Heavy: An American Memoir

There will always be scars on, and in, my body from where you harmed me. You will always have scars on, and in, your body from where we harmed you. You and I have nothing and everything to be ashamed of, but I am no longer ashamed of this heavy black body you helped create. I know that our beautiful bruised black bodies are where we bend.

You taught us to give our lives and work to the liberation of black children in this country. I am working on that, and I finally understand there can be no liberation when our most intimate relationships are built on—and really inflected by—deception, abuse, misdirection, antiblackness, patriarchy, and bald-faced lies. Not teaching me this would h

I will send a draft of the book to you when I think it’s done. I will take out some of what you say needs to be taken out. I will not ignore your questions about my weight. I will not punish myself. I will not misdirect or manipulate human beings, regardless of their age, especially those human beings who love me enough to risk being misdirected or

A few years later, we would meet a skinny, scared, scarred, brilliant black man who walked like you want me to walk, talked like you want me to talk, and wrote like you want me write. When he became president of the United States, you would tell your 235-pound child that the costs of any president loving black folks might be too much, but the viole

I’d been forced, since I left you in that driveway six years earlier, to accept I didn’t understand much about any part of the country other than our part of Mississippi. I assumed all black folk in the nation were from the Deep South. I had no idea how many black folk there were in the nation from Africa and the Caribbean.

LaThon got whupped by a black woman who loved him when he got home. I got beaten by a black woman who loved me the next morning. With every lash you brought down on my body, I was reminded of what I knew, and how I knew it. I knew you didn’t want white folk to judge you if I came to school with visible welts, so you beat me on my back, my ass, my t

I waited in the parking lot of my apartment for a white woman walking out of the complex to get in her car so I wouldn’t scare her.

I listened to the Coup and read everything James Baldwin had written that summer. 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. I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not jus

I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white studen