Heavy: An American Memoir(31)

I balled up my fists.

When Coach Schitzler got shoulder to shoulder with me, I didn’t say anything. I leaned most of my weight on his shoulder and hoped to God he swung, so I could cave in his chest.

He backed up and stepped behind his desk.

“You know your problem?” he asked, and pointed at me. “Besides arrogance and that silly argumentative mind, your problem, Keece Lay-moon, is that you ain’t got no daddy at home.”

Ms. Andrews, LaThon, and two other teachers had to peel me off Coach Schitzler that day because of what he said about you. I didn’t tell you what he said because I knew I’d have to peel you off him, too.

I ended Schitzler’s English class with the lowest D you could earn without failing. Thankfully, I won a few awards from the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association in high school, got recruited to play basketball, and did well enough on the ACT to get into Millsaps.

But my GPA was shameful.

With two weeks of school left, I wrote an essay for our paper about how the mostly black graduates of St. Joseph deserved so much more than having our graduation speaker be the reactionary Republican governor of our state, Kirk Fordice. When the school invited Governor Fordice anyway, I told LaThon, you, and my teachers I wasn’t going to graduation. No one believed me.

I didn’t go to graduation.

That decision, as much as any paragraph I’d written, was when I became a writer. And it wasn’t because I didn’t attend graduation. It was because the night before graduation, you made me write through all the reasons I didn’t want to attend graduation. The whole truth was that I felt trunk-loads of shame for graduating five places from the bottom of my class when I easily could have been near the top if I would have applied myself and stopped trying to punish both of us.

All my friends and family patted me on my back for having the gumption to skip graduation, except you and Grandmama. I sat in Grandmama’s dining room with both of you, eating my second plate of macaroni and cheese while LaThon and the rest of my classmates were walking across that stage in front of Kirk Fordice and Coach Schitzler.

When I reached for a third serving of macaroni and cheese, you told Grandmama I’d had enough.

“How you know I had enough if I still want more?” I asked you.

“Get up from the table,” you said. “Go outside and get a grip.”

I rolled my eyes, sucked my teeth, and went out on Grandmama’s porch.

“You wanna know the truth?” Grandmama said while we sat out on the porch. “After all them ass whuppings and child support payments that ain’t never come, I don’t reckon you wanted your daddy or your mama taking no joy in watching you walk across the stage. I don’t much blame you for it neither, Kie. But the problem is you hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you. God gives us five senses for a reason. You hear me? Use them. Stop hunting for distractions. Stop taking your own legs out. It’s enough mess out there trying to beat us down without you helping. I reckon your mama the least of your troubles. Did you at least tell your teachers in that schoolhouse thank you?”

I sat there thinking about all the teachers I had from first through twelfth grade. I’d gone to majority black schools all but that one year at St. Richard and that one year at DeMatha. Ms. Arnold, my fourth-grade teacher, was the only black teacher I had. Ms. Raphael, who taught us at Holy Family in sixth and seventh grade, loved us so much that LaThon and I once made the mistake of calling her Mama. The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: “economic inequality,” “housing discrimination,” “sexual violence,” “mass incarceration,” “homophobia,” “empire,” “mass eviction,” “post traumatic stress disorder,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “neo-confederacy,” “mental health,” or “parental abuse,” yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.

I loved all my teachers, and I wanted all my teachers to love us. I knew they weren’t being paid right. I knew they were expected to do work they were unprepared to start or finish. But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them how to respect where we’d been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.

Later that summer, I saw LaThon before he left for the University of Alabama. We would always be friends, but we’d stopped taking care of each other when I started seeing Abby Claremont. LaThon told me he got in some trouble at Freaknik and needed Malachi Hunter to connect him with a lawyer who could help get a case thrown out before his school heard about it. I told him I didn’t really talk with Malachi Hunter at all anymore, and even if I did, Malachi Hunter might have been in some legal trouble of his own.

“You the only one of us who ain’t caught up with the police,” he said. “And you the craziest one of all of us.”

“I ain’t crazy, not like that.”

“Bruh,” he said and looked at me without blinking. “Come on, bruh. You ain’t crazy like that? Who you think you talking to? Ever since fourth grade, who got kicked out of school more than you? Who was fucking around with a white girl knowing his mama did not play? Who was steady telling these white folk the truth to they face? Who gave the whole bus a speech about fucking without condoms after Magic got HIV? Who was talking shit to the police like they weren’t police since we were like twelve years old? You the only person I know who will do and say anything anywhere anytime. Swear to God, you the only person I know who ain’t scared of nothing we supposed to be scared of. But I’m like how this nigga got all that gumption, and somehow, he ain’t never even been arrested?”