More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about black lies, black thighs, black loves, black laughs, black foods, black addictions, black stretch marks, black dollars, black words, black abuses, black blues, black belly buttons, black wins, black beens, black bends, black consent, black parents, or black children. I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir. I wanted to write a lie.
I realized that day we didn’t simply love each other. We were of two vastly different generations of blackness, but I was your child. We had the same husky thighs, short arms, full cheeks, mushy insides, and minced imagination. We were excellent at working until our bodies gave out, excellent at laughing and laughing and laughing until we didn’t. We were excellent at hiding and misdirecting, swearing up and down we were naked when we were fully clothed. 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
...more
She told me stories about her father, her uncles, her cousins, and her husband. “I think the men folk forgot,” she said near the end, “that I was somebody’s child.”
But Grandmama is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as a somebody worth respecting. You hear me? Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either.
We have always been a bent black southern family of laughter, outrageous lies, and books. The presence of all those books, all that laughter, all our lies, and your insistence I read, reread, write, and revise in those books, made it so I would never be intimidated or easily impressed by words, punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and white space.
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. I wanted to write a lie. You wanted to read that lie. I wrote this to you instead.
Daryl and his boys went from rolling their own cigarettes, to smoking weed, to selling tiny things that made people in North Jackson feel better about being alive. In between doing all that smoking and selling, they swam, watched porn, drank Nehis, boiled Red Hots, ate spinach, got drunk, got high, imitated Mike Tyson’s voice, talked about running trains, and changed the rules to swim at Beulah Beauford’s house every other week that summer of 1987.
Layla, who smelled like apple Now and Laters, shea butter, and bleach, always wore a wrinkled sky-blue swimsuit underneath her acid-washed Guess overalls.
Up until that point, I’d never really imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. 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.
Telling happysad stories about what just happened was really all the big boys at Beulah Beauford’s house did well. Whether they were true or not didn’t matter. What mattered was if they were good stories. Good stories sounded honest. Good stories made you feel like you didn’t see all of what you thought you just saw.
I learned you haven’t read anything if you’ve only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision.
“We never told the truth, Kie,” you said. “No one in our family has ever told the truth.”
