by Kiese Laymon
Praise for Heavy
“Oh my god. Heavy is astonishing. Difficult. Intense. Layered. Wow. Just wow.”
—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger
“What I have always loved about Kiese Laymon is that he is as beautiful a person as he is a writer. What he manages to do in the space of a sentence is unparalleled, and that’s because no one else practices the art of revision as an act of love quite like Kiese. He loves his mother, his grandmama, Mississippi, black folks, his students, his peers, and anyone else willing to embrace his love enough to give us this gorgeous memoir, Heavy. This reckoning with trauma, terror, fear, sexual violence, abuse, addiction, family, secrets, lies, truth, and the weight of the nation and his body would be affecting in less capable hands, but with Kiese at the helm it is nothing short of a modern classic. These sentences that he so painstakingly crafted are some the most arresting ever printed in the English language. Kiese’s heart and humor shine through, and we are blessed to have such raw humanity rendered in prose that begs for repeat readings. We do not deserve Heavy. We do not deserve Kiese. That he is generous enough to share is testament to his commitment to helping us all heal.”
—Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching
“There are those rare writers in the world whose work unearths the stories that have been buried in and around us for so long. They force us to confront all that we would rather not see, and ask us to reckon with why we have failed to see it for so long. Kiese Laymon is one such rare writer. Heavy is a memoir, yes, but it is also a testament to a sort of truth and self-reflection that is increasingly rare in our world today. If for some reason you were not already convinced, there should no longer be any doubt that Kiese Laymon is one of the important writers of our time.”
—Clint Smith, author of Counting Descent
“At once tender and explosive, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy is a growing-up story laden with an unusual candor. The book is stark, beautiful, challenging, and refreshing. Laymon explores abuse, love, violence, addiction, gender, and race without ever veering into the realm of the titillating or dehumanizing. He carries his people with a sweetness and fullness of heart that allows them to shine in three dimensions, allowed to be ugly and complicated and beloved and human. The abundance of Heavy is going to be a gift for many hurting hearts, in our time and beyond.”
—Eve Ewing, author of Electric Arches
“With Heavy, Laymon has outlined the wretched shape of our relentless national lie with duty and precision, breathing and pouring into it to shine the light ever brighter on its contours and limits. Heavy is an intimate excavation, a diagnosis, and a prescription for a cure for the terrifying dishonesty of the American body politic. I did not want to remember what I have found necessary to forget. Ready or not, Heavy remembers for me, and for us all, with the exquisite black southern precision of a post-soul blues. Its brilliance is in its intimate and firm reminder that we are more than what has been done to us by others and by this nation, and that we can and must unburden ourselves as we move toward freedom. With Heavy, Laymon, the chief blues scribe of our time, writes and plays us a path through the weight of things.”
—Zandria F. Robinson, author of This Ain’t Chicago
“Kiese Laymon’s new book is an emotional powerhouse. He fearlessly takes the reader into the dark corners of his interior life. Wound, grief, and enduring pain reside there. But this book is a love letter. And, as we all know, love is a beautiful and funky experience. Thank you, Kiese, for this gift.”
—Eddie Glaude, author of Democracy in Black
“Kiese Laymon has done nothing less than write the autobiography of the first generation of African Americans born after the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the black power ethos of the 1970s. His story of grappling with love and violence and language and our bodies is this generation’s story, and it is as moving and heartbreaking and heartwarming as you would expect. And then some.”
—Courtney Baker, author of Humane Insight
“Heavy is an act of truth telling unlike any other I can think of in American literature, partly due to Laymon’s uniquely gifted mind—his ability to pursue the ways we lie to each other while also loving each other, or not, and the humility he brings to bear while doing so, this consistently brings us back to life, to what matters in this world. Heavy is a gift to us, if we can pick it up—a moral exercise and an intimate history that is at the same time a story about America.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“On the low, many in these United States of America imagine that to be black means that whiteness, whether in its feigned supremacy or brutal imaginings, should be the center of every black story. But nah, that’s meager. In Heavy, Kiese Laymon remembers how people who loved each other or might have loved each other nearly shattered everything around them with hurt and then struggled to piece it all back together. Kiese crafts the most honest and intimate account of growing up black and southern since Richard Wright’s Black Boy. Circumventing the myths about blackness, he writes something as complex and fragile as who we is. An insider’s look into the making of a writer, Heavy is part memoir and part look into the books that turned a kid into a storyteller. Heavy invites us into a black South that remembers that we loved each other through it all. In ‘Nikki-Rosa,’ Nikki Giovanni wrote that ‘black love is black wealth.’ This book is the weight of black love, and might we all be wealthy by daring to open up to it.”
—Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of A Question of Freedom
“Heavy heaves, sings, hums, and runs all night to make it clear that there’s an alternative, that black history’s first premise is mutuality. That mutuality isn’t perfect, ain’t safe, it’s dangerous, in fact, and Heavy moves in a terrible and beautiful and so gentle proximity to that—at crucial times our primary—danger, the ones we love and who love us the most. I was with Kiese the whole damn heavy-floating way, word for word in laughter and tears, in recognition, refraction, and revelation. But, way more than any of those, sentence by sentence, I was with Kiese in thanks.”
—Ed Pavlić, author of Another Kind of Madness
“In Heavy, Kiese Laymon asks how to survive in a body despite the many violences that are inflicted upon it: the violence of racism, of misogyny, of history—the violence of a culture that treats the bodies of black men with fear and suspicion more often than with tenderness and attentive care. In prose that sears at the same time as it soars, Kiese Laymon breaks the unbearable silence each of these violences, in their peculiar cruelty, has imposed. Permeated with humility, bravery, and a bold intersectional feminism, Heavy is a triumph. I stand in solidarity with this book, and with its writer.”
—Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Other Side and The Reckonings
“How appropriate Kiese Laymon’s stunning memoir is titled Heavy. Not only are the stains and hurt highlighted here, heavy, but also the writer’s capacity to revive graveyards of ghosts who haunt and seemingly will continue to haunt the protagonist. Laymon is a fearless writer, our writer, who’s willing to expose and explore his most vulnerable interiors so that we might get closer to our truths. This is a southern book for backroads and cornbread, for Cadillacs and collard greens, for big mamas and moonshine. Heavy is full of our beautiful and ugly histories, and a declaration of how we might seek redemption. The colorful and complicated characters here speak a blues and poetry that is both nostalgic and familiar. This is the book we need right now. We should all be thankful for this ultramodern weighty testament of heartache, catharsis, and utter brilliance.”
—Derrick Harriell, author of Stripper in Wonderland and Ropes
“You do not just read Kiese Laymon’s work. It does a reading of you, too—one that unburies the stories you
thought you would never be able to tell truthfully, and reminds you of your voice to tell them. Heavy marks this quality in its highest definition yet. Written with as much devastating poignance as a humor only the black South could inspire, Heavy asks readers not just to observe Laymon’s courageous journey to understand even the most frightening complexities of life in an antiblack, sexist, fatphobic society, but to embark on it with him. In doing so, Laymon’s gorgeous wordsmithing moves us beyond simple binaries of pleasure and pain, joy and trauma, toward a deeper love for communities too often flattened into one dimension. Heavy is a book for the ages.”
—Hari Ziyad, author of Black Boy Out of Time
“Heavy is beautiful, lyrical, painful, and really brave. It is both exigent and timeless. Laymon’s use of juxtaposition—of the political and personal, the many stories of dishonesty and history, violence, everything—is all-world.”
—Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People
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CONTENTS
Epigraph
Been
I. BOY MAN.
TRAIN
NAN
WET
BE
II. BLACK ABUNDANCE.
MEAGER
CONTRACTION
HULK
GUMPTION
III. HOME WORKED.
FANTASTIC
DISASTER
ALREADY
SOON
IV. ADDICT AMERICANS.
GREENS
TERRORS
SEAT BELTS
PROMISES
Bend
About the Author
For the porch that Grandmama built
. . . cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.
—Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
BEEN
I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about black lies, black thighs, black loves, black laughs, black foods, black addictions, black stretch marks, black dollars, black words, black abuses, black blues, black belly buttons, black wins, black beens, black bends, black consent, black parents, or black children. I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir.
I wanted to write a lie.
I wanted to do that old black work of pandering and lying to folk who pay us to pander and lie to them every day. I wanted to write about our families’ relationships to simple carbohydrates, deep-fried meats, and high-fructose corn syrup. I wanted the book to begin with my weighing 319 pounds and end with my weighing 165 pounds. I wanted to pepper the book with acerbic warnings to us fat black folk in the Deep South and saccharine sentimental exhortations from Grandmama. I did not want you to laugh.
I wanted to write a lie.
I wanted to write about how fundamental present black fathers, responsible black mothers, magical black grandmothers, and perfectly disciplined black children are to our liberation. I wanted to center a something, a someone who wants us dead and dishonest. I wanted white Americans, who have proven themselves even more unwilling to confront their lies, to reconsider how their lies limit our access to good love, healthy choices, and second chances. I wanted the book to begin and end with the assumption that if white Americans reckoned with their insatiable appetites for black American suffering, and we reckoned with our insatiable appetites for unhealthy food, we could all be ushered into a reformed era of American prosperity. I wanted to create a fantastic literary spectacle. I wanted that literary spectacle to ask nothing of you, Grandmama, or me other than our adherence to a low-carb diet, limited sugar, weight lifting, twelve thousand steps a day, gallons of water, and no eating after midnight. I wanted you to promise. I did not want you to remember.
I wanted to write a lie.
I wanted that lie to be titillating.
I wrote that lie.
It was titillating.
You would have loved it.
I discovered nothing.
You would have loved it.
I started over and wrote what we hoped I’d forget.
I was eleven years old, five-nine, 208 pounds when you told me to stand still and act like your husband. You’d just given me your daddy’s musty brown brim, five dollars, and the directive to play the slot machine next to yours. We were under the stars on the Vegas Strip celebrating the only Christmas we’d ever spent away from Grandmama’s shotgun house in Forest, Mississippi. Instead of sliding my five dollars in the machine, I put the money in the pocket of my Raiders Starter jacket. After four pulls, I remember 260 quarters splashing the tin catcher in front of you. We looked over our right shoulders. We looked over our left shoulders. We got on our knees. We raked more quarters than I’d ever seen into that warped white cup.
“Rake, Kie,” you said. “Rake.”
I loved how you used “rake” to describe what we were doing. When you wrapped my hand in yours and told me to hold the cup steady, I was convinced that we were the luckiest black couple in Las Vegas. Even though you were winning, even though we’d just won, you did not look at me. You kept pulling that handle and looking behind you. “Just one more minute,” you said. “I think I can hit again. I promise. Just one more minute.”
Every time you promised, I believed you.
I told Grandmama about all the quarters we raked when we got back to Aunt Linda’s apartment that night. Grandmama didn’t say a word. She looked her twitching eyes past me, found your eyes, and said, “Is that right? You know didn’t nan one of them casinos build themselves. They all built off of some fool’s money.”
You slept on a slender pallet that night in Vegas. I was supposed to be sleeping next to you but I couldn’t because I was so happy. Your snores reminded me that you were alive. If you were alive and next to me, I had everything in the world I could ever want.
When we got back from Vegas, you used some of those quarters in the warped white cup to buy an extra tennis racket. The first time we played at Callaway High School, we were volleying when the sound of an M-80 distracted us. We looked toward the school and saw a black woman in a faded jean jacket on one knee. She was wiping the blood from her nose in front of a slender black man in a short blue Members Only jacket.
“Put them hands down,” we heard the man say. The woman in the faded jean jacket slowly dropped her hands and the man hit her in the face with what sounded like a loose soggy fist. The woman in the faded jean jacket fell to the ground, murmured something to the man, and covered her face.
Without saying a word, we cocked our rackets and sprinted toward the couple. “Motherfucker,” you screamed as the man pulled the woman up. “You better not hit her again, motherfucker.” When the man saw us coming after him, he dragged the woman off through the dirt path.
“Motherfucker,” I yelled, and looked for confirmation that cussing in front of you was okay. On the other side of the building, the man, and the woman in the faded jean jacket whose face he’d exploded, got in a raggedy black Mazda. She put on her seat belt and they sped off. We didn’t call the police. We didn’t run back to our Nova.
We caught our breath.
We held hands.
We got on our knees.
I’d never prayed in the middle of that kind of anger, or fear. I knew we were praying for the safety of the woman in the jean jacket. I assumed we were also praying for ourselves. If we could have touched the man, he would have suffered.
We would have killed him.
I realized that day we didn’t simply love each other. We were o
f two vastly different generations of blackness, but I was your child. We had the same husky thighs, short arms, full cheeks, mushy insides, and minced imagination. We were excellent at working until our bodies gave out, excellent at laughing and laughing and laughing until we didn’t. We were excellent at hiding and misdirecting, swearing up and down we were naked when we were fully clothed. Our heart meat was so thick. Once punctured, though, we waltzed those hearts into war without a plan of escape. No matter how terrified or hurt we were, we didn’t dare ask anybody for help. We stewed. We remembered. We heaved like two hulks. We resented everyone who watched us suffer. We strapped ourselves in for the next disaster, knowing—though we had no proof—we would always recover.
As a child, on nights when you and I didn’t sleep together, I remember trembling, imagining a life where I wasn’t yours. I remember you chiding me not to use contractions when talking to white people and police. I remember believing all your lies were mistakes, and forgetting those mistakes when we woke up tucked into each other. Every time you said my particular kind of hardheadedness and white Mississippians’ brutal desire for black suffering were recipes for an early death, institutionalization, or incarceration, I knew you were right.
I just didn’t care.
I cared about the way you’d grit your teeth when you beat me for not being perfect. I cared about girls at school seeing my welts. I cared about you. Days, and often hours, before you beat me, you touched me so gently. You told me you loved me. You called me your best friend. You forgave me for losing the key to the house. You coated the ashy cracks in my face with Vaseline-slick palms. You used your nubby thumbs, wet with saliva, to clean the sleep out of my eyes. You made me feel like the most beautiful black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn’t.
“I didn’t try to hurt you,” you told me the last time we spoke. “I don’t remember hurting you as much as you remember being hurt, Kie. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying I don’t remember everything the way you do.”