Heavy: An American Memoir(37)

The next day when I came home from selling Cutco knives, you were in your room. “Why do you say that?” I heard you ask someone on the phone that night. “I will tell him when I have to. I don’t have to now. I’ll come see you when I can.”

I didn’t know whom you were talking to, but I could tell by the whispery, welcoming tone it wasn’t Malachi Hunter. Even though Malachi Hunter had a new baby with another woman, he wouldn’t leave you alone. It’s not so much he wanted you back; it’s that he didn’t want you to want anyone else. Whenever he invited himself over, you asked me not to leave the house. As soon as his car pulled into the driveway, I went under your pillow, got your gun, and put it in my pocket.

Malachi Hunter came into my room without knocking that night you were whispering on the phone. I had the gun underneath the covers, between my thighs. He didn’t say hey or how you doing or what’s up. “The white man, he’ll get you one way or another,” he said. “You can’t be a black scholar and be free unless you independently wealthy. You can’t be independently wealthy and be the white man’s labor. Let’s say your mama needs to go to the conference for revolutionaries in Nairobi, as smart as she is, does she have the money to go?”

“There’s a conference for revolutionaries in Nairobi?”

“Laymon,” he said, “catch up. You supposed to be a writer. Use your imagination. Goddamn.”

You appeared in my doorway and told him he needed to leave. Y’all didn’t fight. Y’all didn’t argue. Malachi Hunter laughed in your face and kept talking like you weren’t there. “She still ain’t free, Laymon,” he said. “She the smartest woman in the world, but she not free. It’s too many cheese-eating niggas in this house who think free and black are oxymorons. I’m allergic to houses like this. I’m gone, Laymon.”

I followed Malachi Hunter out the front door. I stayed in the driveway until I couldn’t see the lights of his Jaguar anymore.

Later on that night, you knocked on my bedroom door. I was working on a satirical essay about Millsaps College filled with something I called “Laymon’s terms.”

“Can I come in, Kie?”

I put my notebook down and didn’t say a word. You sat on the edge of the bed just looking at the carpet. You wanted me to ask you a question but I didn’t have anything to ask other than “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know, Kie,” you said. “Sometimes I think I go from one disaster to another.”

“But why?” I asked you.

“Why what?”

“Why do you go from one disaster to another?”

“I think part of me feels most calm during those really quick destructive storms.”

“But maybe you’d feel even more calm during calm.”

“Yeah,” you said. “I think you’re right. I averted at least one disaster. I stopped seeing Malachi when you were in high school because I knew our relationship was toxic for you. Anyway, I wrote my last check today. Do you have forty dollars I could use until the rest of my checks come?”

I didn’t say a word. I just blinked, listened to what I thought was bullshit, and eventually gave you what you came to my room for: a long hug, forty dollars, and the promise I would always love you no matter how many disasters you walked into. I didn’t know the man you were talking to on the phone, but I hoped with every cell in my body that if he was a disaster, y’all could create something a lot less disastrous than what you and Malachi Hunter created.

That night, I started rereading Black Boy. Reading the book at Millsaps felt like a call to arms. Reading the book in my bed, a few feet from your room, in our house, felt like a warm whisper. Richard Wright wrote about disasters and he let the reader know that there wasn’t one disaster in America that started the day everything fell apart. I wanted to write like Wright far more than I wanted to write like Faulkner, but I didn’t really want to write like Wright at all. I wanted to fight like Wright. I wanted to craft sentences that styled on white folk, and dared them to do anything about the styling they’d just witnessed. I understood why Wright left Jackson, left Mississippi, left the Deep South, and ultimately left the nation. But I kept thinking about how Grandmama didn’t leave when she could. I thought about how you left and chose to come back. I thought about how I chose to stay. I wondered if the world would have ever read Wright had he not left Mississippi. I wondered if black children born in Mississippi after Wright would have laughed, or smiled more at his sentences if he imagined Mississippi as home. I wondered if he thought he’d come back home soon the day he left for Chicago.

The next day, the lights in the house were off. Like always, you said there must be a problem with all the lights in the neighborhood. Before leaving for the airport back to Harvard, you checked the mail. A Millsaps College report card was in that box on top of a stack of bills you refused to bring in the house.

I had not been a perfect student.

I stood in front of the bookcase waiting for you. You marched into your room, went in the closet, and came out with a belt. You brought one lash down across my shoulder. You brought another lash down across the front of my stomach. I didn’t move. You went on and on about ruining the only chance I had to get free.

I grabbed the belt, snatched it from your hand, and threw it against the bookcase. You looked at me for the first time in my life the same way you looked at Malachi Hunter when he was angry. I knew your body was afraid of mine. You knew, for the first time in our lives, my body was not afraid of yours.