Heavy: An American Memoir(2)

We caught our breath.

We held hands.

We got on our knees.

I’d never prayed in the middle of that kind of anger, or fear. I knew we were praying for the safety of the woman in the jean jacket. I assumed we were also praying for ourselves. If we could have touched the man, he would have suffered.

We would have killed him.

I realized that day we didn’t simply love each other. We were of two vastly different generations of blackness, but I was your child. We had the same husky thighs, short arms, full cheeks, mushy insides, and minced imagination. We were excellent at working until our bodies gave out, excellent at laughing and laughing and laughing until we didn’t. We were excellent at hiding and misdirecting, swearing up and down we were naked when we were fully clothed. Our heart meat was so thick. Once punctured, though, we waltzed those hearts into war without a plan of escape. No matter how terrified or hurt we were, we didn’t dare ask anybody for help. We stewed. We remembered. We heaved like two hulks. We resented everyone who watched us suffer. We strapped ourselves in for the next disaster, knowing—though we had no proof—we would always recover.

As a child, on nights when you and I didn’t sleep together, I remember trembling, imagining a life where I wasn’t yours. I remember you chiding me not to use contractions when talking to white people and police. I remember believing all your lies were mistakes, and forgetting those mistakes when we woke up tucked into each other. Every time you said my particular kind of hardheadedness and white Mississippians’ brutal desire for black suffering were recipes for an early death, institutionalization, or incarceration, I knew you were right.

I just didn’t care.

I cared about the way you’d grit your teeth when you beat me for not being perfect. I cared about girls at school seeing my welts. I cared about you. Days, and often hours, before you beat me, you touched me so gently. You told me you loved me. You called me your best friend. You forgave me for losing the key to the house. You coated the ashy cracks in my face with Vaseline-slick palms. You used your nubby thumbs, wet with saliva, to clean the sleep out of my eyes. You made me feel like the most beautiful black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn’t.

“I didn’t try to hurt you,” you told me the last time we spoke. “I don’t remember hurting you as much as you remember being hurt, Kie. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m just saying I don’t remember everything the way you do.”

I still believe you.

This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been, which means no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—wants to be free. I asked Grandmama why she stayed in Mississippi instead of running to the Midwest with the rest of her family if white folk made her so sick, and why she told so many of her stories in present tense.

“The land, Kie,” she said. “We work too hard on this land to run. Some of us, we believe the land will one day be free. I been eating off this land my whole life. Greens. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Collards. You hear me? That’s all I can tell you. As far as these stories, I just try to gather up all the gumption I can before I take it to the Lord. And when I tell it to my children, sometimes I just be trying to put y’all where I been.”

I wondered, for a second, about why “be trying” and “where I been” felt far heavier than “I try” and “what I have experienced.” I asked if I could ask one more difficult question. Grandmama looked at me, for the first time in our lives, like she was afraid. She grabbed her keys and made me wheel her around to the side of the house under the thick scent of her pecan tree. Once we got there, I knelt and asked whether she minded if we talked about words, memory, emergencies, weight, and sexual violence in our family.

Grandmama rubbed the graying hair sliding out from under her wig and put both palms across her frown lines. I asked her why she covered her face when she got nervous or when she laughed. I asked why she wore that fake-looking wig all the time.

“Choices,” she murmured. “I already told you. I can’t let no man, not even my grandbaby, choose my choice for me.” Grandmama looked past what was left of our woods. “Kie, I think we remembered enough for today. I know you been trying to talk about that thing going on thirty years. I need to talk about something else first.”

Right there, in the same spot where I remember Grandmama teaching me how to hang up clothes on the clothesline, she told me about not being able to vote, not pissing where she needed to piss, not eating what she needed to eat, not walking how she needed to walk, not driving when she needed to drive because she was born a poor black girl in Scott County, Mississippi. She talked about the shame of white-folk wants always trumping black-folk needs. She talked about how much she loved eating vegetables off her land, and the fear of running north with the rest of her family during the Great Migration. Grandmama told me survival stories placed in offices, washrooms, Sunday school classrooms, parking lots, kitchens, fields, and bedrooms. She told me stories featuring her body and the white foremen at the chicken plant. She told me about Mr. Mumford, about the deacons at our church, about the men who worked the line with her. She told me stories about her father, her uncles, her cousins, and her husband. “I think the men folk forgot,” she said near the end, “that I was somebody’s child.”