by Kiese Laymon
I turned the light off and walked out behind her. “You friends with that white boy, Cole?” she asked me in the parking lot.
“Friends? Nah. He’s my thesis student.”
“Good. That white boy and his friends, they be slangin’ so much of that shit on this campus.”
“How you know?”
“I just know,” she said, before dapping me up and walking toward Main Building.
I thought about the older colleague who suggested I work with Cole, the same colleague who insisted on letting me know how lucky I was every time he saw me. He had no idea what my work was on, no idea what I wanted to do with language, no idea who or what I was before getting a job at Vassar. We both knew Cole, a dealer of everything from weed to cocaine, could be a college graduate, college professor, college trustee, or president of all kinds of American things in spite of being scared, desperate, and guilty.
By my third semester at Vassar, I learned it was fashionable to call Cole’s predicament “privilege” and not “power.” I had the privilege of being raised by you and a grandmama who responsibly loved me in the blackest, most creative state in the nation. Cole had the power to never be poor and never be a felon, the power to always have his failures treated as success no matter how mediocre he was. Cole’s power necessitated he literally was too white, too masculine, too rich to fail. George Bush was president because of Cole’s power. An even richer, more mediocre white man could be president next because of Cole’s power. Even progressive presidents would bow to Cole’s power. Grandmama, the smartest, most responsible human being I knew, cut open chicken bellies and washed the shit out of white folks’ dirty underwear because of Cole’s power. She could never be president. And she never wanted to be because she knew that the job necessitated moral mediocrity. My job, I learned that first year, was to dutifully teach Cole to use this power less abusively. I was supposed to encourage Cole to understand his power brought down buildings, destroyed countries, created prisons, and lathered itself in blood and suffering. But if used for good, his power could lay the foundation for liberation and some greater semblance of justice in our country, and possibly the world.
I just didn’t buy it.
I loved my job, and I understood the first week of school it was impossible to teach any student you despised. A teacher’s job was to responsibly love the students in front of them. If I was doing my job, I had to find a way to love the wealthy white boys I taught with the same integrity with which I loved my black students, even if the constitution of that love differed. This wasn’t easy because no matter how conscientious, radically curious, or politically active I encouraged Cole to be, teaching wealthy white boys like him meant I was being paid to really fortify Cole’s power.
In return for this care, I’d get a monthly check, some semblance of security, and moral certainty we were helping white folk be better at being human. This was new to me, but it was old black work, and this old black work, in ways you warned me about, was more than selling out; this old black work was morally side hustling backward.
• • •
The judicial case we were tasked with looking at that night was sad and simple like most of the cases we heard. Security came into Cole’s best friend’s dorm room. They saw and took pictures of felonious amounts of cocaine, little scales, and Baggies on the table. Cole’s best friend, a small, smart white boy with massive eyebrows, was being charged with possession and intent to distribute. I never really understood how or why college judicial boards were hearing potential felony cases, but I had more trust in the college judicial boards to fairly adjudicate these situations than actual jails, judges, juries, police, and prisons.
During the small, smart white boy’s opening statement, he talked about being at a club in the city of Poughkeepsie and being approached by a “big dark man” who made him buy cocaine. I sat back in my chair and looked around the room. Everyone in the room was white. And every white person in the room was transfixed by the story of the small, smart white boy being made to buy cocaine by a nigger on the floor of a club in Poughkeepsie. I breathed heavy through the student’s opening statement, through security’s statement, and through the student’s closing statement. I kept thinking of Brown, the first person I met in Poughkeepsie. He was in prison for violating parole, and he went to prison the first few times for selling less coke than was found in this small, smart white boy’s room. I thought about how even when we weren’t involved in selling drugs, big, dark folks like us could be used to shield white folk from responsibility.
Brown was five-seven, 220 pounds. Big and dark.
I was six-one, 179 pounds. Big and dark.
Mazie was five-nine, 158 pounds. Big and dark.
I’d looked like a big, dark black man since I was an eleven-year-old black boy. I’d been surrounded by big, dark black men since I was born. I never met one big, dark black man who would make a white boy buy cocaine. Apparently, there was one such big, dark black man in Poughkeepsie, New York.
The rest of the disciplinary committee said we couldn’t hold the small, smart white boy responsible for possession because the details of what led to his possession of cocaine were so frightening. We don’t know what it’s like to be as small as this kid, the professor next to me said, and be forced to buy coke from a scary person in a downtown club.
“We don’t?” I asked him.
We don’t know what it’s like to go through what he went through, another administrator said.
I asked both of them why any man who could make a person buy cocaine would not just take the person’s money and keep his cocaine. The professor started talking to me about transformative justice. I told him that I knew well what transformative justice was, and asked again how anything transformative could be happening in this room if it’s predicated on us believing a big black dude made the small, smart white boy buy cocaine.
Everyone in the room looked at me like I had hog-head cheese oozing out of my nose. He never said the guy was black, another member of the committee said. If the small, smart white boy did not technically possess the cocaine, the small, smart white boy could not be held responsible for intent to distribute cocaine. If the small, smart white boy was found not responsible for distributing cocaine, he would have to be let free.
No expulsion.
No suspension.
No disciplinary probation.
I kept looking at the black-and-white pictures of felonious amounts of cocaine, the scale, the Baggies. Apparently, I did not see what I saw because a big black man in the city of Poughkeepsie, a nigger, made me see it.
I didn’t have my own computer or Internet at home, so I walked back to my office after the hearing to e-mail Cole. I believed in prison abolition. But I wasn’t sure how fair it was to practice transformative justice on the cisgendered, heterosexual, white, rich male body of someone who’d been granted transformative justice since birth. I didn’t want Cole making a home in my office anymore. I didn’t want his little skinny white self talking to me about drugs he’d never be guilty of consuming or selling in Poughkeepsie. I asked Cole over e-mail if we could meet in the library from now on.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at my office.
I picked up a chewed pen, a green spiral notebook, and I wrote the names of every person I knew in jail or prison for drug-related offenses. I filled that white piece of paper with black friends, black cousins, black uncles, and black aunties. Some of those black names were serving upwards of thirty years in prison for far less cocaine than the small, smart white boy who was forced to buy cocaine in a club. Then I wrote the names of young people I met in Poughkeepsie who were locked up for drug-related offenses.
Cole responded to my e-mail a few minutes later, saying he’d really appreciate it if we kept meeting in my office because it was the only place he felt safe on that campus.
“That’s fine,” I wrote, “if that’s what you want to do.”
I threw my notebook across my office, yelled “motherf
ucker,” and texted Douglass.
This Keys. I ain’t doing that thing. We ballin at 8 tomorrow if you can make it. I can scoop you.
I didn’t want to waste any of my phone’s minutes so I used the department business code to call you back before leaving my office. I told you I was sorry for waking you up and asked if I could wire half of the money this month and half of the money next month.
“Thank you,” you said. “Wire what you can tomorrow, Kie. Please know that we need it as soon as possible.”
I hung up the phone, grabbed my keys, unlocked the English faculty lounge, and stole some colleagues’ Fresca, a blueberry-vanilla yogurt, and granola from the office fridge. I left my car at work, ran to my apartment, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles around Poughkeepsie, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, said prayers, got in bed, and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our last kilos of cocaine. Then some of us would watch them watch us watch them walk free after getting caught. And some of us, if we were extra lucky, would get to teach these small, smart, addicted white boys and girls today so we could pay for our ailing grandmamas’ dental care tomorrow.
SEAT BELTS
You were on your way to Vassar from Cuba, while I was 0.7 pounds away from 165 pounds after playing two hours of basketball, running eleven miles, eating three PowerBars, and drinking two gallons of water a day. The fourth day of my seventh semester at Vassar, I bought a used stair-stepper from the gym. After three more hours of basketball, and an hour of jogging, I maxed the heat in my tiny apartment and stair-stepped until I was down to 165.7 pounds, sixty pounds less than I weighed at twelve years old, and 153.3 pounds less than I weighed at my heaviest. The heaviest version of my body was past tense. My current body was present tense. There was no limit to how light I could be, and I knew I needed to live in the future.
I had 2.5 percent body fat the day I picked you up from the train station in Poughkeepsie.
In the past six years, you’d worked in over fifteen countries. You were paid little to nothing for these work trips, and you still had a full-time professor and associate dean job, but you said the trips made living in Mississippi and the United States bearable. You looked around at empty buildings in downtown Poughkeepsie. You watched Oaxacans and black folk walking down main street and said for the first time in my life, “I’m so glad you left home. I think you’d like Cuba.”
“You hate Mississippi and America, huh?”
“I don’t hate Mississippi, Kie,” you said. “I don’t hate America. I hate the backlash that happens anytime black folk strive to make our state better than its origins. Sometimes I think Mississippi is home to the greatest and the worst people ever created.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think the same thing about America as a whole.”
“Do you think you’ll ever travel abroad?” you asked me. “I think you’d appreciate the work I do in Cuba, Zimbabwe, Palestine, and Romania.”
I sucked my teeth, laughed, and reminded you I was afraid of flying and asked you not to ever say the word “abroad” in my car or apartment. You started laughing and told me to get a grip.
The whole first day you were in my apartment, you kept asking what my father, who visited me a few weeks earlier, said about you. Eventually, I lied and said he asked about your work. When you asked me if he seemed proud of you, I lied again and said yes.
The truth was that when my father walked his five feet eight inches, 250 pounds into my office, he closed his eyes and said, “I’m so proud of you, son.” I told him I had to meet with some students before we could leave so he sat outside my office on a bench. My father sat with nothing in his hands. No books. No magazines. No cell phone. He just looked up at the empty bookcases in the waiting area and wouldn’t stop smiling.
After office hours, he went with me to the gym and watched me warm up by running a few miles on the track. Then he sat on the floor, with his back against the maroon mat, while I practiced with the basketball team. Twenty minutes after we got there, my father was asleep.
When we got in my car, my father didn’t put on his seat belt. He kept looking out the passenger window at the stars. “I’m so proud of you, son,” he said again as I took him to get a salad.
I offered my father my bed when we got home to my four-hundred-square-foot apartment but he refused. He told me again how proud he was of me for not quitting after getting kicked out of college. No matter what he was talking about, every few minutes he looked at my chest, forearms, neck, and legs and said, “You look great, Kie. I’m really proud of how you’re taking care of yourself.”
When my father said he thought I was ready to hear a story he should have told me years ago, I thought he was going to tell me something about you. Instead, he told me how a white sheriff in Enterprise, Mississippi, raped his mother, my grandma Pudding, when he was a child. My father said the sheriff neglected the child born from the rape, and threw my grandfather Tom in prison for two years for bootlegging when some white teenagers crashed after purchasing his product. My father wanted me to know he suspected his little brother, the child of the rape, was killed by someone he knew when he was a baby, as was the sheriff who raped his mother. More than solving the mystery of who killed his little brother or the sheriff, my father wanted me to understand that the so-called terror linking all Americans was nothing compared to the racial and gendered terror that controlled and contorted the bodies of our family.
“It is not theoretical, Kie,” he tried to tell me that night. “None of it. That’s why I’m so proud of you. They came after you like they came after both sides of your family. Your mother and I went about fighting that terror differently. I fought my fight from the inside of corporate America. You and your mother fought it through education.”
I never understood why black dudes who worked for corporations called their employers “corporate America” no matter if they were CEOs, members of the janitorial staff, or seasonal temporary workers.
Anyway, that was the only time my father mentioned you. Then he started talking about his trips to Vegas and asked me if I ever thought about going out there with him. When I asked him if he ever missed you, his big eyes started closing, so I went in the bathroom, did some push-ups, threw some punches in the mirror, and got in the shower. When I got out, my father was slumped over with both feet on the floor, glasses still on, one fist balled up on his lap, one hand tucked under his left thigh.
“I wish I had a professor like you when I was in school,” my father said as I covered him in the orange-red quilt you gave me for Christmas. My father didn’t come to Poughkeepsie to tell me something I already knew about the familial impact of racial terror in our nation. He didn’t come to tell me something I suspected about the violation of his mother and his brother. He was running, ducking, deflecting, and he didn’t want to run, duck, or deflect anymore. I felt all of what he told me, but I knew there was more his body needed to say.
That night, I saw in that slumping, sleeping black man the ten-year-old black child who ran away from home because he tired of the beatings his father gave his mother and siblings. I saw the fourteen-year-old black child charged with hiding the money his father made from bootlegging. I saw the sixteen-year-old black child forced to share his valedictorian honor with a white student with a lower GPA. I saw the nineteen-year-old black child who sold weed to make it through college. I saw the twenty-year-old black child who proudly repped the Republic of New Afrika. I saw the twenty-one-year-old black child who loved to have sex but hated talking about love with his wife. I saw the twenty-seven-year-old black child who sent his son and ex-wife postcards every week.
I’d never given much weight to the idea of present black fathers saving black boys. Most of the black boys I grew up with had present black fathers in the home. Sure, some of those fathers taught my friends how to be tough. But I can’t think of one who encouraged his son
to be emotionally or even bodily expressive of joy, fear, and love. I respected my father but I never felt that I needed him or any other man in the house to show me how to become a loving man. I knew, truth be told, that a present American man would likely teach me how to be a present American man. And I couldn’t imagine how those teachings would have made me healthier or more generous. What I saw of my father that day didn’t make me miss the father who was rarely present in my childhood, but it made me feel the beautiful black boy you fell in love with. It reaffirmed my belief that you needed a loving partner in our home far more than I needed a present father. I realized you and my father had broken and you’d never tell anyone about the depth of the breaks.
And all of that made me miss you.
Instead of telling you any of that, I asked you why you had so many questions about someone you don’t even know anymore. “We have a child together, Kie. We knew each other. We’ll always know each other.” When I said okay, you asked more about both of his marriages and the young children he had with his third wife.
“It’s all good,” I told you. “Everything with him is all good. I don’t ask questions. I don’t get answers.”
My schedule of running at least six miles during the day and six miles at night didn’t work when you were in Poughkeepsie. You worried too much the police would shoot me, so I couldn’t leave the house after midnight. I told you I ran at night to help process workdays.
“You have to find some way to deal with the stress of doing this job that doesn’t involve the possibility of you getting shot.”
“How is running at night increasing the possibility of my getting shot?”
“Please,” you said. “You are a big black man. Stop running at night.” I asked you if you still thought I was big even though I had hardly any body fat. “To white folk and police, you will always be huge no matter how skinny you are. Get a grip.”