Heavy: An American Memoir

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

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

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 anyt

But Grandmama is too heavy to blow away or drown in tears made because somebody didn’t see me as a somebody worth respecting. You hear me? Ain’t nothing in the world worse than looking at your children drowning, knowing ain’t nothing you can do because you scared that if you get to trying to save them, they might see that you can’t swim either. But

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

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.

“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.”

I had to sit and listen to hundreds of talks from you and your friends telling me no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never drive over the speed limit or do those rolling stops at stop signs, always speak the king’s English in the pres

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