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“This is the book you fall asleep reading and wake up excited to get back to. A Cult Masterpiece with so many memorable characters and phrases you’ll want to grab strangers and read paragraphs to them.”
—KATHLEEN HANNA
“I have always admired Brontez Purnell’s writing, and this novel is his greatest achievement yet. Purnell is never careful, never evasive. He hits you with honesty, passion, painful humor and never stops.”
—MIKE ALBO
“Brontez Purnell is foul-mouthed and evil. Be warned: this book will make you cackle out loud like you’ve got the Devil inside you then it will break your heart. Be careful where you read it. BUT DO READ IT.”
—JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND
“With epic detail and crude truth, Brontez Purnell reminds us that the lessons of survival and love are learned through life’s most fucked-up circumstances. Brontez has written a story that helps us laugh, grieve, and breathe.
—CRISTY C. ROAD
“Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.”
—MICHELLE TEA
Published in 2017 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
First Feminist Press edition 2017
Copyright © 2017 by Brontez Purnell
All rights reserved.
This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing June 2017
Cover and text design by Drew Stevens
Cover photo: Untitled #301, from the series The Parts by Evie Leder, © 2016; courtesy of the artist.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Purnell, Brontez, author.
Title: Since I laid my burden down / by Brontez Purnell.
Description: New York: Feminist Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016047025 (print) | LCCN 2016054862 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558614321 (Ebook All)
Subjects: LCSH: African American men—Fiction. | Self-realization—Fiction. | Gay men—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / African American / General. | FICTION / Gay. | FICTION / Family Life.
Classification: LCC PS3616.U785 S56 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.U785 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047025
CONTENTS
PRAISE PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS
ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS
PROLOGUE
Hate is a strong word, but sometimes it’s not a strong enough word. DeShawn hated this.
He knew what had brought him back to Alabama. It was all that drinking, drugging, and fucking all those fucking worthless men. It was not any one catastrophe in particular, but all his failures in general. His uncle’s death was just happenstance.
DeShawn got the call while in bed, in California: Your uncle is dead. The sentence punched him in the stomach, hard. He stayed in bed for two days, got up, packed, got on a plane, landed in Nashville, and drove an hour straight to the church. It was tucked deep in the woods, through the cotton fields, and sat on a grassy hill. The creek where he had been baptized almost thirty years earlier ran at the bottom of the hill. He remembered the cold, dirty water, and the preacher with one leg dunking him underwater like a little rag doll.
DeShawn peeked into the church he grew up in, and was shocked by how much hadn’t changed. Maybe it was even moving backward. He entered and was handed a fan by the ushers, the same kind he was handed some thirty years ago as a little boy. It had a wooden handle with a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. or Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington. He couldn’t believe they were still using these fans, which were a symbolic gesture, as they really didn’t protect one from the oppressive humidity. Plus, the church had central cooling. As a child in the late
