Heavy: An American Memoir(3)

Grandmama’s body just started laughing. And my body laughed, too. “I’m black and I’m a woman,” she finally said. “I love me some Jesus. That’s who I always been. And I ain’t afraid to shoot somebody trying to harm me and mines. You hear me? I am okay because I pray every day. Some days, the tears just be pouring out my eyes, Kie. But Grandmama is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as a somebody worth respecting. You hear me? Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either. But I am okay. You hear me?”

I heard Grandmama. But I saw and smelled what diabetes left of her right foot. Grandmama hadn’t felt her foot, controlled her bowels, or really tasted her food in over a decade. This Sunday, like every Sunday before it, Grandmama wanted me to know it could all be so much worse. Like you, Grandmama beat the worst of white folk and the mean machinations of men every day she was alive, but y’all taught me indirectly that unacknowledged scars accumulated in battles won often hurt more than battles lost.

“I believe you,” I told her. “I will always believe you even when I know you lying.” I asked Grandmama if she’d been saying B-E-N-D or B-E-E-N all day.

“Been,” she said. “B-E-E-N. Like where you been. And after all the places you and your mama been, y’all way more than mother and son and y’all done way more drowning than an’ one of y’all want to admit.”

Grandmama was right and Grandmama was wrong.

You and I have never been a family of cabinets filled with Band-Aids, alcohol, and peroxide. We have never been a family of tuck-ins and bedtime stories any more than we’ve been a family of consistent bill money, pantries, full refrigerators, washers and dryers. We have always been a bent black southern family of laughter, outrageous lies, and books. The presence of all those books, all that laughter, all our lies, and your insistence I read, reread, write, and revise in those books, made it so I would never be intimidated or easily impressed by words, punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and white space. You gave me a black southern laboratory to work with words. In that space, I learned how to assemble memory and imagination when I most wanted to die.

Your gifts of reading, rereading, writing, and revision are why I started this book thirty years ago on Grandmama’s porch. In spite of those gifts, or maybe because of those gifts, it’s important for me to accept, that like all American children, I’ve been brutally dishonest with you. And like all American parents, you’ve been brutally dishonest with me.

A few months ago, I was standing behind you with ten dollars I stole from a scared black woman who would never steal ten dollars from me. You were sitting in front of a slot machine, looking nervously over both shoulders, as you spent your last bill money. We were sixteen hundred miles from home. You did not know I was there. If you turned around, I knew you’d talk about how much weight I’d gained, not where our bodies had been since we’d last seen each other.

I wanted to tap you on your shoulder and ask if you were ready to go home. On the way home, I wanted to ask you if we were deserving of different kinds of liberation, different modes of memory, different policy, different practices, and different relationships to honesty. I wanted to ask you if we were also deserving of different books. I am writing a different book to you because books, for better and worse, are how we got here, and I am afraid of speaking any of this to your face.

I would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of you. You would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of me. But neither of us would ever, under any circumstance, be honest about yesterday. This is how we are taught to love in America. Our dishonesty, cowardice, and misplaced self-righteousness, far more than how much, or how little we weigh is part of why we are suffering. In this way, and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation. We do not have to be this way.

I wanted to write a lie.

You wanted to read that lie.

I wrote this to you instead.





TRAIN


You stood in a West Jackson classroom teaching black children how correct usage of the word “be” could save them from white folk while I knelt in North Jackson, preparing to steal the ID card of a fifteen-year-old black girl named Layla Weathersby. I was twelve years old, three years younger than Layla, who had the shiniest elbows, wettest eyes, and whitest Filas of any of us at Beulah Beauford’s house. Just like the big boys, Dougie and me, all Layla ever wanted to do was float in the deep end.

Beulah Beauford’s house, which sat deep in a North Jackson neighborhood next to ours, was only the second house I’d been in with new encyclopedias, two pantries filled with name-brand strawberry Pop-Tarts, and an in-ground pool. Unlike us in our rented house, which we shared with thousands of books and two families of rats, Beulah Beauford and her husband owned her house. When we moved from apartments in West Jackson to our little house in the Queens, and eventually to North Jackson, I wanted people who dropped me off to think Beulah Beauford’s house belonged to us. Our house had more books than any other house I’d ever been in, way more books than Beulah Beauford’s house, but no one I knew, other than you, wanted to swim in, or eat, books.

Before dropping me off, you told me I was supposed to use Beulah Beauford’s encyclopedias to write a report about these two politicians named Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens. You told me to compare their ideas of citizenship to President Ronald Reagan’s claim: “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”