Heavy: An American Memoir(41)

If home wasn’t Millsaps, I didn’t know where home was. In spite of all the violence and strangeness at school, I felt a kind of freedom and intellectual stimulation at Millsaps that I’d never felt anywhere else in the world. I was targeted, but I felt strangely happy and free.

Nzola and I fought and had sex more frequently since being put on disciplinary probation for defending ourselves against the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sig fraternities on bid day. The local news stations followed me around campus daily and the NAACP said everything that happened was typical of the bodily terror young endangered black men in this nation face when just trying to get an education.

“All of this is just wrong,” Nzola said one night while making a collage on the floor of my room. Her back was against my door. I didn’t ask her what she meant, but she kept going. “Those white boys, they called both of us niggers, right? I just wanna make sure I’m not trippin’.”

“You ain’t trippin’.”

“But they called me a nigger and a bitch, right?”

“Right.”

“Nigger bitch, right?”

“Right.”

“And all these people on the news can talk about is how they were dressed when they said what they said to you?”

“I already—”

“Hold on. A group of big drunk-ass white boys called me a nigger and a bitch. Everyone, including you, heard it. If you know that’s what happened, why don’t you do something?”

“I tried to fight them that day. I tried to fight them the next day. If I do anything else, they’ll kick me out.”

“I’m asking why you didn’t say that they called me a nigger and a bitch when they put those fucking microphones in your face.”

“Every time I did an interview, I talked about you and why we did what we did,” I told her. “Didn’t I do that? You want these news folk to be talking more about you?”

“I’m not saying that,” she said. “I’m saying people are acting like you were out there fighting back by yourself. And you weren’t. I’m saying if I wrote the same essays you wrote, no one would care. You take all these damn women’s studies courses and you haven’t said one fucking word about no ‘patriarchy’ or ‘sexism’ or ‘intersectionality’ these past two weeks.”

“Wait, wait, wait. How do you know nothing would happen if you wrote the same shit I wrote?”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

I sucked on my teeth. “Right, but how do you know? You making excuses,” I said, looking at Nzola, who was biting the inside of her bottom lip.

“Excuses for what?”

“You a funny woman.”

“You a funny nigga,” she said. “Excuses for what, Kiese?”

“When I was staying up forty-eight hours straight, writing all this shit, you could’ve been making art, too, but you were on the phone playing doctor with that Trapper James, MD–ass nigga up in DC,” I told her. “You’d still be playing doctor if the nigga hadn’t decided to start playing with another girl. Now you wanna say the only reason my art landed was because I’m a black boy and you a black girl? Sometimes I wonder if I’m talking to you or your stepmama. You a funny-ass woman. Believe that.”

Nzola stood up, dusted off the back of her khakis, and applied a taste of ChapStick. I knew what was coming. I wanted it to come. Nzola cocked her arm back and jabbed me in the left eye.

She sat back down and kept working on her collage.

This wasn’t the first, second, third, or fourth time I let her punch me in my face. Almost every time she did it, I’d said something about her stepmother. I knew it was coming. I hoped it would come. I thought I deserved it.

It always made me feel lighter.

We had sex because that’s how we apologized. Nzola talked about how we might be more useful organizing with other black students in Jackson, Malachi Hunter, and you to fight the Ayers case. Y’all had been fighting to stop the state from closing or merging historically black colleges and universities in Mississippi, including Jackson State. I told her she was right but I had no intention of stopping the work I was doing on the Millsaps campus. When we woke up, Nzola said I still didn’t understand. I told her I did. I told Nzola she didn’t understand.

She said she had to.

Nzola said there was no way two drunk fraternities of black men with their shirts off could threaten a white girl going to work, call the white girl a “cracker bitch,” and then have that white girl be found guilty of anything. “How do you not see it?” she kept saying.

“I see it,” I told her. “I so see it. For real. But what you want me to do?”

Nzola and I were in the middle of our city, lying wet, resentful, and nearly naked on top of a plastic twin mattress separating our backs from a loaded pistol. We hated where we were. We hated ourselves. We hated fighting, fucking, fighting, fucking, fighting over who was most violated by a spiteful college president, confused white classmates, and the gated institution we took out thousands of dollars in loans to attend.

“What are you thinking?” Nzola asked the back of my head.

“I’m thinking something bad is about to happen. What about you?”