Heavy

“My body knew things my mouth and my mind couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, express. It knew that all over my neighborhood, boys were trained to harm girls in ways girls could never harm boys, straight kids were trained to harm queer kids in ways queer kids could never harm straight kids, men were trained to harm women in ways women could never harm men, parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them. I didn’t know how to tell you or anyone else the stories my body told me, but, like you, I knew how to run, deflect, and duck.” 

Body-knowledge will be a recurring idea in Heavy: the body understanding or admitting what the mind doesn’t want to. Here, Laymon can feel the rules of an oppressive culture before he can articulate them. It’s in part because this knowledge lives in Laymon’s body that the body is the place where he will later play out his shame and self-hatred.

“I don’t know why but beating you felt harmful. I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. Knowing, or accepting I could beat you was enough for me. We both knew that game would be the last game we ever played no matter the score because we both knew, without saying it, you needed to not lose much more than I needed to win. When you made the last shot of the game, you celebrated, hugged my neck, told me good game, and held my hand.” 

Even as a child, Laymon understands the dynamics of his relationship with his mother. Here, he takes on a parental role, understanding that it’s his job to keep his mother safe from even the small indignity of losing a game to her child. The two of them collude to maintain a lie, but that lie is also founded on genuine love for each other.

“The tearing of flesh hurt less than it should have, I think, because 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.” 

This passage is an early instance of a characteristic piece of Laymon’s style: the sentence-long paragraph. Laymon often uses an isolated sentence to undermine, complicate, or emphasize the paragraph that comes before it. Here, the words “that would have made everything a lot less confusing” poignantly express Laymon’s conflict over his relationship with his mother. Her inconsistency is more painful to him than her violence.

“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.” 

In this passage, when the young Laymon tries to ignore the return of his mother’s abusive boyfriend, he turns his hatred onto himself. More specifically, he turns his hatred onto his body. Here, he uses food to stop up his own mouth, the sticky peanut butter and preserves clogging his voice. He can’t tell the truth of his hatred and anger to his mother, so he forces his pain back down into his body instead. His use of his beloved grandmother’s preserves in this binge is also relevant: he’s trying to eat his way toward love and safety as well as to restrain himself.

“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.’” 

Laymon’s grandmother’s response to his weight introduces a new dimension to the idea of being “heavy.” Here, she thinks of heaviness as substance, reliability, and selfhood, rather than something burdensome, excessive, or ugly. The paradoxes of heaviness—self-hate and self-love, weakness and solidity—will continue to play out over the course of the book.

“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 thick thighs instead of my arms, my neck, my hands, and my face like you did when I went to Holy Family. I knew that if my white classmates were getting beaten at home, they were not getting beaten at home because of what any black person on Earth thought about them.”

Earlier in the chapter where this passage appears, Laymon makes a distinction between the less severe “whupping” and the pretty-serious “beating” (neither as bad as getting “beat the fuck up”). Recalling that distinction again here, he underlines this passage’s ideas about a Black world illegible to the white world that exerts power over it. Whiteness is the origin point of the violence that can be so carefully delineated in Black language.

“Wait, I know my nigga ain’t acting all sensitive over no scale. you ain’t gross. you know that, right? You ain’t gross. You just a heavy nigga who quicker than most skinny niggas we know. You ain’t gross. You hear me? You you.” 

Laymon’s friend LaThon, coiner of the “black abundance” after which this section of the book is titled, here makes use of a white-coded word to deny a white-coded judgment. Laymon earlier remarks that no one in his Black community used the word “gross” or thought of anyone’s body as “gross.” By using the word here, LaThon rejects the very concept of grossness, and with it the white paradigm that rejects Laymon’s body.

“They don’t even know about the Abundance. For real. We can’t even be mad. They don’t even know.” 

In another important language moment, LaThon revitalizes the word “abundance,” plucking it from a dry vocabulary list and transforming it into an idea that helps to keep him and his friends afloat in a hostile environment. This joyful, playful deepening of a school assignment is an example of the very abundance he describes.

“It seemed like just driving, or walking into a house, or doing your job, or cutting grapefruit was all it took to get shot out of the sky. And the biggest problem was police weren’t the only people doing the shooting. They were just the only people allowed to walk around and threaten us with guns and prison if they didn’t like our style of flying.

I loved our style of flying.” 

Using one of his emphatic one-sentence paragraphs, Laymon introduces another image of heaviness and lightness. This time, Black talent, liberation, and joy are imagined as flight—an image that perhaps echoes Toni Morrison’s Sula, which itself uses images of flight drawn from Black American folkloric traditions. This flight, as Laymon notes, can be interrupted by white violence in more and less overt ways.

“For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words. Revisiting and rearranging words didn’t only require vocabulary; it required will, and maybe courage. Revised word patterns were revised thought patterns. Revised thought patterns shaped memory. I knew, looking at all those words, that memories were there. I just had to rearrange, add, subtract, sit and sift until I found a way to free the memory

Laymon’s reading of memory lays out his attitude toward the project of memoir as a whole. To Laymon, memory isn’t something you have and then convey. Rather, it’s something locked up in a sort of mental puzzle-box; words have to be shifted around until the right combination is found to free a truth that is trapped inside them.

“About three hours into Donnie Gee’s party, Kamala Lackey asked me to follow her into one of the bedrooms. [...] The room we walked into was the same room where Donnie Gee and I watched Clarence Thomas talk about experiencing a high-tech lynching when Anita Hill told on him for sexually harassing her. I knew Clarence Thomas was lying because there was no reason in the world for Anita Hill to lie, and because I’d never met one older man who treated women the way he wanted to be treated. Every older man I knew treated every woman he wanted to have sex with like a woman he wanted to have sex with. Clarence Thomas seemed as cowardly as every older man to me.” 

When Kamala confesses a secret to Laymon, he promises not to reveal it, and he keeps that promise in Heavy. But his reference to the Clarence Thomas case, in which Anita Hill’s credible accusations of sexual harassment did not prevent Thomas from being confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, suggests that Kamala might have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of an older man. This passage also inflects Laymon’s own confession, shortly thereafter, that he falsely hinted to other boys that he and Kamala slept together. Laymon’s self-critique—his understanding that being a thoughtful and reflective “nice guy” has not stopped him from doing violence in less obvious ways—is part of his drive toward honesty and challenges his readers to interrogate themselves with similar rigor.

“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 students, or white randoms. I didn’t want to teach white folk not to steal. I didn’t want to teach white folk to treat us respectfully. I wanted to fairly fight white folk and I wanted to known them out. Even more than knocking them out, I wanted to never, ever lose to them again.” 

The “manufactured excellence” Laymon talks about here hearkens back to the first pages of Heavy and the dishonest, pleasing memoir he couldn’t write. Manufactured excellence, to Laymon, means toeing a line drawn by white people in the first place, exchanging insincerity for a temporary, tenuous, and always-revocable safety. 

“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.” 

“Safe, private, and celebratory:” the feelings Laymon seeks in cakes are those feelings the world most often denies him. The privacy of cakes is especially telling. A big part of Laymon’s suffering is constant intrusion: other people’s opinions on his body and his capacities are always there to get in his way and knock him down. This passage is also important for its observation about one of the more insidious consequences of racism in education: if you can never be weak, uncertain, or wrong without being judged, your capacity to learn will suffer.

“‘I don’t know, Kie,’ you said. ‘Sometimes I think I go from one disaster to another.’

‘But why?’ I asked you.

‘Why what?’

‘Why do you go from one disaster to another?’

‘I think part of me feels most calm during those really quick destructive storms.’

‘But maybe you’d feel even more calm during calm.’”

In this passage, Laymon’s mother again calls on him as a child might call on a parent. She also expresses a problem that Laymon will likewise grapple with: the strangely alluring familiarity of suffering. The hypothesis that one might feel calmer during calm than disaster is surprisingly scary for his mother to approach. Under many other forms of addiction, Laymon suggests, lies disaster-addiction.

“[...] the only class I attended and participated in regularly was a class called ‘Introduction to Women’s Studies.’ I read everything for the class twice, arrived early, and stayed late because the class gave me a new vocabulary to make sense of what I saw growing up. Before the class, I knew men, regardless of race, had the power to abuse in ways women didn’t. I knew the power to abuse destroyed the interiors of men as much as it destroyed the interiors and exteriors of women.” 

Laymon’s childhood body-feelings of the wrongness of male violence toward women and white violence toward Black people (among other forms of oppression) develop into a scholarly interest in women’s studies. The influence of feminist thinkers, especially Black feminist thinkers, is visible in the very structure of Heavy, down to its epigram from Toni Cade Bambara. These women’s studies classes, unlike those that Laymon skips or stays silent for, connect to Laymon’s earlier body-knowledge, giving shape to a deeper knowing.

“The editor told me I needed to make the ending of the piece much more colorblind. He said I would lose readers if I kept the focus of the essay on what black students at Millsaps could do to organize, love each other, and navigate institutional racism. He said my primary audience should be white students who wanted to understand what they needed to do about racism on their college campus. After going back and forth, the editor won because it was his newspaper, and I was desperate to be read by white folk.”

The editor’s demand that Laymon rewrite his editorial to reach a broader (i.e. whiter) audience is an example of exactly what Laymon’s mother has taught him to expect. Laymon’s mother, a professor, teaches him never to use contractions or Black-coded slang, and the editor’s reaction to Laymon’s piece shows why. To try to be heard by white people, Laymon again has to choke back his own voice and his own genuine feelings.

“I read The Fire Next Time over and over again. I wondered how it would read differently had the entire book, and not just the first section, been written to, and for, Baldwin’s nephew. I wondered what, and how, Baldwin would have written to his niece. I wondered about the purpose of warning white folk about the coming fire. Mostly, I wondered what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change.” 

Laymon’s response to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time points at an important stylistic influence on Heavy. Here, Laymon’s thoughts about Baldwin’s use of an address to a beloved family member make an obvious connection between The Fire Next Time and Heavy. Laymon is standing on Baldwin’s shoulders, moving deeper into questions about the lives of Black women and the freedom (or lack thereof) of Black writers to speak to Black audiences.

“I will not be back soon.

I will forget how the insides of my thighs feel when rubbed raw. I will play on the basketball team. I will think 190 pounds is too heavy so I will jog three miles before every practice and game. I will sit in saunas for hours draped in thermals, sweatpants, and sweatshirts. I will make a family of people who cannot believe I was ever heavy. I will become a handsome, fine, together brother with lots of secrets. I will realize there is no limit to the amount of harm handsome, fine, together brothers with lots of secrets can do.” 

The style of the conclusion to Part II prefigures other important moments in the book. Laymon’s “I will” refrain here returns when his body gives out after years of anorexia, and again when he imagines a future—powerful, but uncertain—of greater truth, honesty, and acceptance at the end of the book. This repetition might make the reader think of Laymon’s earlier passage about unlocking memories through revision. The memoirist has the luxury of knowing what happens to his subject—but only up to a point.

“Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered. I knew Grandmama would act like she recovered before thanking Jesus for keeping her alive. She would never publicly reckon with damage done to her insides and outsides at the hands of people who claimed to have her best interest at heart. She would just thank Jesus for getting through the other side of suffering. Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family’s superpowers.”

Laymon’s account of his grandmother’s horrific suffering at the hands of doctors recalls his first chapters, when he makes a stand about the lies he refuses to tell. One of those lies is about “magical black grandmothers” and their superhuman resilience. Part of Laymon’s work in Heavy is to show that such resilience is born of cruel necessity; no one should have to be resilient through so much avoidable pain, and the myth of resilience only leads to more pain.

“By my third semester at Vassar, I learned it was fashionable to call Cole’s predicament ‘privilege’ and not ‘power.’ I had the privilege of being raised by you and a grandmama who responsibly loved me in the blackest, most creative state in the nation. Cole had the power to never be poor and never be a felon, the power to always have his failures treated as success no matter how mediocre he was. Cole’s power necessitated he literally was too white, too masculine, too rich to fail. George Bush was president because of Cole’s power. An even richer, more mediocre white man could be president next because of Cole’s power. Even progressive presidents would bow to Cole’s power. Grandmama, the smartest, most responsible human being I knew, cut open chicken bellies and washed the shit out of white folks’ dirty underwear because of Cole’s power. She could never be president. And she never wanted to be because she knew that the job necessitated moral mediocrity. My job, I learned that first year, was to dutifully teach Cole to use this power less abusively.” 

Laymon here rejects the term “white privilege” as insufficient, returning instead to “white power”—a term with more menacing and violent associations, putting the reader in mind of Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. The young Cole, in wriggling out of consequences for his drug dealing by pushing the blame onto an imaginary Black dealer, is not merely exerting privilege, but a kind of power that originates in violence. The “moral mediocrity” demanded by the role of President is the mediocrity that can work comfortably with this system.

“That Thursday, the first day in eight years I did not push my body to exhaustion, my body knew what was going to happen, because it, and only it, knew what I’d made it do, and what I hoped it would forget. I sat on the floor knowing my body broke because I carried and created secrets that were way too heavy.” 

When Laymon finally collapses after years of anorexia and grueling exercise, he feels his collapse as an emotional crisis as much as a physical one. The link between body and mind, and the double-bind of being a Black man in America, are starkly revealed here. To be a more “acceptable” Black man, Laymon must at once abuse his body and present a face of health. 

“I would learn fifteen years too late that asking for consent, granting consent, surviving sexual violence, being called a good dude, and never initiating sexual relationships did not incubate me from being emotionally abusive. Consent meant little to nothing if it was not fully informed. What, and to whom, were my partners consenting if I spent or entire relationship convincing them that a circle was not a circle but just a really relaxed square? I’d become good at losing weight and great at convincing women they didn’t see or know what they absolutely saw and knew. Lying there on the floor, I accepted that I’d never been honest with myself about what carrying decades of lies did to other people’s hearts and heads.”

Laymon’s work is deeply interested in reciprocity and connectedness. His study of intersectionality—the ways in which different categories of oppression overlap—leads him to reflect on the ways in which he used power harmfully just as power was used harmfully against him. Here, that idea is further complicated by his reading of how the shame and pain that produce dishonesty cause harm as well as being harm. 

“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 manipulated. I will not misdirect or manipulate myself. I will not say I am naked when I am fully clothed. I will not say I am sorry when I am resentful. I will not give my blessings away. I will love myself enough to be honest when I fail at loving. I will accept that black children will not recover from economic inequality, housing discrimination, sexual violence, heteropatriarchy, mass incarceration, mass evictions, and parental abuse. I will accept that black children are all worthy of the most abundant, patient, responsible kind of love and liberation this word has ever created. And we are worthy of sharing the most abundant, patient, responsible kind of love and liberation with every vulnerable child on this planet.”

The return of Laymon’s “I will” refrain here raises a painful, grounded hope. But the book doesn’t leave it here. Rather, it ends on note of uncertainty: maybe, Laymon goes on to say, I won’t do any of these things, but keep on doing exactly what America has trained all Americans to do: to hide, to lie, to forget. Refusing to end on a note of unreflecting strength is part of refusing a false lightness in favor of a truthful heaviness.