Heavy: An American Memoir(57)

At 314 pounds, I should have told you that I was sitting in a room in Main Building with a senior professor and two high-ranking administrators. I would come to the meeting with a contraption under my shirt that measures the irregularities of my heartbeat. The committee tasked with reviewing my tenure file first asked for an unredacted contract for my first book after the president told them not to ask for it. They then mistakingly sent my colleague, Flora Wadley, who had the same initials as a member of the committee—an e-mail insinuating I was lying about my graduation from grad school. Near the end of the meeting, this white senior professor on the committee affirmed their white liberal commitment to “African Americans” and said members of the committee believed I was a “fraud.”

I would tuck both hands underneath my buttocks as tears pooled in the gutters of both eyes. I would come into that meeting knowing the illest part of racial terror in this nation is that it’s sanctioned by sorry, overpaid white bodies that will never be racially terrorized, and maintained by a few desperate underpaid black and brown bodies that will. I would leave that meeting knowing that there are few things more shameful than being treated like a nigger by—and under the gaze of—intellectually and imaginatively average white Americans who are not, and will never have to be, half as good at their jobs as you are at yours.

Neither that day, nor the day I was stuck on the floor, hoping you’d answer the phone, would I have the will to imagine the night a detective from Poughkeepsie asks my 319-pound body to come by the precinct. I’d been to the police station in Poughkeepsie on four different occasions helping students, and seven other times to pay traffic violations. Two members of the tenure committee, and another senior professor, will receive anonymous racist, sexist, anti-Semitic letters threatening them for what they did to me. The professors will turn the letters over to the Poughkeepsie police, and a detective will call me into the station at ten o’clock Monday night.

I will walk into the interrogation room and watch the detective ask me if I knew who could have sent the threatening letters. I will explain, as best I can, that no one who had my best interest in heart would threaten folk on a disgraced tenure committee with anti-Semitic, racist, sexist language.

“I hear you,” he will say. “We have a suspect.”

“Who is it?”

“I’m looking at him,” he will say and ask me if I’d be willing to take a polygraph test.

“I’ll take that shit right now.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I will suck my teeth. “Really.”

I will understand that I am a heavy black boy from Mississippi, which means that I am vulnerable. But unlike most heavy black boys from Mississippi, I have a solid check coming in every month for the rest of my life. I have “professor” associated with my name. I have a mother and father with almost powerful friends who could help defend me if I needed it. I will understand that I am vulnerable but I am not powerless. I am not powerless because, though we have no wealth, we have peculiar access to something resembling black power.

I will question what we had to give up to get this peculiar access to something resembling black power when the detective says, “I’m just doing my job.” He will ask me if I think he wants to be wasting my time with stupid professor beefs at Vassar College with all the drugs and violence in Dutchess County?

I will tell him there are a lot of drugs and violence at Vassar College, too.

The detective will walk out of the interrogation room, and I will sit there looking at the handcuffs on the table in front of me. I will wonder how coming up for tenure at Vassar College landed me in an interrogation room. All I will want to do is run.

Not to my apartment.

Not to a classroom.

Not to my office.

Not to deceitful sex.

Not to you.

The detective will come back into the room and tell me they plan on contacting me tomorrow about the polygraph test. Tomorrow will come and the detective will never call. When I call him, he will tell me they no longer need me to take the test. I will not know if that meant they found who actually sent the letters or if they did not want to extend any more resources on threats made against the professors making the accusations, or if the detective was intentionally agitating me all along.

Either way, I am supposed to be happy because I am free, because I am not in handcuffs, because I have peculiar access to something resembling black power. I will know that I am not free precisely because I am happy that my wrists are free of handcuffs the month I earn tenure with distinction from Vassar College.

That Thursday, six years before I end up in an interrogation room for coming up for tenure, the first day in eight years I did not push my body to exhaustion, my body knew what was going to happen, because it, and only it, knew what I’d made it do and what I’d hoped it would forget.

? ? ?

I am sprawled out on the floor of my apartment, looking at the shiny brown leather couch. I call you again and hope you answer so I can tell you, for the first time in my life, that I need your help. I want to ask you if you remember the day you drove me to Grandmama’s house when I was twelve years old. Before picking me up to take me, I tried calling you at your office and I let the phone ring for twenty-three minutes. When you finally came, you drove me to Grandmama’s because you thought Grandmama could fix me. We were expecting my father’s child support payment but you told me it hadn’t come yet because the mail carrier might have stolen it.