Heavy: An American Memoir(35)

“Heavy,” I told her.

“Heavy like deep?”

“Maybe a little, but more heavy like huge. Heavy like dumb fat. What about you?”

“But heavy and huge and dumb fat are three completely different things,” she said.

“You think so?”

“I’m small but I know I’m heavy. What about you?”

Nzola’s baggy clothes and full cheeks cloaked a tiny frame. She wasn’t just tiny compared to me, or tiny compared to Abby Claremont; she was tiny compared to every woman who’d ever kissed me. “You asked me and I told you. You can’t tell I gained like forty pounds since school started.”

“I can’t tell,” she said.

“Why you lying?”

“I’m not lying. I can’t tell. But even if I could tell, so what?”

I told Nzola I had to go back to my dorm and finish a paper. She asked if she could come with me. The paper was due in the morning, I told her, and it was hard for me to concentrate if I was working next to someone.

“Other people’s breathing throws off your thinking, Kiese?”

“I mean, kinda, but more like . . .”

“You are some kind of strange-ass dude, Kiese Laymon,” she said. “Even when I know you’re lying to me, I just feel crazy sorry for you.”

“Why?”

“Because I can just tell you’ll never let me carry what you’re hiding.”

I thought about what Nzola said, but I didn’t think about what I was hiding. I hadn’t thought about what I was hiding the whole time I’d been at Millsaps. “You won’t let me hold what you’re hiding, either. And it’s obvious you’re hiding just as much as me.”

“Yep. You’re right,” she said. “That’s different. I know y’all. Y’all love to see us break.”

“I’m not trying to see you break, though.”

“If you want me to believe you when you’re lying,” she said, “then you want to see me break.”

Nzola invited me to her house for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t go because her stepmother was always commenting on Nzola’s weight and how she wanted “a fine, handsome, together brother” for her stepdaughter. I’d been treated like a man in and out of our house for about a decade. But I was also forever the kind of black boy who could never really be a fine, handsome, together brother because I was too husky to be fine and too dusty to be together.

Even though the dorms were closed, I spent Thursday through Sunday in the student lounge eating everything I could afford off the ninety-nine-cent menu at Wendy’s. When all my Wendy’s was gone, I broke into vending machines on campus. I stole their Moon Pies, Hot Fries, Twix, and Grandma’s Vanilla Sandwich Cremes. I kicked my feet up on their couch and watched The Arsenio Hall Show on their television. Before falling asleep, I started reading a book I checked out of their library by Toni Cade Bambara. The book was called Gorilla, My Love.

It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on page 42 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whupped.

The first sentence of the book showed me first sentences could be roller coasters designed especially for us. I read it again. Then I wrote it. Bambara took what Welty did best and created worlds where no one was sheltered, cloistered, or white, but everyone—in some form or fashion—was weird, wonderful, slightly wack, and all the way black. Blackness, in all its boredom and boom, was the historical and imaginative context in Bambara’s work. I wanted to be that kind of free, on and off the page. I wanted to write something someday with that kind of first sentence and I wanted that kind of first sentence to be written to me every day for the rest of my life.

I still wrote every night and revised every morning, but practicing crafting formidable sentences just made me a formidable sentence writer. The other part of writing required something more than just practice, something more than reading, too. It required loads of unsentimental explorations of black love. It required an acceptance of our strange. And mostly, it required a commitment to new structures, not reformation. I’d spent eighteen years reading the work of supposed excellent sentence-writers who did not love, or really see us. Many wrote for us, without writing to us. After reading Bambara, I wondered for the first time how great an American sentence, paragraph, or book could be if it wasn’t, at least partially, written to and for black Americans in the Deep South.

A few days before winter break, Nzola invited me to the Grill to eat greasy pieces of Red Velvet cake. I brought Gorilla, My Love because I wanted to see her face when she read the first sentence. “So James asked me to visit him for Christmas break,” she said while we were eating.

“That’s cool,” I told her, and put the book back in my book bag. “Tell Dr. Rick James hey for me.”

“I don’t want to go, Kiese,” she said.