Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

  I sat in the booth of the restaurant, musty, screw-faced, trying to make sense of what you said. None of it really made sense but I was happy to learn we were this contentious thick-thighed Mississippi duo facing a slew of northern enemies trying to punish us for shining.

  “They cannot fuck with us,” you kept saying. “Excuse me for saying it. But it’s true. They cannot fuck with us.”

  On the way back to our apartment that night, I thought about how the black boys at DeMatha call me a “Bama,” how the coaches and students made fun of how I pronounced the word “am-bue-lance,” how my Spanish teacher joked with the rest of the class that my blazer smelled like catfish, and how all my teachers, who all happen to be white men, patted me on the head in class and said “Good for you, Kee-say” when I got an obvious answer right.

  When we were half a mile from home, a Maryland police car stopped us. Just like when they stopped us in Mississippi, you sat up in your seat, kept both hands on the wheel, and looked straight ahead. You took out your University of Maryland ID and tucked my red, black, and green African medallion into my Public Enemy T-shirt. You told me to sit up, keep my hands on the dashboard, and don’t say a word.

  The officer knelt down and looked in your window. When I saw your face so close to his gun, I wanted to snatch it and watch it melt into black grits. Ever since police started approaching me more often in Mississippi, I wanted the superpower to melt every gun in the world into black grits. The officer asked why we had Mississippi license plates.

  “Because we are residents of Jackson, Mississippi,” you said. “I have a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Maryland at College Park. Have I done anything wrong, Officer?”

  When the officer told you to speak up and claimed you changed lanes without signaling, you kept your grip on the steering wheel and said, “I did not change lanes without signaling. You sped up behind me so I signaled and changed lanes.”

  The officer tried to laugh in your face as he asked for license and registration. “Is that your man?” he asked you. “He needs to show identification, too.”

  Your hands came off the steering wheel and you pointed at the officer’s face. “Move away from my car,” you said. “That is my child and he is fifteen years old. He does not have identification. May I have your badge number, please?” I hated how it sounded when you didn’t use contractions.

  The officer asked both of us to step out of the car.

  “We will not get out of this car,” you said, louder this time. “We have done nothing wrong.”

  My fists were balled up, and I was inching toward the driver-side window. You slapped me across my chest with the back of your hand, and told me to be quiet and unclench my fists right as another officer pulled up. The first officer, who was now laughing, walked back to the second officer’s car.

  You eventually showed the second officer your license and your University of Maryland ID. The officer looked at the ID, flipped it over, and told us to have a good night.

  “Never give them a chance to take the shot,” you finally said after we walked in the apartment and locked the door. “They will take it. They will take it. They will take it.” I wondered why you said it three times, and why you never told me to shoot back. “Mississippi. Maryland. It don’t matter where you are. They will shoot your black ass out of the sky every chance they get. If you have a heart attack dodging their bullets, they will hide they guns and say you killed yourself.”

  “I hear you,” I told you, and tried to make you laugh. “Why didn’t you just say ‘don’t’ instead of ‘does not’ or ‘doesn’t’ and ‘they’ instead of ‘their,’ though?”

  “If I did not know correct English, it’s more likely that police officer might have shot us,” you said.

  “No he wouldn’t,” I told you. “That fool got madder because you were speaking correct English.”

  You looked at me like you were thinking. “You might actually be right, Kie. But in the long run, correct English will save a black man more than it will hurt you.”

  “Will correct English save you, though?”

  “I do not need saving,” you said. “I am not the one who is an endangered species.”

  “I’m not either,” I told you. “I’m an endangered species with a lot of gas in my stomach. I’ll be right back. That cop gave me the bubble-guts.”

  You laughed and laughed and laughed until you didn’t.

  While I was in my room changing, you told me to write about what I learned from the experience with the police. I wasn’t sure what to write because I wasn’t sure how to live life in a way that didn’t give them a chance to shoot us out of the sky. It seemed like just driving, or walking into a house, or doing your job, or cutting a grapefruit was all it took to get shot out of the sky. And the biggest problem was police weren’t the only people doing the shooting. They were just the only people allowed to walk around and threaten us with guns and prison if they didn’t like our style of flying.

  I loved our style of flying.

  • • •

  During the Christmas break, LaThon took me to Murrah High School, where we watched a six-nine tenth grader we knew named Othella make every shot he attempted in warm-ups, the first half, and halftime of the game. Othella finished with over forty points, twelve dunks, and over twenty rebounds. He hardly played the fourth quarter. LaThon and I watched the game completely silent.

  “You know they say Othella the best tenth grader in the nation?” LaThon finally asked me on the way home.

  “You mean best in Mississippi?”

  “Naw, bruh. I mean the nation. The game done changed.”

  “Them busters at my school up in Maryland be calling us Bamas down here,” I told him. “If we Bamas, how come we got the best tenth grader in the nation? Plus we got Hollywood Robinson and Chris Jackson.”

  “Walter Payton,” LaThon said.

  “Fannie Lou Hamer.”

  “Even if we look at white boys, we got Brett Favre.”

  “And Oprah,” I told him. “Oprah ’bout to be bigger than Barbara Walters out here. They trippin’.”

  “Yeah,” LaThon said, “they stay trippin’ but what we gone do? Me and you.”

  That night, LaThon and I realized the basketball we’d been playing and the basketball Othella played weren’t the same basketball. We loved playing ball, but Othella was a baller. Thanks to Othella Harrington, LaThon Simmons started imagining life as an engineer that night and I started imagining life as a middle school teacher whose side-hustle was rapping.

  A few weeks after we returned to Maryland, I got caught cheating on a world history test Coach Ricks was proctoring. I cheated the day after I refused to read the world history book assigned and read a book called Before the Mayflower in class instead. You hadn’t beaten me the whole time we’d been in Maryland but when you came to school to get me, I knew I’d get my back destroyed.

  “I know what you’re doing,” you said when we got in the car. “Let it go.”

  “Let what go?” I asked you.

  “Just let it go, Kie.”

  That was it. No lashes. No slaps. No lines.

  You were happier than I’d ever seen you. You never came in my bedroom crying in the middle of the night. You gave me kisses on the face, cracked fart jokes, and held my hand when I least expected it.

  “I’m not a teacher here,” I heard you tell Grandmama a few times on the phone. “I’m just a scholar. I earned this time to write and research. That means a lot to me, Ma. I’m learning how to love Kie and myself the right way. Yeah, I guess it is better late than never.”

  I didn’t understand what the “scholar” part of your sentence really meant. But in Maryland, for the first time since I’d known you, we didn’t run out of gas. Our lights were never cut off. We didn’t have a fridge full of food or much extra money, but we were never, ever hungry.

  When I came back from playing ball at the Greenbelt rec center during spring break, you made me read back over sen
tences I’d written in my notebooks back in Mississippi. You said I asked a lot of questions about what I saw and heard in my writing, but because I didn’t reread the questions I didn’t push myself to different answers. You said a good question always trumps an average answer.

  “The most important part of writing, and really life,” you said, “is revision.”

  When you don’t care about making other people feel pain, I’m wondering if you are being a violent person?

  I wrote that sentence in Jackson and revised it the night Marion Barry was caught on TV smoking crack. I couldn’t understand why you cried that night and kept saying, “This is all so violent. They’re going to use this video to come after black elected officials for decades. Do your work, Kie. Revise, and never, ever let these people see you fail.”

  Nothing I’d read in school prepared me to think through the permanence of violence in Mississippi, Maryland, and the whole nation. After school, I kept reading and rearranging the words I’d written, trying to understand what the words meant for my understanding of violence. For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory. You told me in Mississippi revision was practice. In Maryland, I finally believed you. The truth was that practicing writing meant practicing sitting down, sitting still, and my body did not ever want to be still. When it had to be still, all it wanted to do was imagine dunking with two hands or kissing a girl who loved me. Sitting still, just as much as any other part of writing, took practice. Most days, my body did not want to practice, but I convinced it that sitting still and writing were a path to memory.

  I remembered writing down and memorizing tens of thousands of sentences written by rappers and wondering what it would feel like to write sentences black children wanted to memorize.

  I remembered flying around Jackson, teeth chattering on command from LaThon’s new subwoofer. I remember lounging in the passenger seat with “Criminal Minded” and “Dopeman” blasting, and LaThon leaning at a forty-five-degree angle in the driver’s seat of his grandfather’s Cutlass. I remembered LaThon saying, “You take that black shit too far sometimes,” after I almost got a whole car of us shot for talking reckless to the police.

  I remembered turning the volume up on our little black-and-white TV to watch Benson and Night Court when Malachi Hunter came to the house. I remember feeling petrified when Kamala Lackey asked me to touch her breasts in the art closet during second period in ninth grade. I remembered being okay never kissing a girl if I could touch myself to the thought of Layla, or Kamala Lackey asking me to touch her breasts in the art closet, for the rest of my life.

  I remembered watching friends with hats cocked left shoot friends with hats cocked right. I remembered what it felt like to watch some of those friends disappear.

  I remembered begging Grandmama to let me stay with her when you told me we had to leave Mississippi for a year. I remembered sitting on Grandmama’s porch and watching her tell me she was going to be lonely while we’re gone. I remembered forgiving you when Grandmama told me you beat me so much because something in Jackson was beating you.

  I remembered waking up one morning wondering where all the big boys in Beulah Beauford’s house went. I remember finding out that two of them were in jail for selling drugs too close to a school, one of them was shipped out of the state, and that Layla had to move in with her grandparents in Memphis.

  I remembered seeing Layla when she came back to Jackson for the homecoming game at Jackson State. I remembered asking her if she was mad at me for leaving her at Beulah Beauford’s house that day. I remembered listening, and trying to look cool as Layla said, “All I wanted to do was swim, just like y’all. I ain’t studdin’ none of y’all niggas.”

  Before leaving Maryland, I went to a doctor for the second time in my life. The good news was the doctor said I was six-one, 208 pounds, two inches taller and almost twenty pounds lighter than I was when I left Jackson. The bad news was I had a murmur in my heart. You said even though the murmur was functional, I should be worried because we watched Hank Gathers, the power forward for the Loyola Marymount basketball team, die of a heart attack on television after catching an alley-oop.

  I loved the sound of the word “murmur” and I loved that I was coming back to Mississippi with a murmur, a smaller body, and a new relationship to writing, revision, memory, and you.

  America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.

  HULK

  You were on one end of Grandmama’s couch yelling at me while I was on the other end grasping the side of my face. We weren’t back in Mississippi for longer than a week when you smashed me across my face with the heel of a Patrick Ewing Adidas because I talked back. The side of my face started to swell, but I couldn’t understand why getting hit in the face with the heel of a Ewing didn’t hurt as much as it had before we left Jackson. I was six-one, 215 pounds, nine inches taller and over forty pounds heavier than you. The softer parts of my heart and body were getting harder and those harder parts didn’t want to hurt you, but they wanted to never, ever be hurt by you again.

  I was heavier and taller than all of my friends’ fathers, but the peach fuzz under my arms, thin patches of pubic hair, and no hair at all on my face didn’t care how big my body was. Let the hair tell it, I was still a child while LaThon, Donnie Gee, Jabari, and them were all starting to grow full-fledged mustaches and beards. The weekend before school started, you promised me you’d take me to get a haircut Monday. When Monday came, I had to decide between lunch money for the week or a haircut. I chose lunch money for the week, and you convinced me you could give me the best at-home fade I’d ever seen. I’m not sure why I believed you. You had many gifts, but drawing straight lines with or without a ruler, staying in the lines while coloring in a coloring book were not some of those gifts.

  I expected the fade would be a bit off, but you actually managed to give me the worst fade I’d ever seen on a human in Mississippi. It wasn’t just that the fade didn’t fade; it was that no part of the fade looked symmetrical. My eyes watered looking at my new haircut. I asked you to leave the bathroom while you laughed until you cried at my reaction to this fade that refused to fade. I locked the door and wondered what would happen if I shaved my head bald like Barkley and Jordan.

  When I opened the door, you gasped and said a bald head would make white people and police think I was more of a threat.

  “Good,” I said, and closed the door again to wash all the hair off.

  After I got out of the shower, I looked at my hairless head and face and wondered how I’d look, not with a huge Lamont Sanford mustache, but with just the shadow of a mustache like LaThon and them had. I opened the drawer, found your mascara, and smudged the coal across the skin above my top lip until my face joined my body in looking, and feeling, more like a man.

  The entire ride to school, you kept talking about my bald head. I kept thinking about my new fake mustache. When I grabbed my bag and got ready to get out of the car, you said, “Be patient with your body, Kie. I love you.” I remember wishing you’d been this version of yourself the day you clocked me across the face with a Patrick Ewing Adidas.

  • • •

  My first few months back in Jackson were spent moving my big bald-headed self from LaThon’s couch, to Jabari’s bottom bunk, to Donnie Gee’s guest room, to varsity basketball practice at St. Joseph High School. One night, after a basketball game, a chubby white tenth grader with glassy eyes, a black convertible, and strong hands asked to buy me a banana shake. Her name was Ab
by Claremont. Two days later, in the back of Jabari’s van, Abby asked me how many girls I’d kissed. After I lied and said about five—which was five more than the truth—Abby kissed me on my lips. A few weeks later, Abby asked me how many times I’d had sex. After I lied and said about four and a half—which was four and a half more than the truth—Abby asked me to have sex at Donnie Gee’s house while his mother was at work.

  Even though Abby didn’t really know me, and I didn’t really know her, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I’d heard a lot about big boys cheating on their girlfriends but cheating confused me. I assumed all of those big boys knew sex with someone they loved felt the opposite of gross, the opposite of meager. It was actually the only thing in the world that felt nearly as good as that black abundance. I didn’t understand how sex with someone you didn’t love could feel nearly as good.

  “Thank you,” Abby said while we were lying in the bed after having sex the first time. “I know you were scared.”

  “How you know I was scared?” I asked her. “My rhythm was meager, huh? I can do better next time.”

  “Not at all,” she said, and laughed until she started coughing. “I just know you were scared because I love you. I can tell you love me back. That’s scary.”

  No other woman who touched me wanted to only be touched by me. All I wanted to do was make Abby feel as happy as she made me feel. I wondered what it meant to be touched and loved sexually by a white girl in Mississippi, but I was lost in what it felt to be touched and loved by any woman or girl in Mississippi other than you, Grandmama, and Renata. I always assumed the first woman I would have real sex with would be Layla, after I got older, got a decent job, and lost a lot of weight around my thighs.