by Kiese Laymon
So I did what we do.
I told you the truth about white folks’ treatment of me without being honest about how I treated myself and others close to me while surviving that treatment.
After you hugged my neck, said you were so sorry, and asked questions about what the officers did to me in the interrogation room, I said, “Wait. So I abused you?” just loud enough for the people in the room next door to hear.
“I think so.”
“I abused you by lying to you? Did you abuse me?”
You stood up and walked toward the door. “Do you ever just feel lonely? I feel like I walk around this world raw, Kie. It’s hard to open up when you’re already open, and people just never get tired of sticking their nasty hands into that raw.”
“I hear you,” I said, “but I’m asking if you abused me. How did I stick my hands into your raw? How did I abuse you?”
“You come from that raw, Kie. I think you’re raw, too. I know you love me. I just think you share too much with people who don’t love either of us. You let too many hands into that raw. There are things I want to say to you that white folk do not deserve to hear. I have a heart, Kie. I have a heart and a job. And even though you don’t act like it, you do, too. You’ve got to be much more careful. White folk do not deserve to stick their nasty hands into our raw. Hiding from them and being excellent are actually the only ways for us to survive here.”
I told you that running and hiding from folk who can’t see themselves has fatal consequences. You told me that unnecessarily opening yourself up for folk who can’t see themselves has even more fatal consequences. I asked you why we’re still talking about people not in this room.
“Because they’re listening, Kie,” you said. “They read everything you write. They see how you dress. They are watching. You make it easy for white folk to discredit you. You really think you’re free. It’s one of the most endearing things about you. But every single time they remind you what you really are, you crumble and lie about that crumbling. I just want you to protect yourself.”
“Protect myself from who?”
“You mean ‘from whom.’ I’m still trying to protect you from them, from the world. I failed at that.”
I told you that I never crumbled, and asked if I should have done anything to protect myself from you.
“You did protect yourself from me,” you said, and looked toward the door for the second time in the conversation. “You know what it feels like to have people ask me why my only son never visits me, doesn’t pick up the phone when I call, doesn’t respond to e-mails?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I know.”
“Kie,” you finally said. “I’m just asking you to forgive me for whatever I’ve done to make you this resentful.”
Now I’m hunting for the other side of that door. A casino is no place to ask a parent or child drowning in shame why they were abusive. “Can we just not lie?” I asked. “I’m really asking. Can we start there? Can we just promise each other we won’t lie?”
You buried your head in your chest. You picked up your bag and walked toward the door. You turned around, walked back to me. You stood over me while I sat on the edge of the bed. I looked up at your face. My body remembered, but my body did not flinch. My body did not shudder. My body did not brace. I wanted you to kneel down and hold my face in your hands. I wanted you to say let’s please be honest about where we’ve been. I wanted you to be gentle. I wanted to remember being your child.
“Can we just not lie?”
“Yes, we can,” you said. “I promise we can. Just know that I did the best I could, Kie. That’s all I’m trying to say. I didn’t know how to do any better. I did the best I could.”
“But why do you need me to know that? What if you didn’t do the best you could? What if you could have actually done better?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just think sometimes we don’t do the best we could have done, and it’s impossible to know that if we’re scared to remember where we’ve been, and what we actually did. I don’t think either of us did our best. I know I didn’t. Do you really believe you did?”
You ignored my question and asked me why I write instead of paint or sing or dance or cook or sculpt. I told you that I write because you made me, and I write what I write because I am afraid of becoming you or my father. I told you that it took me ten years of teaching to understand that my students loved me, valued our time, but they did not want to become me. I told you that you cared so much for black folk, but couldn’t believe there were some folk in this nation who could love you in the worst minutes of the worst hours of the worst days of your life. I told you that I was one of those folk. And Grandmama was, too.
I told you I imagine you at eleven years old, climbing Grandmama’s pecan tree with A Tale of Two Cities in your hands. I see you reading, but I also see you looking down at Grandmama’s pink shotgun house, watching your brother throw pecans at your two sisters. I see you watching Grandmama rock back and forth alone on that porch. Your eyes meet her eyes and Grandmama tells you to come on down from that tree before you fall and break your arm. You smile because you know Grandmama just wants you and the rest of her children to be careful. You are curious. You are weird. You are loved. You are audacious. You are as safe as you’ll ever be. Tomorrow, you and Grandmama know that you will all be less safe. Today, though, twenty minutes from Sunday school, tucked securely in a pecan tree with a book in your hand, you are free.
“I be seeing you,” I told you, “especially when you think you be doing a great job of hiding. Maybe you be seeing me too.”
You did not correct my English because it could not be corrected. You held my hand and we hugged for longer than we’d hugged in over thirty years. I was a grown man, but I was your child, and I fell in love again that day.
Hand in hand, we walked out of the hotel room. We stepped into an elevator. We walked across the casino lobby and made it outside the casino. You hugged my neck and told me you did not want to let go. I felt so free, so fantastic, so delivered.
“I want you to feel like I’m always home,” you said. “Could you please get control of your weight? Will you go on a diet?”
“I will,” I said.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“I’m sorry for hurting you, Kie. Do you want to say anything else?”
“We all broken,” I said. “Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we’re gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it’s possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.”
“I’m sorry for breaking you,” you said.
“You didn’t break me,” I told you. “You helped make me. I helped make you. We can talk more honestly about that making. That’s really all I’m saying. That’s what people can do.”
“I think we turned a page in our relationship today, Kie.”
“You think so?” I asked you.
“I know we did,” you said. “Please come visit me. Please stop eating so much sugar and so many carbs. You have one body. Please value it.”
I watched you get in the taxi. The taxi door closed. You slowly disappeared on the other side of a winding curve. I’d parked Flora’s Kia on the other side of the building, so I had to walk through the casino to get to the car. I did not make eye contact with the blackjack dealers. I did not say fuck you to the twinkling slot machines. I did not suck my teeth at the Johnny Rockets, Ben and Jerry’s, and Krispy Kreme. I simply said bye to them and made it to Flora’s Kia.
I knew this would be my last time in a casino.
Thank you for not giving up on me, you texted four minutes later.
Do not put any of your hard-earned money into those machines. Be better than me. I am going to get help. Please stop and smell the roses. Promise me you will lose weight.
I promise, I texted.
Consider getting married and having ki
ds. You would be a great father. Your children would be so lucky. You are better than your parents’ failures. Promise me you will consider getting married and having children this year.
I wanted to tell you that if I ever have a child, I want to raise that child in the Deep South. I want free land to wrap around that child’s feet. I want that child to know that you do not need to be magical, or mythologize the so-called struggle. I am not at all sure what the child will need, but I want them to figure out the kind of lover of black children they want to be. And I want them to accept that we are all black children. I want them to articulate whether they are capable of being that kind of lover, and I want them to never wall themselves up from the world when they fail at loving themselves or our people.
I know that’s a lot.
I wanted to tell you that I am afraid to bring a child into the world because I do not know how to protect my child from life, from you, from our nation, and from me. I worry about the possibility of our black child feeling my touch was violation. I wondered what our child would see when I was scared. I wondered what they’d hear when I was angry. I learned indirectly from you that we cannot responsibly love anyone, and especially not black children in America, if we insist on making a practice of hiding and running from ourselves. I wonder if a part of me wants to hold on to the possibility of hiding, running, and harming myself. I cannot do that if I have a child.
I did not have the courage to text you any of that. So instead I wrote, I promise. We’ve come too far to turn back.
We really have, you texted back. Promise me you will do what I asked. Promise me you will leave the past where it is and go forward with no regrets. Promise me you will not look back.
I promise, I texted. You are right. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our lives. I will try to bring a child into this world. I will teach that child to never look back. We cannot live healthy lives in the present if we drown ourselves in the past.
Promise me you mean everything you’re saying, Kie.
I can’t promise that.
Please promise, Kiese. Please.
For a few seconds, I remembered that the most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility. I remembered that we got here by refusing to honestly remember together. I remembered that it was easier to promise than it was to reckon or change. But I wanted to continue feeling delivered. I wanted to continue feeling fantastic. I wanted to continue feeling free. And I wanted to feel loved by both of us again.
I promise, I slowly texted. We have come too far to turn back. I promise. We have come way too far to turn back.
BEND
Two miles from all those promises and three minutes from our last cliché, I will understand that no meaningful promises are made or kept in casinos. I will head back to the casino and spend the last ten dollars I stole from Flora’s apartment. I will stop at Vassar College when I leave the casino. I will not know where home is. I will not smell the roses. I will not leave the past in the past. I will teach my students. I will write and revise. I will become a tired teacher and a terrified black writer.
I will take a train to Washington, DC, to talk to the architects of Barack Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. I will argue, with a group of committed intersectional feminists, that we need effective structural remedies to structural impediments for black children in this country. We will argue that black girls and black women, like black men and boys, cannot wait. I will take the train back to Poughkeepsie with Flora feeling good about fighting for black girls and black women. On the way home, I will lie to Flora, a black woman, who lost her mother when she was a black girl. Flora will not forgive me.
I will continue to hide behind podiums, lecterns, huge camouflage shorts, and black sweatshirts. I will listen to you talk about addiction. I will say no when you ask me to wire you four thousand dollars tomorrow. I will punish myself for saying no by going to a casino and blowing my last four thousand dollars the day after tomorrow.
I will not know where home is.
I will hate going to sleep. I will hate waking up. I will not buy a gun because I know I will use it. I will watch them murder Tamir Rice’s body for using his imagination outside. I will watch them call Toya Graham, a black mother who beat her son upside the head during the Baltimore rebellion, “Mom of the Year.” I will watch them murder Korryn Gaines’s body for using her voice and a gun to defend her five-year-old black child from America. I will watch them murder Philando Castile in front of his partner, Diamond Reynolds, and her child. I will watch, and hear, that black child tell her mother, another black child, “I don’t want you to get shooted. I can keep you safe.”
I can keep you safe.
I will watch them ridicule us and exonerate themselves for terrorizing the bodies of black children they have yet to shoot. I will hear them call themselves innocent, American, and Christian as they call us ungrateful, irresponsible, reckless, thuggish.
I will not buy a gun because I know I will use it.
I will watch Dougie, LaThon, Donnie Gee, Abby, Nzola, Ray Gunn, and scores of my students raise their children. I will avoid them all because I am ashamed of how heavy I’ve become and how childless I am. I will live and sleep alone, just like you. I will want to lie every day of my life, just like you. I will want to starve. I will want to gorge. I will want to punish my black body because fetishizing and punishing black bodies are what we are trained to do well in America.
I will write. I will revise.
When I finally decide to leave Vassar College, I will remember meeting The College Dropout; A Mercy; K.R.I.T. Wuz Here; The Electric Lady; Prophets of the Hood; good kid, m.A.A.d city; and Salvage the Bones. I will remember teaching and learning from the weirdest, most avidly curious students I’d ever imagined. I will apologize for failing them. I will understand that every single one of my colleagues at Vassar College tried to love, serve, and teach the students in front of them. And just like me, they often failed at loving, serving, and teaching the students in front of them.
I will find my way back to Mississippi to finish revising a book I started thirty years ago on Grandmama’s porch. I will drive by Beulah Beauford’s house, Millsaps College, St. Richard, St. Joe, LaThon’s house, Jabari’s house, Ray Gunn’s apartment, Jackson State, Donnie Gee’s house, familiar parking lots, grocery stores, interstates, basketball courts. I will walk slowly through rooms, scenes, smells, and sounds I made myself forget. While sitting on a porch in Oxford, Mississippi, I will hear Grandmama’s voice tell me “Ain’t nothing for you up in there” when I want to give my blessings away.
I will fall to my knees that day and laugh and I will laugh and I will laugh until I cry. I will drive to Forest and read a draft of this book to Grandmama from beginning to end on her porch. She will say, “I think it’s real good, Kie” even though she will periodically fall asleep while I’m reading. “Thank you for all them words,” she will say every time she wakes up. “And thank you for all y’all do for me.”
Grandmama will ask me to wheel her back into the house after I finish reading and find that thirty-year-old raggedy gold and silver contraption she calls her phone book. “Gimme your number again, Jimmy Earl,” Grandmama will say, looking right in my face. “I tried to call you last night but I don’t believe I got the right number in here.”
I will look in the phone book and show Grandmama my number under K, not J.
“Oh, okay,” she will say. “I already got the number, Kie?” She will pick up the phone and start dialing the number she had for Uncle Jimmy. “Jimmy Earl not answering,” she will say. “I reckon I’ll call back in a little while.”
I will not remind Grandmama how she found the body of her first child, Jimmy Earl Alexander, dead on the floor of his kitchen from an overdose a few years earlier. “Me and Jimmy Earl,” she will say, “we love talking to each other on that telephone.”
I will wonder about the memories Grandmama misplaced, forgot, or maybe just lost fr
om the time I started this book until I finished. I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true. I will wonder if at ninety years old, after remembering and carrying so much, Grandmama has any room left in her body for new memories.
Though Grandmama confused me with Uncle Jimmy during our conversation, she will remember that I am forty-three years old, heavy, and childless. “It’s still time for you to be somebody’s daddy and somebody’s husband, Kie,” she will say. “What is it you scared of?”
I will smile and say I do not want to hurt anybody.
Grandmama will say she believes me even when she knows I am lying. I will kneel down, hug her neck, and thank her for responsibly loving all of her children, and never, ever harming me.
“I was just trying to put y’all where I been,” she will say.
“I am just trying to put y’all where I bend,” I will hear.
I will show Grandmama my first stretch mark and talk to her about how it’s changed in thirty years. I will show her these six scratches on my right wrist from years of trying to dunk. I will show her a blotched scar underneath my right eye. I pull my bottom lip down and show her scar tissue from a fall. I will show her these three eyelashes on my left eye that curl downward instead of up. I will show her how my right big toe is so much more callused than my left one since I lost mobility in my left hip. I will show her the holes in my mouth where teeth would be if I thought my health was worth taking care of. I will show her how much softer my thighs have gotten over the years since I stopped trying to disappear. I will show her my wide palms and short fingers. I will show her my navel and the two new stretch marks framing it.