by Kiese Laymon
Later that summer, I saw LaThon before he left for the University of Alabama. We would always be friends, but we’d stopped taking care of each other when I started seeing Abby Claremont. LaThon told me he got in some trouble at Freaknik and needed Malachi Hunter to connect him with a lawyer who could help get a case thrown out before his school heard about it. I told him I didn’t really talk with Malachi Hunter at all anymore, and even if I did, Malachi Hunter might have been in some legal trouble of his own.
“You the only one of us who ain’t caught up with the police,” he said. “And you the craziest one of all of us.”
“I ain’t crazy, not like that.”
“Bruh,” he said and looked at me without blinking. “Come on, bruh. You ain’t crazy like that? Who you think you talking to? Ever since fourth grade, who got kicked out of school more than you? Who was fucking around with a white girl knowing his mama did not play? Who was steady telling these white folk the truth to they face? Who gave the whole bus a speech about fucking without condoms after Magic got HIV? Who was talking shit to the police like they weren’t police since we were like twelve years old? You the only person I know who will do and say anything anywhere anytime. Swear to God, you the only person I know who ain’t scared of nothing we supposed to be scared of. But I’m like how this nigga got all that gumption, and somehow, he ain’t never even been arrested?”
“Not yet.”
“You still don’t drank or smoke weed?”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet?” LaThon mocked me. “If you ain’t smoke yet, you ain’t never gone smoke. You think it’s ’cause your mama beat the tar out of your ass all the time?”
I dapped LaThon up and hugged him. “Nah,” I said. “I don’t think it’s ’cause my mama beat the tar out my ass. We all scared of something.”
“I’m just playing,” he said. “Quit being sensitive. I can’t believe you staying in Jackson and going to that white-ass private school. You forgot how meager it was the last time we went to one of they schools in eighth grade?”
“I love you, bruh,” I told him for the first time in our lives. “Don’t forget about your boys when you in engineering school.”
“I love you, too, bruh. Don’t forget about your boys when you get kicked out of that private white school.”
“Ain’t nobody getting kicked out of college,” I told him. “It’s still that black abundance, right?”
“You already know,” LaThon said. “All day. Every day. And they still don’t even know.”
FANTASTIC
You sat in the driver’s seat singing the wrong lyrics to Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love” while I rode shotgun wishing you would drive faster. We were headed to the airport. You’d been awarded another postdoc. This one was at Harvard University for the entire academic year. I was eighteen years old, 242 pounds. I had $175 to my name.
“Do you try to sing the lyrics wrong every time?” I asked you.
“Sometimes.”
We didn’t say another word until we were in front of your departure gate. “I think we need this time away,” you said. “Maybe I’ll worry less about you if I know I can’t control anything you do.”
“Maybe.”
“I know,” you said. “I know.”
I asked you if I could take some books from the house to have in my dorm room. You reached up, pulled on my neck, and kissed me on the top of the head. I pulled away. “Maybe the books will protect you,” you said. “Take all the books you need. And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry. Don’t let those people shoot you out of the sky while I’m gone.” I rolled my eyes and sucked hard on my teeth as you walked to the end of the line. “Don’t be good,” you said across the space between us. “Be perfect. Be fantastic.”
You smiled. I smiled.
You waved. I waved.
You fake yawned. I fake yawned.
You disappeared. I was free.
I wanted you to be safe in Boston and get your work done. I wanted you to finally find healthy, affirming love and all that stuff they sang about on the adult contemporary radio stations. I also didn’t want you to ever come back to Mississippi if I was there.
Instead of driving back to Millsaps, I went to the Waffle House across from the Coliseum, right next to the Dunkin’ Donuts, and ordered the all-you-can-eat special on the left side of the menu. I’d never driven myself to a restaurant. Sitting alone and ordering a waffle, an omelet, hash browns, cheese grits, a patty melt, and another waffle with pecans made me feel grown. I cleaned all my plates, walked next door, ordered a dozen donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts without wondering or caring how the caked-up glaze on my face looked to anyone.
I felt so free.
The next day, all the first- and second-year black boys gathered in Clinton Mayes’s room. We all liked each other on Friday night when no one was drinking. We all loved each other Saturday night when nearly everyone was drunk.
I hadn’t had a drink in seven years because I was afraid I’d shoot myself or someone else. But I smiled a lot, and I nodded, and I listened, and I blinked my big red eyes really slowly, and said “that’s funny to me” every eight minutes. That, and the fact I was from Jackson, was enough to make folk think I was drunk and high.
I heard the sentence “We gone make it” more than thirty-four times that weekend. The sentence was always followed by a hug, a “you already know,” or an offering of a peppermint from this hovering long-neck senior named Myles.
I learned to say “You already know” and “We gone make it” that weekend, too, but I didn’t understand why we wouldn’t make it. Most of us made it through high school in Mississippi. At Millsaps, we were only reading books. We were only writing papers. We were only taking tests. The students surrounding us were only white, and all of us were Mississippi, black, and abundant. That meant we were the kinfolk of Fannie Lou Hamer, Ida B. Wells, and Medgar Evers. I assumed we were wittier, tougher, and more imaginative than white students, administrators, and faculty because we had to be.
I told a super-duper senior from Winona named Ray Gunn he looked like a bootleg Stokely Carmichael. “You mean, Kwame Ture old ass looked like me when he was young,” he said.
I told Gunn I assumed the teachers at Saps would do everything possible, in and out of the classroom, to make sure all of us did far more than make it. Even though Ray Gunn just looked at me and blinked, we got along well the first day we met because he was shameless and loved trying to invent slang that never stuck. “These Saps teachers,” he said, “they gives no fuck about dumb black blasters like us when we leave that classroom. You ain’t special. I ain’t special. Not to them. Or you way too special because they think you an exception to the race. You’ll see. You better practice saying words like ‘fantastic’ in the mirror. Saps is known for making dumb blasters forget who they wanted to be.”
There weren’t many black boys at Millsaps, but nearly all of us were football and basketball recruits from Mississippi. Ray Gunn told me when most of the black boys in his class lost their eligibility, they went back home, or went to work somewhere, and never graduated. “All that,” he said, “and them damn oral and written comps be fucking up our flow. Flow-fuckers. They be thinning out dumb blasters faster than you think.”
The black girls I met that first weekend were not recruited to play a sport, but like us, they hadn’t been around this many white folk with money before either. Most of them said they wanted to be doctors, accountants, or lawyers. This freshly dressed bowlegged girl named Nzola Johnston made the whole room fall out laughing when she called herself “fake-ass Denise Huxtable at night” and a “fake-ass Claire Huxtable during the day.” Nzola told all the girls, in front of all the boys, that they had to look out for themselves because black women couldn’t count on these white folk or “those niggas over there” to look out for them.
When I wasn’t in class, in the cafeteria, playing basketball, or drivin
g to get food, I spent most of my first semester in my room writing parts of essays I hoped to plug into paper assignments. I acted the part of a smart black boy from Mississippi, even though it was harder for me to dress the part. I used all my work-study money to buy sweet potato pies and gas instead of clothes that fit. After a month in school, the one pair of khakis I liked to wear couldn’t fit around the bottom of my ass.
The first few weeks of school, I was asked by security to show my ID inside my room a few times and I was accused of plagiarism for using the word “ambivalent” in an English class. I wanted to tell the teacher who accused me how I never even used a thesaurus when writing because I thought that was cheating. Immediately after the plagiarism accusation, I started bringing five books to all my classes. Usually, the books had nothing to do with the class I was taking. I sometimes stacked the books on my desk. Sometimes I slowly brought them out one at a time, and even slower, I placed them back in my briefcase, letting the white students and professor know I’d read more than they would.
In class, I only spoke when I could be an articulate defender of black people. I didn’t use the classroom to ask questions. I didn’t use the classroom to make ungrounded claims. There was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than. For the first time in my life, the classroom scared me. And when I was scared, I ran to cakes, because cakes felt safe, private, and celebratory.
Cakes never fought back.
By the time I met Nzola Johnston again, my thighs rubbed raw and newer stretch marks streaked across my belly. When Nzola walked past my table at the grill one Wednesday night, I was halfway through three big greasy pieces of Red Velvet cake and was reading a book by Derrick Bell called Faces at the Bottom of the Well.
Nzola Johnston walked past my table on the way out, rocking the bushiest eyebrows and deepest frown lines of anyone I’ve ever met other than Grandmama. She dressed like she worked at the Gap and listened to A Tribe Called Quest 24/7, but she talked like she was bored to death of dudes in Jackson who worked at the Gap and listened to A Tribe Called Quest 24/7.
“You like to read, huh?” she asked. I didn’t say anything. I just nodded up and down in slo-mo. “Oh, okay,” she said. “I’m Kenyatta’s roommate, Nzola. She said you like Digable Planets and be making all kinds of sense in liberal studies class.”
“That’s what’s up,” I said. “I know who you are. We already met.”
“Just because you were in a room looking at my ass does not mean we met. What’s your name mean?”
“Joy,” I told her. “In Kikongo, it means joy. My father was in Zaire when I was born. What about Nzola?”
“If you want to know, you’ll find out. I’ll definitely see you later, Kiese.”
I decided that night I was going to come to the Grill every day of the week with a different book, hoping Nzola Johnston would see me reading. I stayed in the library that night trying to find what Nzola meant. When I couldn’t find it, the librarian told me I should try the Internet.
“The what?” I asked her.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll look around and see what I can find for you.”
Six nights after Nzola Johnston said she would definitely see me later, I watched her say “I’ll definitely see you later” to two black seniors sweating her way too hard. After she walked out of the Grill, and they walked out after her, Nzola came back.
“You running away from something,” she said during our first conversation. “I am, too. I don’t know what I’m running from but I’m definitely running. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You running from something,” she said again. “Or you wouldn’t be here tonight hoping I showed up.” Before I could say anything, Nzola kept talking. She said she watched you doing election analysis on WJTV for years. She called you one of her heroes, and asked me what life was like growing up in the house of such a strong, brilliant black woman. I started to answer when she said, “These white girls are so trifling. A few of them act like they got some sense. Most of them, not a drop of sense. Not one drop. But they got all the money. It’s so annoying. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“The money stuff doesn’t get on your nerves?”
I didn’t want the white folk at Millsaps or Nzola to know I just got a bank account and only had thirty-seven dollars in it. I didn’t want them to know thirty-seven dollars was a lot of disposable income to everyone in our family near the third week of every month.
“They do them,” I said. “We do us. My money is good so I’m good. Is it weird having a name that means ‘love’?”
“Your money that good?” she asked, ignoring my game. “Or you that free? Because I’m trying be free. You think you the shit because you found out what my name means?”
“Yup,” I said. “I think I’m the shit because I found out what your name means.” I called Nzola an ol’ fake-ass Angela Davis and told her I was trying to be free, too, and it helped that my money was already good. She asked me why I always talked about my money being good. I laughed and laughed and laughed until I didn’t.
Nzola and I met at the Grill over greasy pieces of Red Velvet cake five days in a row. The next week, I bought her the new Digable Planets tape and took her out to the Chinese buffet every day for lunch or dinner. I bounced two checks and exceeded the limit on my new credit card the following week. The week after Nzola, Ray Gunn, and I were falsely accused of plagiarizing a paper in separate English classes, I bounced two more checks on an Izod rugby shirt.
Every waking moment on that campus was filled with my trying to misdirect people from seeing who I really was. Misdirection was fun, but it was also exhausting. I wasn’t sure who I really was, but I understood where I was. I was right in the middle of Jackson, my city, but I was so far from home.
When I was admitted into Millsaps, I knew on one side of the school was the neighborhood of Belhaven, where wealthy white liberals who hadn’t flown to Madison and Rankin lived. On the other side of the college was a poor black neighborhood called the North End. I knew the gates facing the North End were always bolted shut, and the gates facing Belhaven were always open, always welcoming. I knew that white boys at my majority black high school got punched in their mouths repeatedly for wearing Confederate flags on their shirts or talking mess about the Old South. I knew at Millsaps that those shirts were as common as fake Polos and Izods.
One semester into school, and I now knew most of the groundskeepers were black men. I knew most of the cafeteria workers and folk who cleaned the dorms were black women. I knew the fraternities and sororities spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday out of their minds, breaking things that shouldn’t be broken. I knew dorms, classrooms, offices, paths, and parties were filled with white students, faculty, and administrators saying in their own way that our presence at their school was proof they were innocent, and could never be racist. I knew, after a semester at Millsaps, books couldn’t save me from a college, classes, a library, dorms, and a cafeteria that belonged to wealthy white folk. I never expected to have that feeling right in the middle of my city.
Two weeks later, Nzola and I were in her room, kissing each other’s necks like it was going out of style while her roommate slept. I saw pictures of Nzola’s boyfriend’s face down under her bed next to these blue paintings and brown chicken-wire sculptures. Nzola’s boyfriend’s jawline was so pronounced. He looked like Lance, one of Theo’s friends from The Cosby Show.
Nzola whispered she wanted us to be like Bill and Hillary Clinton except we’d actually love black folk and not just what black folk did for us.
“Cool,” I said, and kissed her forehead. “Your boyfriend probably won’t like you being married to me, though.”
“Neither will your white girlfriend,” she said. I hadn’t told her about my relationship with Abby Claremont, but someone else had.
“What
white girlfriend?”
“Wow,” Nzola said. “You didn’t use to mess with a white girl? Niggas these days love acting like niggas these days.”
Three weeks later, right before Thanksgiving break, Nzola and I were on a stage after midnight in the academic complex doing the heaviest petting I’d ever done. Nzola told me she loved my bottom lip and never wanted to stop kissing me.
I didn’t believe her.
She asked if we should go somewhere private because there were hidden cameras on campus watching every move we made. We headed back to her room since Kenyatta was gone for the weekend. Nzola handed me a condom while we were on the floor.
“What’s your boyfriend’s name?” I asked her. “He’s way older than us and he’s a doctor, right?”
“He’s just a good friend,” she said. “And yeah, he’s a doctor. He’s twenty-seven.”
“What’s your twenty-seven-year-old good friend the doctor’s name?”
“His name is James.”
“How you end up with a Golden Grahams–type dude with a basic-ass name like Dr. James?” I asked her.
“What’s your girlfriend’s name? Molly, right? Or something like Claire,” she said. “I don’t care what that white skeezer’s name is. I wanna ask you something.”
“What?”
“I want you to tell me what being with me makes you feel.”
“For real?”
“Yeah,” she said. “For real. Like what do your insides feel when you’re around me?”
“Heavy,” I told her.
“Heavy like deep?”
“Maybe a little, but more heavy like huge. Heavy like dumb fat. What about you?”
“But heavy and huge and dumb fat are three completely different things,” she said.
“You think so?”
“I’m small but I know I’m heavy. What about you?”
Nzola’s baggy clothes and full cheeks cloaked a tiny frame. She wasn’t just tiny compared to me, or tiny compared to Abby Claremont; she was tiny compared to every woman who’d ever kissed me. “You asked me and I told you. You can’t tell I gained like forty pounds since school started.”
