Heavy: An American Memoir(53)

Cole responded to my e-mail a few minutes later, saying he’d really appreciate it if we kept meeting in my office because it was the only place he felt safe on that campus.

“That’s fine,” I wrote, “if that’s what you want to do.”

I threw my notebook across my office, yelled “motherfucker,” and texted Douglass.

This Keys. I ain’t doing that thing. We ballin at 8 tomorrow if you can make it. I can scoop you.

I didn’t want to waste any of my phone’s minutes so I used the department business code to call you back before leaving my office. I told you I was sorry for waking you up and asked if I could wire half of the money this month and half of the money next month.

“Thank you,” you said. “Wire what you can tomorrow, Kie. Please know that we need it as soon as possible.”

I hung up the phone, grabbed my keys, unlocked the English faculty lounge, and stole some colleagues’ Fresca, a blueberry-vanilla yogurt, and granola from the office fridge. I left my car at work, ran to my apartment, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles around Poughkeepsie, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, said prayers, got in bed, and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our last kilos of cocaine. Then some of us would watch them watch us watch them walk free after getting caught. And some of us, if we were extra lucky, would get to teach these small, smart, addicted white boys and girls today so we could pay for our ailing grandmamas’ dental care tomorrow.





SEAT BELTS


You were on your way to Vassar from Cuba, while I was 0.7 pounds away from 165 pounds after playing two hours of basketball, running eleven miles, eating three PowerBars, and drinking two gallons of water a day. The fourth day of my seventh semester at Vassar, I bought a used stair-stepper from the gym. After three more hours of basketball, and an hour of jogging, I maxed the heat in my tiny apartment and stair-stepped until I was down to 165.7 pounds, sixty pounds less than I weighed at twelve years old, and 153.3 pounds less than I weighed at my heaviest. The heaviest version of my body was past tense. My current body was present tense. There was no limit to how light I could be, and I knew I needed to live in the future.

I had 2.5 percent body fat the day I picked you up from the train station in Poughkeepsie.

In the past six years, you’d worked in over fifteen countries. You were paid little to nothing for these work trips, and you still had a full-time professor and associate dean job, but you said the trips made living in Mississippi and the United States bearable. You looked around at empty buildings in downtown Poughkeepsie. You watched Oaxacans and black folk walking down main street and said for the first time in my life, “I’m so glad you left home. I think you’d like Cuba.”

“You hate Mississippi and America, huh?”

“I don’t hate Mississippi, Kie,” you said. “I don’t hate America. I hate the backlash that happens anytime black folk strive to make our state better than its origins. Sometimes I think Mississippi is home to the greatest and the worst people ever created.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the same thing about America as a whole.”

“Do you think you’ll ever travel abroad?” you asked me. “I think you’d appreciate the work I do in Cuba, Zimbabwe, Palestine, and Romania.”

I sucked my teeth, laughed, and reminded you I was afraid of flying and asked you not to ever say the word “abroad” in my car or apartment. You started laughing and told me to get a grip.

The whole first day you were in my apartment, you kept asking what my father, who visited me a few weeks earlier, said about you. Eventually, I lied and said he asked about your work. When you asked me if he seemed proud of you, I lied again and said yes.

The truth was that when my father walked his five feet eight inches, 250 pounds into my office, he closed his eyes and said, “I’m so proud of you, son.” I told him I had to meet with some students before we could leave so he sat outside my office on a bench. My father sat with nothing in his hands. No books. No magazines. No cell phone. He just looked up at the empty bookcases in the waiting area and wouldn’t stop smiling.

After office hours, he went with me to the gym and watched me warm up by running a few miles on the track. Then he sat on the floor, with his back against the maroon mat, while I practiced with the basketball team. Twenty minutes after we got there, my father was asleep.

When we got in my car, my father didn’t put on his seat belt. He kept looking out the passenger window at the stars. “I’m so proud of you, son,” he said again as I took him to get a salad.

I offered my father my bed when we got home to my four-hundred-square-foot apartment but he refused. He told me again how proud he was of me for not quitting after getting kicked out of college. No matter what he was talking about, every few minutes he looked at my chest, forearms, neck, and legs and said, “You look great, Kie. I’m really proud of how you’re taking care of yourself.”

When my father said he thought I was ready to hear a story he should have told me years ago, I thought he was going to tell me something about you. Instead, he told me how a white sheriff in Enterprise, Mississippi, raped his mother, my grandma Pudding, when he was a child. My father said the sheriff neglected the child born from the rape, and threw my grandfather Tom in prison for two years for bootlegging when some white teenagers crashed after purchasing his product. My father wanted me to know he suspected his little brother, the child of the rape, was killed by someone he knew when he was a baby, as was the sheriff who raped his mother. More than solving the mystery of who killed his little brother or the sheriff, my father wanted me to understand that the so-called terror linking all Americans was nothing compared to the racial and gendered terror that controlled and contorted the bodies of our family.