Heavy: An American Memoir(9)

On the walk to the car, I wondered what it felt like to have a face like yours, one of the most beautiful recognizable faces in our world, plastered on the wall at the biggest grocery store in North Jackson because you claimed you had money in the bank you didn’t really have. You were the only local black political scientist on TV during election season talking about politics. The way you overpronounced your words, defended poor black communities in the face of white resentment, and insisted on correcting everyone whose subjects and verbs didn’t agree made black folk in Jackson think we had plenty of lunch money, gas money, rent money, and light bill money.

We didn’t.

“Why’d they put a picture of your license up there, like you robbed a bank?” I asked you in the parking lot. “Can you tell me?”

“I’m just tired, Kie,” you said. “You know how hard Grandmama had to fight to get line work in that chicken plant?”

“I think I do,” I told you. “Want me to drive?”

We were two miles from the house and you weren’t making a drop of sense. You talked like this a few years earlier before collapsing.

“I’m just so tired,” you kept saying, now from the passenger seat. “I work hard, Kie. I really do. I work so hard. They never pay us what we’re worth. I try to tell Mama the same thing. Drive slowly, Kie.” I reached over and held the warm fold underneath the curve of your knee. That’s what you did for me when I was sad.

By the time we made it home, you were snoring. I didn’t want to wake you so I turned off the Nova in the driveway and pushed the driver’s seat back. I sat there watching you breathe with your chin tucked into your left shoulder.

I watched you sleep and thought about how a few weeks earlier, you had this party for your students at the house. You played a mix of Anita Baker, Sade, Patrice Rushen, and Phil Collins all night long. Malachi Hunter was there but he didn’t do much other than drink bourbon and watch you. The house was filled with students who’d fallen in love with you. Shareece wanted to watch you laugh. Cornell wanted to watch you dance. Carlton wanted to watch you talk. Judy wanted to watch you listen.

Near the end of the night, you sat at a table with Beulah Beauford. You said something about how “infinitely finer” Denzel was than Bryant Gumbel or Dr. J, and everyone around the table burst out laughing. I watched you look up at Malachi Hunter, who was grinning ear to ear in the kitchen. Malachi Hunter knew, whether he deserved it or not, he’d been chosen by the freshest woman in our world.

Sitting in the Nova, I took out my wallet, got your old license, and placed it on the dashboard. That summer day, the day Dougie said “running a train,” the day I left Layla alone at Beulah Beauford’s house, the day I slipped around the memory of what happened with Renata in our bedroom, the day you bought new encyclopedias intended to save my insides from white folk, you and I held on to each other like we were the first people in the world to float over, under, and around all the orange-red stars in the galaxy.

? ? ?

I might have liked the raggedy psychologist you got Hunter Malachi to pay for me to see two days later if she hadn’t tried so hard to talk proper, and ask me all these questions about parents, food, and church, or if you didn’t sit in the same room with us the whole time. The first question the psychologist asked was how I felt about my parents getting divorced.

“I don’t think about it much,” I told her.

She asked me to tell her everything I remembered about my parents being together. I told her how y’all met as sophomores and juniors at Jackson State University in 1973. I told her that ten months after y’all met, you were pregnant with me. My father was in Zaire during the entire pregnancy. You weren’t alone during the thirty-two-hour labor and C-section though. Grandmama was there. My father sent the name “Kiese” to you in a letter a few weeks before my birth. You told him you wanted my first name to be “Citoyen” and my middle name to be “Makeba,” after Miriam Makeba, the South African singer and freedom fighter.

The psychologist thought I was lying when I told her I had no Mississippi memories of my father. I told her pictures showed me my father was in Mississippi with us. Pictures said he loved tight short shorts, and red, black, and green knit hats, and he appreciated pondering tough questions and getting high under the gritting teeth and pointed finger of Malcolm X. I told her my first memories of my father came after y’all stopped seeing each other in Madison. When you dropped me off one Saturday, you gave me some money Grandmama sent us. I was supposed to give my father the money so he could afford groceries. I didn’t remember how much it was, but I took a dollar of it and put it in my pocket before I handed it to him. It just didn’t make sense to me that we had no food in our fridge, yet here we were giving my father money Grandmama had given us.

Life at my father’s Wisconsin apartment was different from our life. I remember both places having lots of music and incense, but there were so many rules at my father’s apartment. People had to take their shoes off when they came in. I couldn’t ever put my hands on the walls. One time I went to do laundry with him at the laundromat and he saw some skid marks in my underwear. He swore it was because you weren’t teaching me how to wipe my ass correctly. When I wiped my ass in his apartment, I couldn’t use more than four pieces of toilet paper. And the toilet paper had to be folded perfectly, not balled up. When we ate, my father had every bit of food planned out. And there was always lots of space between whatever he put on my plate.