Heavy: An American Memoir(17)

At the end, I wrote, “Grandmama, can you please help me with my words?” I gave Grandmama my notebook when I was done like I had to every Sunday night we spent together. Unlike on other nights, she didn’t say anything about what I’d written. When she walked by me, I didn’t even hear her breathing.

Later that night, before bed, Grandmama got on her knees, turned the light off, and told me she loved me. She told me tomorrow would be a better day. Grandmama looked at that old raggedy gold and silver contraption she called her phone book before she got in bed with me like she always did. She looked up your name and number, Aunt Sue’s name and number, Uncle Jimmy’s name and number, and Aunt Linda’s name and number.

Before both of us went to sleep, I asked Grandmama if 218 pounds was too fat for twelve years old. “What you weighing yourself for anyway?” she asked me. “Two hundred eighteen pounds is just right, Kie. It’s just heavy enough.”

“Heavy enough for what?”

“Heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy enough for.”

I loved sleeping with Grandmama because that was the only place in the world I slept all the way through the night. But tonight was different. “Can I ask you one more question before we go to bed?”

“Yes, baby,” Grandmama said, and faced me for the first time since I gave her the notebook. “What do you think about counting to ten in case of emergencies?”

“Ain’t no emergency God can’t help you forget,” Grandmama told me. “Evil is real, Kie.”

“But what about the emergencies made by folk who say they love you?”

“You forget it all,” she said. “Especially that kind of emergency. Or you go stone crazy. My whole life, it seem like something crazy always happens on Sunday nights in the summer.”

Grandmama made me pray again that night. I prayed for you to never close the door to your room if Malachi Hunter was there. I prayed for Layla and Dougie to never feel like they had to go back in Daryl’s room. I prayed for Grandmama to have more money so she wouldn’t have to stand in that big room ripping the bloody guts out of chickens before standing in that smaller room smelling bleach and white folks’ shitty underwear. I prayed nothing would ever happen again in any room in the world that made us feel like we were dying.

When I got off my knees, I watched the back of Grandmama’s body heave in and heave out as she fell asleep on the bed. Grandmama was trying, hard as she could, to forget one more Sunday night in the summer. For a second, though, she stopped heaving. I couldn’t hear her breathing. When I finally climbed into bed, I placed my left thumb lightly on the small of Grandmama’s back. She jerked forward and clenched the covers tighter around her body.

“My bad, Grandmama. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Be still, Kie,” Grandmama mumbled with her back to me. “Just be still. Close your eyes. Some things, they ain’t meant to be remembered. Be still with the good things we got, like all them quick foots.”

“Quick feet,” I told her. “It’s already plural. I know you know that, Grandmama. Quick feet.”





MEAGER


You were on your way back from Hawaii with Malachi Hunter while LaThon Simmons and I sat in the middle of a white eighth-grade classroom, in a white Catholic school, filled with white folk we didn’t even know. These white folk watched us toss black vocabulary words, a dull butter knife, and pink grapefruit slices back and forth until it was time for us to go home.

We were new eighth graders at St. Richard Catholic School in Jackson, Mississippi, because Holy Family, the poor all-black Catholic school we attended most of our lives, closed unexpectedly due to lack of funding. All four of the black girls from Holy Family were placed in one homeroom at St. Richard. All three of us black boys from Holy Family were placed in another. Unlike at Holy Family, where we could wear what we wanted, at St. Richard, students had to wear khaki or blue pants or skirts and light blue, white, or pink shirts.

LaThon, who we both thought looked just like a slew-footed K-Ci from Jodeci, and I sat in the back of homeroom the first day of school doing what we always did: we intentionally used and misused last year’s vocabulary words while LaThon cut up his pink grapefruit with his greasy, dull butter knife. “These white folk know we here on discount,” he told me, “but they don’t even know.”

“You right,” I told him. “These white folk don’t even know that you an ol’ grapefruit-by-the-pound-eating-ass nigga. Give me some grapefruit. Don’t be parsimonious with it, either.”

“Nigga, you don’t eat grapefruits,” LaThon said. “Matter of fact, tell me one thing you eat that don’t got butter in it. Ol’ churning-your-own-butter-ass nigga.” I was dying laughing. “Plus, you act like I got grapefruits gal-low up in here. I got one grapefruit.”

Seth Donald, a white boy with two first names, looked like a dustier Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, but with braces. Seth spent the first few minutes of the first day of school silent-farting and turning his eyelids inside out. He asked both of us what “gal-low” meant.

“It’s like galore,” I told him, and looked at LaThon. “Like grapefruits galore.”

LaThon sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes. “Seth, whatever your last name is, first of all, your first name ends with two f’s from now on, and your new name is Seff six-two because you five-four but you got the head of a nigga we know who six-two.” LaThon tapped me on the forearm. “Don’t he got a head like S. Slawter?” I nodded up and down as LaThon shifted and looked right in Seff 6‘2’s eyes. “Everythang about y’all is erroneous. Every. Thang. This that black abundance. Y’all don’t even know.”