Heavy

by Kiese Laymon

Our heart meat was so thick. Once punctured, though, we waltzed those hearts into war without a plan of escape. No matter how terrified or hurt we were, we didn’t dare ask anybody for help. We stewed. We remembered. We heaved like two hulks. We resented everyone who watched us suffer. We strapped ourselves in for the next disaster, knowing—though we had no proof—we would always recover.

Like you, Grandmama beat the worst of white folk and the mean machinations of men every day she was alive, but y’all taught me indirectly that unacknowledged scars accumulated in battles won often hurt more than battles lost.

I would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of you. You would try to kill anyone who harmed or spoke ill of me. But neither of us would ever, under any circumstance, be honest about yesterday. This is how we are taught to love in America. Our dishonesty, cowardice, and misplaced self-righteousness, far more than how much, or how little we weigh is part of why we are suffering. In this way, and far too many others, we are studious children of this nation. We do not have to be this way.

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 didn’t hate white folk. I didn’t fear white folk. I wasn’t easily impressed or even annoyed by white folk because even before I met actual white folk, I met every protagonist, antagonist, and writer of all the stories I ever read in first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. At the same time, I met Wonder Woman, the narrator on The Wonder Years, Ricky from Silver Spoons, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds, Spock from Star Trek, Mallory from Family Ties, damn near all the coaches and owners of my favorite teams. I met Captain America, Miss America, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes. I met Luke Skywalker and his white father, even though his white father’s voice, outfit, and mask were blacker than thirty-seven midnights. I met poor white folk, rich white folk, and middle-class white folk. I met all the Jetsons, all the Flintstones, all the Beverly Hillbillies, the entire Full House, damn near everyone in Pee Wee’s Playhouse, all American presidents, the dudes they said were Jesus and Adam, the women they said were the Virgin Mary and Eve, and all the characters on Grandmama’s stories except for Angie and Jessie from All My Children. So even if we didn’t know real white folk, we knew a lot of the characters white folk wanted to be, and we knew who we were to those characters. That meant we knew white folk. That meant white folk did not know us.

When you don’t care about making other people feel pain, I’m wondering if you are being a violent person?

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. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit, and sift until I found a way to free the memory.

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

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms. I didn’t want to teach white folk not to steal. I didn’t want to teach white folk to treat us respectfully. I wanted to fairly fight white folk and I wanted to knock them out. Even more than knocking them out, I wanted to never, ever lose to them again.

Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us.

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.

Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered.

Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family’s superpowers.

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.

I will watch them ridicule us and exonerate themselves for terrorizing the bodies of black children they have yet to shoot. I will hear them call themselves innocent, American, and Christian as they call us ungrateful, irresponsible, reckless, thuggish.