Heavy

Laymon and his mother move to Maryland for a year so that his mother can do a postdoctoral fellowship—a long-time dream. He remembers being pulled over by a Maryland cop who mistrusts his mother’s academic ID; his mother has already taught him the hands-on-the-wheel, stay-calm cop procedure, but has to keep him calm while she pushes back on the cop’s false claims about his reasons for pulling her over. Afterwards, Laymon’s mother warns him of the white world’s hatred of Black excellence. Laymon reflects: “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” (83).

Over Christmas break, Laymon and his mother go back to Mississippi, where Laymon and LaThon watch a brilliant 10th-grade basketball player nail shot after shot and realize their own ambitions will have to take them elsewhere: they can’t play like that. Laymon gets interested in teaching and writing, and he and his mother look back over the many essays she’s made him write over the years. He finds that writing demands both revision and practice: he’ll have to sit down and stay still even when he doesn’t want to in order to find truth through writing.

Laymon’s mother is happier in Maryland, and so is he. A doctor tells him he has a heart murmur, but he doesn’t mind; he loves the word “murmur.” He concludes: “I was coming back to Mississippi with a murmur, a smaller body, and a new relationship to writing, revision, memory, and you” (88).

When Laymon and his mother move back to Mississippi, things devolve quickly. His mother begins beating him again, and money is tight: when Laymon has to choose between lunch money and haircut money, he chooses wrong, and his mother gives him a fade so terrible he has to shave himself bald—a look she warns him will make white people see him as more of a threat.

Laymon is sixteen now and going out with a white girl named Abby. Though he doesn’t know her well, he feels intense love for her. His family and friends, meanwhile, warn him that she’s probably only in it to provoke her parents. A smart, funny Black girl named Kamala, who also has her eye on Laymon, tells him: “Abby Claremont got that big ol’ jungle fever and you the big ol’ jungle [...] I’m the big ol’ jungle too [...] Big ol’ jungles need to be with big ol’ jungles” (93). Laymon finds this very funny, and then not funny at all. He and his friends joke about chasing sexual thrills, but he only truly wants sex with people he loves; sex without love feels wrong in his body. He also worries that his mother and his Black female friends will see a rejection of their beauty—a beauty he feels deeply—in his relationship with a white girl.

Laymon’s relationship with Abby gets even more complicated when the LA police viciously beat Rodney King. This attack, and the rioting that follows, capture global attention, and make the gap between Laymon’s and Abby’s experiences of the world impossible to ignore.

Not long after, at a party, Kamala gets drunk and makes a long confession to Laymon, telling him a secret that he promises to keep—and does, though context suggests that Kamala has been a victim of sexual violence. Laymon thanks her for telling him, but later hints to other boys that he and Kamala had been having sex. “The night Kamala Lackey told me her secrets,” he writes, “I promised I’d never sexually violate or sexually abuse any woman or girl on earth. The existence of that promise was enough to excuse myself for lying to Abby Claremont and any other girl who wanted to have sex with me. I was a liar [...] and according to you and the white girl I lied to every day, I was a good dude” (103).

Laymon begins the story of his senior year in high school with a visit to his mother’s mentor, the poet Margaret Walker. He remembers her house—like his, stuffed with books and art—and the awkward, memorable lecture she gives him about claiming his own voice: “Our communication, she said, is the mightiest gift passed down by our people. Every word you write and read, every picture you draw, every step you take should be in the service of our people” (105). She gives him Nikki Giovanni’s Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day to read.

The next day, Rodney King’s assailants are acquitted, and the news erupts with stories of rioting in LA. Outraged, heartbroken, and deeply sick of white people’s unrestrained cruelty, Laymon steals armfuls of bread from a parked grocery truck and binges until he throws up.

The next day, he gets in trouble with his English teacher when he refuses to continue a discussion of The Once and Future King, and instead reads excerpts of Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day aloud in class. His teacher retaliates with a condescending analysis of Laymon’s final paper on Moby-Dick that begins with comments on Laymon’s weight. Laymon’s mother finds him crying over the teacher’s comments; also infuriated, she helps him to revise the paper into something he’s proud of.

Laymon confronts his teacher again the next day, asking for an explanation. Through his mother, he’s realized that this man, “just like most of the grown black men I knew, wanted to set people’s brains on fire before situating himself as the only one who could calm the blaze” (111). The teacher doesn’t respond well and tells Laymon that his problem is that he doesn’t have a dad at home. Laymon fights him and has to be pulled off him by teachers and friends.

In spite of getting in trouble and struggling with his GPA, Laymon wins some awards and earns a basketball scholarship to Millsaps College. His friend LaThon is going to the University of Alabama to study engineering. As the two part, LaThon thinks back on Laymon’s courage: “You the only person I know who will do and say anything anywhere anytime. Swear to God, you the only person I know who ain’t scared of nothing we supposed to be scared of. But I’m like how this nigga got all that gumption, and somehow, he ain’t ever even been arrested?” (115)