Heavy: An American Memoir
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
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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.
Kiese Laymon • Heavy: An American Memoir
The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words:
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gumption?
Kiese Laymon • Heavy: An American Memoir
I left my car at work, ran to my apartment, did some push-ups, weighed myself, ran six miles around Poughkeepsie, came back home, locked the bedroom door, did more push-ups, said prayers, got in bed, and accepted no matter how much weight I lost, small, smart white boys would always have the power to make big black boys force them into buying our
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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
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hated about The Cosby Show. The sweaters, the corny kids, the problems that weren’t problems, the smooth jazz, the manufactured cleanliness, the nonexistent poverty just didn’t do it for me. It wasn’t only that the Cosbys were never broke, or in need of money, or that none of their black family members and friends were ever in material need of
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Do not steal nothing from no white folk. Ever. Or you likely to be off in hell with them folk one day.”
Kiese Laymon • Heavy: An American Memoir
I’d fallen in love with provoking white folk, which really meant I’d fallen in love with begging white folk to free us by demanding that they radically love themselves more.