Heavy

Laymon remembers growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, and the time he used to spend at the house of Beulah Beauford, a neighbor whose well-stocked pantry and in-ground pool marked her out as rich. There, Laymon would avoid his academic mother’s instructions to work on an essay using Beulah’s encyclopedias, and instead hang out and swam with Beulah’s son, Dougie. Dougie’s teenage cousin and his older friends would hang around the house forcing the younger kids to act as their servants or to box for their amusement.

The older boys’ commands become sinister one day: in exchange for allowing another visitor, a teenage girl called Layla, to swim in the pool, they take her into a bedroom and close the door behind them. Laymon is confused: “‘What they up in there doing?’ I asked Dougie, whose ear was pressed against Daryl’s door. ‘Fool, what you think? Running a train’” (17). Laymon can’t imagine what this means, but knows it’s sexual, and connects it to what happened between him and a babysitter named Renata, a student of his mother’s who used to put her breasts in his mouth. When her boyfriend came over to the house and the two had sex in Laymon’s bed, Laymon blamed himself, feeling that he was too fat for Renata to stay interested.

After the boys emerge from the locked room, they invite Laymon to take a turn. Laymon refuses, and instead brings Layla some Kool-Aid; then, overwhelmed, he runs home. His mother is angry with him for coming home early and for not doing the essay she assigned him. She’s a stickler for white-coded “proper” language: she refuses to let Laymon use contractions, warning him that he needs to speak carefully to avoid being hurt by white people. Laymon reflects that, though he couldn’t express it, he felt in his body the ways in which people in positions of power were trained to harm weaker people: boys against girls, straight people against queer people, white people against Black people. He, like his mother, can’t express this, only try to run from it through being unimpeachably correct.

As a punishment for disobedience, Laymon’s mother sets him to write lines: “I promise to read and write as I’m told when I go to Beulah Beauford’s house.” Laymon writes his lines, but doesn’t finish the last one, instead concluding: “I promise to read and write as I’m told” (29).

Laymon remembers going to the grocery store with his mother and being turned away at the cash register: her picture is on a sign warning the cashier not to accept her checks. Laymon’s mother walks away remarking that the people who wrote the sign didn’t even know to use the word “any” instead of “nan.” Laymon protests that his grandmother says “nan,” and his mother retorts that his grandmother wasn’t educated, and the grocery store people don’t have that excuse. She warns him: “Don’t excuse mediocrity, Kie” (31). Then, exhausted, she falls asleep in the car. Laymon drives them home. He looks on her with love as she sleeps, thinking of her charisma and brilliance: she’s a beloved teacher, and she appears on TV as a political commentator sometimes. No one in the neighborhood would suspect that their family is struggling.

Laymon’s mother once took him to a psychologist, which he didn’t like much, especially because his mother stayed in the room. He told the psychologist his parents’ story: his parents met in college, and his mom got pregnant not long after they started dating. The couple married, but soon divorced, and his dad was never especially involved. When Laymon spent time with him, he was obsessive and controlling, even monitoring how much toilet paper Laymon used. He also remembers his father saving snow in the freezer so they could have a summer snowball fight: “It was the first time I’d ever seen him just be a normal goofy person” (35). The memory makes him cry.

The psychologist questions Laymon about his problems with violence and his compulsive eating and drinking. Laymon denies that he’s angry and explains that he drinks box wine when there’s nothing else in the house because it’s “sweeter than water” (36). The psychologist sees anger in him at that very moment. If Laymon—and his mother—make a habit of going outside and counting to ten when they feel angry, and watch their diets, a lot could get better, the psychologist thinks.

When Laymon and his mother return home from this appointment, they play a game of one-on-one. It’s to be their last. Laymon realizes that not only is he beating his mother now, but he could have been beating her for some time. “I don’t know why,” he says, “but beating you felt harmful” (38). He lets her win; she thanks him. He believes for a moment that they might have turned a corner.

Laymon’s mother drops him off at Beulah Beauford’s house again, over his protests. She claims to be going to do activist work, but Laymon knows she’s going to visit her boyfriend, Malachi Hunter, an ambitious real-estate agent whom Laymon doesn’t like at all.

Things haven’t changed at Beulah’s house. This time, Laymon walks in on one of the older boys, Delaney, forcing his friend Dougie to give him oral sex. Dougie runs away. Delaney emerges and talks to Laymon for a while, telling him they were just playing a game, and teaching him to play Chopsticks on the piano. Laymon is horrified, full of complicated feelings: “I didn’t understand why Delaney thought teaching me ‘Chopsticks’ would make what he did okay, or why Dougie’s hands were behind his back while he was on his knees [...] A part of me didn’t understand why the big boys wanted to be in rooms alone with Dougie and Layla and not me. A part of me knew it was because I was the fattest, sweatiest person in Beulah Beauford’s house” (41).

Laymon calls his mother at Malachi Hunter’s house and sits in the driveway until she comes to pick him up. When she arrives, she’s crying and has a black eye. They drive home, and Laymon looks after her. He remembers the times they’ve been each other’s best friends, and the times when she’s forced him to take his clothes off and lie down for fierce beatings.

Malachi Hunter turns up at the house, and Laymon hears Hunter and his mother making up, and then having sex. Laymon turns on himself, forcing down an entire jar of peanut butter and pear preserves and drinking Mason jarfuls of box wine to drown out the refrain: “I hated my body” (47). That night, he has his first wet dream, and knows he can never tell his mother.

During a summer when Laymon and his mother aren’t getting along, he goes to stay at his grandmother’s house for a while. She’s working several jobs: gutting chickens at a plant, selling produce and cakes, and working as a cleaner for a white family called the Mumfords. Laymon goes with her to the Mumfords’ house one day. The scrawny son of the family invites him to play, and then asks racist questions about why people in Jackson shoot each other. Laymon steps on a scale the Mumfords keep in a garage washroom and finds he weighs 218 pounds; he wonders if that’s a normal weight for a 12-year-old. He also sees that the family has a shiny new washer and dryer of their own and is infuriated to think of his grandmother hauling their dirty clothes home and doing their laundry for them. Later, at home, he scuffles around in the laundry basket, doing a quick-feet drill on the Mumfords’ dirty clothes.

Laymon’s grandmother tells Laymon that he needs to learn not to give a damn about how white people think of him: “‘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’” (56). She takes him to church, where he loves being fussed over by her friends but doesn’t think much of the preachers, whom he finds slick and condescending. He much prefers the Home Mission bible study meetings his grandmother and her friends hold, where he sees real love in action.

When Laymon’s grandmother finds him messing up her kitchen with his quick-feet maneuvers, she whips him—but only on the legs. He asks her why she doesn’t hit his head, like his mother does, and she tells him it’s because she never wants to hurt him.

That night, he does a writing assignment for her, and rather than working on an essay about the Book of Psalms as she’s told him to, he writes poignantly about all the secrets he’s carrying, asking her for help finding the right words to make things better. Before bed, his grandmother reassures him that she loves him and that things will get better, and when he asks if he’s too fat, she tells him that he’s just right: he’s “Heavy enough for everything you need to be heavy for” (60).