Heavy: An American Memoir(14)

Grandmama left the key in the ignition and told me she’d be back in about twenty minutes. “Don’t say nothing to that badass Mumford boy if he come out here, Kie,” she said. “He ain’t got a lick of home training. You hear me? Don’t get out of this car unless it’s an emergency.”

I nodded yes and sprawled out across the front seat of the Impala. Damn near as soon as Grandmama went in the house, out came this boy who looked like a nine-year-old Mike D from the Beastie Boys. The Mumford boy was bone-white and skinny in a way Grandmama called “po’.” Grandmama didn’t have much money, and her six-hundred-square-foot shotgun house was clean as Clorox on the inside, but raggedy as a roach on the outside. I always wondered why Grandmama never called people with less stuff than us “po’.” She called them “folk who ain’t got a pot to piss in” or “folk whose money ain’t all the way right” or “folk with nan dime to they name” but she never used “poor” or “po’?” to talk about anything other than people’s bodies.

Without knocking, the po’ white boy opened the door of the driver’s side of Grandmama’s Impala. “You Reno’s grandson?” he asked me.

“Who is Reno?”

“You know Reno. The old black lady who clean my house.”

I’d never seen this po’ white boy before but I’d seen the shiny gray Jams swim trunks, the long two-striped socks and the gray Luke Skywalker shirt he had on in our dirty clothes basket, and hanging on our clothesline. I didn’t like how knowing a po’ white boy’s clothes before knowing a po’ white boy made me feel. And I hated how this po’ white boy called Grandmama “Reno, the old black lady who clean my house.”

I got out of the Impala and kept my hands in my pockets. “So you Reno’s grandson?” the boy asked. “You the one from Jackson?”

Before I could say yes, the Mumford boy told me we couldn’t come in his house but we could play in the backyard. The phrase “I’m good” was something I always said in Jackson, but I didn’t know I had ever meant it as much as I meant it that day.

That’s what I felt before I looked at the size of the Mumfords’ garage and saw a closet door open in the left corner. I walked toward the room and saw a washer, a dryer, and a scale on the ground.

“What y’all call this room?” I asked him.

“That’s our washroom,” he said. “Why y’all stay shooting folk in Jackson? Can I ask you that?”

I ignored the po’ white boy’s question. At Grandmama’s house, our washer was in the dining room and we didn’t have a dryer, so we hung everything up on the clothesline. “Wait. What’s a scale doing in there?”

“My pawpaw like to weigh himself out here.”

“That washer, do it work?”

“It work fine,” he said. “Good as new.”

“And the dryer, too?” I looked at the two irons on this shelf hanging above a new ironing board. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. I stepped on the scale in the corner. “This scale, it’s right?”

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I never used it. I told you it’s my pawpaw scale.”

I walked back to Grandmama’s Impala, got in the driver’s seat, and locked the doors. I remember gripping the steering wheel with one hand and digging my fingernails into my knee with the other hand. I wondered how fat 218 pounds really was for twelve years old.

Less than a minute after I was in the car, the Mumford boy came back out. Without knocking, he tried to open the Impala’s driver-side door again.

“Come on in and play, Jackson,” he said again from outside the car.

“Naw. I’m good,” I told him, and rolled the window down.

“You wanna shoot squirrels in the head with my pellet gun in the backyard?”

“Naw,” I told him. “My mama don’t let me shoot squirrels in the head. I’m not allowed to shoot guns. I’m good.”

“But all y’all do is shoot guns in Jackson.”

I sat in Grandmama’s Impala with a rot spreading in my chest for a few seconds before Grandmama walked out of the house carrying a basket of dirty clothes. An envelope sat on top of the clothes.

When I told Grandmama what the Mumford boy said to me, she told me to leave these folk alone. “Do you know who you messing with?” she asked me. “These white folk, they liable to have us locked up under the jail, Kie.”

I kept looking at Grandmama as we drove home. I was trying to decide if I should ask her why she had to wash, dry, iron, and fold the Mumfords’ nasty clothes if the Mumfords had a better washer than ours, a working dryer, a newer iron, and an ironing board. I wanted to ask her if there were better side hustles than washing nasty white-folk clothes on the weekend. But I didn’t say anything on the first half of the way home. I just looked at Grandmama’s face and saw deeper frown lines around her mouth than I’d ever seen before.

I wanted to shrink and slide down Grandmama’s frown lines.

I understood that day why you and Grandmama were so hungry for black wins, regardless of how tiny those wins were. For Grandmama, those wins were always personal. For you, the wins were always political. Both of y’all knew, and showed me, how we didn’t even have to win for white folk to punish us. All we had to do was not lose the way they wanted us to.