by Kiese Laymon
You and Malachi Hunter didn’t share the same political imaginations about black folk in Mississippi. You were more invested in organizing, teaching, grassroots political movement to help black folk in rural Mississippi exit poverty and shield ourselves from white folk’s negligence. Malachi Hunter was much more invested in becoming a black southern symbol of wealth and black power before he was fifty. But when it came to kids, y’all were both invested, and really obsessed with what y’all called “redeeming value.” Y’all didn’t think black children should watch shows, listen to music, or read books with violence, nudity, adult situations, or cussing because violence, nudity, adult situations, and cussing lacked redeeming value.
I always thought that was funny.
“This Kie,” I said into Malachi Hunter’s answering machine again. “Please come get me. You told me you would beat me if I went home, so I’m just waiting here in Beulah Beauford driveway. Please come. Beulah Beauford house, it make my head hurt. It’s real sad over here.”
An hour later, you pulled up. It didn’t matter where I was, how late you were, or how angry we were with each other when you dropped me off, nothing on earth felt as good as watching you pull up in our Nova to pick me up.
“I love you,” I told you as I got in the Nova. You didn’t say anything. “I love you,” I said again. Your right cheek was quivering. “You ain’t hear me leaving messages?”
“Put your seat belt on,” you said in the most brittle voice I’d ever heard come out of your head. You’d just started making me wear my seat belt a week earlier. I put the seat belt on when a round, clear tear slid down your cheek. The tear slowed down, sped up past your thin top lip, and slipped into the black corner of your mouth. I’d seen you cry when you talked to me about my grades, or when you lied about having more money than you did, or when you created some strange lie about why my father didn’t send child support.
I put my left hand on the right fist you used to steer our Nova. “How come you can’t look at me?” You stopped the Nova at the stop sign on the corner of Beasley and Hanging Moss and slowly turned your face to mine.
The white of your left eye was filled with a cloud of blood. The brown flesh around the eye was darker and puffed up twice its normal size. It looked like someone put a tiny plum under your eyelid.
When we got to the house, you knew what I was going to get. You pushed me away and rushed into your room. I watched you lift your pillow where you kept your gun. If I got to it first, you knew I would use it.
Instead of going to my room, I got ice, napkins, a jar of pear preserves, a spoon, and our butcher knife.
“You gotta be still, for real,” I told you, wiping the dried blood off your face with thumbs wet from my saliva.
“Have to be,” you said. “Don’t say ‘gotta.’ ”
“Gotta,” I said. “Gotta. They gotta have fleas at Beulah Beauford’s house. The fleas over there, they gotta be the maddest fleas in the world the way they be biting me all upside the head. Gotta.”
You laughed so hard and told me not to use the word “be” like that. I hoped you’d never stop laughing. “I don’t want any pear preserves, Kie,” you told me. “Not now.”
“How come?”
“They too sweet.”
When you finally put your arm around my neck, I felt all of your weight. “Hold me tight, Kie,” you said from our bed. “You’re my best friend. I’m sorry,” you said as you fell asleep with the covers over the swollen, slick parts of your face. “I’m sorry for all of this.”
“You my best friend, too,” I told you. “My best friend ever.”
Lying next to you in that bed, I remembered the first time you told me I was your best friend. I knew you kissed my cheeks because you loved me. I knew you asked me to hold you tighter because you loved me. You were so gentle. For more than a year, this was how we spent some of our mornings in my room and yours. Then you met Malachi Hunter. A few weeks later, you started to beat me for talking back and for way-less-than-excellent grades. Sometimes you’d beat me upside the head. Sometimes you’d beat me across the hands. Sometimes you’d beat me as hard as you could in my mouth with belts, shoes, fists, and clothes hangers.
I remember you making me take my clothes off and lie across the same bed we used to sleep in. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed like that. You made me put my face down into the bed so I couldn’t brace myself. As much as the lashes hurt, knowing you were beating me at nine years old as hard as you could while looking at my fat naked black body hurt way more. The tearing of flesh hurt less than it should have, I think, because I knew you didn’t really want to hurt me. I knew you didn’t want to hurt me because you sometimes touched me like you loved me. I wish you could have just chosen one kind of touch, even if it was just beating me ten times a day every day.
That would have made everything a lot less confusing.
• • •
You were still snoring when Malachi Hunter pulled his black Volvo into our driveway. You woke up when I tried to kill a revolutionary black man from Mississippi for hurting you that night.
Two hours later, you and Malachi Hunter took one glass of wine to your bedroom. From my bed, I heard long-tailed rats hiking through our walls, wet tires skating past our windows, and Johnny Carson’s nasal monologue. I couldn’t hear your voice, the only voice I wanted to hear when I woke up, the last voice I wanted to hear before going to sleep.
I opened the bedroom door, walked down the hallway a few feet from your bedroom. Behind a locked door, Malachi Hunter said he was sorry for punching you in your face, sorry for making you bleed, sorry for fighting your son, sorry for punishing you for wanting to know the truth. You told Malachi Hunter you wanted a daughter and you were sorry for running away.
I went back to my room and heard your bedroom door unlock and lock again.
The minisqueaks from your bed got louder. I got on my knees and prayed to God not to hear you wailing under the weight of the revolutionary black man from Mississippi.
I hated my body.
I walked in the kitchen, got the biggest spoon I could find, and dipped it halfway in the peanut butter and pear preserves Grandmama had given us. I heard the wailing all the way in the kitchen. I dipped the same spoon a quarter deep into Grandmama’s pear preserves and put the whole spoon in my mouth. I did it again and again until the jar of peanut butter was gone.
The wailing didn’t stop. I hated my body.
Before leaving the kitchen, I gulped down a few Mason jars of box wine until I forgot the shape of the sound I was running from. When I was supposed to be finishing my report for you on Fannie Lou Hamer, I wrote instead about losing my twelve-year-old heavy black body to an emergency I was too sad, too drunk—and really too terrified—to identify.
Early the next morning, I had my first wet dream. I was afraid to tell you what my body did while you were with Malachi Hunter because I knew you’d ask me why. Though I never wanted you to touch me again, I didn’t want to lie to you. Lying to you felt like cheating. Cheating felt like something I never wanted to do to my best friend.
BE
A few weeks into the summer, when counting to ten and limiting sugar and simple carbohydrates didn’t work for either of us, you dropped me off with Grandmama for a few days in Forest, Mississippi. I loved Grandmama but I didn’t really love going to her house any day other than Friday. Every Friday, Grandmama let me watch Dukes of Hazzard, a show you said “operates in a world even more racist than the one we live in, where two white drug dealers who keep violating probation and making fools of the police in a red Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag on top called the General Lee never go to prison.”
The Friday night I was sent to stay with Grandmama, I asked her if black folk like us could ever get away from the police like Bo and Luke Duke could.
“No,” Grandmama said before I could get the whole question out. “Nope. Not at all. Never. You better never try that mess either, Kie.”
The one or two
times there were black characters on Dukes of Hazzard, I remember Grandmama and her boyfriend, Ofa D, getting closer to the screen and cheering for them the same way they cheered if the Georgetown Hoyas were playing, if Jackson State won, or if there was a black contestant on Wheel of Fortune.
Like most black women in Forest, Grandmama had a number of side hustles in addition to working the line at the chicken plant. One of her side hustles was selling vegetables from her garden. Another side hustle was selling fried fish, pound cakes, and sweet potato pies every Saturday evening to anyone who would buy them. The most important of Grandmama’s side hustles was washing clothes, ironing, cooking, and doing dishes for this white family called the Mumfords.
After church, that Sunday, on the way to the Mumfords, I complained to Grandmama my slacks were so tight I had to unzip them to breathe. Grandmama laughed and laughed and laughed until she didn’t. She said she wouldn’t be at the Mumfords for long. I always saw the Mumfords’ nasty clothes next to Grandmama’s washer, and their clean clothes out on the clothesline behind her house.
I hated those clothes.
The Mumfords lived right off Highway 35. I was amazed at how the houses off Highway 35 were the only houses in Forest that looked like the houses on Leave It to Beaver, Who’s the Boss?, and Mr. Belvedere. When I imagined the insides of rich-white-folk houses, I imagined stealing all their food while they were asleep. I wanted to gobble up palms full of Crunch ’n Munch and fill up their thirty-two-ounce glasses with name-brand ginger ale and crushed ice tumbling out of their silver refrigerators. I wanted to leave the empty glasses and Crunch ’n Munch crumbs on the counter so the white folk would know I’d been there and they’d have something to clean up when I left.
Grandmama left the key in the ignition and told me she’d be back in about twenty minutes. “Don’t say nothing to that badass Mumford boy if he come out here, Kie,” she said. “He ain’t got a lick of home training. You hear me? Don’t get out of this car unless it’s an emergency.”
I nodded yes and sprawled out across the front seat of the Impala. Damn near as soon as Grandmama went in the house, out came this boy who looked like a nine-year-old Mike D from the Beastie Boys. The Mumford boy was bone-white and skinny in a way Grandmama called “po’.” Grandmama didn’t have much money, and her six-hundred-square-foot shotgun house was clean as Clorox on the inside, but raggedy as a roach on the outside. I always wondered why Grandmama never called people with less stuff than us “po’.” She called them “folk who ain’t got a pot to piss in” or “folk whose money ain’t all the way right” or “folk with nan dime to they name” but she never used “poor” or “po’ ” to talk about anything other than people’s bodies.
Without knocking, the po’ white boy opened the door of the driver’s side of Grandmama’s Impala. “You Reno’s grandson?” he asked me.
“Who is Reno?”
“You know Reno. The old black lady who clean my house.”
I’d never seen this po’ white boy before but I’d seen the shiny gray Jams swim trunks, the long two-striped socks and the gray Luke Skywalker shirt he had on in our dirty clothes basket, and hanging on our clothesline. I didn’t like how knowing a po’ white boy’s clothes before knowing a po’ white boy made me feel. And I hated how this po’ white boy called Grandmama “Reno, the old black lady who clean my house.”
I got out of the Impala and kept my hands in my pockets. “So you Reno’s grandson?” the boy asked. “You the one from Jackson?”
Before I could say yes, the Mumford boy told me we couldn’t come in his house but we could play in the backyard. The phrase “I’m good” was something I always said in Jackson, but I didn’t know I had ever meant it as much as I meant it that day.
That’s what I felt before I looked at the size of the Mumfords’ garage and saw a closet door open in the left corner. I walked toward the room and saw a washer, a dryer, and a scale on the ground.
“What y’all call this room?” I asked him.
“That’s our washroom,” he said. “Why y’all stay shooting folk in Jackson? Can I ask you that?”
I ignored the po’ white boy’s question. At Grandmama’s house, our washer was in the dining room and we didn’t have a dryer, so we hung everything up on the clothesline. “Wait. What’s a scale doing in there?”
“My pawpaw like to weigh himself out here.”
“That washer, do it work?”
“It work fine,” he said. “Good as new.”
“And the dryer, too?” I looked at the two irons on this shelf hanging above a new ironing board. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. I stepped on the scale in the corner. “This scale, it’s right?”
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I never used it. I told you it’s my pawpaw scale.”
I walked back to Grandmama’s Impala, got in the driver’s seat, and locked the doors. I remember gripping the steering wheel with one hand and digging my fingernails into my knee with the other hand. I wondered how fat 218 pounds really was for twelve years old.
Less than a minute after I was in the car, the Mumford boy came back out. Without knocking, he tried to open the Impala’s driver-side door again.
“Come on in and play, Jackson,” he said again from outside the car.
“Naw. I’m good,” I told him, and rolled the window down.
“You wanna shoot squirrels in the head with my pellet gun in the backyard?”
“Naw,” I told him. “My mama don’t let me shoot squirrels in the head. I’m not allowed to shoot guns. I’m good.”
“But all y’all do is shoot guns in Jackson.”
I sat in Grandmama’s Impala with a rot spreading in my chest for a few seconds before Grandmama walked out of the house carrying a basket of dirty clothes. An envelope sat on top of the clothes.
When I told Grandmama what the Mumford boy said to me, she told me to leave these folk alone. “Do you know who you messing with?” she asked me. “These white folk, they liable to have us locked up under the jail, Kie.”
I kept looking at Grandmama as we drove home. I was trying to decide if I should ask her why she had to wash, dry, iron, and fold the Mumfords’ nasty clothes if the Mumfords had a better washer than ours, a working dryer, a newer iron, and an ironing board. I wanted to ask her if there were better side hustles than washing nasty white-folk clothes on the weekend. But I didn’t say anything on the first half of the way home. I just looked at Grandmama’s face and saw deeper frown lines around her mouth than I’d ever seen before.
I wanted to shrink and slide down Grandmama’s frown lines.
I understood that day why you and Grandmama were so hungry for black wins, regardless of how tiny those wins were. For Grandmama, those wins were always personal. For you, the wins were always political. 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 to.
I kept wishing I would have gone in the Mumfords’ house and stolen all their food. Stealing their food felt like the only way to make the rotten feeling in my belly go away.
Before going home, Grandmama took the envelope she’d gotten from the Mumfords’, wrote your name and address on it, and put it in the mailbox downtown.
“Grandmama,” I said, as we turned down Old Morton Road, “do those white folk know your name is Catherine or do they think your name is Reno?”
“I know my name,” Grandmama said, “and I know how much these white folk pay me every week.”
“Do you tell the Mumfords the truth when you’re in their house?”
“Naw,” she said. “I shole don’t.”
“Then what you be telling them?”
“I be telling them whatever it takes to get they little money and take care of my family.”
“But do you ever wanna steal they food?”
“Naw, Kie,” she said. “They test me like that all the time. If I ever stole from them folk, we wouldn’t have nothi
ng. You hear me? Nothing. I’m telling you what I know now. Do not steal nothing from no white folk. Ever. Or you likely to be off in hell with them folk one day.”
In Grandmama’s world, most white folk were destined for hell, not because they were white, but because they were fake Christians who hadn’t really heeded their Bibles. Grandmama really believed only two things could halt white folks’ inevitable trek into hell: appropriate doses of Jesus and immediate immersion in Concord Missionary Baptist church. I didn’t understand hell, or the devil, but I understood Concord Missionary Baptist church.
And I hated most of it.
My slacks were too tight in Sunday school so they were always flooding. My shirt choked my esophagus. My clip-on tie looked like a clip-on tie. No matter the temperature, Grandmama made me wear a polyester vest. My feet grew so fast that my penny loafers never fit. Plus, she stopped me from putting dimes or nickels in my penny loafers because that was something only mannish boys did.
Inside Concord Missionary Baptist church, I loved the attention I got for being a fat black boy from the older black women: they were the only women on earth who called my fatness fineness. I felt flirted with, and like most fat black boys, when flirted with, I fell in love. I loved the organ’s bended notes, the aftertaste of the grape juice, the fans steadily moving through the humidity, the anticipation of somebody catching the Holy Ghost, the lawd-have-mercy claps after the little big-head boy who couldn’t read so well was forced to read a greeting to the congregation.
But as much as I loved parts of church, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t love the holy word coming from the pulpit. The voices carrying the word were slick and sure of themselves in ways I didn’t believe. The word at Concord was always carried by the mouths of the reverend, deacons, or other visiting preachers who acted like they knew my grandmama and her friends better than they did.
