Heavy: An American Memoir(49)

My first week of class, I understood that none of my students, especially the black and brown ones who gravitated to me, wanted to be treated as noble exceptions to their communities. They wanted to be loved, inspired, protected, and heard. They didn’t want to be punished or unfairly disciplined for navigating the craziness that came with leaving home to sleep, eat, and drink with people they didn’t know while learning in haunted classrooms and dorms. Like nearly every black professor I knew from the Deep South, I expected to protect my students from security, police, and malicious administrations. I expected to pick them up from police stations, train stations, and emergency rooms. I didn’t expect to fail them as much as I did. I misgendered my students when they asked if I could help push the college to cover the cost of transitioning because they’d been disowned by their parents for being transgender. I made my students engage with art that attacked them for being queer, femme, black, and poor. I came into my James Baldwin lecture after the Virginia Tech shootings and told the one Asian American boy in the class, who happened to be Vietnamese, I was free if he ever wanted to talk about violence. I asked one of my Chicana students who told me her family had been deported if she knew when they’d be back, and if she wanted to publish an essay about it.

I found more ways to fail and harm my kids than I ever imagined. Every time I failed them, I knew I thought I was doing something you would never have done.

When I told you about security coming in my office, asking to see my ID when pictures of you and me sat on my desk, you said, “Terror looks like this.” I laughed off your comment and told you how happy I was to have access to a copier, printing paper, one of the most beautiful libraries on earth, unlimited smoothies, a meditation spot called Shakespeare garden, and a make-out spot called Sunset Lake. I knew the job would be challenging, but I was essentially getting paid to teach, serve, and write for seven months of the year. I tried to convince you that my relationship with students at Vassar was home, and the two rooms of that home were our classrooms and my office. You told me to learn from your mistakes and understand that pain awaited any worker in this country who made a home of their job.

I should have listened to you.

On September 11, 2001, a week and a half after school started, I learned I was as far from home as I could be and still be within the United States. On September 12, I watched my Pakistani neighbors plaster their Corollas with I LOVE THE U.S.A. bumper stickers and dress their newborn in a red, white, and blue outfit I’d seen at Marshalls.

I didn’t understand.

Three days later, on September 15, I decided to take the Metro North down to New York City to volunteer at Ground Zero. The Poughkeepsie station was packed with slack-faced soldiers holding M-16s next to ignorant-looking German shepherds. When I got on the train, a dark-skinned South Asian family was seated in front of me. The entire family wore clothing in variations of red, white, and blue. The father placed a suitcase above their seat; on it a sticker proclaimed PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. I saw that his keys were held together by an American flag key chain that still had the tag on them.

Now I understood. Terror looked like this.

“If they reach in that bag, I know something,” a young black man wearing green wristbands said to his friend.

“What you know?” I asked.

“I know they better not try to blow up this train,” he said, loud enough so everyone in our car could hear. “That’s what I know.”

A white man whose chest hair looked like it was soaked in curl activator nodded affirmatively across the aisle from us and gave the young brother a thumbs-up. “USA, right?” the white man asked.

“You already know,” he shot back. “USA.”

I rolled my eyes. “These white folk got you tripping,” I whispered for the family in front of me to hear, and then added more loudly, for everyone, “These people ain’t trying to blow up no train.”

For the entire hour to Grand Central Terminal, the family in front of me sat still and erect, rarely tilting their heads to speak to each other. Every time the child, who looked like he was six or seven, tried to move, his parents held him in place. For the first time in my life, I experienced not having the most fear-provoking body in a contained American space. Of course, folks on that train were still afraid of black bodies like mine, but they were more afraid of brown folks who “looked” like Muslims. I kept thinking of your directive to be excellent, disciplined, elegant, emotionally contained, clean, and perfect in the face of American white supremacy. “I gotta pee,” the boy whispered to his mother, but she wouldn’t let go of his arm.

When the train pulled into Grand Central, the father grabbed their suitcase from the bin and the boy stood next to his parents. The mother placed her body and the suitcase in front of the child, shielding our eyes from his piss-darkened red shorts.

“Thank you,” the mother said as she walked by me.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Y’all have a good day.”

I wondered if this feeling I had was what “good white folk” felt when we thanked them for not being as terrible as they could be.

As I walked deeper into New York City that day, I saw and heard black, brown, and white men in a Lower East Side bodega filled with mini American flags talk about harming “the Moozlums who blew up our city” and speculate about where they would attack next.

Thirty minutes later, I stood dizzy in a cathedral near Ground Zero, passing out bottled water, sandwiches, and blankets to tired firefighters still looking for survivors. For the first time since I left you six years earlier, I knew you and Grandmama were safer back in Jackson than I was up north. Your safety had nothing to do with airplanes torpedoing skyscrapers filled with people just doing their jobs. Y’all were safer because you knew exactly where you were in the world.