How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(9)
President Harmon and his lawyers don’t look me in the eye. They zero in on the eyes of Mama, as Harmon tells her that I am being suspended from Millsaps for at least a year for taking and returning The Red Badge of Courage from the library without formally checking it out.
He ain’t lying.
I took the book out of the library for Shonda’s brother without checking it out and I returned it the next day. I looked right at the camera when I did it, too. I did all of this knowing I was on parole, but not believing any college in America, even one in Mississippi, would kick a student out for a year for taking and returning a library book without properly checking it out.
I should have believed.
George Harmon tells me, while looking at my mother, that I will be allowed to come back to Millsaps College in a year only after having attended therapy sessions for racial insensitivity. We are told he has given my writing to a local psychologist and the shrink believes I need help. Even if I am admitted back as a student, I will remain formally on parole for the rest of my undergrad career, which means that I will be expelled from Millsaps College unless I’m perfect.
Nineteen-year-old black boys cannot be perfect in America. Neither can sixty-year-old white boys named George.
Before riding home with Mama, I go to my room, put the gun in my backpack, and get in her car.
On the way home, Mama stops by the zoo to talk about what just happened in George Harmon’s office. She’s crying and asking me over and over again why I took and returned the gotdamn book knowing they were watching me. Like a loving black mother of her only black boy, Mama starts blaming Shonda for asking me to check the book out in the first place. I don’t know what to say other than that I knew it wasn’t Shonda’s fault and that I left my ID behind and I didn’t want to swing back to get it, so I keep walking and say nothing. She says that Grandma is going to be so disappointed in me.
“Heartbroken” is the word she uses.
There.
I feel this toxic miasma unlike anything I’ve ever felt, not just in my body, but in my blood. I remember the wobbly way my grandma twitches her eyes at my Uncle Jimmy and I imagine being at the end of that twitch for the rest of my life. For the first time in almost two years, I hide my face, grit my crooked teeth, and sob.
I don’t stop for weeks.
The NAACP and lawyers get involved in filing a lawsuit against Millsaps on my behalf. Whenever the NAACP folks talk to me or to the newspaper, they talk about how ironic it is that a black boy trying to read a book gets kicked out of college. I appreciate their work, but I don’t think the irony lies where they think it does. If I’d never read a book in my life, I shouldn’t have been punished that way for taking and bringing back a library book—not when kids are smoking that good stuff, drinking themselves unconscious, and doing some of everything imaginable to nonconsenting bodies.
That’s what I tell all the newspapers and television reporters who ask. To my friends, I say that after stealing all those Lucky Charms, Funyons, loaves of light bread, and over a hundred cold dranks out of the cafeteria in two years, how in the fuck do I get suspended for taking and returning the gotdamn Red Badge of Courage?
The day I’m awarded the Benjamin Brown Award, named after a twenty-one-year-old truck driver shot in the back by police officers during a student protest near Jackson State in 1967, I take the bullets out of my gun, throw it in the Ross Barnett Reservoir, and avoid my grandma for a long, long time.
I enroll at Jackson State University, where my mother teaches political science, in the spring semester. Even though I’m not really living at home, Mama and I fight every day over my job at Cutco and her staying with her boyfriend and her not letting me use the car to get to my second job at an HIV hospice since my license is suspended.
Really, we’re fighting because she raised me to never ever forget I was born on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the King’s English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students, and, most importantly, always remembering that no matter what, the worst of white folks will do anything to get you.
Mama’s antidote to being born a black boy on parole in Central Mississippi is not for us to seek freedom, but to insist on excellence at all times. Mama takes it personal when she realizes that I realize she is wrong. There ain’t no antidote to life, I tell her. How free can you be if you really accept that white folks are the traffic cops of your life? Mama tells me that she is not talking about freedom. She says that she is talking about survival.
One blue night Mama tells me that I need to type the rest of my application to Oberlin College after I’ve already handwritten the personal essay. I tell her that it doesn’t matter whether I type it or not since Millsaps is sending a dean’s report attached to my transcript. I say some other truthful things I should never say to my mother. Mama goes into her room, lifts up her pillow, and comes out with her gun.
It’s raggedy, small, heavy, and black, like an old dead crow. I’d held it a few times before with Mama hiding behind me and a friend of hers around the corner.
Mama points the gun at me and tells me to get the fuck out of her house. I look right at the muzzle pointed at my face and smile the same way I did at the library camera at Millsaps. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.