Heavy: An American Memoir(19)

The next day at school, the teachers at St. Richard made sure LaThon and I never shared a classroom again. At St. Richard, the only time we saw each other was during recess, at lunch, or after school. When LaThon and I saw each other, we dapped each other up, held each other close as long as we could.

“It’s still that black abundance?” I asked LaThon.

“You already know,” he said, annunciating every syllable in a voice he’d never used before walking into his homeroom.

After school, in the front seat of our Nova, you told me what white folk demanded of us was never fair, but following their rules was sometimes safer for all the black folk involved and all the black folk coming after us. You kept talking about how amazing it was that Mississippi had just elected its first progressive governor since William Winter. You worked on Governor Mabus’s campaign and kept talking about how much was possible politically in Mississippi because it was the blackest state in the nation.

“A third of white voters in Mississippi came out and did the right thing,” you said. “That’s all you need when thirty-three percent of your electorate is black and we get our folks out to the polls. Do you understand what’s possible if we actually get effective radical politicians in place down here?”

“I understand it now because you’ve told me the same thing every day for the last year. I’m glad Mabus won, but hearing about it every day is just kinda mee-guh.”

“Me what?” you asked me, cocking your hand back. “What did you say to me, Kie?”

“Me nothing,” I said. “Me nothing.”

? ? ?

Somewhere around our third quarter, Ms. Stockard made us read William Faulkner and Eudora Welty stories and watch Roots for black history month. I was the only Holy Family kid in my English class. Ms. Stockard talked a lot about the work of Eudora Welty all year. She talked a lot about “historical context” when speaking about the “quirky racism” of Welty’s characters and compared quirky racism to the “bad real racism” of most of the white characters in Roots. I didn’t like what “historical context” and “quirky racism” in our English class granted white folk. If we could understand historical context, we could understand how Eudora Welty could create fully developed, unreliable white protagonists who treated partially developed black objects like “niggers.” I felt the weight of “historical context,” “quirky racism,” and “bad real racism” in that eighth-grade classroom, but I also felt something else I was embarrassed to admit. I felt a tug toward the interior of Welty’s stories.

Even though there were bold boundaries between my imagination and Welty’s, when she started “Why I Live at the P.O.” with the sentence “I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again,” I didn’t just feel an intimate relationship to Welty’s text; I felt every bit of Jackson, and really every bit of Mississippi you taught me to fear.

Welty didn’t know a lick about Mississippi black folk, but she knew enough about herself to mock white folk in the most ruthlessly petty ways I’d ever read. You and Grandmama taught me white folk were capable of anything and not to be provoked, but Welty reminded me of what my eyes and ears taught me: white folk were scared and scary as all hell, so scared, so scary the words “scared” and “scary” weren’t scared or scary enough to describe them.

I didn’t hate white folk. I didn’t fear white folk. I wasn’t easily impressed or even annoyed by white folk because even before I met actual white folk, I met every protagonist, antagonist, and writer of all the stories I ever read in first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. At the same time, I met Wonder Woman, the narrator on The Wonder Years, Ricky from Silver Spoons, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, Spock from Star Trek, Mallory from Family Ties, damn near all the coaches and owners of my favorite teams. I met Captain America, Miss America, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes. I met Luke Skywalker and his white father, even though his white father’s voice, outfit, and mask were blacker than thirty-seven midnights. I met poor white folk, rich white folk, and middle-class white folk. I met all the Jetsons, all the Flintstones, all the Beverly Hillbillies, the entire Full House, damn near everyone in Pee Wee’s Playhouse, all American presidents, the dudes they said were Jesus and Adam, the women they said were the Virgin Mary and Eve, and all the characters on Grandmama’s stories except for Angie and Jessie from All My Children. So even if we didn’t know real white folk, we knew a lot of the characters white folk wanted to be, and we knew who we were to those characters.

That meant we knew white folk.

That meant white folk did not know us.

The next day in English class, we watched the scene where Kizzy, Kunta Kinte’s daughter on Roots, was raped by this white man named Tom Moore. The morning after the rape, a black woman played by Helen from The Jeffersons came by to wash Kizzy’s wounds.

Helen told Kizzy, “You best know about Master Tom Mo’. He’s one of them white mens that likes nigger women . . . Reckon he be bothering you most every night now. Used to bother me, but no mo’.”

I wasn’t sure what to do with what I just heard. The first time I watched that Roots scene, I was eight years old. I remember hearing “rake” instead of “rape” when I asked you what happened to Kizzy. “Raking” someone sounded like the scariest thing that could happen to a person. I didn’t understand why Helen sounded sad that Tom Mo’ wouldn’t be raking her anymore. I asked you why anyone would “rake” another person. “Because some men do not care if they hurt other people’s bodies,” you said. “Some men want to feel what they want to feel when they want to feel it because it hurts other people, not in spite of it hurting people.”