by Kiese Laymon
“I can’t tell,” she said.
“Why you lying?”
“I’m not lying. I can’t tell. But even if I could tell, so what?”
I told Nzola I had to go back to my dorm and finish a paper. She asked if she could come with me. The paper was due in the morning, I told her, and it was hard for me to concentrate if I was working next to someone.
“Other people’s breathing throws off your thinking, Kiese?”
“I mean, kinda, but more like . . .”
“You are some kind of strange-ass dude, Kiese Laymon,” she said. “Even when I know you’re lying to me, I just feel crazy sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“Because I can just tell you’ll never let me carry what you’re hiding.”
I thought about what Nzola said, but I didn’t think about what I was hiding. I hadn’t thought about what I was hiding the whole time I’d been at Millsaps. “You won’t let me hold what you’re hiding, either. And it’s obvious you’re hiding just as much as me.”
“Yep. You’re right,” she said. “That’s different. I know y’all. Y’all love to see us break.”
“I’m not trying to see you break, though.”
“If you want me to believe you when you’re lying,” she said, “then you want to see me break.”
Nzola invited me to her house for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t go because her stepmother was always commenting on Nzola’s weight and how she wanted “a fine, handsome, together brother” for her stepdaughter. I’d been treated like a man in and out of our house for about a decade. But I was also forever the kind of black boy who could never really be a fine, handsome, together brother because I was too husky to be fine and too dusty to be together.
Even though the dorms were closed, I spent Thursday through Sunday in the student lounge eating everything I could afford off the ninety-nine-cent menu at Wendy’s. When all my Wendy’s was gone, I broke into vending machines on campus. I stole their Moon Pies, Hot Fries, Twix, and Grandma’s Vanilla Sandwich Cremes. I kicked my feet up on their couch and watched The Arsenio Hall Show on their television. Before falling asleep, I started reading a book I checked out of their library by Toni Cade Bambara. The book was called Gorilla, My Love.
It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on page 42 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whupped.
The first sentence of the book showed me first sentences could be roller coasters designed especially for us. I read it again. Then I wrote it. Bambara took what Welty did best and created worlds where no one was sheltered, cloistered, or white, but everyone—in some form or fashion—was weird, wonderful, slightly wack, and all the way black. Blackness, in all its boredom and boom, was the historical and imaginative context in Bambara’s work. I wanted to be that kind of free, on and off the page. I wanted to write something someday with that kind of first sentence and I wanted that kind of first sentence to be written to me every day for the rest of my life.
I still wrote every night and revised every morning, but practicing crafting formidable sentences just made me a formidable sentence writer. The other part of writing required something more than just practice, something more than reading, too. It required loads of unsentimental explorations of black love. It required an acceptance of our strange. And mostly, it required a commitment to new structures, not reformation. I’d spent eighteen years reading the work of supposed excellent sentence-writers who did not love, or really see us. Many wrote for us, without writing to us. After reading Bambara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn’t, at least partially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.
A few days before winter break, Nzola invited me to the Grill to eat greasy pieces of Red Velvet cake. I brought Gorilla, My Love because I wanted to see her face when she read the first sentence. “So James asked me to visit him for Christmas break,” she said while we were eating.
“That’s cool,” I told her, and put the book back in my book bag. “Tell Dr. Rick James hey for me.”
“I don’t want to go, Kiese,” she said.
“For real? What would Bill Clinton do?”
“He would lie, and fuck whoever he wants,” Nzola said without cracking a smile. “Then he’d lie again.” I told her I’d been working on an essay about Bill Clinton. “That’s all you have to say?” she asked, and hugged my neck. “That’s really all you have to say?”
“Yup.”
“I guess I’ll see you later. Good luck with your essay. Send it to me if you want. I hope you have a fantastic break.”
Nzola never used “fantastic” in conversation with me before that day, the day we broke up without ever really going together. No black person I knew ever used “fantastic” before that day other than you and Ray Gunn when he was warning me.
That night, I went searching through all the garbage cans in my dorm looking for uneaten slices of pizza. On the first and second floor alone, I found enough to make an entire eight-slice pie. I stacked the slices one on top of another and placed them on a paper towel. I started to turn on the microwave in the dorm kitchen when Ray Gunn tapped me on my shoulder.
“Fuck is you doing?” he asked.
I told him Nzola used “fantastic” when she said bye to me.
“Oh, it’s a wrap then,” he said, throwing my pizza in the garbage, slice by slice. “Nigga, you depressed?”
“What you mean?”
“I mean what I said. You depressed, ain’t you?” Ray Gunn started telling me about his ninth semester at Millsaps when a teacher suggested he see a psychiatrist. “I was feeling like you look. Gaining weight and shit. I talked to the dude about stuff like suicide and psychosis. All of a sudden, this white nigga prescribing me with antidepressants.”
“Did they work?”
“That shit had me feeling so white, blaster.”
“White how?”
“Just white,” he said. “Not too high. Not too low. You know when blasters say ‘I don’t give a fuck’? Nobody who say ‘I don’t give a fuck’ has ever been on antidepressants. Antidepressants make you give nan fuck about nothing. I felt so white.” I was bent over dying laughing. “I’m serious. I bullshit you not. If you go, don’t go to a psychiatrist. Go to a psychologist.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is one will listen to you, and try to blame your mama, and maybe your daddy, and one will give you pills to make yo big ass feel white.”
“Nah,” I told him. “I’m good.”
“How you good? You had a fine bowlegged genius sweating your fat ass, and you fucked around and got her using ‘fantastic’ when she say bye to you. You the smartest dumb blaster I met at Saps, but you might be the saddest dumb blaster to ever enroll in the twelve semesters I been here. Don’t eat when you sad, though. I’m serious. Don’t eat or drank or gamble when you sad. Pray. Or talk to me. Or exercise. Or just go to bed. You letting all this shit kill you. That’s exactly what they want,” Ray Gunn said. “Trust me. I been there. You my boy, but you might wanna think about transferring. Ain’t nothing fantastic about where you at. Switch that shit up. Be a switch hitter.”
“A switch hitter? That’s your new shit. You know that already means something else, right?”
“I know what they say it mean, but when I say it, I mean what I mean,” he said. “You see how I be hitting them switches in my Impala? You see how I’m steady switching up my styles? Be like me,
dumb blaster. Be a switch hitter.”
I dapped Ray Gunn up and told him I had no idea what he was talking about before walking him to his Impala.
“Bruh, I finally understand you,” I told him. “You a forever nineties-type nigga. Like even in the seventies, you were a nineties-type nigga and even in the two thousands you still gonna be a nineties-type nigga.”
“You just realizing that, dumb blaster?”
“Yeah, I’m just realizing that,” I told him. “On the serious tip, thanks for telling me about your experience with those pills. For real. I appreciate that.”
When I made it back to my room, I wanted the greasy pizza Ray Gunn threw in the garbage. I thought writing might distract my appetite, so I got my notebook and wrote through why Ray Gunn saying antidepressants made him feel white was so funny.
I read.
I looked out of the window.
I felt the painted cement wall behind my head.
I read.
I looked out of the window.
I wrote.
An hour later, I walked back down to the kitchen, dug six of the eight slices out of the garbage, ran warm water on them, picked off the pepperoni, and warmed up my second dinner.
I didn’t feel depressed. I didn’t feel white. I felt so free. I felt so fantastic.
DISASTER
When you came home for your Christmas break, you looked at me, shook your head, and asked, “What are you doing to yourself?”
You made me get on the scale in front of you.
256.
264.
269.
272.
275.
287.
296.
I asked you to leave, then took all my clothes off and tiptoed on the scale again.
293.
In one semester, three and a half months, I gained over fifty pounds. The only good thing about the weight was you seemed disgusted when I acted like I didn’t care.
The next day when I came home from selling Cutco knives, you were in your room. “Why do you say that?” I heard you ask someone on the phone that night. “I will tell him when I have to. I don’t have to now. I’ll come see you when I can.”
I didn’t know whom you were talking to, but I could tell by the whispery, welcoming tone it wasn’t Malachi Hunter. Even though Malachi Hunter had a new baby with another woman, he wouldn’t leave you alone. It’s not so much he wanted you back; it’s that he didn’t want you to want anyone else. Whenever he invited himself over, you asked me not to leave the house. As soon as his car pulled into the driveway, I went under your pillow, got your gun, and put it in my pocket.
Malachi Hunter came into my room without knocking that night you were whispering on the phone. I had the gun underneath the covers, between my thighs. He didn’t say hey or how you doing or what’s up. “The white man, he’ll get you one way or another,” he said. “You can’t be a black scholar and be free unless you independently wealthy. You can’t be independently wealthy and be the white man’s labor. Let’s say your mama needs to go to the conference for revolutionaries in Nairobi, as smart as she is, does she have the money to go?”
“There’s a conference for revolutionaries in Nairobi?”
“Laymon,” he said, “catch up. You supposed to be a writer. Use your imagination. Goddamn.”
You appeared in my doorway and told him he needed to leave. Y’all didn’t fight. Y’all didn’t argue. Malachi Hunter laughed in your face and kept talking like you weren’t there. “She still ain’t free, Laymon,” he said. “She the smartest woman in the world, but she not free. It’s too many cheese-eating niggas in this house who think free and black are oxymorons. I’m allergic to houses like this. I’m gone, Laymon.”
I followed Malachi Hunter out the front door. I stayed in the driveway until I couldn’t see the lights of his Jaguar anymore.
Later on that night, you knocked on my bedroom door. I was working on a satirical essay about Millsaps College filled with something I called “Laymon’s terms.”
“Can I come in, Kie?”
I put my notebook down and didn’t say a word. You sat on the edge of the bed just looking at the carpet. You wanted me to ask you a question but I didn’t have anything to ask other than “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, Kie,” you said. “Sometimes I think I go from one disaster to another.”
“But why?” I asked you.
“Why what?”
“Why do you go from one disaster to another?”
“I think part of me feels most calm during those really quick destructive storms.”
“But maybe you’d feel even more calm during calm.”
“Yeah,” you said. “I think you’re right. I averted at least one disaster. I stopped seeing Malachi when you were in high school because I knew our relationship was toxic for you. Anyway, I wrote my last check today. Do you have forty dollars I could use until the rest of my checks come?”
I didn’t say a word. I just blinked, listened to what I thought was bullshit, and eventually gave you what you came to my room for: a long hug, forty dollars, and the promise I would always love you no matter how many disasters you walked into. I didn’t know the man you were talking to on the phone, but I hoped with every cell in my body that if he was a disaster, y’all could create something a lot less disastrous than what you and Malachi Hunter created.
That night, I started rereading Black Boy. Reading the book at Millsaps felt like a call to arms. Reading the book in my bed, a few feet from your room, in our house, felt like a warm whisper. Richard Wright wrote about disasters and he let the reader know that there wasn’t one disaster in America that started the day everything fell apart. I wanted to write like Wright far more than I wanted to write like Faulkner, but I didn’t really want to write like Wright at all. I wanted to fight like Wright. I wanted to craft sentences that styled on white folk, and dared them to do anything about the styling they’d just witnessed. I understood why Wright left Jackson, left Mississippi, left the Deep South, and ultimately left the nation. But I kept thinking about how Grandmama didn’t leave when she could. I thought about how you left and chose to come back. I thought about how I chose to stay. I wondered if the world would have ever read Wright had he not left Mississippi. I wondered if black children born in Mississippi after Wright would have laughed, or smiled more at his sentences if he imagined Mississippi as home. I wondered if he thought he’d come back home soon the day he left for Chicago.
The next day, the lights in the house were off. Like always, you said there must be a problem with all the lights in the neighborhood. Before leaving for the airport back to Harvard, you checked the mail. A Millsaps College report card was in that box on top of a stack of bills you refused to bring in the house.
I had not been a perfect student.
I stood in front of the bookcase waiting for you. You marched into your room, went in the closet, and came out with a belt. You brought one lash down across my shoulder. You brought another lash down across the front of my stomach. I didn’t move. You went on and on about ruining the only chance I had to get free.
I grabbed the belt, snatched it from your hand, and threw it against the bookcase. You looked at me for the first time in my life the same way you looked at Malachi Hunter when he was angry. I knew your body was afraid of mine. You knew, for the first time in our lives, my body was not afraid of yours.
Malachi Hunter was outside the house, blowing his horn.
Before walking out of the house, you said I was the saddest, most self-destructive person you’d ever met. I told you if you wanted me to listen to anything you had to say, you needed to learn to pay your damn light bill and stop riding in cars with disasters.
We were both telling the truth.
We were both lying.
We were both telling the truth.
ALREADY
I went to the Grill and waited for Nzola Johnston for two weeks. She never showed up. Ray Gunn told me he’d seen her
walking around campus with an older yellow-brown brother who kept his beard extra crispy. He said the yellow-brown dude was pigeon-toed and walked around with a red briefcase. He was supposedly narrow through the hips but his forearms were on swole.
“Not Popeye forearms,” Ray Gunn said, “but similar to Brutus, I swear to God.”
“You act like the dude carried his own sunset, Gunn.”
“This blaster was a sunset,” he said. “It ain’t in my nature to want to be another blaster, but this blaster was perfect.”
“How you know he perfect just from looking at him?”
“I mean, wait until you see him. He definitely lifting heavy and doing all the cardio. I mean . . .”
“I hear you,” I told him. “You can be quiet now. That blaster stuff, I don’t think it’s catching on. It’s been like almost a year. You the only one who uses it.”
Gunn just looked at me, acted like he was fixing his left contact. “Like I was saying,” he finally said, “the dumb blaster your fine-ass ex was with had arms similar to Brutus.”
I never went to professors’ office hours, and rarely spoke in any of my classes anymore. I read all the books I was assigned for Latin, philosophy, and English. I did my papers for all my classes, but the only class I attended and participated in regularly was a class called “Introduction to Women’s Studies.” I read everything for the class twice, arrived early, and stayed late because the class gave me a new vocabulary to make sense of what I saw growing up. Before the class, I knew men, regardless of race, had the power to abuse in ways women didn’t. I knew the power to abuse destroyed the interiors of men as much as it destroyed the interiors and exteriors of women.
I now knew what “patriarchy” was. I could define “compulsory heterosexuality.” I could explain “intersectionality” to Ray Gunn. I understood gender was a construction and there were folk on earth who were transgender and gender-fluid. I went to abortion-clinic defenses. I marched in safer-sex rallies. I made photocopies of my bell hooks essays and gave them to my friends. I had new lenses and frames to see the world. I called those new lenses and frames “black feminist,” but I didn’t really have the will to publicly or privately reckon with what living my life as a black feminist meant.