Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

  Reckon or not, the white women in women’s studies class treated me like I was the most liberated of good dudes. A few of them asked to go for long walks so we could talk about the reading. If I wasn’t so fat, I would have gone, but I hated sweating and breathing loud around women I didn’t know. I spent most of my days wondering what Nzola was feeling, eating all the leftover pizza I could find, touching my body gently in the dark, rereading Lucille Clifton poems and Beloved, playing Madden with Ray Gunn, shooting midrange jumpers, listening to Redman, The Chronic, and Dionne Farris, and watching the Eyes on the Prize episode about Mississippi over and over again on VHS in the library.

  I knew enough now about Millsaps to write an essay for my liberal studies course called “Institutional Racism at Millsaps.” An editor for the paper heard about the essay from one of my professors and asked if he could run it in the newspaper. He wanted to run it with the subhead “Voice of the Oppressed.”

  I never used the word “oppressed” and had no idea what an oppressed voice actually sounded like. The editor told me I needed to make the ending of the piece much more color-blind. He said I would lose readers if I kept the focus of the essay on what black students at Millsaps could do to organize, love each other, and navigate institutional racism. He said my primary audience should be white students who wanted to understand what they needed to do about racism on their college campus. After going back and forth, the editor won because it was his newspaper, and I was desperate to be read by white folk.

  At least while educating, we must be color-blind, not character blind. This is the only way Millsaps will reach out of the depths of whiteness and better all people equally.

  I hated the last paragraph. I hated most of the essay, but I knew Nzola would be impressed that a two-thousand-word essay on institutional racism written by a black boy whose inner thighs she heavy petted almost told these white folk the truth to their faces. I knew Nzola would think almost telling white folk in Mississippi the truth in their paper was as close to winning as black folk could come.

  The day after the essay came out, Nzola sent me an e-mail saying she was proud of me. She asked me what you thought. The essay was the first piece of writing I ever published that I hadn’t shown you first.

  I’d started using the Internet to send e-mails, but you had not, so I faxed you the piece and called you to ask whether I should accept the opinions editor position I’d been offered for the following year. The editor wanted to call my column “The Key Essay.”

  Before I could get to the point of the call, you said, “Did they not copyedit your piece, Kiese? I saw four errors on the first page.”

  “Bye,” I said. I didn’t have room in my heart or head for your criticism even if you were right.

  “Watch your back, Kie. You can’t call white folk who think they’re liberal or enlightened ‘racist’ in Mississippi and not expect violent backlash. Reread the books that mean the most to you. Lock your doors. Walk in groups. Strive for perfection. Edit your work. Something feels off. Are you worried about those people shooting you out of the sky?”

  “No,” I told you. “I’m not even sure what you mean by that.”

  “Please be careful,” you said. “You can always transfer. You said you had to ask me something.”

  “I’m good. Bye,” I said again. “I can’t believe you just told me to ‘walk in groups.’ ”

  • • •

  I listened to the Coup and read everything James Baldwin had written that summer. I learned you haven’t read anything if you’ve only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision. I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not just the first section, been written to, and for, Baldwin’s nephew. I wondered what, and how, Baldwin would have written to his niece. I wondered about the purpose of warning white folk about the coming fire. Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.

  Three weeks into the summer, I read an essay from Nobody Knows My Name called “Faulkner and Desegregation.”

  Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

  Baldwin was critiquing Faulkner for holding on to shamefully violent versions of neo-Confederate white Mississippi identity, but I imagined the sentence was written to me. I thought about the safety I found in eating too much, eating too late, eating to run away from memory. I stopped eating red meat, then pork, then chicken, then fish. I stopped eating eggs, then bread, then anything with refined sugar. I started running at night. I added three hundred push-ups a day. Then three hundred sit-ups. I began the summer weighing 309 pounds. In two weeks, I was 289. In a month, I was 279. In two months, I was 255. By the end of the summer, I was 225 pounds.

  I jogged three miles before bed, and three miles in the morning. I ate one meal of ramen noodles every other day. When I wasn’t reading and running, I wrote a few satirical essays for the paper that caught the attention of students, faculty, and alums of Millsaps. I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. The day I went under 218 pounds for the first time since seventh grade, Nzola knocked on my door.

  “Everyone is talking about your essay,” she said.

  “Already?”

  “Already.”

  “Everyone who?”

  “White folk, chile,” she said. “They so mad. But fuck them. You told the truth.”

  Nzola and I laughed and laughed and laughed until we hugged, turned the lights off, turned the lights on, said we were sorry, and said we were afraid. We laughed as I awkwardly stood up and played Janet Jackson’s “Again.”

  “Weirdo, it’s a CD,” Nzola said. “You can just put it on repeat.”

  I messed around with the thing for damn near a minute before Nzola walked over to the stereo and took my hand and my palm against her face. We kissed. We took off almost all our clothes. We started to sweat. I asked Nzola if she minded if I took a shower. She asked if she could come with me. I said yes because I had a new body. We laughed while kissing with the lights on. We laughed while kissing with the lights off. We laughed and loved each other’s bodies on a damp yellow frayed towel, on a plastic twin bed, on a floor littered with empty ramen packs, on a yellow brick wall that held up Norman Rockwell’s Ruby Bridges painting.

  Nzola told me she felt safer when she felt smaller around me, but she said I seemed happier in a smaller body. I asked her how sexy she’d think I was if she could see my cheekbones, my hip bones, my clavicle. I told Nzola losing weight made me feel like I was from the future, like I could literally fly away from folk when I wanted to. Heavy was yesterday.

  “You are so crazy,” she said.

  “I love losing weight,” I told her.

  “Boy, you sound so crazy.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “My penis shines more since I have less layers, too, right?”

  “Kiese Laymon, what are you talking about?”

  “I legit feel like my penis is shinier since I lost all that weight. You don’t think so? I know y’all don’t like a dusty penis.”

  “I think your penis is shiny enough, Kiese.”

  “So my penis was dusty when I was heavier, right? Why didn’t you tell me to use lotion?”

  Nzola laughed and laughed and laughed until she didn’t. She grabbed both of my ears and kissed me. “Do you feel home?” she asked me. “Honestly. Next to me?”

  “I feel so home,” I told her. “Do you?”

  “I never want to feel anything else other than what I feel right now for the rest of my life, Kiese. Please stop worrying about the size of your body. And please don’t ever stop kissing me.”

  Two weeks later, Malachi Hunter asked me to come to his office after I got a gun to protect Nzola and me from threatening letters we received. The president of Millsaps, George Harmon, shut down the campus paper and s
ent a letter to twelve thousand Millsaps alums claiming a satirical essay I wrote for the paper violated the institution’s decency guidelines. Half of the letters called me a nigger. Others threatened to take me off that campus if I didn’t leave on my own. One, filled with the ashes of all the essays I’d written for the paper, claimed I was going to end up burnt like the ashes if I didn’t change and give myself over to God.

  I walked from campus to Malachi Hunter’s office. After congratulating me on losing so much weight and asking how to get more definition in his calves, Malachi Hunter asked me, “Who is the richest nigga you know?”

  “You are.”

  “And how much do you think I made last year?”

  “A hundred thousand?”

  “Nigga, please. I’m rich,” he said, and looked at me without blinking like I tried to cut him with a spoon. “Let’s say I only made three hundred thousand dollars. Now let’s look at your mama’s white lawyer friend, Roger.”

  “Roger who?”

  “The white Roger,” he said.

  “I don’t know the white Roger.”

  “Let’s say white Roger made three hundred thousand dollars, too. You following me? My three hundred thousand ain’t close to white Roger’s three hundred thousand. If I made that little three hundred thousand, I’m still the only nigga with money I know, you see? My girlfriend ain’t got no money. The black women I’m trying to fuck, they ain’t got no money. My mama and daddy ain’t got no money. My sisters and brothers ain’t got no money. My uncles ain’t got no money. My aunties ain’t got no money. The radical organizations I support ain’t got no money. The black school I went to ain’t got no money. Meanwhile, damn near everyone white around white Roger got at least some land, some inheritance, some kind of money. White Roger might be the poorest person in his family making three hundred thousand.”

  “I already read Black Power,” I told him. “I know this.”

  “You wasting time fighting rich Mississippi white folk for free,” he said. “And I’m asking you, right here, for what? You can’t fight these folk with no essay. You ain’t organized. You ain’t got no land. You ain’t feeding no one with that shit you writing. What is it you want white folk to do, and how is whatever they do after reading an essay going to help poor niggas in Mississippi? That’s the only question that matters.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “I know you don’t. You fucking up, Kie,” he said. “You fucking up. And we only have a limited number of fuckups before we be fucked up for good. The school has no choice but to get rid of you. You making it so easy for them. Your mama said you getting death threats.”

  “I am.”

  “Nobody who wants to kill you is ever going to threaten you. They will kill you, or they won’t. There’s a difference between deed and word. They will get rid of you, though. It’s inevitable. That’s already in motion. I don’t agree with your mama about much, but we both agree about that.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Just be careful,” Malachi Hunter said. “I think you think that school is yours. And Jackson is yours. And Mississippi is yours. Only thing you own is your body. Just be careful.”

  I wanted to shoot Malachi Hunter in his pinky toe for even mentioning you, but I wanted to shoot him in his ankle for always acting like he knew exactly what black folk should do. Malachi Hunter loved black folk, but even more than black folk, he loved preaching about what black folk were doing wrong. What we were ultimately always doing wrong, according to Malachi Hunter, was not doing what he would do. Even though I wanted to shoot Malachi Hunter, I knew he wasn’t all the way wrong about Millsaps or me.

  It was too late, though.

  Nothing, other than losing weight, felt as good as provoking and really titillating white folk with black words. On the morning of bid day, Nzola and I were going to our jobs at Ton-o-Fun when we saw drunk members of Kappa Sig and Kappa Alpha fraternities dressed in Afro wigs and Confederate capes. We watched them watch us as we walked to Nzola’s car. After one of them said “Write about this,” and others started calling me a “nigger” and Nzola a “nigger bitch,” I went back to my room to get my gun.

  I grabbed a T-ball bat instead, and threw the bat down when we returned to the scene and got closer to the white boys. They surrounded us, and we defended ourselves with words until our words broke. The white boys were blasting Snoop’s “Gz and Hustlas” the whole time they were calling us niggers.

  When we got to work, we called the local news and told them there was something they might want to see happening on the campus of Millsaps College. We’d only been working at Ton-o-Fun a few weeks and knew if we left we might be fired, but we didn’t care. The news crew showed up and got all the footage they needed to paint Millsaps College as the regressive, racist institution I’d been writing about for a semester.

  “Come home,” you told me on the phone that night. “Do not step foot on that campus again. You’ve done all you can do. There are some amazing people at that school, but white people’s ignorance is not your responsibility. Come home and leave those crazy people alone.”

  If home wasn’t Millsaps, I didn’t know where home was. In spite of all the violence and strangeness at school, I felt a kind of freedom and intellectual stimulation at Millsaps that I’d never felt anywhere else in the world. I was targeted, but I felt strangely happy and free.

  Nzola and I fought and had sex more frequently since being put on disciplinary probation for defending ourselves against the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sig fraternities on bid day. The local news stations followed me around campus daily and the NAACP said everything that happened was typical of the bodily terror young endangered black men in this nation face when just trying to get an education.

  “All of this is just wrong,” Nzola said one night while making a collage on the floor of my room. Her back was against my door. I didn’t ask her what she meant, but she kept going. “Those white boys, they called both of us niggers, right? I just wanna make sure I’m not trippin’.”

  “You ain’t trippin’.”

  “But they called me a nigger and a bitch, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Nigger bitch, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And all these people on the news can talk about is how they were dressed when they said what they said to you?”

  “I already—”

  “Hold on. A group of big drunk-ass white boys called me a nigger and a bitch. Everyone, including you, heard it. If you know that’s what happened, why don’t you do something?”

  “I tried to fight them that day. I tried to fight them the next day. If I do anything else, they’ll kick me out.”

  “I’m asking why you didn’t say that they called me a nigger and a bitch when they put those fucking microphones in your face.”

  “Every time I did an interview, I talked about you and why we did what we did,” I told her. “Didn’t I do that? You want these news folk to be talking more about you?”

  “I’m not saying that,” she said. “I’m saying people are acting like you were out there fighting back by yourself. And you weren’t. I’m saying if I wrote the same essays you wrote, no one would care. You take all these damn women’s studies courses and you haven’t said one fucking word about no ‘patriarchy’ or ‘sexism’ or ‘intersectionality’ these past two weeks.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. How do you know nothing would happen if you wrote the same shit I wrote?”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  I sucked on my teeth. “Right, but how do you know? You making excuses,” I said, looking at Nzola, who was biting the inside of her bottom lip.

  “Excuses for what?”

  “You a funny woman.”

  “You a funny nigga,” she said. “Excuses for what, Kiese?”

  “When I was staying up forty-eight hours straight, writing all this shit, you could’ve been making art, too, but you
were on the phone playing doctor with that Trapper James, MD–ass nigga up in DC,” I told her. “You’d still be playing doctor if the nigga hadn’t decided to start playing with another girl. Now you wanna say the only reason my art landed was because I’m a black boy and you a black girl? Sometimes I wonder if I’m talking to you or your stepmama. You a funny-ass woman. Believe that.”

  Nzola stood up, dusted off the back of her khakis, and applied a taste of ChapStick. I knew what was coming. I wanted it to come. Nzola cocked her arm back and jabbed me in the left eye.

  She sat back down and kept working on her collage.

  This wasn’t the first, second, third, or fourth time I let her punch me in my face. Almost every time she did it, I’d said something about her stepmother. I knew it was coming. I hoped it would come. I thought I deserved it.

  It always made me feel lighter.

  We had sex because that’s how we apologized. Nzola talked about how we might be more useful organizing with other black students in Jackson, Malachi Hunter, and you to fight the Ayers case. Y’all had been fighting to stop the state from closing or merging historically black colleges and universities in Mississippi, including Jackson State. I told her she was right but I had no intention of stopping the work I was doing on the Millsaps campus. When we woke up, Nzola said I still didn’t understand. I told her I did. I told Nzola she didn’t understand.

  She said she had to.

  Nzola said there was no way two drunk fraternities of black men with their shirts off could threaten a white girl going to work, call the white girl a “cracker bitch,” and then have that white girl be found guilty of anything. “How do you not see it?” she kept saying.

  “I see it,” I told her. “I so see it. For real. But what you want me to do?”

  Nzola and I were in the middle of our city, lying wet, resentful, and nearly naked on top of a plastic twin mattress separating our backs from a loaded pistol. We hated where we were. We hated ourselves. We hated fighting, fucking, fighting, fucking, fighting over who was most violated by a spiteful college president, confused white classmates, and the gated institution we took out thousands of dollars in loans to attend.