Heavy: An American Memoir(39)

Before I could get to the point of the call, you said, “Did they not copyedit your piece, Kiese? I saw four errors on the first page.”

“Bye,” I said. I didn’t have room in my heart or head for your criticism even if you were right.

“Watch your back, Kie. You can’t call white folk who think they’re liberal or enlightened ‘racist’ in Mississippi and not expect violent backlash. Reread the books that mean the most to you. Lock your doors. Walk in groups. Strive for perfection. Edit your work. Something feels off. Are you worried about those people shooting you out of the sky?”

“No,” I told you. “I’m not even sure what you mean by that.”

“Please be careful,” you said. “You can always transfer. You said you had to ask me something.”

“I’m good. Bye,” I said again. “I can’t believe you just told me to ‘walk in groups.’?”

? ? ?

I listened to the Coup and read everything James Baldwin had written that summer. I learned you haven’t read anything if you’ve only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision. I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not just the first section, been written to, and for, Baldwin’s nephew. I wondered what, and how, Baldwin would have written to his niece. I wondered about the purpose of warning white folk about the coming fire. Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.

Three weeks into the summer, I read an essay from Nobody Knows My Name called “Faulkner and Desegregation.”

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

Baldwin was critiquing Faulkner for holding on to shamefully violent versions of neo-Confederate white Mississippi identity, but I imagined the sentence was written to me. I thought about the safety I found in eating too much, eating too late, eating to run away from memory. I stopped eating red meat, then pork, then chicken, then fish. I stopped eating eggs, then bread, then anything with refined sugar. I started running at night. I added three hundred push-ups a day. Then three hundred sit-ups. I began the summer weighing 309 pounds. In two weeks, I was 289. In a month, I was 279. In two months, I was 255. By the end of the summer, I was 225 pounds.

I jogged three miles before bed, and three miles in the morning. I ate one meal of ramen noodles every other day. When I wasn’t reading and running, I wrote a few satirical essays for the paper that caught the attention of students, faculty, and alums of Millsaps. I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. The day I went under 218 pounds for the first time since seventh grade, Nzola knocked on my door.

“Everyone is talking about your essay,” she said.

“Already?”

“Already.”

“Everyone who?”

“White folk, chile,” she said. “They so mad. But fuck them. You told the truth.”

Nzola and I laughed and laughed and laughed until we hugged, turned the lights off, turned the lights on, said we were sorry, and said we were afraid. We laughed as I awkwardly stood up and played Janet Jackson’s “Again.”

“Weirdo, it’s a CD,” Nzola said. “You can just put it on repeat.”

I messed around with the thing for damn near a minute before Nzola walked over to the stereo and took my hand and my palm against her face. We kissed. We took off almost all our clothes. We started to sweat. I asked Nzola if she minded if I took a shower. She asked if she could come with me. I said yes because I had a new body. We laughed while kissing with the lights on. We laughed while kissing with the lights off. We laughed and loved each other’s bodies on a damp yellow frayed towel, on a plastic twin bed, on a floor littered with empty ramen packs, on a yellow brick wall that held up Norman Rockwell’s Ruby Bridges painting.

Nzola told me she felt safer when she felt smaller around me, but she said I seemed happier in a smaller body. I asked her how sexy she’d think I was if she could see my cheekbones, my hip bones, my clavicle. I told Nzola losing weight made me feel like I was from the future, like I could literally fly away from folk when I wanted to. Heavy was yesterday.

“You are so crazy,” she said.

“I love losing weight,” I told her.

“Boy, you sound so crazy.”

“I’m serious,” I said. “My penis shines more since I have less layers, too, right?”

“Kiese Laymon, what are you talking about?”

“I legit feel like my penis is shinier since I lost all that weight. You don’t think so? I know y’all don’t like a dusty penis.”

“I think your penis is shiny enough, Kiese.”

“So my penis was dusty when I was heavier, right? Why didn’t you tell me to use lotion?”

Nzola laughed and laughed and laughed until she didn’t. She grabbed both of my ears and kissed me. “Do you feel home?” she asked me. “Honestly. Next to me?”

“I feel so home,” I told her. “Do you?”

“I never want to feel anything else other than what I feel right now for the rest of my life, Kiese. Please stop worrying about the size of your body. And please don’t ever stop kissing me.”