Heavy: An American Memoir(40)

Two weeks later, Malachi Hunter asked me to come to his office after I got a gun to protect Nzola and me from threatening letters we received. The president of Millsaps, George Harmon, shut down the campus paper and sent a letter to twelve thousand Millsaps alums claiming a satirical essay I wrote for the paper violated the institution’s decency guidelines. Half of the letters called me a nigger. Others threatened to take me off that campus if I didn’t leave on my own. One, filled with the ashes of all the essays I’d written for the paper, claimed I was going to end up burnt like the ashes if I didn’t change and give myself over to God.

I walked from campus to Malachi Hunter’s office. After congratulating me on losing so much weight and asking how to get more definition in his calves, Malachi Hunter asked me, “Who is the richest nigga you know?”

“You are.”

“And how much do you think I made last year?”

“A hundred thousand?”

“Nigga, please. I’m rich,” he said, and looked at me without blinking like I tried to cut him with a spoon. “Let’s say I only made three hundred thousand dollars. Now let’s look at your mama’s white lawyer friend, Roger.”

“Roger who?”

“The white Roger,” he said.

“I don’t know the white Roger.”

“Let’s say white Roger made three hundred thousand dollars, too. You following me? My three hundred thousand ain’t close to white Roger’s three hundred thousand. If I made that little three hundred thousand, I’m still the only nigga with money I know, you see? My girlfriend ain’t got no money. The black women I’m trying to fuck, they ain’t got no money. My mama and daddy ain’t got no money. My sisters and brothers ain’t got no money. My uncles ain’t got no money. My aunties ain’t got no money. The radical organizations I support ain’t got no money. The black school I went to ain’t got no money. Meanwhile, damn near everyone white around white Roger got at least some land, some inheritance, some kind of money. White Roger might be the poorest person in his family making three hundred thousand.”

“I already read Black Power,” I told him. “I know this.”

“You wasting time fighting rich Mississippi white folk for free,” he said. “And I’m asking you, right here, for what? You can’t fight these folk with no essay. You ain’t organized. You ain’t got no land. You ain’t feeding no one with that shit you writing. What is it you want white folk to do, and how is whatever they do after reading an essay going to help poor niggas in Mississippi? That’s the only question that matters.”

“I don’t know,” I told him.

“I know you don’t. You fucking up, Kie,” he said. “You fucking up. And we only have a limited number of fuckups before we be fucked up for good. The school has no choice but to get rid of you. You making it so easy for them. Your mama said you getting death threats.”

“I am.”

“Nobody who wants to kill you is ever going to threaten you. They will kill you, or they won’t. There’s a difference between deed and word. They will get rid of you, though. It’s inevitable. That’s already in motion. I don’t agree with your mama about much, but we both agree about that.”

“Is that all?”

“Just be careful,” Malachi Hunter said. “I think you think that school is yours. And Jackson is yours. And Mississippi is yours. Only thing you own is your body. Just be careful.”

I wanted to shoot Malachi Hunter in his pinky toe for even mentioning you, but I wanted to shoot him in his ankle for always acting like he knew exactly what black folk should do. Malachi Hunter loved black folk, but even more than black folk, he loved preaching about what black folk were doing wrong. What we were ultimately always doing wrong, according to Malachi Hunter, was not doing what he would do. Even though I wanted to shoot Malachi Hunter, I knew he wasn’t all the way wrong about Millsaps or me.

It was too late, though.

Nothing, other than losing weight, felt as good as provoking and really titillating white folk with black words. On the morning of bid day, Nzola and I were going to our jobs at Ton-o-Fun when we saw drunk members of Kappa Sig and Kappa Alpha fraternities dressed in Afro wigs and Confederate capes. We watched them watch us as we walked to Nzola’s car. After one of them said “Write about this,” and others started calling me a “nigger” and Nzola a “nigger bitch,” I went back to my room to get my gun.

I grabbed a T-ball bat instead, and threw the bat down when we returned to the scene and got closer to the white boys. They surrounded us, and we defended ourselves with words until our words broke. The white boys were blasting Snoop’s “Gz and Hustlas” the whole time they were calling us niggers.

When we got to work, we called the local news and told them there was something they might want to see happening on the campus of Millsaps College. We’d only been working at Ton-o-Fun a few weeks and knew if we left we might be fired, but we didn’t care. The news crew showed up and got all the footage they needed to paint Millsaps College as the regressive, racist institution I’d been writing about for a semester.

“Come home,” you told me on the phone that night. “Do not step foot on that campus again. You’ve done all you can do. There are some amazing people at that school, but white people’s ignorance is not your responsibility. Come home and leave those crazy people alone.”