Heavy: An American Memoir(44)

“Oberlin has a fall break in October.”

“Just come back soon, Kie,” you said. “Do you promise?”

“I will,” I told you. “For real. I’ll be back in October. I promise. I will be back so soon.”

I will not be back soon.

I will attend Oberlin College. I will get caught stealing a frame for your birthday from the college bookstore. I will learn under Calvin Hernton how to be the black southern writer Margaret Walker wanted me to be. I will read The Cancer Journals. I will learn to get good at the things I didn’t want to get good at. I will listen to Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur die. I will see creases, hear whiffs, and feel futurist pinches in the work of Octavia Butler and Outkast. I will practice. I will write about the holes in the ground in the woods across the street from Grandmama’s house.

I will not be back soon.

I will feel like a good dude for not “technically” having sex with anyone but my girlfriend. I will feel like a good dude. I will call myself a feminist. I will fall in love with friends who fall in love with me. I will listen to friends talk about their experiences with sex and violence and confusion. I will gently ask questions. I will not tell those friends what my body remembered in our bedroom and the bedrooms of Beulah Beauford’s house in Mississippi.

I will not be back soon.

I will forget how the insides of my thighs feel when rubbed raw. I will play on the basketball team. I will think 190 pounds is too heavy so I will jog three miles before every practice and game. I will sit in saunas for hours draped in thermals, sweatpants, and sweatshirts. I will make a family of people who cannot believe I was ever heavy. I will become a handsome, fine, together brother with lots of secrets. I will realize there is no limit to the amount of harm handsome, fine, together brothers with lots of secrets can do. I will learn to love and artfully use the Internet on A-level of the library. I will get a Mellon undergraduate fellowship. I will apply to get an MFA and PhD at Indiana University because the poet Yusef Komunyakaa teaches there. I will walk across the stage at Oberlin College graduation, where I will hug you and my father.

I will not be back soon.

I will never forget the day I told you I’d be back soon, the day I burst your heart wide open, the day I left Mississippi, the day you called me your child, your best friend, your reason for living. I will write about home. I will do everything I can to never feel what I felt those last few years in Mississippi. I will bend. I will break. I will build. I will recover.

I will not be back soon.

Ray Gunn hugged you and promised we’d drive your car carefully. We backed out of the driveway. You walked into the street sobbing into your hands. I should have been crying because you were crying. I tried. I learned how to lie from you but I never learned how to make myself cry. I told Ray to reverse the car. He put it in reverse and I jumped out and hugged your neck.

“Come back, Kie,” you said. “Please.”

“I’ll be back soon,” I whispered in your ear, and jumped back in the car. “I’ll be back soon,” I yelled out the window as we shrunk out of each other’s sight. This felt different. “I’ll be back soon. Don’t worry. I love you. I promise. I will be back home so soon.”





GREENS


You were in Grandmama’s living room delicately placing a blinking black angel with a fluorescent mink coat on top of her Christmas tree while Uncle Jimmy and I were examining each other’s bodies in a one-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. I was in my final year of graduate school. Uncle Jimmy and I were having a contest to see who could make their forearms veinier. “Shit, sport,” Uncle Jimmy said as he hugged me. “You eating a lot of spinach in grad school or what? You look like you training for the league.”

I was twenty-six years old, 183 pounds. My body fat was 8 percent.

Uncle Jimmy was six-three and so skinny that his eyes, which were nearly always yolk yellow, looked like they wanted to pop out of his head. He wore the same Chicago Bears sweatshirt, same gray church slacks, same church shoes he wore when he was forty pounds heavier.

When I asked him if anything was wrong, Uncle Jimmy said, “This blood pressure medicine the doctor got me on, it make it hard for a nigga to keep weight on. That’s all. Is it okay for me to say ‘nigga’ around you now? I know you’re a professor like your mama and shit now.”

I told Uncle Jimmy I was a graduate instructor and a graduate student. “That’s a long way from a professor. I think I wanna teach high school. But regardless, you can always say ‘nigga’ and any other word you want around me. I’m not my mama.”

On the way to Mississippi, we stopped at gas station after gas station. Uncle Jimmy went to the bathroom for ten minutes each time. I cranked up Aquemini and did push-ups and jumping jacks outside the van while he did whatever he needed to do. He eventually came back with pints of butter pecan ice cream and big bags of Lay’s Salt & Vinegar.

“Want some, nephew?” he asked.

“Naw,” I said over and over again. “I’m good.”

“You good?”

“I’m good,” I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day. I didn’t tell him I gleefully passed out the previous week in the checkout line at Kroger. I didn’t tell him a cashier named Laurie asked if I was “diabetic or a dope fiend” when I woke up. I didn’t tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.