Heavy: An American Memoir(21)

LaThon and I loved Jabari too much to tell him Ms. Stockard and some other white kids whose smiles, words, and food he loved thought he was gross. Instead of saying any of what I was really feeling to Ms. Stockard, a white woman who had the power to get us beaten by black women who loved us and distrusted her, I said, “We understand, Ms. Stockard. We will tell Jabari to take more wash-ups before he comes to school.”

? ? ?

Later that day, near the end of practice, my basketball coach, Coach Gee, the father of Donnie Gee, one of the only black boys at St. Richard, brought out a scale so we could weigh ourselves. We were going to a tournament in Vicksburg and the organizers needed our weight and height for the program.

I hadn’t weighed myself since stepping on the scale at the Mumfords’ earlier in the summer. I hated public scales, but I made myself believe I was under 210 pounds for the first time in three years.

I stepped on the scale.

170.

175.

180.

185.

190.

Shit.

200.

210.

215.

225.

228.

“Damn,” Coach Gee said, looking at the rest of the team. “This big joker weigh two hundred thirty-one pounds!”

I walked away from the scale, faked a smile, and watched the rest of the team laugh. I went to the bathroom, made myself pee twice, and walked back to the scale.

“Two hundred thirty-one,” Coach Gee said again. “It ain’t the scale, Baby Barkley. Shit. It’s you.”

After practice, I tried to hold my stomach in and put dry clothes over my wet musty practice uniform. For the first time in my life, I thought about the sweat and fat between my thighs, the new stretch marks streaking toward my nipples. I felt fat before. I felt husky every day of my life. I’d never felt what I felt in that St. Richard bathroom.

“Damn, nigga,” LaThon said as I walked out of the gym. His grandfather was picking us up and taking us home. “Everybody trippin’ because you weigh like twenty-six more pounds than Michael Jordan, but you like eight inches shorter?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Wait, I know my nigga ain’t acting all sensitive over no scale. You ain’t gross. You know that, right? You ain’t gross. You just a heavy nigga who quicker than most skinny niggas we know. You ain’t gross. You hear me? You you.”

Later that weekend, LaThon and I met Jabari in his backyard over in Presidential Hills. LaThon hyped this soft-ass dunk Jabari did on his younger brother, Stacey. He called the dunk “the Abundance” and I gave Jabari the nickname “Kang Slender.” Jabari tucked his bottom lip under his front teeth and flew through the air doing awkward versions of “the Abundance” until the sun went down. Every time he dunked, LaThon and I laughed and laughed and laughed until we didn’t. Eventually, Jabari laughed with us when LaThon said, “They don’t even know about the Abundance. For real. We can’t even be mad. They don’t even know.”

“We can be mad,” Jabari said. “But we can be other stuff, too.”

We both looked at Jabari and waited for him to say more. I was finally understanding, for all that bouncy talk of ignorance and how they didn’t really know, that white folk, especially grown white folk, knew exactly what they were doing. And if they didn’t, they should have.

But by the end of February of our eighth-grade year, what white folk at St. Richard and the world knew didn’t matter. We were learning how to suck our teeth, shake our heads, frame a face for all occasions like Richard III, and laugh each other whole. That meant a lot. Mostly, it meant that although some of us had more welts on our bodies than lunch money, light bill money, or money for our discounted tuition, we knew we were not the gross ones.

We were mad, and sometimes sad, but we were other stuff, too.

On the way out of Jabari’s house that day, I grabbed a T-shirt from his dirty clothes. I was well into an XL, while Jabari’s and LaThon’s bird chests barely filled out a smedium. But I was learning from you how to make anything, regardless the size or shape, bend. I came to school the rest of that year with my breasts, my love handles, and my stomach compressed in a T-shirt that smelled so much like Jabari’s house. When white folk at St. Richard looked at me like I was gross, I smiled, shook my head, sucked my teeth, intentionally misused and mispronounced some vocabulary words. Then I dapped LaThon up at lunch and said, “They so meager and we so gross. I’m talking about we so gross. It’s still that black abundance?”

“Yup,” LaThon told me. “And they still don’t even know.”





CONTRACTION


While I was shaking my head, sucking my teeth, and mumbling Ice Cube lyrics on the bench of the junior varsity basketball team at DeMatha Catholic High in Hyattsville, Maryland, you were realizing your academic dream of earning a postdoc fellowship in College Park, Maryland.

On the way home from a basketball game where you went off on Coach Ricks for benching me in the fourth quarter, we stopped to eat at Western Sizzler. I was supposed to be eating salads. “That white boy, your coach,” you said, “what is his name, Kie? Micks?”

“Ricks.”

“Coach Ricks is so intimidated. I’ll take a dumb white boy over a smug, insecure white boy any day of the year.”

“Intimidated by what?”