Heavy: An American Memoir(38)

Malachi Hunter was outside the house, blowing his horn.

Before walking out of the house, you said I was the saddest, most self-destructive person you’d ever met. I told you if you wanted me to listen to anything you had to say, you needed to learn to pay your damn light bill and stop riding in cars with disasters.

We were both telling the truth.

We were both lying.

We were both telling the truth.





ALREADY


I went to the Grill and waited for Nzola Johnston for two weeks. She never showed up. Ray Gunn told me he’d seen her walking around campus with an older yellow-brown brother who kept his beard extra crispy. He said the yellow-brown dude was pigeon-toed and walked around with a red briefcase. He was supposedly narrow through the hips but his forearms were on swole.

“Not Popeye forearms,” Ray Gunn said, “but similar to Brutus, I swear to God.”

“You act like the dude carried his own sunset, Gunn.”

“This blaster was a sunset,” he said. “It ain’t in my nature to want to be another blaster, but this blaster was perfect.”

“How you know he perfect just from looking at him?”

“I mean, wait until you see him. He definitely lifting heavy and doing all the cardio. I mean . . .”

“I hear you,” I told him. “You can be quiet now. That blaster stuff, I don’t think it’s catching on. It’s been like almost a year. You the only one who uses it.”

Gunn just looked at me, acted like he was fixing his left contact. “Like I was saying,” he finally said, “the dumb blaster your fine-ass ex was with had arms similar to Brutus.”

I never went to professors’ office hours, and rarely spoke in any of my classes anymore. I read all the books I was assigned for Latin, philosophy, and English. I did my papers for all my classes, but the only class I attended and participated in regularly was a class called “Introduction to Women’s Studies.” I read everything for the class twice, arrived early, and stayed late because the class gave me a new vocabulary to make sense of what I saw growing up. Before the class, I knew men, regardless of race, had the power to abuse in ways women didn’t. I knew the power to abuse destroyed the interiors of men as much as it destroyed the interiors and exteriors of women.

I now knew what “patriarchy” was. I could define “compulsory heterosexuality.” I could explain “intersectionality” to Ray Gunn. I understood gender was a construction and there were folk on earth who were transgender and gender-fluid. I went to abortion-clinic defenses. I marched in safer-sex rallies. I made photocopies of my bell hooks essays and gave them to my friends. I had new lenses and frames to see the world. I called those new lenses and frames “black feminist,” but I didn’t really have the will to publicly or privately reckon with what living my life as a black feminist meant.

Reckon or not, the white women in women’s studies class treated me like I was the most liberated of good dudes. A few of them asked to go for long walks so we could talk about the reading. If I wasn’t so fat, I would have gone, but I hated sweating and breathing loud around women I didn’t know. I spent most of my days wondering what Nzola was feeling, eating all the leftover pizza I could find, touching my body gently in the dark, rereading Lucille Clifton poems and Beloved, playing Madden with Ray Gunn, shooting midrange jumpers, listening to Redman, The Chronic, and Dionne Farris, and watching the Eyes on the Prize episode about Mississippi over and over again on VHS in the library.

I knew enough now about Millsaps to write an essay for my liberal studies course called “Institutional Racism at Millsaps.” An editor for the paper heard about the essay from one of my professors and asked if he could run it in the newspaper. He wanted to run it with the subhead “Voice of the Oppressed.”

I never used the word “oppressed” and had no idea what an oppressed voice actually sounded like. The editor told me I needed to make the ending of the piece much more color-blind. He said I would lose readers if I kept the focus of the essay on what black students at Millsaps could do to organize, love each other, and navigate institutional racism. He said my primary audience should be white students who wanted to understand what they needed to do about racism on their college campus. After going back and forth, the editor won because it was his newspaper, and I was desperate to be read by white folk.

At least while educating, we must be color-blind, not character blind. This is the only way Millsaps will reach out of the depths of whiteness and better all people equally.

I hated the last paragraph. I hated most of the essay, but I knew Nzola would be impressed that a two-thousand-word essay on institutional racism written by a black boy whose inner thighs she heavy petted almost told these white folk the truth to their faces. I knew Nzola would think almost telling white folk in Mississippi the truth in their paper was as close to winning as black folk could come.

The day after the essay came out, Nzola sent me an e-mail saying she was proud of me. She asked me what you thought. The essay was the first piece of writing I ever published that I hadn’t shown you first.

I’d started using the Internet to send e-mails, but you had not, so I faxed you the piece and called you to ask whether I should accept the opinions editor position I’d been offered for the following year. The editor wanted to call my column “The Key Essay.”