Heavy: An American Memoir(42)
“I’m knowing a lot of bad things already did.”
SOON
President George Harmon told you I was lucky not to be thrown in jail for taking The Red Badge of Courage from the library without checking it out. He claimed if Millsaps turned the security tape of my taking the library book over to the police, they’d arrest me on sight. In addition to kicking me out of college and forbidding me from trespassing on Millsaps property, Harmon gave my work to a local psychologist who claimed I needed immediate help interacting with white folk before they would even consider reenrolling me.
I smiled while sitting across from you and George Harmon that day, not because I was happy but because I really didn’t think any student in the country could be kicked out of school for taking The Red Badge of Courage out of the library. I didn’t think it was possible because I didn’t think my teachers in the middle of my city would let it happen. I assumed when we walked out of that office, all my professors would be waiting to meet with Harmon. I knew Jackson State would never kick one of your students out for improperly taking a library book and returning it because they’d have to deal with you and your colleagues if they did. In the few minutes between when Harmon gave you the letter outlining my discipline and our walk out to the car, I realized that my professors at Millsaps were nothing like you.
By the time you put the key in the ignition of the Oldsmobile, we both accepted I did not make it. I was no longer a student. I allowed Millsaps College to shoot me out of the sky, and any school I thought of transferring to would see I was put on disciplinary probation for fighting and kicked out of college for theft. For the second time in my life since that night when Malachi Hunter spent the night after punching you in your eye, I felt waves of shame that made me not want to be alive.
Ray Gunn introduced me to the word “antiblack” two weeks before I got kicked out of school. I was talking to him about patriarchy and he nodded and said patriarchy was like antiblackness. He said the problem with fighting white folk was even the most committed of black folk had to deal with their own relationships to “antiblackness.” I told him how LaThon and I used to say and believe black abundance. He said I should have learned a lot more about black abundance before I got kicked out of school for making educating white folks at Millsaps my homework.
He was right. Nzola begged me to do more organizing with folk at Jackson State. Malachi Hunter begged me not to waste time fighting white Mississippians for free. Ray Gunn told me Millsaps would do anything to get rid of ungrateful black students. Grandmama told me to put my head down and get good at the parts of school I disliked. Dr. Jerry Ward, who was still teaching at Tougaloo College and wrote the introduction to the version of Black Boy we read in class, suggested I transfer to Oberlin and work with Calvin Hernton long before I got kicked out of school. You begged me not to let those folk shoot me out the sky. I’m sorry for not listening to you. I didn’t listen to one black person who loved me because listening to black folk who loved me brought me little pleasure. I’d fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I’d fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.
? ? ?
I enrolled at Jackson State and spent most of my nights at Ray Gunn’s house listening to him theorize about everything from why white dudes whose noses were too close to their top lips were always assholes to how there was no way a black president could actually make life better for poor black people, but when he started taking care of his little sister from Chicago, I was forced to stay home with you. Going to classes every day at a school where I was conceived, born, and raised, a place filled with dynamic black students and tired, dynamic black professors, was everything I thought it would be. But going to school every day where you worked was everything I feared. My teachers told you how I performed in class, whether I came to class, approximately how late I was. The worst part was that every day I left Jackson State, I found my way back to the campus of Millsaps to see Gunn and Nzola. And nearly every time I showed up, security showed up and made me leave.
One Friday morning, a day after you pulled a gun on me for talking back to you about whether the transfer application to Oberlin should be typed or handwritten, I sat naked in a cold tub of water with your .22 cocked, tapping my temple. We’d been told by three schools that they couldn’t even consider my transfer application because I’d been kicked out of Millsaps for fighting and stealing.
I didn’t know how to pray anymore, but I knew how to listen. I got on my knees in that bathtub listening for deliverance, forgiveness, and redemption. I didn’t hear any of that. I heard the words “be” and “meager” and “murmur” and “nan” and “gumption” in Grandmama’s voice. All those words sounded like love to me. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I knew I never wanted you or Grandmama to live in a world that sounded like the world might sound if I shot a bullet through my skull in your bathtub.
Despite pleas from you and Nzola, I started working at Grace House, a home that offered care for homeless HIV-positive men in Jackson. Grace House was a huge two-story home shielded by a massive gray wooden gate. It was thirty yards from Millsaps, literally on a street called Millsaps Avenue, in the North End. The first day I stepped through the gate, I wondered why the house was located in the poorest, blackest neighborhood in Jackson, and why a house for homeless HIV-positive men in Jackson could never be in a white wealthy neighborhood.