Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

Both of y’all knew, and showed me, how we didn’t even have to win for white folk to punish us. All we had to do was not lose the way they wanted us

I looked at Grandmama and told her I felt like a nigger, and feeling like a nigger made my heart, lungs, kidneys, and brain feel like they were melting and dripping out the ends of my toenails.

“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.”

Trauma

“Two hundred eighteen pounds is just right, Kie. It’s just heavy enough.” “Heavy enough for what?” “Heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy enough for.”

“Be still, Kie,” Grandmama mumbled with her back to me. “Just be still. Close your eyes. Some things, they ain’t meant to be remembered. Be still with the good things we got, like all them quick foots.” “Quick feet,” I told her. “It’s already plural. I know you know that, Grandmama. Quick feet.”

Smell of poverty?

There wasn’t a “gross” or anything approximating a “gross” in our vocabulary, or our stories. Bodies at Holy Family were heavier than the bodies at St. Richard. And none of those heavy bodies were gross.

For the first time in my life, I thought about the sweat and fat between my thighs, the new stretch marks streaking toward my nipples. I felt fat before. I felt husky every day of my life. I’d never felt what I felt in that St. Richard bathroom.

“Wait, I know my nigga ain’t acting all sensitive over no scale. You ain’t gross. You know that, right? You ain’t gross. You just a heavy nigga who quicker than most skinny niggas we know. You ain’t gross. You hear me? You you.”

That meant a lot. Mostly, it meant that although some of us had more welts on our bodies than lunch money, light bill money, or money for our discounted tuition, we knew we were not the gross ones.

Reminds me of Nikki Giovanni’s poem, Nikki Rosa.

way that didn’t give them a chance to shoot us out of the sky. It seemed like just driving, or walking into a house, or doing your job, or cutting a grapefruit was all it took to get shot out of the sky. And the biggest problem was police weren’t the only people doing the shooting. They were just the only people allowed to walk around and threaten us with guns and prison if they didn’t like our style of flying.

“The most important part of writing, and really life,” you said, “is revision.”

Sitting still, just as much as any other part of writing, took practice. Most days, my body did not want to practice, but I convinced it that sitting still and writing were a path to memory.

I loved the sound of the word “murmur” and I loved that I was coming back to Mississippi with a murmur, a smaller body, and a new relationship to writing, revision, memory, and you. America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.

The softer parts of my heart and body were getting harder and those harder parts didn’t want to hurt you, but they wanted to never, ever be hurt by you again.

let you hit me. I did not scream. I did not yell. I barely breathed. I took my shirt off without you telling me. I let you beat me across my back. It was the only beating in my life where watching you beat me as hard as you could felt good.