Heavy

Laymon’s mother returns home for the Christmas break, and is shocked by how much weight Laymon has put on in college: fifty pounds in a little more than three months. She’s got other problems, too. Laymon overhears her on the phone to someone who sounds like a new boyfriend. Malachi Hunter is still hovering: “It’s not so much he wanted you back; it’s that he didn’t want you to want anyone else. Whenever he invited himself over, you asked me not to leave the house” (136).

One day, after Hunter walks uninvited into Laymon’s bedroom to deliver a lecture on how his mother is smart but not “free,” Laymon finds his mother sad and looking for reassurance. He asks her why she keeps making the disastrous choices she does, and she replies that she thinks disaster is sometimes the thing that makes a deep part of her feel calm. Laymon is fed up, especially when she asks him for money. He distracts himself by working on his own essays and rereading Richard Wright, whose Black Boy he finds inspiring. He wonders, though, if Wright would have made it if he’d chosen to stay in Mississippi, as Laymon’s family mostly has.

The next day, the lights go out because Laymon’s mother hasn’t paid the electric bill, and Laymon’s far-from-perfect report card arrives in the mail. Laymon’s mother starts to beat him with her belt, but he finds something has changed: he’s not physically scared of her, but she’s scared of him.

Laymon is still pining for Nzola and giving little energy to any of his classes. The one exception is Women’s Studies, which gives him a way to make sense of his childhood observations of men’s cruelty to and power over women. He also gets involved with the school newspaper, writing an editorial about Millsaps’s institutional racism—an editorial that the paper’s white editor makes him rewrite so that it addresses a wider (meaning whiter) audience. Laymon hates doing this rewrite, but agrees to it in the end, feeling “desperate to be read by white folk” (142). Nzola writes to say she’s proud of him for this piece. His mother, though, is worried. She well knows that speaking up means inevitable retaliation from white people.

Laymon thinks more about what it means to write about racism as a Black man as he works as a columnist for the school paper. He reads and rereads James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, loving it, but wondering “what black writers weren’t writing when we spent so much creative energy begging white folk to change” (144). He also begins a punishing diet and exercise regimen and rapidly loses weight, at last dropping below the 218 pounds he remembers weighing in 7th grade. Nzola comes back to him, and the two fall deeply in love. Nzola is a little nonplussed at Laymon’s excitement over his weight loss, telling him not to worry about his body so much.

Just as Laymon’s mother predicted, trouble arrives. Laymon and Nzola start receiving death threats. One day, while they’re out walking, a crew of frat boys in blackface and Confederate flag capes surround them and spit racist abuse at them. After they get away, Laymon calls the news, and reports of racism on the Millsaps campus are widely distributed. This doesn’t make Laymon any more popular among the white students (or indeed the white faculty), and Laymon and Nzola get put on academic probation for defending themselves. Laymon gives interviews to the NAACP, among other organizations, and Nzola is angry: she knows that her art and her pain aren’t going to get this kind of attention, and that her sex as well as her race make her even more invisible and even more of a target than Laymon. She and Laymon fight, and sometimes she punches him. Laymon feels at home with violence: “I knew it was coming. I hoped it would come. I thought I deserved it. It always made me feel lighter” (152).

Laymon’s mother’s dire predictions come true, and Laymon is expelled from Millsaps on a ludicrous charge of having improperly checked out a library book. Laymon goes to study at the university where his mother teaches and is desperately unhappy to be back under her roof. One night, she pulls a gun on him; later that night, he considers shooting himself with that same gun, but holds back when he tries to listen for guidance and hears snatches of his grandmother’s voice.

He goes to work at a home for HIV-positive homeless men, where he finds a loving community; the sincere, caring men there “were quick to explain how getting kicked out of college for stealing and returning a library book was nothing more than a complicated annoyance” (157).

His relationship with Nzola is still fraught. He’s applying for a transfer to Oberlin college, and she feels like he’s going to abandon her. When Oberlin accepts him, he’s upset by both Nzola’s unhappiness and his mother’s. He promises he’ll be back soon, but, as he says in a refrain through the last pages of the chapter, “I will not be back soon” (161). Instead, at Oberlin, he begins to construct a new identity: “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” (161).