“The most abusive parts of our nation obsessively neglect yesterday while peddling in possibility,” Laymon writes. So much has gone wrong already, Laymon insists. Indeed, the book thunders as an indictment of hope, a condemnation of anyone ever looking forward. There’s a broader message here - not just a reckoning with having one stubborn black body, or with being poor and wanting more. It’s hard to open up when you’re already open.” “I feel like I walk around this world raw, Kie. “Do you ever just feel lonely?” she asks. ![]() Confronting this woman who’s raised him as best as she could, Laymon finds the gaze turned back on him. Just when you think things are getting better, or couldn’t get any worse, Laymon finds himself in a casino, and it’s debatable whether it’s he or his mom who’s hit a new low. ![]() Can you love your students too much? When you’re up for tenure, as he eventually is, how can it be that you end up at the police station, a set of cuffs sitting on the table between you and an officer? The effect on his body and mind accumulates. “Usually, when I wanted to run from memory, I transcribed rap lyrics, or I drew two-story houses, or I wrote poems to Layla, or I watched black sitcoms … or I ate and drank everything that wasn’t nailed down.”Įventually he’s a professor, counting his money and relentlessly trying to post smaller numbers on the scale. When he finally attends a third, it’s a prelude to a fourth and a fifth - none of them perfect, all of them cause for upset, defense, outrage. At another smaller college he feels safer, until he doesn’t. “I did not answer,” he writes, “because I did not know what was wrong with me.”Īdmitted to a competitive private college, Laymon gets kicked out. “I stood there wondering why the shallow grunts and minisqueaks coming from the boys in Daryl’s room made me want to be dead.” When a young girl is apparently forced to engage in sexual activity with several boys, Laymon’s reaction is as chilling as it is succinct. “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.”īooks become life raft, armor: In a mostly white high school, he starts bringing armloads of five, stacking them one by one on the desk, a sort of counter-evidence, daring anyone to doubt him. Justifying another harsh moment - his mom not only whips her son with a belt but makes him write punishing essays, over and over, a kind of training, he eventually realizes, for making his voice heard - Laymon’s mother tells him a darker truth. “When I saw your face so close to his gun, I wanted to snatch it and watch it melt into black grits.” ![]() “The officer knelt down and looked in your window,” he writes, addressing his mom as “you” as he does throughout the book. We resented everyone who watched us suffer.” In another tense and terrifying moment, he and his mom are pulled over by the police. “Our heart meat was so thick,” Laymon writes about himself and his mother. There is always the specter of state violence, casual racism and the brutal difficulty of having a body that lets you down. “I wanted to pepper and end the book with acerbic warnings to us fat black folk in the Deep South.” “I wanted to do that old black work of pandering and lying to folk who pay us to pander and lie to them every day,” he writes. In early chapters Laymon alludes to a simpler and more uplifting book, about weight loss and African American power. ![]() The memoir was almost a different project. The searing and upsetting piece “My Vassar College Faculty ID Makes Everything OK,” felt so fresh and urgent, and introduced many readers to a voice that felt brilliant but brittle, furious but full of a desire to make everyone understand. There was hardly any food other than spoiled pimento cheese, the backs of molded wheat bread, a half-empty box of wine, and swollen green olives.” When he thought of places like the “rich-white folk houses” his grandma cleaned for, he “imagined stealing all their food while they were asleep.”Īnger and beauty, agony and the will to go on: It all goes back to an essay Laymon published four years ago, in Gawker. “At our house,” writes Kiese Laymon - recalling a Mississippi childhood in a startling, essential new memoir, “Heavy” - “there was no pantry.
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