by Kiese Laymon
“What are you thinking?” Nzola asked the back of my head.
“I’m thinking something bad is about to happen. What about you?”
“I’m knowing a lot of bad things already did.”
SOON
President George Harmon told you I was lucky not to be thrown in jail for taking The Red Badge of Courage from the library without checking it out. He claimed if Millsaps turned the security tape of my taking the library book over to the police, they’d arrest me on sight. In addition to kicking me out of college and forbidding me from trespassing on Millsaps property, Harmon gave my work to a local psychologist who claimed I needed immediate help interacting with white folk before they would even consider reenrolling me.
I smiled while sitting across from you and George Harmon that day, not because I was happy but because I really didn’t think any student in the country could be kicked out of school for taking The Red Badge of Courage out of the library. I didn’t think it was possible because I didn’t think my teachers in the middle of my city would let it happen. I assumed when we walked out of that office, all my professors would be waiting to meet with Harmon. I knew Jackson State would never kick one of your students out for improperly taking a library book and returning it because they’d have to deal with you and your colleagues if they did. In the few minutes between when Harmon gave you the letter outlining my discipline and our walk out to the car, I realized that my professors at Millsaps were nothing like you.
By the time you put the key in the ignition of the Oldsmobile, we both accepted I did not make it. I was no longer a student. I allowed Millsaps College to shoot me out of the sky, and any school I thought of transferring to would see I was put on disciplinary probation for fighting and kicked out of college for theft. For the second time in my life since that night when Malachi Hunter spent the night after punching you in your eye, I felt waves of shame that made me not want to be alive.
Ray Gunn introduced me to the word “antiblack” two weeks before I got kicked out of school. I was talking to him about patriarchy and he nodded and said patriarchy was like antiblackness. He said the problem with fighting white folk was even the most committed of black folk had to deal with their own relationships to “antiblackness.” I told him how LaThon and I used to say and believe black abundance. He said I should have learned a lot more about black abundance before I got kicked out of school for making educating white folks at Millsaps my homework.
He was right. Nzola begged me to do more organizing with folk at Jackson State. Malachi Hunter begged me not to waste time fighting white Mississippians for free. Ray Gunn told me Millsaps would do anything to get rid of ungrateful black students. Grandmama told me to put my head down and get good at the parts of school I disliked. Dr. Jerry Ward, who was still teaching at Tougaloo College and wrote the introduction to the version of Black Boy we read in class, suggested I transfer to Oberlin and work with Calvin Hernton long before I got kicked out of school. You begged me not to let those folk shoot me out the sky. I’m sorry for not listening to you. I didn’t listen to one black person who loved me because listening to black folk who loved me brought me little pleasure. I’d fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I’d fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.
• • •
I enrolled at Jackson State and spent most of my nights at Ray Gunn’s house listening to him theorize about everything from why white dudes whose noses were too close to their top lips were always assholes to how there was no way a black president could actually make life better for poor black people, but when he started taking care of his little sister from Chicago, I was forced to stay home with you. Going to classes every day at a school where I was conceived, born, and raised, a place filled with dynamic black students and tired, dynamic black professors, was everything I thought it would be. But going to school every day where you worked was everything I feared. My teachers told you how I performed in class, whether I came to class, approximately how late I was. The worst part was that every day I left Jackson State, I found my way back to the campus of Millsaps to see Gunn and Nzola. And nearly every time I showed up, security showed up and made me leave.
One Friday morning, a day after you pulled a gun on me for talking back to you about whether the transfer application to Oberlin should be typed or handwritten, I sat naked in a cold tub of water with your .22 cocked, tapping my temple. We’d been told by three schools that they couldn’t even consider my transfer application because I’d been kicked out of Millsaps for fighting and stealing.
I didn’t know how to pray anymore, but I knew how to listen. I got on my knees in that bathtub listening for deliverance, forgiveness, and redemption. I didn’t hear any of that. I heard the words “be” and “meager” and “murmur” and “nan” and “gumption” in Grandmama’s voice. All those words sounded like love to me. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I knew I never wanted you or Grandmama to live in a world that sounded like the world might sound if I shot a bullet through my skull in your bathtub.
Despite pleas from you and Nzola, I started working at Grace House, a home that offered care for homeless HIV-positive men in Jackson. Grace House was a huge two-story home shielded by a massive gray wooden gate. It was thirty yards from Millsaps, literally on a street called Millsaps Avenue, in the North End. The first day I stepped through the gate, I wondered why the house was located in the poorest, blackest neighborhood in Jackson, and why a house for homeless HIV-positive men in Jackson could never be in a white wealthy neighborhood.
Most of the men at Grace House were black. Some saw the stories on the news about my suspension from Millsaps. They joked about how I was going to steal all the chewy Chips Ahoy! out the kitchen the first week I worked there. I never knew where to throw my eyes when they told me day after day how God had a plan for me, and I’d soon understand that plan. The brothers were free to come and go at Grace House, but most of them talked like brothers I’d met just recently released from the penitentiary. I appreciated what they said, but the goofy eighth grader in me appreciated how sincere they were with every word. They were quick to explain how getting kicked out of college for stealing and returning a library book was nothing more than a complicated annoyance.
It’s too simple to say the brothers at Grace House gave me perspective. I’m not sure they gave me anything, other than some of the funniest stories I’d ever heard and access to the painful changes in their bodies. Those stories gave me time and space to shrink back into my comfortable position as a listener. They reminded me I’d been living in a pulpy fiction the past year at Millsaps. They reminded me directly and indirectly I was not the center of the world. I was not nearly as heavy as I thought. There was actually nothing big or heavy about me when I walked into Grace House every day. I was the care provider who liked to read Toni Morrison, watch basketball, watch Martin, and do push-ups, not the care provider who liked to read comic books, do crossword puzzles, and watch Seinfeld, which really meant that to them I was that other paid listener who they trusted to never reveal their names or identities to anyone outside of Grace House.
I listened to the pauses, repetitions, and holes in their stories as much as I listened to the aches and changes of all their bodies. All the brothers I cared for at Grace House told stories about cars, sports, clothes, politics, food, and families but never talked about how they contracted HIV or whom they might have infected. Their stories were as differently shaped as they were, but they all agreed contracting HIV saved their lives. The first few times I heard this, I nodded and even said “I hear that,” but I never fully understood how something so seemingly full of death could actually save a life.
Outside of Grace House, Nzola wouldn’t kiss me anymore. She claimed I worked at Grace House because I was HIV-positive and I wanted to be around my people. I’d only had sexual relationships with two women in my life. Neither of those women told me they were HIV-posi
tive and whenever Gunn and I gave blood or plasma for money, we knew they were checking our blood for the virus. I got tested again anyway just to prove to Nzola I was working at Grace House because I wanted to, not because I wanted to “be around my people.”
When the test came back negative, I told Nzola the results, knowing she’d have to say she didn’t believe me. We’d gone from smiling over greasy pieces of Red Velvet cake to sucking teeth and not even looking at each other over the results of an HIV test.
Every time I saw Nzola after the results came back, we barely spoke other than her asking, “What are you going to do with yourself? Why are you just giving up?”
When I told Nzola on a ride home that Oberlin College might accept my transfer application because of what happened at Millsaps, not in spite of what happened at Millsaps, she cried in front of me for the first time in thirteen months. “I feel like you’re trying to leave me in this shit by my fucking self.”
I reminded Nzola they’d only accepted my transfer application. When Nzola dropped me off at your house, we hugged. “You feel so small,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with us. Is there anything you want to say?”
Nzola walked with me to the mailbox. On top of all the bills you left in the box, there was a thin piece of mail from Oberlin College. I knew it was my rejection letter. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Take care, Kiese,” Nzola said as she walked back to her car. “Please eat. I worry one day your mama is gonna call me and say you just disappeared.”
It was too late for that. We’d fought, lost, fought again, and both disappeared already. “That won’t happen,” I told Nzola as she reversed out of your yard. “I’m sorry about all of this.”
That night, I stretched out in the driveway and looked at the stars. For the first time in years, I thought about waiting for you to come home the day I ran away from Beulah Beauford’s house. Back then I wanted all my seasons to be Mississippi seasons, no matter how strange, hot, or terrifying. Now I felt something else. I didn’t want to float in, under, and around all the orange-red stars in our galaxy if our galaxy was Mississippi. I wanted to look at Mississippi from other stars and I didn’t ever want to come home again.
• • •
Three months later, you walked me out of the house into the passenger seat of your Oldsmobile with tears in your eyes. Ray was in the driver’s seat. He was going to drive me up to Oberlin, and you were going to drive his Impala while he was gone. You and I spent those three months tolerating each other, and really preparing for this day. The shade of the pine trees made both of us colder than we should have been.
“I just love you, Kie,” you said. “I’m so scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“You’ve never left me before. I’ve never been down here, in all this, without you. I just feel like my child, my best friend is leaving me.” You wrapped your arms around my chest and I kissed the top of your braids. “How did you get so small? It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Maybe I can visit Oberlin for Thanksgiving.”
“Oberlin has a fall break in October.”
“Just come back soon, Kie,” you said. “Do you promise?”
“I will,” I told you. “For real. I’ll be back in October. I promise. I will be back so soon.”
I will not be back soon.
I will attend Oberlin College. I will get caught stealing a frame for your birthday from the college bookstore. I will learn under Calvin Hernton how to be the black southern writer Margaret Walker wanted me to be. I will read The Cancer Journals. I will learn to get good at the things I didn’t want to get good at. I will listen to Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur die. I will see creases, hear whiffs, and feel futurist pinches in the work of Octavia Butler and Outkast. I will practice. I will write about the holes in the ground in the woods across the street from Grandmama’s house.
I will not be back soon.
I will feel like a good dude for not “technically” having sex with anyone but my girlfriend. I will feel like a good dude. I will call myself a feminist. I will fall in love with friends who fall in love with me. I will listen to friends talk about their experiences with sex and violence and confusion. I will gently ask questions. I will not tell those friends what my body remembered in our bedroom and the bedrooms of Beulah Beauford’s house in Mississippi.
I will not be back soon.
I will forget how the insides of my thighs feel when rubbed raw. I will play on the basketball team. I will think 190 pounds is too heavy so I will jog three miles before every practice and game. I will sit in saunas for hours draped in thermals, sweatpants, and sweatshirts. I will make a family of people who cannot believe I was ever heavy. I will become a handsome, fine, together brother with lots of secrets. I will realize there is no limit to the amount of harm handsome, fine, together brothers with lots of secrets can do. I will learn to love and artfully use the Internet on A-level of the library. I will get a Mellon undergraduate fellowship. I will apply to get an MFA and PhD at Indiana University because the poet Yusef Komunyakaa teaches there. I will walk across the stage at Oberlin College graduation, where I will hug you and my father.
I will not be back soon.
I will never forget the day I told you I’d be back soon, the day I burst your heart wide open, the day I left Mississippi, the day you called me your child, your best friend, your reason for living. I will write about home. I will do everything I can to never feel what I felt those last few years in Mississippi. I will bend. I will break. I will build. I will recover.
I will not be back soon.
Ray Gunn hugged you and promised we’d drive your car carefully. We backed out of the driveway. You walked into the street sobbing into your hands. I should have been crying because you were crying. I tried. I learned how to lie from you but I never learned how to make myself cry. I told Ray to reverse the car. He put it in reverse and I jumped out and hugged your neck.
“Come back, Kie,” you said. “Please.”
“I’ll be back soon,” I whispered in your ear, and jumped back in the car. “I’ll be back soon,” I yelled out the window as we shrunk out of each other’s sight. This felt different. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry. I love you. I promise. I will be back home so soon.”
GREENS
You were in Grandmama’s living room delicately placing a blinking black angel with a fluorescent mink coat on top of her Christmas tree while Uncle Jimmy and I were examining each other’s bodies in a one-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. I was in my final year of graduate school. Uncle Jimmy and I were having a contest to see who could make their forearms veinier. “Shit, sport,” Uncle Jimmy said as he hugged me. “You eating a lot of spinach in grad school or what? You look like you training for the league.”
I was twenty-six years old, 183 pounds. My body fat was 8 percent.
Uncle Jimmy was six-three and so skinny that his eyes, which were nearly always yolk yellow, looked like they wanted to pop out of his head. He wore the same Chicago Bears sweatshirt, same gray church slacks, same church shoes he wore when he was forty pounds heavier.
When I asked him if anything was wrong, Uncle Jimmy said, “This blood pressure medicine the doctor got me on, it make it hard for a nigga to keep weight on. That’s all. Is it okay for me to say ‘nigga’ around you now? I know you’re a professor like your mama and shit now.”
I told Uncle Jimmy I was a graduate instructor and a graduate student. “That’s a long way from a professor. I think I wanna teach high school. But regardless, you can always say ‘nigga’ and any other word you want around me. I’m not my mama.”
On the way to Mississippi, we stopped at gas station after gas station. Uncle Jimmy went to the bathroom for ten minutes each time. I cranked up Aquemini and did push-ups and jumping jacks outside the van while he did whatever he needed to do. He eventually came back with pints of butter pecan ice cream and big bags of Lay’s Salt & Vinegar.
“Want some, nephew?”
he asked.
“Naw,” I said over and over again. “I’m good.”
“You good?”
“I’m good,” I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day. I didn’t tell him I gleefully passed out the previous week in the checkout line at Kroger. I didn’t tell him a cashier named Laurie asked if I was “diabetic or a dope fiend” when I woke up. I didn’t tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.
Uncle Jimmy looked at me, with Lay’s Salt & Vinegar grease all over his mouth, like my nose was a fitted hat. “Let me find out you went from fucking a white girl to eating like a white girl.”
“I just love losing weight,” I told him. “That’s really all it is. I just love losing weight.”
“You just love losing weight?” Uncle Jimmy was dying laughing. “My nephew went to grad school and now he turning into a white girl. You just love losing weight? That’s damn near the craziest shit I heard in thirty years, Kie. Who say shit like that? You just love losing weight?”
Somewhere around Little Rock, Arkansas, we stopped at a truck stop. Uncle Jimmy started telling me a story about one of his friends he worked with at the Caterpillar plant. He said he and this friend served the same tour in Vietnam and had been to Alcoholics Anonymous three times each.
“So yeah, he always talking big about all the Martell he drank over the weekend and all the pussy he be getting,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Always talking about how the white man’ll do anything to keep a nigga down. And he start talking about spoiled-ass Bush. I told him we been known there ain’t nothing the white man won’t do. He said he agreed. But soon as the white boss man come around, this nigga tuck his head into his shoulders like a gotdamn turtle. Steady grinning and jiving them white folk to death.”