Heavy: An American Memoir(33)

There weren’t many black boys at Millsaps, but nearly all of us were football and basketball recruits from Mississippi. Ray Gunn told me when most of the black boys in his class lost their eligibility, they went back home, or went to work somewhere, and never graduated. “All that,” he said, “and them damn oral and written comps be fucking up our flow. Flow-fuckers. They be thinning out dumb blasters faster than you think.”

The black girls I met that first weekend were not recruited to play a sport, but like us, they hadn’t been around this many white folk with money before either. Most of them said they wanted to be doctors, accountants, or lawyers. This freshly dressed bowlegged girl named Nzola Johnston made the whole room fall out laughing when she called herself “fake-ass Denise Huxtable at night” and a “fake-ass Claire Huxtable during the day.” Nzola told all the girls, in front of all the boys, that they had to look out for themselves because black women couldn’t count on these white folk or “those niggas over there” to look out for them.

When I wasn’t in class, in the cafeteria, playing basketball, or driving to get food, I spent most of my first semester in my room writing parts of essays I hoped to plug into paper assignments. I acted the part of a smart black boy from Mississippi, even though it was harder for me to dress the part. I used all my work-study money to buy sweet potato pies and gas instead of clothes that fit. After a month in school, the one pair of khakis I liked to wear couldn’t fit around the bottom of my ass.

The first few weeks of school, I was asked by security to show my ID inside my room a few times and I was accused of plagiarism for using the word “ambivalent” in an English class. I wanted to tell the teacher who accused me how I never even used a thesaurus when writing because I thought that was cheating. Immediately after the plagiarism accusation, I started bringing five books to all my classes. Usually, the books had nothing to do with the class I was taking. I sometimes stacked the books on my desk. Sometimes I slowly brought them out one at a time, and even slower, I placed them back in my briefcase, letting the white students and professor know I’d read more than they would.

In class, I only spoke when I could be an articulate defender of black people. I didn’t use the classroom to ask questions. I didn’t use the classroom to make ungrounded claims. There was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than. For the first time in my life, the classroom scared me. And when I was scared, I ran to cakes, because cakes felt safe, private, and celebratory.

Cakes never fought back.

By the time I met Nzola Johnston again, my thighs rubbed raw and newer stretch marks streaked across my belly. When Nzola walked past my table at the grill one Wednesday night, I was halfway through three big greasy pieces of Red Velvet cake and was reading a book by Derrick Bell called Faces at the Bottom of the Well.

Nzola Johnston walked past my table on the way out, rocking the bushiest eyebrows and deepest frown lines of anyone I’ve ever met other than Grandmama. She dressed like she worked at the Gap and listened to A Tribe Called Quest 24/7, but she talked like she was bored to death of dudes in Jackson who worked at the Gap and listened to A Tribe Called Quest 24/7.

“You like to read, huh?” she asked. I didn’t say anything. I just nodded up and down in slo-mo. “Oh, okay,” she said. “I’m Kenyatta’s roommate, Nzola. She said you like Digable Planets and be making all kinds of sense in liberal studies class.”

“That’s what’s up,” I said. “I know who you are. We already met.”

“Just because you were in a room looking at my ass does not mean we met. What’s your name mean?”

“Joy,” I told her. “In Kikongo, it means joy. My father was in Zaire when I was born. What about Nzola?”

“If you want to know, you’ll find out. I’ll definitely see you later, Kiese.”

I decided that night I was going to come to the Grill every day of the week with a different book, hoping Nzola Johnston would see me reading. I stayed in the library that night trying to find what Nzola meant. When I couldn’t find it, the librarian told me I should try the Internet.

“The what?” I asked her.

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll look around and see what I can find for you.”

Six nights after Nzola Johnston said she would definitely see me later, I watched her say “I’ll definitely see you later” to two black seniors sweating her way too hard. After she walked out of the Grill, and they walked out after her, Nzola came back.

“You running away from something,” she said during our first conversation. “I am, too. I don’t know what I’m running from but I’m definitely running. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“You running from something,” she said again. “Or you wouldn’t be here tonight hoping I showed up.” Before I could say anything, Nzola kept talking. She said she watched you doing election analysis on WJTV for years. She called you one of her heroes, and asked me what life was like growing up in the house of such a strong, brilliant black woman. I started to answer when she said, “These white girls are so trifling. A few of them act like they got some sense. Most of them, not a drop of sense. Not one drop. But they got all the money. It’s so annoying. What about you?”