Heavy: An American Memoir(13)

I remember you making me take my clothes off and lie across the same bed we used to sleep in. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed like that. You made me put my face down into the bed so I couldn’t brace myself. As much as the lashes hurt, knowing you were beating me at nine years old as hard as you could while looking at my fat naked black body hurt way more. The tearing of flesh hurt less than it should have, I think, because I knew you didn’t really want to hurt me. I knew you didn’t want to hurt me because you sometimes touched me like you loved me. I wish you could have just chosen one kind of touch, even if it was just beating me ten times a day every day.

That would have made everything a lot less confusing.

? ? ?

You were still snoring when Malachi Hunter pulled his black Volvo into our driveway. You woke up when I tried to kill a revolutionary black man from Mississippi for hurting you that night.

Two hours later, you and Malachi Hunter took one glass of wine to your bedroom. From my bed, I heard long-tailed rats hiking through our walls, wet tires skating past our windows, and Johnny Carson’s nasal monologue. I couldn’t hear your voice, the only voice I wanted to hear when I woke up, the last voice I wanted to hear before going to sleep.

I opened the bedroom door, walked down the hallway a few feet from your bedroom. Behind a locked door, Malachi Hunter said he was sorry for punching you in your face, sorry for making you bleed, sorry for fighting your son, sorry for punishing you for wanting to know the truth. You told Malachi Hunter you wanted a daughter and you were sorry for running away.

I went back to my room and heard your bedroom door unlock and lock again.

The minisqueaks from your bed got louder. I got on my knees and prayed to God not to hear you wailing under the weight of the revolutionary black man from Mississippi.

I hated my body.

I walked in the kitchen, got the biggest spoon I could find, and dipped it halfway in the peanut butter and pear preserves Grandmama had given us. I heard the wailing all the way in the kitchen. I dipped the same spoon a quarter deep into Grandmama’s pear preserves and put the whole spoon in my mouth. I did it again and again until the jar of peanut butter was gone.

The wailing didn’t stop. I hated my body.

Before leaving the kitchen, I gulped down a few Mason jars of box wine until I forgot the shape of the sound I was running from. When I was supposed to be finishing my report for you on Fannie Lou Hamer, I wrote instead about losing my twelve-year-old heavy black body to an emergency I was too sad, too drunk—and really too terrified—to identify.

Early the next morning, I had my first wet dream. I was afraid to tell you what my body did while you were with Malachi Hunter because I knew you’d ask me why. Though I never wanted you to touch me again, I didn’t want to lie to you. Lying to you felt like cheating. Cheating felt like something I never wanted to do to my best friend.





BE


A few weeks into the summer, when counting to ten and limiting sugar and simple carbohydrates didn’t work for either of us, you dropped me off with Grandmama for a few days in Forest, Mississippi. I loved Grandmama but I didn’t really love going to her house any day other than Friday. Every Friday, Grandmama let me watch Dukes of Hazzard, a show you said “operates in a world even more racist than the one we live in, where two white drug dealers who keep violating probation and making fools of the police in a red Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag on top called the General Lee never go to prison.”

The Friday night I was sent to stay with Grandmama, I asked her if black folk like us could ever get away from the police like Bo and Luke Duke could.

“No,” Grandmama said before I could get the whole question out. “Nope. Not at all. Never. You better never try that mess either, Kie.”

The one or two times there were black characters on Dukes of Hazzard, I remember Grandmama and her boyfriend, Ofa D, getting closer to the screen and cheering for them the same way they cheered if the Georgetown Hoyas were playing, if Jackson State won, or if there was a black contestant on Wheel of Fortune.

Like most black women in Forest, Grandmama had a number of side hustles in addition to working the line at the chicken plant. One of her side hustles was selling vegetables from her garden. Another side hustle was selling fried fish, pound cakes, and sweet potato pies every Saturday evening to anyone who would buy them. The most important of Grandmama’s side hustles was washing clothes, ironing, cooking, and doing dishes for this white family called the Mumfords.

After church, that Sunday, on the way to the Mumfords, I complained to Grandmama my slacks were so tight I had to unzip them to breathe. Grandmama laughed and laughed and laughed until she didn’t. She said she wouldn’t be at the Mumfords for long. I always saw the Mumfords’ nasty clothes next to Grandmama’s washer, and their clean clothes out on the clothesline behind her house.

I hated those clothes.

The Mumfords lived right off Highway 35. I was amazed at how the houses off Highway 35 were the only houses in Forest that looked like the houses on Leave It to Beaver, Who’s the Boss?, and Mr. Belvedere. When I imagined the insides of rich-white-folk houses, I imagined stealing all their food while they were asleep. I wanted to gobble up palms full of Crunch ’n Munch and fill up their thirty-two-ounce glasses with name-brand ginger ale and crushed ice tumbling out of their silver refrigerators. I wanted to leave the empty glasses and Crunch ’n Munch crumbs on the counter so the white folk would know I’d been there and they’d have something to clean up when I left.