by Kiese Laymon
Older black women in the church made up the majority of the audience. But their voices and words were only heard during songs, in ad-libbed responses to the preacher’s word and during church announcements. While Grandmama and everyone else amen’d and well’d their way through shiny hollow sermons, I just sat there, usually at the end of the pew, sucking my teeth, feeling super hot, super bored, and really resentful because Grandmama and her friends never told the sorry-ass preachers to shut up and sit down somewhere.
My problem with church was I knew what could have been. Every other Wednesday, the older women of the church had something called Home Mission: they would meet at alternate houses, and bring their best food, their Bibles, notebooks, and their testimonies. There was no instrumental music at Home Mission, but those women, Grandmama’s friends, used their lives, their mo(u)rning songs, and their Bibles as primary texts to boast, confess, and critique their way into tearful silence every single time.
I didn’t understand hell, partially because I didn’t believe any place could be hotter than Mississippi in August. But I understood feeling good. I did not feel good at Concord Missionary Baptist church. I felt good watching Grandmama and her friends love each other during Home Mission.
• • •
When we pulled into our yard, Grandmama told me to grab the basket of nasty clothes and put it next to the washer. I picked the clothes up and instead of stopping at the washer, I walked into the kitchen, placed the dirty clothes basket on the floor in between the fridge and the oven.
I looked around to see if Grandmama was coming before stepping both of my penny loafers deep into the Mumfords’ basket and doing “quick feet” like we did at the beginning of basketball and football practice. “I got your gun right here, white nigga,” I said, stomping my feet all up in the white folks’ clothes as hard and fast as I could. “Y’all don’t even know. I got your gun right here, white nigga.”
I was doing quick feet in the Mumfords’ clothes for a good thirty seconds when Grandmama came out of nowhere, whupping my legs with a pleather blue belt. The little pleather blue licks didn’t stop me. I was still doing quick feet like it was going out of style.
“Kie,” Grandmama said, “get out my kitchen acting like a starnated fool.”
I stopped and took my whupping. Afterward, I asked Grandmama whether she meant “star-nated” or “stark naked.” I told her I’d rather be a “star-nated” fool because I loved stars even though I didn’t think “star-nated” was a word. Grandmama and I loved talking about words. She was better than anyone I’d ever known at bending, breaking, and building words that weren’t in the dictionary. I asked her what word I could use to make that Mumford boy feel what we felt.
“Ain’t no need to make up words for words that already exist, Kie,” she said. “That ain’t nothing but the white you saw in that po’ child today. And you don’t want to feel no kinds of white. I feel sorry for them folk.”
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.” Grandmama started laughing. “Kie, what you call yourself doing to those folks’ clothes?”
“Oh,” I said, and start doing it again. “At practice, we be calling this quick feet.”
“You gave them white-folk clothes them quick feets?”
“Not feets,” I said, laughing. “It’s already plural, Grandmama. Quick feet.”
“Quick feets?” she said again, and kept laughing until she almost fell out of her chair. “Quick foots?”
“Grandmama,” I told her, and sat next to her legs. “I hate white-folk clothes. I’m serious.”
“I know you do.” Grandmama stopped laughing. “I don’t much appreciate them or they clothes either, but cleaning them nasty clothes is how we eat, and how I got your mama and them through school. You know I been washing them folks’ clothes for years and I ain’t never seen one washcloth?”
“What you mean, Grandmama?”
“I mean what I said. Them folk don’t use no washcloths.” I waited for a blink, a smirk, a slow roll of her eyes. I got nothing. “And the one time the little po’ one who was messing with you asked me how to use a washrag, I told that baby, ‘if you bring that washrag from your ass to your face, that’s between you and your God.’ And this baby just stood there laughing like I’m telling jokes. You know I was serious as a heart attack, Kie.”
While I was dying laughing, Grandmama told me she whupped me for acting up in her kitchen, not for messing up them folks’ clothes. She said she spent so many hours in white-folk kitchens and just wanted her children to respect her kitchen when she got home.
I asked Grandmama why she whupped me on my legs when I was doing quick feet, and not my head or my neck or my back like you would. “Because I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “I want you to act like you got good sense but I don’t ever want to hurt you.”
Grandmama stood up and told me to follow her out to her garden. We went outside and picked butter beans, purple hull peas, collard greens, green tomatoes, and yellow squash.
“You know why I love my garden, Kie?”
“Because you don’t want to have to rely on white folk to eat?”
“Chile, please,” Grandmama said, walking back to the porch. “I ain’t studdin’ nan one of those folk when I’m at my own house. I love knowing directly what the food that be going in us has been through. You know what I mean?”
“I think I do,” I told Grandmama as we sat on the porch, hulling peas and talking more about quick feet. My bucket of peas was between my legs when Grandmama stood up and straddled my tub.
“Kie, try hulling like this here,” Grandmama said. I looked up at her hands and how they handled the purple hull peas. When she reached for my face, I jumped back. “I ain’t trying to hurt you,” she said. “What you jumping back for?”
I didn’t know what to say.
Grandmama took the bucket from between my legs into the kitchen. I sat there looking at my hands. They wouldn’t stop shaking. I felt sweat pooling up between my thighs. My body remembered what happened yesterday, and strangely knew what would happen tomorrow.
At supper, Grandmama apologized again for whupping my legs and told me when I wrote my report on the Book of Psalms later that night, I could write the way we talk. Like you, Grandmama made me do written assignments every night. Unlike your assignments, all of Grandmama’s assignments had to be about the Bible.
Later that evening, I wrote, “I know you want me to write about the Book of Psalms. If it is okay I just want to tell you about some secrets that be making my head hurt. I be eating too much and staying awake at night and fighting people in Jackson. Mama does not like how my eyes are red. I wake her up in the morning and she be making me use Visine before school. I try but I can’t tell her what’s wrong. Can I tell you? Can you help me with my words? The words Mama make me use don’t work like they supposed to work.”
I wrote the words “be kissing me in the morning” “be choking me” “be running a train” “be beating my back” “be hearing her heartbeat” “be slow dancing with me” “be rubbing her breasts in my mouth” “be abandoning her” “be wet dreaming about stuff that scare me” “be watching people” “be getting beaten” “be listening to trains” “be on top of me” “be on my knees” “be kissing me in the morning” “be choking me” “be kissing him at night” “be hitting hard” “be saying white folk hit the hardest” “be laughing so it won’t hurt” “be eating when I’m full” “be kissing me” “be choking me” “be confusing me.”
At the end, I wrote, “Grandmama, can you please help me with my words?” I gave Grandmama my notebook when I was done like I had to every Sunday night we sp
ent together. Unlike on other nights, she didn’t say anything about what I’d written. When she walked by me, I didn’t even hear her breathing.
Later that night, before bed, Grandmama got on her knees, turned the light off, and told me she loved me. She told me tomorrow would be a better day. Grandmama looked at that old raggedy gold and silver contraption she called her phone book before she got in bed with me like she always did. She looked up your name and number, Aunt Sue’s name and number, Uncle Jimmy’s name and number, and Aunt Linda’s name and number.
Before both of us went to sleep, I asked Grandmama if 218 pounds was too fat for twelve years old. “What you weighing yourself for anyway?” she asked me. “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.”
I loved sleeping with Grandmama because that was the only place in the world I slept all the way through the night. But tonight was different. “Can I ask you one more question before we go to bed?”
“Yes, baby,” Grandmama said, and faced me for the first time since I gave her the notebook. “What do you think about counting to ten in case of emergencies?”
“Ain’t no emergency God can’t help you forget,” Grandmama told me. “Evil is real, Kie.”
“But what about the emergencies made by folk who say they love you?”
“You forget it all,” she said. “Especially that kind of emergency. Or you go stone crazy. My whole life, it seem like something crazy always happens on Sunday nights in the summer.”
Grandmama made me pray again that night. I prayed for you to never close the door to your room if Malachi Hunter was there. I prayed for Layla and Dougie to never feel like they had to go back in Daryl’s room. I prayed for Grandmama to have more money so she wouldn’t have to stand in that big room ripping the bloody guts out of chickens before standing in that smaller room smelling bleach and white folks’ shitty underwear. I prayed nothing would ever happen again in any room in the world that made us feel like we were dying.
When I got off my knees, I watched the back of Grandmama’s body heave in and heave out as she fell asleep on the bed. Grandmama was trying, hard as she could, to forget one more Sunday night in the summer. For a second, though, she stopped heaving. I couldn’t hear her breathing. When I finally climbed into bed, I placed my left thumb lightly on the small of Grandmama’s back. She jerked forward and clenched the covers tighter around her body.
“My bad, Grandmama. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“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.”
MEAGER
You were on your way back from Hawaii with Malachi Hunter while LaThon Simmons and I sat in the middle of a white eighth-grade classroom, in a white Catholic school, filled with white folk we didn’t even know. These white folk watched us toss black vocabulary words, a dull butter knife, and pink grapefruit slices back and forth until it was time for us to go home.
We were new eighth graders at St. Richard Catholic School in Jackson, Mississippi, because Holy Family, the poor all-black Catholic school we attended most of our lives, closed unexpectedly due to lack of funding. All four of the black girls from Holy Family were placed in one homeroom at St. Richard. All three of us black boys from Holy Family were placed in another. Unlike at Holy Family, where we could wear what we wanted, at St. Richard, students had to wear khaki or blue pants or skirts and light blue, white, or pink shirts.
LaThon, who we both thought looked just like a slew-footed K-Ci from Jodeci, and I sat in the back of homeroom the first day of school doing what we always did: we intentionally used and misused last year’s vocabulary words while LaThon cut up his pink grapefruit with his greasy, dull butter knife. “These white folk know we here on discount,” he told me, “but they don’t even know.”
“You right,” I told him. “These white folk don’t even know that you an ol’ grapefruit-by-the-pound-eating-ass nigga. Give me some grapefruit. Don’t be parsimonious with it, either.”
“Nigga, you don’t eat grapefruits,” LaThon said. “Matter of fact, tell me one thing you eat that don’t got butter in it. Ol’ churning-your-own-butter-ass nigga.” I was dying laughing. “Plus, you act like I got grapefruits gal-low up in here. I got one grapefruit.”
Seth Donald, a white boy with two first names, looked like a dustier Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, but with braces. Seth spent the first few minutes of the first day of school silent-farting and turning his eyelids inside out. He asked both of us what “gal-low” meant.
“It’s like galore,” I told him, and looked at LaThon. “Like grapefruits galore.”
LaThon sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes. “Seth, whatever your last name is, first of all, your first name ends with two f’s from now on, and your new name is Seff six-two because you five-four but you got the head of a nigga we know who six-two.” LaThon tapped me on the forearm. “Don’t he got a head like S. Slawter?” I nodded up and down as LaThon shifted and looked right in Seff 6'2’s eyes. “Everythang about y’all is erroneous. Every. Thang. This that black abundance. Y’all don’t even know.”
LaThon’s favorite vocab word in seventh grade was “abundance,” but I’d never heard him throw “black” and “that” in front of it until we got to St. Richard.
While LaThon was cutting his half into smaller slices, he looked at me and said Seth six-two and them didn’t even know about the slicing “shhhtyle” he used.
Right as I dapped LaThon up, Ms. Reeves, our white homeroom teacher, pointed at LaThon and me. Ms. Reeves looked like a much older version of Wendy from the Wendy’s restaurants. We looked at each other, shook our heads, and kept cutting our grapefruit slices. “Put the knife away, LaThon,” she said. “Put it down. Now!”
“Mee-guh,” we said to each other. “Meager,” the opposite of LaThon’s favorite word, was my favorite word at the end of seventh grade. We used different pronunciations of meager to describe people, places, things, and shhhtyles that were at least eight levels less than nothing. “Mee-guh,” I told her again, and pulled out my raggedy Trapper Keeper. “Mee-guh.”
While Ms. Reeves was still talking, I wrote “#1 tape of our #1 group?” on a note and passed it to LaThon. He leaned over and wrote, “EPMD and Strictly Business.” I wrote, “#1 girl you wanna marry?” He wrote, “Spinderalla + Tootie.” I wrote, “#1 white person who don’t even know?” LaThon looked down at his new red and gray Air Maxes, then up at the ceiling. Finally, he shook his head and wrote, “Ms. Reeves + Ronald Reagan. It’s a tie. With they meager ass.”
I balled up the note and put it in my too-tight khakis while Ms. Reeves kept talking to us the way you told me white folk would talk to us if we weren’t perfect, the way I saw white women at the mall and police talk to you whether you’d broken the law or not.
I understood how Ms. Reeves had every reason in her world to think I was a sweaty, red-eyed underachiever who drank half a Mason jar of box wine before coming to school. That’s almost exactly who I was. But LaThon was as close to abundant as an eighth grader could be.
LaThon brilliantly said “skrrimps” instead of “shrimp” because “skrrimps” just sounded better. He added three s’s to “mine” so it sounded like “minessss” no matter where we were. I once watched him tear open a black-and-white TV and make it into a bootleg version of Frogger and a miniature box fan for his girlfriend. One Friday in seventh grade, I saw him make the freshest paper airplane in the history of paper airplanes in Jackson. For five minutes and forty-six seconds, that plane soared, flipped, and dipped while LaThon and I ran underneath it for three blocks down Beaverbrook Drive. When the plane finally landed, LaThon kept
looking up at the sky, wondering how the pocket of wind that carried our plane could find its way into a city like Jackson. LaThon could do anything, but the thing I’d never seen him do was come close to hurting someone who hadn’t hurt him first, with a knife, his hands, or even his words.
“It’s not a knife. It’s a butter knife,” I told Ms. Reeves. “And it’s dull. Why she acting like a nigga got fine cutlery up in here?”
“You know,” LaThon said. “ ’Cause they preposterous in this school.”
“Preposterous-er than a mug,” I told Ms. Reeves, looking directly at Jabari, the other Holy Family black boy in our homeroom. LaThon and I knew it was against the West Jackson law for Jabari to get in trouble in school, so we didn’t take it personally when he didn’t stand up for us. LaThon got whuppings from his grandmama. I got beatings from you. Jabari could get beat the fuck up by his father when he got home. In Jackson, getting a whupping was so much gentler than getting a beating, and getting a beating was actually ticklish compared to getting beat the fuck up.
Ms. Reeves marched out of the room to get Ms. Stockard, a white teacher who’d subbed a few times at Holy Family. Ms. Stockard watched LaThon, Jabari, and me eat grapefruits with actual silver knives plenty of times at Holy Family and never said a word.
But it didn’t matter.
“This isn’t how we wanted you guys to start the year,” she said as we all walked to the principal’s office to call you and call LaThon’s grandparents.
I sat in the principal’s office thinking about what you told me the day before we started St. Richard. “Be twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this point on,” you said. “Everything you thought you knew changes tomorrow. Being twice as excellent as white folk will get you half of what they get. Being anything less will get you hell.”
I assumed we were already twice as excellent as the white kids at St. Richard precisely because their library looked like a cathedral and ours was an old trailer on cinder blocks. I thought you should have told me to be twice as excellent as you or Grandmama since y’all were the most excellent people I knew.
