Heavy

Laymon becomes an adjunct professor at Vassar, where he again has to grapple with racism from colleagues and students in a supposedly progressive, predominantly white space. He discovers the difficulties of teaching, learning all the ways that one can fail students even when trying to do one’s best by them; he often thinks of his mother’s teaching, and believes that “a teacher’s job was to responsibly love the students in front of them” (191).

During Laymon’s time at Vassar, the September 11 attacks happen, and he begins to notice brown-skinned families around him broadcasting American patriotism: dressing in red, white, and blue, covering their cars in “I Heart America” bumper stickers. On a train into New York, where he goes to do volunteer work supporting firefighters, he watches a South Asian family sit rigid with terror as the other passengers mutter about terrorism. When he speaks up to defend the family and they thank him, he wonders “if this feeling I had was what ‘good white folk’ felt when we thanked them for not being as terrible as they could be” (183).

A colleague asks Laymon to take on a troubled white student as an advisee. This boy, Cole, is smart, but difficult, and he’s a major drug dealer on campus. Laymon is wary of drugs, remembering his mother saying that drugs were just another trick the white world played on Black people, but he’s sympathetic to Black friends who’ve worked as dealers to make ends meet.

Cole eventually gets busted with large amounts of cocaine but wriggles his way out of trouble when he tells a story of being forced to buy that cocaine from “a big dark man” in a club. Laymon, who has recently watched a brilliant Black female student suffer serious punishments for allegedly yelling at a roommate, is infuriated by this display of blatant white privilege, and even more infuriated when Cole later tells him that Laymon’s office is the only place he feels safe. The whole world is much safer for Cole than Cole is willing to see.

Laymon keeps punishing his body, losing more and more weight. Meanwhile, he rises through the ranks at Vassar, eventually becoming a tenured professor. His father comes to visit and can’t stop talking about how proud he is of his fit, successful son. His mother is also proud but is calling to ask him for money with increasing frequency. Laymon begins to suspect that something isn’t right when she refuses to let him speak to a repairman who’s supposedly working on her fireplace, and then pretends the line has broken up. A call to his grandmother confirms that whatever his mother is spending money on, it isn’t house repairs.

In sadness, Laymon forces himself to go for a 20-mile run, on a day when he’s barely eaten and has already run for miles. It’s the last straw. Something goes very wrong with his leg. His body breaks down, and in this breakdown he feels a prescience. His body already knows, he writes, that he’s been running from secrets through his anorexia; that he’s about to put back on all the weight he lost; that his informed sexual politics don’t keep him from emotionally abusing his partners through his lies; and that terrible things are about to happen in his work life.

When he’s up for tenure, an all-white committee falsely accuses him of fraud. He’s then called by a police detective who falsely accuses him of sending anti-Semitic and racist letters to that committee. Nothing comes of this accusation. Laymon writes: “I am supposed to be happy because I am free, because I am not in handcuffs, because I have peculiar access to something resembling black power. I will know that I am not free precisely because I am happy that my wrists are free of handcuffs the month I earn tenure with distinction from Vassar College” (211).

His body’s breakdown is telling him that he can’t endure the shape of this life any more. Lying on the floor in agony on the day his leg gives out, Laymon remembers his mother throwing her body across his when she feared they were about to get into a traffic accident. In the aftermath, he made her put her own seatbelt on. Finally, he calls his mother for help; it’s the first time the request is going in that direction.

Laymon’s mother has left her job, gotten addicted to gambling, and moved to be closer to a casino. After ten years of struggle as an overcommitted and undervalued professor at Vassar, Laymon falls into the same addiction. He and his girlfriend, a fellow academic named Flora, start visiting casinos in Connecticut together, and the machines do their work, luring them in with the elusive promise of big wins. He sometimes sees his mother at these very casinos, and knows she sees him, but they never acknowledge each other, keeping up the fiction that they’re states apart.

After a dramatic loss and a lot of fights with Flora, Laymon finds himself alone in a casino with ten dollars (stolen from Flora’s purse) to his name and sees his mother there. He texts her, asking her to come meet him in his hotel room. When she finally arrives, she berates him about the weight he’s gained. He interrupts her to ask a one-word question: Why?

The two have a painful conversation about honesty. His mother accuses him of having been abusively dishonest with her. “I hear you,” he replies, “but I’m asking if you abused me. How did I stick my hands into your raw? How did I abuse you?” (225). Laymon’s mother feels exposed, and Laymon, she fears, is always going to be too open, revealing too much of himself to white people who can never understand his experience. Laymon pushes back, asking if he should have protected himself from her. She’s clearly deeply ashamed, and Laymon asks, simply, “Can we just not lie?” (226) He tells her about why he writes: because she taught him to; to avoid being caught up in the shame that consumes her and his father; because he wants her to be able to imagine that she is truly loved.

They part lovingly, in some kind of truthful contact for the first time in a long time. His mother sends him texts encouraging him to have children, and he reflects on how he’d want to be a parent: he wouldn’t want to raise his child in Mississippi; he’d be afraid to have a child because he’d know he would no longer be able to run and hide. At last, with ambivalent feelings, and not completely honestly, he texts his mother: “I promise. [...] We have come too far to turn back. Promise. We have come way too far to turn back” (231).

Life doesn’t magically get easier after this conversation. Laymon’s relationship with his mother won’t be easily healed, nor will his problems all be solved. Laymon writes in the future tense: he’ll go on teaching, he’ll suffer, he’ll watch Black people be murdered by police, he’ll go on writing. He’ll finally leave Vassar, return to Mississippi, and read a draft of this book to his grandmother, now suffering from dementia and believing him to be his Uncle Jimmy, who will die of an overdose.

He’ll write this book to his mother, he says, not because “you are a black woman, or deeply southern, or because you taught me how to read and write. I wrote this book to you because, even though we harmed each other as American parents and children tend to do you did everything you could to make sure the nation and our state did not harm its most vulnerable children” (238). The book ends on a note of mingled hope and uncertainty: maybe Laymon and his mother and his country will work to love and to heal and to be honest, and maybe they won’t. He refuses to write a comfortable lie. “I wrote this to you instead,” he writes, “because I am your child, and you are mine” (241).