by Kiese Laymon
I still believe you.
This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been, which means no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—wants to be free. I asked Grandmama why she stayed in Mississippi instead of running to the Midwest with the rest of her family if white folk made her so sick, and why she told so many of her stories in present tense.
“The land, Kie,” she said. “We work too hard on this land to run. Some of us, we believe the land will one day be free. I been eating off this land my whole life. Greens. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Collards. You hear me? That’s all I can tell you. As far as these stories, I just try to gather up all the gumption I can before I take it to the Lord. And when I tell it to my children, sometimes I just be trying to put y’all where I been.”
I wondered, for a second, about why “be trying” and “where I been” felt far heavier than “I try” and “what I have experienced.” I asked if I could ask one more difficult question. Grandmama looked at me, for the first time in our lives, like she was afraid. She grabbed her keys and made me wheel her around to the side of the house under the thick scent of her pecan tree. Once we got there, I knelt and asked whether she minded if we talked about words, memory, emergencies, weight, and sexual violence in our family.
Grandmama rubbed the graying hair sliding out from under her wig and put both palms across her frown lines. I asked her why she covered her face when she got nervous or when she laughed. I asked why she wore that fake-looking wig all the time.
“Choices,” she murmured. “I already told you. I can’t let no man, not even my grandbaby, choose my choice for me.” Grandmama looked past what was left of our woods. “Kie, I think we remembered enough for today. I know you been trying to talk about that thing going on thirty years. I need to talk about something else first.”
Right there, in the same spot where I remember Grandmama teaching me how to hang up clothes on the clothesline, she told me about not being able to vote, not pissing where she needed to piss, not eating what she needed to eat, not walking how she needed to walk, not driving when she needed to drive because she was born a poor black girl in Scott County, Mississippi. She talked about the shame of white-folk wants always trumping black-folk needs. She talked about how much she loved eating vegetables off her land, and the fear of running north with the rest of her family during the Great Migration. Grandmama told me survival stories placed in offices, washrooms, Sunday school classrooms, parking lots, kitchens, fields, and bedrooms. She told me stories featuring her body and the white foremen at the chicken plant. She told me about Mr. Mumford, about the deacons at our church, about the men who worked the line with her. She told me stories about her father, her uncles, her cousins, and her husband. “I think the men folk forgot,” she said near the end, “that I was somebody’s child.”
Grandmama’s body just started laughing. And my body laughed, too. “I’m black and I’m a woman,” she finally said. “I love me some Jesus. That’s who I always been. And I ain’t afraid to shoot somebody trying to harm me and mines. You hear me? I am okay because I pray every day. Some days, the tears just be pouring out my eyes, Kie. But Grandmama is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as a somebody worth respecting. You hear me? Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either. But I am okay. You hear me?”
I heard Grandmama. But I saw and smelled what diabetes left of her right foot. Grandmama hadn’t felt her foot, controlled her bowels, or really tasted her food in over a decade. This Sunday, like every Sunday before it, Grandmama wanted me to know it could all be so much worse. Like you, Grandmama beat the worst of white folk and the mean machinations of men every day she was alive, but y’all taught me indirectly that unacknowledged scars accumulated in battles won often hurt more than battles lost.
“I believe you,” I told her. “I will always believe you even when I know you lying.” I asked Grandmama if she’d been saying B-E-N-D or B-E-E-N all day.
“Been,” she said. “B-E-E-N. Like where you been. And after all the places you and your mama been, y’all way more than mother and son and y’all done way more drowning than an’ one of y’all want to admit.”
Grandmama was right and Grandmama was wrong.
You and I have never been a family of cabinets filled with Band-Aids, alcohol, and peroxide. We have never been a family of tuck-ins and bedtime stories any more than we’ve been a family of consistent bill money, pantries, full refrigerators, washers and dryers. We have always been a bent black southern family of laughter, outrageous lies, and books. The presence of all those books, all that laughter, all our lies, and your insistence I read, reread, write, and revise in those books, made it so I would never be intimidated or easily impressed by words, punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and white space. You gave me a black southern laboratory to work with words. In that space, I learned how to assemble memory and imagination when I most wanted to die.
Your gifts of reading, rereading, writing, and revision are why I started this book thirty years ago on Grandmama’s porch. In spite of those gifts, or maybe because of those gifts, it’s important for me to accept, that like all American children, I’ve been brutally dishonest with you. And like all American parents, you’ve been brutally dishonest with me.
A few months ago, I was standing behind you with ten dollars I stole from a scared black woman who would never steal ten dollars from me. You were sitting in front of a slot machine, looking nervously over both shoulders, as you spent your last bill money. We were sixteen hundred miles from home. You did not know I was there. If you turned around, I knew you’d talk about how much weight I’d gained, not where our bodies had been since we’d last seen each other.
I wanted to tap you on your shoulder and ask if you were ready to go home. On the way home, I wanted to ask you if we were deserving of different kinds of liberation, different modes of memory, different policy, different practices, and different relationships to honesty. I wanted to ask you if we were also deserving of different books. I am writing a different book to you because books, for better and worse, are how we got here, and I am afraid of speaking any of this to your face.
I would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of you. You would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of me. But neither of us would ever, under any circumstance, be honest about yesterday. This is how we are taught to love in America. Our dishonesty, cowardice, and misplaced self-righteousness, far more than how much, or how little we weigh is part of why we are suffering. In this way, and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation. We do not have to be this way.
I wanted to write a lie.
You wanted to read that lie.
I wrote this to you instead.
TRAIN
You stood in a West Jackson classroom teaching black children how correct usage of the word “be” could save them from white folk while I knelt in North Jackson, preparing to steal the ID card of a fifteen-year-old black girl named Layla Weathersby. I was twelve years old, three years younger than Layla, who had the shiniest elbows, wettest eyes, and whitest Filas of any of us at Beulah Beauford’s house. Just like the big boys, Dougie and me, all Layla ever wanted to do was float in the deep end.
Beulah Beauford’s house, which sat deep in a North Jackson neighborhood next to ours, was only the second house I’d been in with new encyclopedias, two pantries filled with name-brand strawberry Pop-Tarts, and an in-ground pool. Unlike us in our rented house, which we shared with thousands of books and two families of rats, Beulah Beauford and her husband owned her house. When we moved from apartments in West Jackson to our little house in the Queens, and eventually to North Jackson, I wanted people wh
o dropped me off to think Beulah Beauford’s house belonged to us. Our house had more books than any other house I’d ever been in, way more books than Beulah Beauford’s house, but no one I knew, other than you, wanted to swim in, or eat, books.
Before dropping me off, you told me I was supposed to use Beulah Beauford’s encyclopedias to write a report about these two politicians named Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens. You told me to compare their ideas of citizenship to President Ronald Reagan’s claim: “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
Then I was also supposed to read the first chapter of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and imitate Faulkner’s style when writing a short story placed in Jackson. The first sentence in the book was a million words long, which was cool, and it used strange words like “wisteria” and “lattices,” but I didn’t know how to write like Faulkner and say anything honest about us. Ronald Reagan gave me the bubble-guts and William Faulkner made me feel drunker than a white man, so I decided I’d take the whupping from you or write lines when I got home.
Besides Layla, and Beulah Beauford’s son, Dougie, usually there were at least two other seventeen-year-old big boys in the house who were the friends of Dougie’s older cousin, Daryl. Daryl moved into Beulah Beauford’s house a year earlier from Minnesota and his room was a straight-up shrine to Vanity, Apollonia, and Prince Rogers Nelson. Daryl and his boys went from rolling their own cigarettes, to smoking weed, to selling tiny things that made people in North Jackson feel better about being alive. In between doing all that smoking and selling, they swam, watched porn, drank Nehis, boiled Red Hots, ate spinach, got drunk, got high, imitated Mike Tyson’s voice, talked about running trains, and changed the rules to swim at Beulah Beauford’s house every other week that summer of 1987.
One week, the rule was Dougie, Layla, and I had to make the older boys all the supersweet Kool-Aid they could drink with perfectly chipped ice if we wanted to swim. Two weeks later, the rule was Dougie and I had to place five socks around our fists and box each other until one of our noses bled. The next-to-last day I spent at Beulah Beauford’s house, the rule was simple: Layla had to go in Daryl’s room with all the big boys for fifteen minutes if she wanted to float in the deep end, and Dougie and I had to steal all the money out of her purse and give it to the big boys when they got out.
Layla, who smelled like apple Now and Laters, shea butter, and bleach, always wore a wrinkled sky-blue swimsuit underneath her acid-washed Guess overalls. I watched her walk down the hall behind Darryl, Wedge, and this dude named Delaney with the biggest calves in the neighborhood. Delaney claimed he’d been initiated into the Vice Lords one weekend earlier.
We all believed him.
When the door to Darryl’s bedroom closed, Dougie and I started rummaging through Layla’s purse. Stealing stuff, getting to the last level in Donkey Kong, barely losing fights, and saying “on hard,” “on punishment,” and “on swole” were Dougie’s superpowers. He wasn’t all-world at any of them, but he did all four ten times more than anyone I’d ever known in Jackson.
Since Layla didn’t have any money to steal, Dougie stole Layla’s compact that day. He claimed he was going to fill it with these weak joints Daryl showed him how to roll. I saw and stole a crumpled minipack of apple Now and Laters right next to this unopened bottle of white shoe polish.
Inside the smallest pocket of the purse, wrapped around some yellow legal pad paper, was this homemade ID. None of the edges were smooth and Layla had on a red Panama Jack shirt and braces on her bottom teeth in the picture. The ID had Layla’s birth date, school name, weight, height, and a church picture of her and her family standing in front of Mt. Calvary, but it didn’t have her name on it. I remember Layla was at least six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me. On the other side of the ID, blazing across the middle in huge bleeding black marker, were the words USE THIS IN CASE OF EMERGENCIES.
Up until that point, I’d never really imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys who were taught by big boys who were taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them. Part of it was Layla was three whole years older than me and I never really had a conversation with her for more than eight seconds. Layla wasn’t the most stylish girl in North Jackson, but she was definitely the funniest person in Beulah Beauford’s house, and she was all-world at more things than all of us combined. She was all-world at dissing Daryl for having feet that stank through his bootleg Jordans, all-world at reminding Delaney his breaststroke was forever a “drownstroke,” and all-world at never really laughing at anyone else’s sentences until she was good and ready. I wasn’t the type of fat black boy to ever talk to fine black girls first, and Layla wasn’t the type of fine black girl to ever really talk to fat black boys like me unless she was asking me to get out of her way, walk faster, or get her some Kool-Aid.
I didn’t have an ID of my own, but I did have this blue velcro Jackson State University wallet with the faded tiger on the front. You gave it to me for Christmas. I kept the two-dollar bill Grandmama gave me for my birthday in it. Behind a black-and-white picture of Grandmama, in one of the folds, was one of your old licenses. You said I couldn’t leave the house without it until I got my own license. A real license, you told me way more than once, didn’t mean I was grown. It just meant I was technically protected from the Vice Lords, the Folks, and the Jackson police, who you claimed worked for Ronald Reagan and the devil.
“What they up in there doing?” I asked Dougie, whose ear was pressed against Daryl’s door.
“Fool, what you think? Running a train.”
I smirked like I knew what running a train was. Really I had no idea how running a train worked physically or verbally. Running a train sat orange-red in my imagination. Running a train occupied the space of a proper noun, but moved like the most active of active verbs. Just saying “running a train,” whether you were a participant in the train or knowledgeable of a train, gave you a glow and gravity every black boy in Jackson respected. The only other three words that gave you a similar glow and gravity were “I got initiated.”
“They ran a train up in there this morning, too,” Dougie said.
“Layla was here this morning?”
“Naw. It was this other girl.”
“Who?”
“I forgot her name,” Dougie told me. “LaWon or LaDon some shit. They ran a train on her twice. Be quiet, fool. Listen.”
I stood there wondering why the shallow grunts and minisqueaks coming from the boys in Daryl’s room made me want to be dead. I didn’t know, but I assumed some kind of sex was happening, but I couldn’t understand why Layla was so much less breathy than the white women on Cinemax and The Young and the Restless. I assumed Layla’s short fingers were balled up and her eyes were rolling back in her head. If everyone in the room was naked, I wondered what they all were doing with their hands and how they looked at the hair on each other’s thighs. I wondered if anyone was crying.
Fifteen minutes later, the door to the bedroom opened. “Both of y’all little niggas getting on hard, ain’t you?” Delaney asked us. Daryl and Wedge walked out of the bedroom a few seconds later with their shirts wrapped around their heads like turbans. Dougie started walking into Daryl’s bedroom.
“Where you think you going?” Daryl asked Dougie. “Keece knocked you out like a little-ass trick the other day. Keece, take your big football-playing ass in there and get you some if you want. I think she like you anyway.”
I looked at Dougie, who was looking at the ground. “I’m good,” I told Daryl, and walked behind the big boys. “I don’t want none right now.”
When I saw no one was in the bathroom, I acted like I had to pee. After hearing one of the doors to outside close, I walked back down the hallway an
d stood in the doorway of Daryl’s bedroom.
“Big Keece,” Layla said from the bedroom. “I be seeing you.”
I wasn’t sure what Layla saw, other than a twelve-year-old, 213-pound black boy with a suspect hairline and no waves, but under the three crooked Vanity 6 posters and the chlorinated stank of Daryl’s bedroom, I saw Layla’s Filas were on, and the long stretch marks streaking across the backs of her thighs were so much prettier than the squiggly ones forming on my biceps and butt.
“Big Keece,” she said again. “Can you get me some yellow Kool-Aid?”
“Okay,” I said. “Wait. Can you tell me how you get your Filas so white?”
“Why you whispering?”
“Oh,” I said louder. “I was just wondering how you got your Filas so white.”
“Bleach and shoe polish,” she said, adjusting the fitted sheet.
“Bleach and shoe polish?”
“Yup. Use bleach first on the white part with, like, a toothbrush. How come you always be reading books when you come over here?”
“Oh. ’Cause my mama will beat my ass if I don’t.”
“That’s funny,” Layla said, and laughed and laughed and laughed until she didn’t. “My mama kinda does not play. But I heard your mama really does not play.”
“She don’t,” I said, and walked to the kitchen hunting for strawberry Pop-Tarts. I remember watching the swirling reds, yellows, and forest greens in Beulah Beauford’s pantry. At our house, there was no pantry. There was hardly any food other than spoiled pimento cheese, the backs of molded wheat bread, a half-empty box of wine, and swollen green olives. I missed our fridge, though. I missed our kitchen.
I missed you.
I opened an unopened bottle of thick bleu cheese dressing and drank as much as I could. Then I placed some crushed ice in a huge red plastic cup, poured some lemonade mix in it. I used a plastic butter knife to stir before walking back to Daryl’s bedroom.