Heavy: An American Memoir(16)

“Ain’t no need to make up words for words that already exist, Kie,” she said. “That ain’t nothing but the white you saw in that po’ child today. And you don’t want to feel no kinds of white. I feel sorry for them folk.”

I looked at Grandmama and told her I felt like a nigger, and feeling like a nigger made my heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain feel like they were melting and dripping out the ends of my toenails.

“It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk.” Grandmama started laughing. “Kie, what you call yourself doing to those folks’ clothes?”

“Oh,” I said, and start doing it again. “At practice, we be calling this quick feet.”

“You gave them white-folk clothes them quick feets?”

“Not feets,” I said, laughing. “It’s already plural, Grandmama. Quick feet.”

“Quick feets?” she said again, and kept laughing until she almost fell out of her chair. “Quick foots?”

“Grandmama,” I told her, and sat next to her legs. “I hate white-folk clothes. I’m serious.”

“I know you do.” Grandmama stopped laughing. “I don’t much appreciate them or they clothes either, but cleaning them nasty clothes is how we eat, and how I got your mama and them through school. You know I been washing them folks’ clothes for years and I ain’t never seen one washcloth?”

“What you mean, Grandmama?”

“I mean what I said. Them folk don’t use no washcloths.” I waited for a blink, a smirk, a slow roll of her eyes. I got nothing. “And the one time the little po’ one who was messing with you asked me how to use a washrag, I told that baby, ‘if you bring that washrag from your ass to your face, that’s between you and your God.’ And this baby just stood there laughing like I’m telling jokes. You know I was serious as a heart attack, Kie.”

While I was dying laughing, Grandmama told me she whupped me for acting up in her kitchen, not for messing up them folks’ clothes. She said she spent so many hours in white-folk kitchens and just wanted her children to respect her kitchen when she got home.

I asked Grandmama why she whupped me on my legs when I was doing quick feet, and not my head or my neck or my back like you would. “Because I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I want you to act like you got good sense but I don’t ever want to hurt you.”

Grandmama stood up and told me to follow her out to her garden. We went outside and picked butter beans, purple hull peas, collard greens, green tomatoes, and yellow squash.

“You know why I love my garden, Kie?”

“Because you don’t want to have to rely on white folk to eat?”

“Chile, please,” Grandmama said, walking back to the porch. “I ain’t studdin’ nan one of those folk when I’m at my own house. I love knowing directly what the food that be going in us has been through. You know what I mean?”

“I think I do,” I told Grandmama as we sat on the porch, hulling peas and talking more about quick feet. My bucket of peas was between my legs when Grandmama stood up and straddled my tub.

“Kie, try hulling like this here,” Grandmama said. I looked up at her hands and how they handled the purple hull peas. When she reached for my face, I jumped back. “I ain’t trying to hurt you,” she said. “What you jumping back for?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Grandmama took the bucket from between my legs into the kitchen. I sat there looking at my hands. They wouldn’t stop shaking. I felt sweat pooling up between my thighs. My body remembered what happened yesterday, and strangely knew what would happen tomorrow.

At supper, Grandmama apologized again for whupping my legs and told me when I wrote my report on the Book of Psalms later that night, I could write the way we talk. Like you, Grandmama made me do written assignments every night. Unlike your assignments, all of Grandmama’s assignments had to be about the Bible.

Later that evening, I wrote, “I know you want me to write about the Book of Psalms. If it is okay I just want to tell you about some secrets that be making my head hurt. I be eating too much and staying awake at night and fighting people in Jackson. Mama does not like how my eyes are red. I wake her up in the morning and she be making me use Visine before school. I try but I can’t tell her what’s wrong. Can I tell you? Can you help me with my words? The words Mama make me use don’t work like they supposed to work.”

I wrote the words “be kissing me in the morning” “be choking me” “be running a train” “be beating my back” “be hearing her heartbeat” “be slow dancing with me” “be rubbing her breasts in my mouth” “be abandoning her” “be wet dreaming about stuff that scare me” “be watching people” “be getting beaten” “be listening to trains” “be on top of me” “be on my knees” “be kissing me in the morning” “be choking me” “be kissing him at night” “be hitting hard” “be saying white folk hit the hardest” “be laughing so it won’t hurt” “be eating when I’m full” “be kissing me” “be choking me” “be confusing me.”