Heavy: An American Memoir(18)

LaThon’s favorite vocab word in seventh grade was “abundance,” but I’d never heard him throw “black” and “that” in front of it until we got to St. Richard.

While LaThon was cutting his half into smaller slices, he looked at me and said Seth six-two and them didn’t even know about the slicing “shhhtyle” he used.

Right as I dapped LaThon up, Ms. Reeves, our white homeroom teacher, pointed at LaThon and me. Ms. Reeves looked like a much older version of Wendy from the Wendy’s restaurants. We looked at each other, shook our heads, and kept cutting our grapefruit slices. “Put the knife away, LaThon,” she said. “Put it down. Now!”

“Mee-guh,” we said to each other. “Meager,” the opposite of LaThon’s favorite word, was my favorite word at the end of seventh grade. We used different pronunciations of meager to describe people, places, things, and shhhtyles that were at least eight levels less than nothing. “Mee-guh,” I told her again, and pulled out my raggedy Trapper Keeper. “Mee-guh.”

While Ms. Reeves was still talking, I wrote “#1 tape of our #1 group?” on a note and passed it to LaThon. He leaned over and wrote, “EPMD and Strictly Business.” I wrote, “#1 girl you wanna marry?” He wrote, “Spinderalla + Tootie.” I wrote, “#1 white person who don’t even know?” LaThon looked down at his new red and gray Air Maxes, then up at the ceiling. Finally, he shook his head and wrote, “Ms. Reeves + Ronald Reagan. It’s a tie. With they meager ass.”

I balled up the note and put it in my too-tight khakis while Ms. Reeves kept talking to us the way you told me white folk would talk to us if we weren’t perfect, the way I saw white women at the mall and police talk to you whether you’d broken the law or not.

I understood how Ms. Reeves had every reason in her world to think I was a sweaty, red-eyed underachiever who drank half a Mason jar of box wine before coming to school. That’s almost exactly who I was. But LaThon was as close to abundant as an eighth grader could be.

LaThon brilliantly said “skrrimps” instead of “shrimp” because “skrrimps” just sounded better. He added three s’s to “mine” so it sounded like “minessss” no matter where we were. I once watched him tear open a black-and-white TV and make it into a bootleg version of Frogger and a miniature box fan for his girlfriend. One Friday in seventh grade, I saw him make the freshest paper airplane in the history of paper airplanes in Jackson. For five minutes and forty-six seconds, that plane soared, flipped, and dipped while LaThon and I ran underneath it for three blocks down Beaverbrook Drive. When the plane finally landed, LaThon kept looking up at the sky, wondering how the pocket of wind that carried our plane could find its way into a city like Jackson. LaThon could do anything, but the thing I’d never seen him do was come close to hurting someone who hadn’t hurt him first, with a knife, his hands, or even his words.

“It’s not a knife. It’s a butter knife,” I told Ms. Reeves. “And it’s dull. Why she acting like a nigga got fine cutlery up in here?”

“You know,” LaThon said. “?’Cause they preposterous in this school.”

“Preposterous-er than a mug,” I told Ms. Reeves, looking directly at Jabari, the other Holy Family black boy in our homeroom. LaThon and I knew it was against the West Jackson law for Jabari to get in trouble in school, so we didn’t take it personally when he didn’t stand up for us. LaThon got whuppings from his grandmama. I got beatings from you. Jabari could get beat the fuck up by his father when he got home. In Jackson, getting a whupping was so much gentler than getting a beating, and getting a beating was actually ticklish compared to getting beat the fuck up.

Ms. Reeves marched out of the room to get Ms. Stockard, a white teacher who’d subbed a few times at Holy Family. Ms. Stockard watched LaThon, Jabari, and me eat grapefruits with actual silver knives plenty of times at Holy Family and never said a word.

But it didn’t matter.

“This isn’t how we wanted you guys to start the year,” she said as we all walked to the principal’s office to call you and call LaThon’s grandparents.

I sat in the principal’s office thinking about what you told me the day before we started St. Richard. “Be twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this point on,” you said. “Everything you thought you knew changes tomorrow. Being twice as excellent as white folk will get you half of what they get. Being anything less will get you hell.”

I assumed we were already twice as excellent as the white kids at St. Richard precisely because their library looked like a cathedral and ours was an old trailer on cinder blocks. I thought you should have told me to be twice as excellent as you or Grandmama since y’all were the most excellent people I knew.

LaThon got whupped by a black woman who loved him when he got home. I got beaten by a black woman who loved me the next morning. With every lash you brought down on my body, I was reminded of what I knew, and how I knew it. I knew you didn’t want white folk to judge you if I came to school with visible welts, so you beat me on my back, my ass, my thick thighs instead of my arms, my neck, my hands, and my face like you did when I went to Holy Family. I knew that if my white classmates were getting beaten at home, they were not getting beaten at home because of what any black person on Earth thought of them.