Heavy: An American Memoir(28)

When I got ready to ask her why Denise wasn’t on the show anymore, Kamala Lackey asked me again if I wanted to see her boobs.

Of course I wanted to see Kamala Lackey’s boobs. Or, of course I wanted Kamala Lackey to think I wanted to see her boobs. Or, of course I wanted to know Kamala Lackey wanted me to see her boobs. When I fake yawned and coughed, Kamala Lackey stood up and asked if I had any more Now and Laters. After I handed her what was left of the pack, she asked if I was really drunk. Before I could lie, Kamala Lackey told me she wasn’t drunk either.

She sat on the floor with her back pressed against my knees and made me promise not to tell anyone what she was about to tell me.

I promised.

Thirty minutes later, when Kamala Lackey stopped talking, she also stopped digging her fingers into Donnie Gee’s nappy carpet. “You know what I’m trying to say?” she finally asked, and stood in front of the bed. “I feel like I’m dying sometimes.”

I said I understood, even though I didn’t understand why she was saying any of it to me.

“You gone say something?” I remember her asking. “Go ahead. You know you can talk, right?”

I wanted to tell Kamala Lackey that when I was younger, a few miles from where we were, I got drunk off this box wine you kept in the house. I drank until I was numb because it helped me feel better about what was being done to lips, nipples, necks, thighs, a penis, and a vagina in our house. It felt so scary. I felt so stuck. It all felt like love, too, until it didn’t.

Then it felt like dying.

But I didn’t say any of that. I told Kamala Lackey thank you for talking to me. I told her I wouldn’t tell my boys anything she told me if she didn’t tell her girls I was acting drunk. Then we just sat there, wondering who would walk out first.

Like most kids at Donnie Gee’s party, I had to sit and listen to hundreds of talks from you and your friends telling me no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never drive over the speed limit or do those rolling stops at stop signs, always speak the king’s English in the presence of white folk, never get outperformed in school or in public by white students, and most important, always remember, no matter what, white folk will do anything to get you.

I listened.

I never heard the words “sexual violence” or “violent sex” or “sexual abuse” from one family member, one teacher, or one preacher but my body knew sexual violence and violent sex were as wrong as anything police or white folk could do to us.

The night Kamala Lackey talked with me, I walked out of Donnie Gee’s room the same way I walked in: loudly rapping Phife’s “Scenario” verse, with a turned-up forty in one hand and cupped testicles in the other. Kamala Lackey rolled her eyes at me, shook her head, and turned left down the hall.

I turned right.

When Donnie Gee asked me if I had sex with Kamala Lackey, I smirked and said, “Fool, what you think?” I remember feeling really good about myself because I technically didn’t lie to Donnie Gee, and technically didn’t touch Kamala Lackey, so I didn’t technically cheat on Abby Claremont, the only girl I’d ever kissed.

The night Kamala Lackey told me her secrets, I promised I’d never sexually violate or sexually abuse any woman or girl on earth. The existence of that promise was enough to excuse myself for lying to Abby Claremont and any other girl who wanted to have sex with me. I was sixteen years old. I’d become something far more violent than a Hulk. I was a liar; a cheater; a manipulator; a fat, happysad, bald-headed black boy with a heart murmur; and according to you and the white girl I lied to every day, I was a good dude.





GUMPTION


Near the end of my senior year, I went with you to the house of your mentor, Margaret Walker. I was six-one, 230 pounds. I had $208 in my pocket after delivering phone books in Jackson with LaThon. I thought I was rich.

You’d spent the last few years helping Ms. Walker organize her notes for this massive biography of Aaron Henry. I watched you and Ms. Walker talk about the backlash in Mississippi that led to Kirk Fordice, a reactionary Republican who beat Governor Mabus a few months earlier. Ms. Walker’s house was the only house I’d seen in Jackson with more books, folders, African masks, and African lotions than ours. I loved how Ms. Walker seemed nervous and unsure of what she was supposed to be doing next. When I thought she was looking in a cabinet for one of her many folders, without even looking at me she said, “So you are Mary’s son, the young writer named after the great Miriam Makeba?”

“I’m not a writer,” I told her. “I just write editorials for the school paper. My middle name is Makeba. My first name is Kiese.”

“Own our writing, Kiese Makeba,” Margaret Walker told me. “Where is your gumption? Own your name. You are a seventeen-year-old black child born in Mississippi. Do you hear me?”

I heard her, but I wasn’t sure what she was really saying.

Ms. Walker was even more relentless with the speeches than you were, but not as smooth with the speeches as Grandmama was. She told me to value our communication and own our fight. Our communication, she said, is the mightiest gift passed down by our people. Every word you write and read, every picture you draw, every step you take should be in the service of our people. “Do not be distracted. Be directed. Those people,” she said, “they will distract you. They will try to kill you. That’s what they do better than most. They distract and they kill. That’s why you write for and to our people. Do not be distracted.”