Heavy: An American Memoir(29)

I told Ms. Walker I understood her speech, but I was lying. I told her I’d read her poem “For My People” and loved it. I was lying about that, too.

“Have you decided on college? Your mama told me you don’t want to go to Jackson State because you don’t want her in your business.”

“I might be going to Millsaps College,” I told her. “They’re recruiting me for basketball.”

“Oh lord,” she said. “I’m talking about revolution and this child is talking about playing some ball at Millsaps.”

Ms. Walker marched over to a book on the floor in front of her bookshelf and handed it to me. Half of the book cover was faded pink and half of a woman’s face was facing the title, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day.

“If you’re going to Millsaps,” she said, “I know you will need as much Nikki as you can get.”

On the way back home, I read Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day cover to cover. When I got to my bedroom, I started reading it again. My favorite part was:

I share with painters the desire

To put a three-dimensional picture

On a One-dimensional surface.

I wrote down what I remembered of Ms. Walker’s speech on the last page of the book and I kept coming back to the sentences “They will distract you. They will try to kill you. Do not be distracted. Be directed. Write to and for our people.”

I loved those sentences, but I didn’t understand the difference between “writing to” and “writing for” anyone. No one ever taught me to write to and for my people. They taught me how to imitate Faulkner and how to write to and for my teachers. And all of my teachers were white. When writing to you, I wrote in the hopes that what I wrote was good enough for me to not get beaten.

I went to the bookshelf and found “For My People.” The last words of the last stanza mesmerized and confused me. Margaret Walker wrote:

Let a race of men now rise and take control.

I wanted to write “martial songs” but I didn’t understand what a “race of men” looked like, or why Margaret Walker ended the poem hoping a group of men would rise and take control. A group of men hadn’t written “For My People.” A group of men hadn’t told me to write to and for my people. Most groups of men I knew were good at destroying women and girls who would do everything not to destroy them. If a group of men happened to rise and take control, I didn’t know where you or Margaret Walker would be when those men got mad at you.

The next day, on April 29, 1992, the night of the Rodney King verdict, you held me in your lap and would not stop rocking for two hours straight. We watched LA burn as cameras showed a white man pulled from a truck getting beat up by black and brown men at an LA intersection.

“I hope you see what they aren’t showing,” you said. “I want you to write an essay about what white folk feel tonight. I know they’re blaming us.”

I looked at you like your bread wasn’t done because the last thing I cared about was what white folk felt. I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms. I didn’t want to teach white folk not to steal. I didn’t want to teach white folk to treat us respectfully. I wanted to fairly fight white folk and I wanted to knock them out. Even more than knocking them out, I wanted to never, ever lose to them again.

I knew there was no way to not lose unless we took back every bit of what had been stolen from us. I wanted all the money, the safety, the education, the healthy choices, and the second chances they stole. If we were to ever get what we were owed, I knew we had to take it all back without getting caught, because no creation on earth was as all-world as white folk at punishing the black whole for the supposed transgressions of one black individual. They were absolute geniuses at inventing new ways for masses of black folk with less to suffer more. Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn’t survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.

That night when you finally started snoring, I crept into the kitchen, opened the garage, got in your Oldsmobile, put it in neutral, pushed it out of the driveway. I didn’t go far, just a mile down the road to the grocery store. I waited in the parking lot for the bread truck to pull up. When the driver went in the store, I got out of the car, snatched as many loaves of wheat bread, white bread, hamburger buns, and cinnamon rolls as I could and took off back to my car. I sped away from the grocery store and drove to a parking lot overlooking the Ross Barnett Reservoir. I ate cinnamon rolls, hamburger buns, and white bread that night until I got the shivers and threw up.

The next morning, I served you some buttered wheat toast for breakfast in bed. You hugged my neck and told me thank you. You told me we would win our fight.

You never asked me where the bread came from.

A week later, I was in Coach Schitzler’s twelfth-grade English class. We were supposed to be discussing The Once and Future King for the fifth week in a row. I didn’t want to discuss The Once and Future King anymore so I pulled out Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. When Coach Schitzler saw me reading my book, he said, “Put that black-power mess down, Keece. Pay attention.”