Heavy: An American Memoir(32)

“Not yet.”

“You still don’t drank or smoke weed?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet?” LaThon mocked me. “If you ain’t smoke yet, you ain’t never gone smoke. You think it’s ’cause your mama beat the tar out of your ass all the time?”

I dapped LaThon up and hugged him. “Nah,” I said. “I don’t think it’s ’cause my mama beat the tar out my ass. We all scared of something.”

“I’m just playing,” he said. “Quit being sensitive. I can’t believe you staying in Jackson and going to that white-ass private school. You forgot how meager it was the last time we went to one of they schools in eighth grade?”

“I love you, bruh,” I told him for the first time in our lives. “Don’t forget about your boys when you in engineering school.”

“I love you, too, bruh. Don’t forget about your boys when you get kicked out of that private white school.”

“Ain’t nobody getting kicked out of college,” I told him. “It’s still that black abundance, right?”

“You already know,” LaThon said. “All day. Every day. And they still don’t even know.”





FANTASTIC


You sat in the driver’s seat singing the wrong lyrics to Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” while I rode shotgun wishing you would drive faster. We were headed to the airport. You’d been awarded another postdoc. This one was at Harvard University for the entire academic year. I was eighteen years old, 242 pounds. I had $175 to my name.

“Do you try to sing the lyrics wrong every time?” I asked you.

“Sometimes.”

We didn’t say another word until we were in front of your departure gate. “I think we need this time away,” you said. “Maybe I’ll worry less about you if I know I can’t control anything you do.”

“Maybe.”

“I know,” you said. “I know.”

I asked you if I could take some books from the house to have in my dorm room. You reached up, pulled on my neck, and kissed me on the top of the head. I pulled away. “Maybe the books will protect you,” you said. “Take all the books you need. And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry. Don’t let those people shoot you out of the sky while I’m gone.” I rolled my eyes and sucked hard on my teeth as you walked to the end of the line. “Don’t be good,” you said across the space between us. “Be perfect. Be fantastic.”

You smiled. I smiled.

You waved. I waved.

You fake yawned. I fake yawned.

You disappeared. I was free.

I wanted you to be safe in Boston and get your work done. I wanted you to finally find healthy, affirming love and all that stuff they sang about on the adult contemporary radio stations. I also didn’t want you to ever come back to Mississippi if I was there.

Instead of driving back to Millsaps, I went to the Waffle House across from the Coliseum, right next to the Dunkin’ Donuts, and ordered the all-you-can-eat special on the left side of the menu. I’d never driven myself to a restaurant. Sitting alone and ordering a waffle, an omelet, hash browns, cheese grits, a patty melt, and another waffle with pecans made me feel grown. I cleaned all my plates, walked next door, ordered a dozen donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts without wondering or caring how the caked-up glaze on my face looked to anyone.

I felt so free.

The next day, all the first-and second-year black boys gathered in Clinton Mayes’s room. We all liked each other on Friday night when no one was drinking. We all loved each other Saturday night when nearly everyone was drunk.

I hadn’t had a drink in seven years because I was afraid I’d shoot myself or someone else. But I smiled a lot, and I nodded, and I listened, and I blinked my big red eyes really slowly, and said “that’s funny to me” every eight minutes. That, and the fact I was from Jackson, was enough to make folk think I was drunk and high.

I heard the sentence “We gone make it” more than thirty-four times that weekend. The sentence was always followed by a hug, a “you already know,” or an offering of a peppermint from this hovering long-neck senior named Myles.

I learned to say “You already know” and “We gone make it” that weekend, too, but I didn’t understand why we wouldn’t make it. Most of us made it through high school in Mississippi. At Millsaps, we were only reading books. We were only writing papers. We were only taking tests. The students surrounding us were only white, and all of us were Mississippi, black, and abundant. That meant we were the kinfolk of Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, and Medgar Evers. I assumed we were wittier, tougher, and more imaginative than white students, administrators, and faculty because we had to be.

I told a super-duper senior from Winona named Ray Gunn he looked like a bootleg Stokely Carmichael. “You mean, Kwame Ture old ass looked like me when he was young,” he said.

I told Gunn I assumed the teachers at Saps would do everything possible, in and out of the classroom, to make sure all of us did far more than make it. Even though Ray Gunn just looked at me and blinked, we got along well the first day we met because he was shameless and loved trying to invent slang that never stuck. “These Saps teachers,” he said, “they gives no fuck about dumb black blasters like us when we leave that classroom. You ain’t special. I ain’t special. Not to them. Or you way too special because they think you an exception to the race. You’ll see. You better practice saying words like ‘fantastic’ in the mirror. Saps is known for making dumb blasters forget who they wanted to be.”