Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

This summer, it took one final conversation with Grandmama for me to understand that no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—has any desire to reckon with the weight of where we’ve been, which means no one in our family—and very few folk in this nation—wants to be free. I asked Grandmama why she stayed in Mississippi instead of running to the Midwest with the rest of her family if white folk made her so sick, and why she told so many of her stories in present tense. “The land, Kie,” she said. “We work too hard on this land to run. Some of us, we believe the land will one day be free.

Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys who were taught by big boys who were taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.

“It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel,” she said. “It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk.”

I knew that if my white classmates were getting beaten at home, they were not getting beaten at home because of what any black person on Earth thought of them.

For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory.

America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.

I knew Clarence Thomas was lying because there was no reason in the world for Anita Hill to lie, and because I’d never met one older man who treated women the way he wanted to be treated.

She told me to value our communication and own our fight. Our communication, she said, is the mightiest gift passed down by our people. Every word you write and read, every picture you draw, every step you take should be in the service of our people. “Do not be distracted. Be directed. Those people,” she said, “they will distract you. They will try to kill you. That’s what they do better than most. They distract and they kill. That’s why you write for and to our people. Do not be distracted.”

I share with painters the desire To put a three-dimensional picture On a One-dimensional surface.

I knew there was no way to not lose unless we took back every bit of what had been stolen from us. I wanted all the money, the safety, the education, the healthy choices, and the second chances they stole. If we were to ever get what we were owed, I knew we had to take it all back without getting caught, because no creation on earth was as all-world as white folk at punishing the black whole for the supposed transgressions of one black individual.

They were absolute geniuses at inventing new ways for masses of black folk with less to suffer more. Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn’t survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.

Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.

I’d fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I’d fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.

I must maintain healthy distance from my colleagues and never let them see me “disheveled.”

Like nearly every black professor I knew from the Deep South, I expected to protect my students from security, police, and malicious administrations. I expected to pick them up from police stations, train stations, and emergency rooms. I didn’t expect to fail them as much as I did. I misgendered my students when they asked if I could help push the college to cover the cost of transitioning because they’d been disowned by their parents for being transgender. I made my students engage with art that attacked them for being queer, femme, black, and poor.

I found more ways to fail and harm my kids than I ever imagined. Every time I failed them, I knew I thought I was doing something you would never have done.

You told me to learn from your mistakes and understand that pain awaited any worker in this country who made a home of their job.

On September 11, 2001, a week and a half after school started, I learned I was as far from home as I could be and still be within the United States. On September 12, I watched my Pakistani neighbors plaster their Corollas with I LOVE THE U.S.A. bumper stickers and dress their newborn in a red, white, and blue outfit I’d seen at Marshalls. I didn’t understand.

When I got on the train, a dark-skinned South Asian family was seated in front of me. The entire family wore clothing in variations of red, white, and blue. The father placed a suitcase above their seat; on it a sticker proclaimed PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. I saw that his keys were held together by an American flag key chain that still had the tag on them. Now I understood. Terror looked like this.

Of course, folks on that train were still afraid of black bodies like mine, but they were more afraid of brown folks who “looked” like Muslims.

I kept thinking of your directive to be excellent, disciplined, elegant, emotionally contained, clean, and perfect in the face of American white supremacy.

“Thank you,” the mother said as she walked by me. “You’re welcome,” I said. “Y’all have a good day.” I wondered if this feeling I had was what “good white folk” felt when we thanked them for not being as terrible as they could be.

I loved my job, and I understood the first week of school it was impossible to teach any student you despised. A teacher’s job was to responsibly love the students in front of them. If I was doing my job, I had to find a way to love the wealthy white boys I taught with the same integrity with which I loved my black students, even if the constitution of that love differed. This wasn’t easy because no matter how conscientious, radically curious, or politically active I encouraged Cole to be, teaching wealthy white boys like him meant I was being paid to really fortify Cole’s power. In return for this care, I’d get a monthly check, some semblance of security, and moral certainty we were helping white folk be better at being human. This was new to me, but it was old black work, and this old black work, in ways you warned me about, was more than selling out; this old black work was morally side hustling backward.

“To white folk and police, you will always be huge no matter how skinny you are. Get a grip.”

I would learn fifteen years too late that asking for consent, granting consent, surviving sexual violence, being called a good dude, and never initiating sexual relationships did not incubate me from being emotionally abusive. Consent meant little to nothing if it was not fully informed. What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent our entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square? I’d become good at losing weight and great at convincing women they didn’t see or know what they absolutely saw and knew. Lying there on that floor, I accepted that I’d actually never been honest in any relationship in my life, and I’d never been honest with myself about what carrying decades of lies did to other people’s hearts and heads.

I would stop talking to you because I did not know how to say no, and everything I said yes to was a lie.

She spent the rest of her life knowing the people you valued most could never abandon you if you always prepared to be abandoned.

Flora did not expect to win, but she worked every moment I knew her to make sure losing hurt as little as possible.

“I be seeing you,” I told you, “especially when you think you be doing a great job of hiding. Maybe you be seeing me too.”

I wanted to tell you that if I ever have a child, I want to raise that child in the Deep South. I want free land to wrap around that child’s feet. I want that child to know that you do not need to be magical, or mythologize the so-called struggle. I am not at all sure what the child will need, but I want them to figure out the kind of lover of black children they want to be. And I want them to accept that we are all black children. I want them to articulate whether they are capable of being that kind of lover, and I want them to never wall themselves up from the world when they fail at loving themselves or our people.

For a few seconds, I remembered that the most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility. I remembered that we got here by refusing to honestly remember together. I remembered that it was easier to promise than it was to reckon or change.

Grandmama will ask me if I am okay. “No,” I will tell her. “I’m not sure any of us are okay.”

It will, though. It will not be reformed. It will be bent, broken, undone, and rebuilt. The work of bending, breaking, and building the nation we deserve will not start or end with you or me; but that work will necessitate loving black family, however oddly shaped, however many queer, trans, cis, and gender-nonconforming mamas, daddies, aunties, comrades, nieces, nephews, granddaddies, and grandmamas—learning how to talk, listen, organize, imagine, strategize, and fight fight fight for and with black children.