Heavy: An American Memoir(51)

It wasn’t complicated.

You, Uncle Jimmy, and Boots from the Coup convinced me drugs distorted our work ethic, weakening our body’s ability to imagine, resist, organize, and remember. You claimed that weakened bodies and weakened imaginations made us easier prey for white supremacy. I didn’t disagree with you but I never knocked my friends’ side hustles. All I ever said was, “The longer you slang, the higher the likelihood white folk gone hem you up.”

None of us were the grandchildren of grandparents who passed money or land down to our parents. Even those of us whose parents were part of this shiny black middle class knew those shiny black middle-class parents were one paycheck away from asking grandparents or us for money we didn’t have the week before payday, and two paychecks away from poverty. There was no wealth in our family, you told me more than once. There were only paydays.

By nineteen, when I finally accepted Uncle Jimmy’s addiction, I decided that if I ever slang, I’d only slang to white folk. By twenty, I realized there wasn’t one white person on earth I trusted with my freedom. The problem with slanging to white folk was that, rich or poor, they already had way too much influence on whether we ended up in prison or dead. Giving white folk even more of that absolute power always felt like side hustling backward.

Still, thinking about the inflamed nerves in Grandmama’s mouth, and knowing you needed more money for some reason almost every week, I wondered if this was the one time in my life I could get away with “collaborating.” Douglass told me a few weeks after we met that he “collaborated” with other Dutchess County professors in endeavors that were “financially beneficial to both sides, Keys.”

I asked him if any of those professor collaborators were black.

“Not yet, Keys,” he said. “Not yet. You could be the first.”

When Douglass left my office, waiting outside were Adam, Niki, Bama, Ghislaine, Matt, and Mazie. Instead of coming into the office one at a time, my black and brown students often came in together and sat in a half circle. Nearly all of the students who made a second home during my office hours had been targeted, disciplined, exceptionalized, and fetishized because of their race, gender, and/or sexuality, in and out of classrooms, on and off campus. They dealt with neo-Nazi groups targeting them, antiblack iconography etched on walls; some got suspended and expelled for infractions white students were rarely even written up for; campus security and local police routinely questioned their identities and the identities of their guests.

Three hours after my students walked in, they all walked out of my office except for Mazie, a tall, queer black girl from Arkansas. Mazie’s talent as a writer and scholar were frightening. A semester earlier, Mazie was kicked out of school for allegedly threatening her roommate after she disrespected Mazie’s mama. I served as Mazie’s faculty support during her hearing. When the judicial board suspended Mazie, we protested and appealed the suspension. Mazie was allowed back on campus but not allowed in the library or dorms after dark. I knew, after Mazie’s suspension, I needed to get on that judicial board to make sure what happened to Mazie never happened to another vulnerable student.

After an hour and a half, the sun started to go down and I told Mazie I should probably go get ready for this student judicial hearing.

I turned the light off and walked out behind her. “You friends with that white boy, Cole?” she asked me in the parking lot.

“Friends? Nah. He’s my thesis student.”

“Good. That white boy and his friends, they be slangin’ so much of that shit on this campus.”

“How you know?”

“I just know,” she said, before dapping me up and walking toward Main Building.

I thought about the older colleague who suggested I work with Cole, the same colleague who insisted on letting me know how lucky I was every time he saw me. He had no idea what my work was on, no idea what I wanted to do with language, no idea who or what I was before getting a job at Vassar. We both knew Cole, a dealer of everything from weed to cocaine, could be a college graduate, college professor, college trustee, or president of all kinds of American things in spite of being scared, desperate, and guilty.

By my third semester at Vassar, I learned it was fashionable to call Cole’s predicament “privilege” and not “power.” I had the privilege of being raised by you and a grandmama who responsibly loved me in the blackest, most creative state in the nation. Cole had the power to never be poor and never be a felon, the power to always have his failures treated as success no matter how mediocre he was. Cole’s power necessitated he literally was too white, too masculine, too rich to fail. George Bush was president because of Cole’s power. An even richer, more mediocre white man could be president next because of Cole’s power. Even progressive presidents would bow to Cole’s power. Grandmama, the smartest, most responsible human being I knew, cut open chicken bellies and washed the shit out of white folks’ dirty underwear because of Cole’s power. She could never be president. And she never wanted to be because she knew that the job necessitated moral mediocrity. My job, I learned that first year, was to dutifully teach Cole to use this power less abusively. I was supposed to encourage Cole to understand his power brought down buildings, destroyed countries, created prisons, and lathered itself in blood and suffering. But if used for good, his power could lay the foundation for liberation and some greater semblance of justice in our country, and possibly the world.