, attending a midday neuroscience lecture perhaps for class credit, or perhaps because they wanted to pursue a career in the field, or perhaps just out of plain old curiosity.

When Han finally finished, I waited for the room to clear. I sat in my seat as he started shuffling the papers on his desk. I raised my hand, but he wasn’t looking at me so I cleared my throat loudly. “Excuse me, Professor?” I said.

He started laughing, leaned against the desk. “Yes, Gifty?”

“Are you telling me that when I get a ‘like’ on my Facebook posts, dopamine is released?”

“Why yes, right you are,” he said.

“What about when I do something bad?” I asked.

Han shrugged. “Depends. What kind of thing? How bad are we talking?”

“Bad, bad,” I said, and he just laughed and laughed.

35

        Dear God,

    I wish Nana would just die already. Please, just let this be over.

36

All of the self-help literature I’ve read says that you have to talk about your pain to move through it, but the only person I ever felt like I wanted to talk to about Nana was my mother and I knew she couldn’t handle it. It felt unfair, to pile my pain on top of hers, and so I swallowed it instead. I wrote journal entries that grew increasingly frantic, increasingly desperate, until I reached that one, heinous line.

“God will read what you write, and he will answer your writing like prayers,” my mother once said. The night I wished for my brother’s death I thought, Good, so be it, but by the light of morning, when I realized that I had written a sentence for which I would never forgive myself, I ripped it out of my notebook, tore it to shreds, then flushed it down the toilet, hoping God would forget. What had I done? When Nana relapsed, I burrowed in my shame. I went quiet.

I went quiet and my mother went insane. She became a kind of one-woman child hunter, driving up and down the streets of Huntsville searching for my brother. At church she would move up to the altar during praise and worship and dance around like a woman possessed. If the song made any mention of “falling on one’s knees” she would take it literally, thudding down immediately in a way that seemed painful.

    Church gossip is as old as the church itself, and oh how my church loved to gossip. Years later, Mary, the pastor’s daughter, would become the worship leader. Her toddler would run around the sanctuary every morning before she took him to the nursery, and everyone would smile sweetly at him, all the while remembering the circumstances under which he came to be. That gossip was as juicy as a peach. My congregation got fat on it, but when Mary got married we starved. Before that there was Nana and my mother’s ridiculous dances at the altar. If Mary’s pregnancy was a peach, then Nana had been a feast.

Everyone knew that Nana had gotten hurt in a game, but it took them a while to catch up to his addiction. Every Sunday, when Pastor John asked for prayer requests, my mother and I would put Nana’s name in the basket. Pray for his healing, we said, and, at first, it was easy for everyone to assume we meant his ankle. But how long does it take God to heal a sprained ankle?

* * *

—

“I heard he’s on drugs,” Mrs. Cline said. She was a deacon at the First Assemblies. Fifty-five years old, unmarried, straight as a broom with lips so thin they looked like a slit across her face.

“No,” Mrs. Morton gasped.

“Oh yes, honey. Why do you think he doesn’t come around here anymore? He’s not playing this season, so we know he’s not too busy.”

“That’s sad. That’s sad he’s on drugs.”

“It is sad, but—and I really do hate to say this—their kind does seem to have a taste for drugs. I mean, they are always on drugs. That’s why there’s so much crime.”

    “You’re right. I have noticed that.”

I had been studying my Bible verses in the Sunday school room when I overheard that conversation in the hallway. If I’d heard it today, I know what I would have done. I would have marched outside and told them that there is no data to support the idea that black people are biologically more given to drugs or crime than any other race. I would have marched out of that church and never looked back.

But I was ten years old and I was ashamed. I sat stock still in my chair and hoped that they couldn’t hear me on the other side of the door. I gripped the open flaps of my Bible so tightly that I left marks pressed into the pages. When they left, I let out the breath I was holding, and pinched the skin between my thumb and index finger, a trick I’d picked up to help keep me from crying. In that moment, and for the first time in my life really, I hated Nana so completely. I hated him, and I hated myself.

* * *

—

I am not a psychologist or a historian or a social scientist. I can examine the brain of a depressed animal, but I am not given to thinking about what circumstances, if any, led up to that depression. Like everyone else, I get a part of the story, a single line to study and recite, to memorize.

When I was a child, no one ever said the words “institutionalized racism.” We hardly even said the word “racism.” I don’t think I took a single class in college that talked about the physiological effects of years of personally mediated racism and internalized racism. This was before studies came out that showed that black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, before people were talking about epigenetics and whether or not trauma was heritable. If those studies were out there, I never read them. If those classes were offered, I never took them. There was little interest in these ideas back then because there was, there is, little interest in the lives of black people.