Heavy: An American Memoir(23)

I loved our style of flying.

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During the Christmas break, LaThon took me to Murrah High School, where we watched a six-nine tenth grader we knew named Othella make every shot he attempted in warm-ups, the first half, and halftime of the game. Othella finished with over forty points, twelve dunks, and over twenty rebounds. He hardly played the fourth quarter. LaThon and I watched the game completely silent.

“You know they say Othella the best tenth grader in the nation?” LaThon finally asked me on the way home.

“You mean best in Mississippi?”

“Naw, bruh. I mean the nation. The game done changed.”

“Them busters at my school up in Maryland be calling us Bamas down here,” I told him. “If we Bamas, how come we got the best tenth grader in the nation? Plus we got Hollywood Robinson and Chris Jackson.”

“Walter Payton,” LaThon said.

“Fannie Lou Hamer.”

“Even if we look at white boys, we got Brett Favre.”

“And Oprah,” I told him. “Oprah ’bout to be bigger than Barbara Walters out here. They trippin’.”

“Yeah,” LaThon said, “they stay trippin’ but what we gone do? Me and you.”

That night, LaThon and I realized the basketball we’d been playing and the basketball Othella played weren’t the same basketball. We loved playing ball, but Othella was a baller. Thanks to Othella Harrington, LaThon Simmons started imagining life as an engineer that night and I started imagining life as a middle school teacher whose side-hustle was rapping.

A few weeks after we returned to Maryland, I got caught cheating on a world history test Coach Ricks was proctoring. I cheated the day after I refused to read the world history book assigned and read a book called Before the Mayflower in class instead. You hadn’t beaten me the whole time we’d been in Maryland but when you came to school to get me, I knew I’d get my back destroyed.

“I know what you’re doing,” you said when we got in the car. “Let it go.”

“Let what go?” I asked you.

“Just let it go, Kie.”

That was it. No lashes. No slaps. No lines.

You were happier than I’d ever seen you. You never came in my bedroom crying in the middle of the night. You gave me kisses on the face, cracked fart jokes, and held my hand when I least expected it.

“I’m not a teacher here,” I heard you tell Grandmama a few times on the phone. “I’m just a scholar. I earned this time to write and research. That means a lot to me, Ma. I’m learning how to love Kie and myself the right way. Yeah, I guess it is better late than never.”

I didn’t understand what the “scholar” part of your sentence really meant. But in Maryland, for the first time since I’d known you, we didn’t run out of gas. Our lights were never cut off. We didn’t have a fridge full of food or much extra money, but we were never, ever hungry.

When I came back from playing ball at the Greenbelt rec center during spring break, you made me read back over sentences I’d written in my notebooks back in Mississippi. You said I asked a lot of questions about what I saw and heard in my writing, but because I didn’t reread the questions I didn’t push myself to different answers. You said a good question always trumps an average answer.

“The most important part of writing, and really life,” you said, “is revision.”

When you don’t care about making other people feel pain, I’m wondering if you are being a violent person?

I wrote that sentence in Jackson and revised it the night Marion Barry was caught on TV smoking crack. I couldn’t understand why you cried that night and kept saying, “This is all so violent. They’re going to use this video to come after black elected officials for decades. Do your work, Kie. Revise, and never, ever let these people see you fail.”

Nothing I’d read in school prepared me to think through the permanence of violence in Mississippi, Maryland, and the whole nation. After school, I kept reading and rearranging the words I’d written, trying to understand what the words meant for my understanding of violence. For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory. You told me in Mississippi revision was practice. In Maryland, I finally believed you. The truth was that practicing writing meant practicing sitting down, sitting still, and my body did not ever want to be still. When it had to be still, all it wanted to do was imagine dunking with two hands or kissing a girl who loved me. Sitting still, just as much as any other part of writing, took practice. Most days, my body did not want to practice, but I convinced it that sitting still and writing were a path to memory.

I remembered writing down and memorizing tens of thousands of sentences written by rappers and wondering what it would feel like to write sentences black children wanted to memorize.

I remembered flying around Jackson, teeth chattering on command from LaThon’s new subwoofer. I remember lounging in the passenger seat with “Criminal Minded” and “Dopeman” blasting, and LaThon leaning at a forty-five-degree angle in the driver’s seat of his grandfather’s Cutlass. I remembered LaThon saying, “You take that black shit too far sometimes,” after I almost got a whole car of us shot for talking reckless to the police.