Heavy: An American Memoir(30)

I sat in my undersized wooden desk, my fist tucked into my lap, LaThon to my left, Jabari to my right, and began reading stanzas from Nikki Giovanni’s book over and over again, loud enough so Coach Schitzler could hear me.

“Look at husky Malcolm X over there,” he said. LaThon and everyone else were dying laughing. “Keece X, is that your new name? Well, Keece X, make sure you read that tonight when you see that Abby Claremont Y.”

“Oh shit,” LaThon said. “He wrong for that.”

Coach Schitzler saw I was getting upset. He told me he seriously loved the poem, and suggested I should use it for my final paper. He said he especially loved the end.

I believed him.

I decided to use Nikki Giovanni’s book and the work of Assata Shakur for my final for Coach Schitzler’s English class. Coach Schitzler, who hated writing comments, gave us recorded comments on these papers incorporating literature and literary devices we read in class, and books we read on our own. He commented on the papers on cassette tapes he handed back near the end of school. I thought he’d be even more generous with all of our papers since he was so late in getting them back to us. I didn’t love my paper, because I didn’t really want to be writing about Moby-Dick, but I thought my next-to-last paragraph was the best writing I’d ever done for Coach Schitzler. It had an allusion to Moby-Dick, alliteration, and some commentary on our nation. I tried to write that paragraph for our people, like Margaret Walker asked me to do, even though I had to write it to Coach Schitzler because he was grading me.

Though I agree with Assata Shakur that a “lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port,” I know tired, seasick American sailors and their families have absolutely no chance at health and dignified lives, unless some Americans first accept their responsibility, and work to calm the bruising brutality of our national sea.

I took the tape home, and just as I had with tapes I dubbed from LaThon, I put the tape in the little radio next to my bed.

“Keece Lay-moon,” the tape began. Ever since Coach Schitzler learned I was in a relationship with Abby Claremont, he said my name like I was some scraggly French dude he paid to cut his yard.

“Keece,” he said again. “I want to say first that you need to watch your weight if you want to play ball in college. You getting close to two-forty and there’s no way you can play even Division Three ball at that weight. You a shooting guard on the next level, not a power forward. The problem with this paper is it relies on faulty logic.” I could hear him flipping the pages. “Faulty logic on page three. Faulty logic on page four. The paper is all just a mess of faulty logic. I see glimpses of your argumentative mind, but you undermine it with faulty logic. Maybe you should get your mommy to help you with papers for class like she does with your newspaper editorials.”

Coach Schitzler saw everything as a quest, and every black boy as his potential hero. He saw black and white girls as darlings, damsels, or damned. I wanted him to see me as the young black Mississippi hero jousting with words, paragraphs, and punctuation. I wanted him to tell me how my writing had the potential to be some of the best writing to come out of Mississippi, or Jackson, or at least our high school.

The night I listened to Coach Schitzler’s tape, you kept coming into my room, asking me why I was crying. I told you I didn’t really know.

“You’re lying to me, Kie,” you said. “Tell me the truth.”

I rolled my eyes, handed you the essay, and played the tape for you.

“Fuck him,” you said after listening to a minute of Coach Schitzler’s response. “Do you hear me? Do not internalize their shit. I’m going to school with you tomorrow to put my whole foot off in that man’s ass.”

I made you promise you wouldn’t embarrass me by coming to school. You promised and sat next to me. You took my paper smudged with tears and you read it out loud. You told me what worked in the essay, and what didn’t work. You asked me questions about word choice, pacing, and something you called political symbolism. You asked me what I was really trying to say with the essay and suggested I start with saying exactly that. You challenged me to use the rest of the essay to discover ideas and questions I didn’t already know and feel. “A good question anchored in real curiosity is much more important than a cliché or forced metaphor,” you told me.

By the end of the night, you helped me revise the essay into a piece I was proud of, even though Coach Schitzler had already given the paper a C. I understood for the first time that day how Coach Schitzler, just like most of the grown black men I knew, wanted to set people’s brains on fire before situating himself as the only one who could calm the blaze. He wanted us to praise him for his tough love, which was really a way of encouraging students to thank him for not hurting us as much as he could.

“Internalizing their abusive bullshit will make you crazy, Kie,” you said before you went to your bedroom. “I love you so much and I hate seeing you hurt.”

I believed you.

The next day when I asked Coach Schitzler to explain himself, he said everything he had to say was on the tape. I said I didn’t understand the tape and that you read my essays but never wrote the essays for me.

“She’s a teacher,” I told him. “But she don’t write my papers.”

“You looking like you ready to jump,” Coach Schitzler said in front of the class. His gumption surprised me. He stepped from behind his desk. “If you jump at me like you grown, don’t be mad if you get knocked upside the head like you grown.”