Heavy: An American Memoir(50)

I’d been forced, since I left you in that driveway six years earlier, to accept I didn’t understand much about any part of the country other than our part of Mississippi. I assumed all black folk in the nation were from the Deep South. I had no idea how many black folk there were in the nation from Africa and the Caribbean.

That day in lower Manhattan, inside the cathedral, you would have seen so much generosity and patience in the face of absolute fear and loss. Before leaving, we held little American flags, gripped coarse American hands, and thanked each other for bringing the best of our American selves out to help. I assumed, though, everyone in that loving space knew what was going to happen next. I didn’t know much about New York, but I knew what white Americans demanded of America. White Americans, primarily led by George W. Bush, were about to wrap themselves in flags and chant “USA!” as poor cousins, friends, sons, and daughters showed a weaker, browner, less Christian part of the world how we dealt with loss.

When I took the train back to Poughkeepsie that night, I remember feeling sad there were no “Muslim-looking” folk in my car whom I could feel good about defending. I imagined the looks of awe on the faces of my students when I told them I volunteered. I looked out at the Hudson River and thanked God the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened while a black president was in office. I wondered, for the first time in my life, what being an American, not just a black American from Mississippi, really demanded of my insides, and what the consequences were for not meeting that demand in the world.

I waited in the parking lot of my apartment for a white woman walking out of the complex to get in her car so I wouldn’t scare her. On the way into my apartment, I saw and heard an airplane. I remembered some of the Jamaican men in an NYC bodega talking about a nuclear facility thirty miles from me called Indian Point. According to them, Muslims were going to fly four planes into Indian Point in the next few days, causing hundreds of thousands of Americans to die from acute radiation syndrome and cancer.

I ran into my apartment, called you, called Grandmama, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, got in bed, and listened for loud booms brought on by terrifying Muslim-looking folk who supposedly hated us because of our freedom.

? ? ?

A few months later, a senior white colleague suggested I direct Cole’s thesis. Cole was one of his thesis advisees who lost people close to him on September 11. He told me he was sure I “could connect with Cole” in ways he couldn’t. While I appreciated Cole’s dirty fingernails and the reckless way he went after loose balls during pickup basketball games, I never had Cole as a student. Cole, whose thesis was on Dante’s Inferno, was a slim, wealthy, Jewish white boy from Connecticut who’d wrestled addiction since he was a sophomore in high school.

Cole and I spent hours in my office that semester, pushing through theories of immersion in Dante’s Inferno on Wednesdays and talking through his experiences of abandonment and addiction on Fridays. In addition to talking to me, Cole made use of the counseling services on campus, and a private counselor off campus.

One day when Cole was leaving my office, Heedy “Douglass” Byers, whom I was introduced to by my friend Brown, was waiting outside my door. Folk in Poughkeepsie called Heedy “Douglass” because he had a blown-out Afro and a massive combed-in part like Frederick Douglass. Douglass called me “Keys” and he said it at the beginning and ends of his sentences. As Cole and Douglass passed each other, I watched them make that exchange I’d seen hundreds of times in Jackson, Forest, Oberlin, and Bloomington.

I pulled Douglass into my office after Cole turned the corner, and closed the door while six black, South Asian, and Filipina students waited outside my office. “You moving shit right in front of my office like that?”

“Keys,” he said. “If you ever need anything, trust me. I got you, Keys. Whatever you need, let me know, Keys. You and Brown trying to ball after work?”

I taught two courses a semester for eighteen thousand dollars a year after taxes. Even though you and Aunt Linda made more money, I somehow had more disposable income than anyone in our family. When I got my job, I imagined doing all kinds of stuff with my new money, like going to IHOP once a week, buying three new albums, three new books every month, and buying a new pair of Adidas at the end of every semester.

It didn’t take me long to realize my eighteen thousand a year wasn’t close to rich, especially when you told me you needed eleven hundred for the air conditioner, four hundred to fix the plumbing, and three hundred for new tires on the car. That same day Cole and Douglass made the exchange, you called and asked me if I could send eight hundred dollars home for Grandmama’s new dental bridge. You said she was in excruciating pain and she was too proud to ask me for the money. I told you I would send all the money I could by the end of the week.

“I love you, Kie,” you said. “Thank you for always helping the family when we need it.”

When I got off the phone, Douglass looked at my fingers lightly tapping the faded wood on the desk. I watched him watch the mountains of books covering the wall, the peeling blue Baldwin poster behind my door, a vinyl version of Jay Z’s Blueprint, the warped picture of Grandmama holding her chin on the windowsill. “Keys, what you wanna do, Keys. You wanna invest in this work?”

Ever since I was twelve, I was surrounded by Mississippi black boys for whom slanging was a side hustle. My friends didn’t call themselves “hustlers” or “dope boys.” They were black boys who wanted to augment money earned at primary jobs by selling a product that made people feel better about being alive. Lots of us were grandchildren of hardworking bootlegging grandparents who shared the importance of multiple side hustles and varied streams of income. So even if we slang, we were going to deliver phone books, bus tables at Applebee’s, mow someone’s lawn, or teach.