The Longreads Blog

The Women Who Help Immigrant Women Escape Domestic Abuse

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

Many undocumented women fear that reporting their husbands’ abuse will get their children deported and cause retaliatory violence, so many Latina farm-workers keep quiet. For The California Sunday Magazine, Lizzie Presser writes about Mily Treviño-Sauceda and Valentina, part of the growing network of women who have stepped in to help empower these victims and end their silence. These women aren’t social workers. They are people who empathize, often from their shared experience as victims of rape, wage theft, racism, and violence, and they take risks by letting women stay in their homes, learn their rights, and connect with social services.

Valentina began waking up at dawn to drive to Santa Maria, more than 100 miles away, two or three times each week. She set up appointments at health clinics, food pantries, and churches, and Elena watched as Valentina took down numbers and asked questions. Elena had felt confined by the street Spanish she spoke and started learning words she hadn’t known. Valentina took her window-shopping at the mall or belted Mexican folk songs, dancing in her seat, when Elena seemed down. After several months, Elena took the lead. She held meetings with women in homes across the city, Valentina sitting by her side.

Within a year, Elena was taking women in. She was nervous about the strangers, reminding her 10-year-old daughter to stay in her bedroom and lock the door, but after the first few came and went with their kids, she loosened up. In the morning, she woke up early to make breakfast and scouted for apartment listings. At her peak, 20 people stayed in the house at once, kids’ arms dangling off the leather sofas. Her daughter slept in the bathtub.

Around the same time that she opened her home, Elena told Valentina why she had been interested. She sat across from her on a bright afternoon at an outdoor table of a coffee shop. “I think I was in a worse situation than you,” she started. Elena began to tell Valentina about the father of her child. She explained how he had raped her at work when she was a teenager and how her parents had pressured her to be with him afterward. She talked about how he would treat her like a piece of paper that he could do whatever he liked to. She said that, after they had a child together, he tried to kill her, running the blade of a knife across her neck.

When she decided to go to the police a week later, they didn’t help. She felt paralyzed, as if her mind had dissolved. She hadn’t known her rights or that she qualified for a U visa. Instead, she kept quiet and hid out at her sister’s house for a year, working 13-hour days picking strawberries and peppers. “How stupid I was,” she said over and over. Valentina wrapped her arms around Elena. “Chaparrita,” she said, “we didn’t have any experience.”

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‘Do you like scary movies?’

Image by Nicki Dugan Pogue via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In an essay in Electric Lit, Megan Pillow Davis explores horror movies — why we love them, how we experience them in our bodies, and how they can help us deal with our own real-world traumas — like Davis’ own near-rape at the hands of a former coworker.

I watched the taillights of Daniel’s truck recede into the darkness. I thought of how Paul was the only thing that had kept me from becoming Mari Collingwood or Phyllis Stone, the girls who are raped and killed in The Last House on the Left. Daniel did neither of those things. But I could still feel a scorching anger welling up inside me. In a matter of seconds, I became not Mari or Phyllis, but Jennifer Hills from I Spit on Your Grave, the rape and revenge film that had called up old memories and given me nightmares for a month the first time I watched it. I had tried to forget about that film. But now it felt like my territory, my home. I could feel Jennifer unzipping my skin like a dress and climbing inside me. I imagined cutting Daniel’s dick off, clean as Chuck cut off the head of the coral snake. I imagined spitting and pissing and shitting on Daniel’s grave. And then, just before his truck disappeared behind a dark curtain of trees, I became Charlie. I willed Daniel’s truck to explode. I wanted his body to sear in the white-hot flame of my fear and shame and rage until there was nothing left.

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Science Has Yet to Prove Mold Makes us Sick

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As climate change chugs on and coastal cities endure hurricane flooding year after year, mold is flourishing in the hot, damp aftermath, bringing complaints of mold-induced illness. But is mold really what’s making us sick? As Peter Andrey Smith reports at Topic, even scientist Joan Bennett — who has dedicated her life to studying fungi — was unable to prove that the mold farm that invaded her home post-Hurricane Katrina caused her headaches.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, flooding the city of New Orleans. Bennett and her husband fled with their three Brittany spaniels, and, after temporarily finding refuge at a country home in southern Louisiana, they drove north to New Jersey with their carload of dogs, uncertain whether their home would be destroyed or if Bennett would still have a job when they returned. Five weeks later, in October, Bennett returned to find that the floodwaters had receded from her neighborhood of Broadmoor, and although the half-century-old azaleas remained, the once-green bushes that lined her street had shriveled up and turned brown. Inside her and her husband’s home, things were even worse: almost every surface had transformed into a fungal utopia, cloaked in a fuzzy blanket of mold.

Unsurprisingly, Bennett had brought along petri dishes and sterile sampling equipment. It took her hours to sample her home. “The part of the story that I didn’t expect was that it made me feel sick to be in the house,” she says. A rug disintegrated in her hands and she lamented the destruction of her personal items, including a four-volume set of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. “The house smelled horrible, horrible, horrible,” she continues. “It had been closed up for a month, and these fungi had been in there eating my carpets, eating my books, eating my furniture, and putting out their metabolites—some of which were aroma compounds.”

Bennett is cautious. “There’s a lot of, you know, smoke around this,” she says. “There are people who claim that their mold-damaged houses are what has caused memory loss and neurodegenerative symptoms. To my knowledge, there’s no solid science backing that up, but I wish there was.”

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‘I’ve Always Been Either Praised or Accused of Ambition’: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver

Getty Images / HarperCollins Publishers

 

Sarah Boon | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,686 words)

 

Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988, on the same day that her first daughter was born. Since then, Kingsolver has published eight more novels, two books of essays, a book of poetry, and three nonfiction books — including the popular Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about growing all of her family’s food on their farm. Her eighth and latest novel, Unsheltered, follows the parallel lives of characters in both 2016 and 1871 as they live and love in the same house at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey.

Kingsolver has received numerous writing awards, including the James Beard Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also been shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize and a PEN/Faulkner Award. Kingsolver has also established The Bellwether Prize for Fiction, an award to support writers who cover topics around social change.

I spoke with Kingsolver three days after Hurricane Florence made landfall on the east coast of the US, and the same day Florence was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, though it continued to bombard the region with strong winds and heavy rain. Kingsolver noted that she lives in the mountainous region of Virginia, farther from the storm. She wasn’t too worried about the rain, but was concerned about her downstream neighbors who were likely to be inundated. It was a perfect play on the title of Unsheltered. Read more…

Living with Dolly Parton

Mark Humphrey / AP, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Wilkerson | Longreads | October 2018 | 43 minutes (7,851 words)

Dolly Parton was one of two women I learned to admire growing up in East Tennessee. The other was Pat Summitt, head coach of the Lady Volunteers, the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team. One flamboyantly female, the other a masculine woman. Both were arguably the best at what they did, had fantastic origins stories of hardscrabble lives in rural Tennessee, and told us that with enough grit and determination, we could succeed. Queer kids and nerdy girls, effeminate boys and boyish girls who desired something more than home took comfort in their boundary crossing. From these women they learned that they too could strike out on their own while maintaining both their authenticity and ties to home.

For years, I found solace in “Wildflowers,” written by Parton and performed with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris on their record Trio. The song’s instrumentation is spare, with the tinny chords of the autoharp and Ronstadt and Harris’s harmonies. In a near warble, Dolly sang of a “rambling rose” who didn’t “regret the path” she chose.

I moved away from home in ways more profound than the physical leaving, and it sometimes caused me to feel the pain of committing a betrayal. My grandmother Laverne warned me: “Don’t forget where you come from.”

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Querida Angelita

AP Photo/Christian Torres

Angela Morales | Michigan Quarterly Review | July 2018 | 24 minutes (4,016 words)

 

When Angelita arrived on our doorstep, she’d been living in the United States for only a few days—hours. I could not have imagined, at that time, her perilous journey and its resulting trauma, nor could I have appreciated the fact of her survival on that uncharted river of migrant travelers, with its snaking tributaries and unpredictable waters, particularly dangerous for a young woman traveling alone. Angelita would later tell my mother about how she’d boarded a bus somewhere in central Mexico, transferred to another bus, and another bus after that, until she reached downtown Tijuana, where she hurried, head down, to the nearest pay phone. She dialed a phone number that a friend of a friend had scrawled onto a scrap of paper. For the whole trip, she’d kept it stashed deep inside her jeans pocket, this little paper being her ticket to a job; and possibly to an American husband; to a little brick house with its own patch of grass and flower garden; and two or three or four fat-wristed baby boys, all nicknamed Gordo; and possibly, and most important, a few extra dollars wired from the 7-Eleven to her mother back home. Of course she knew nothing about this coyote-guy who would answer the phone, only that he came highly recommended, and that for a thousand dollars he could ferry her across to el otro lado. Angelita, like most survivors of the journey, told only parts of the story, leaving gaps in time, omitting descriptions of certain places where the metaphorical river ran up into stagnant creeks, where the road hit cinderblock walls. No details of a certain holding-house, of a filthy bedroom filled with other girls and women. No discussion of threats and empty promises. And, of course, no words at all to describe the worst violations, words best abandoned in the desert, or in that house, or in that van; these were stories not to be repeated if one wanted to keep walking forward.

She did tell the story of climbing into the trunk of a car and, in pitch darkness, rolling across the Tijuana border, inch by inch, right through the international zone, buried beneath newspapers and junk-filled cardboard boxes, entombed between two strangers—both men—the three of them packed tight as tinned sardines and sharing the same fetid, exhaust-filled air. When they finally arrived in San Ysidro, California, she climbed out of the coyote’s trunk, where she was reborn, right there in the corner of a McDonald’s parking lot, parallel to the gargantuan 5 freeway, which looked that night like the tentacles of an electric octopus—bursts of white headlights and red taillights, swirling and whizzing by, right across the chain-link fence. She straightened out her creaky legs, adjusted the straps of her backpack, clutched her battered shopping bag, and began her life anew.

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A Place to Stay, Untouched by Death

Unsplash / Pexels / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jane Ratcliffe | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (2,950 words)

 

A place to stay untouched by death
Does not exist.
It does not exist in space, it does not exist in the ocean,
Nor if you stay in the middle of a mountain. 

-Buddha

When my mother grew quite ill and it became clear she would soon die, we brought her from the hospital to my parents’ house where they’d lived for nearly 50 years. My father, brother, niece, and I moved the dining-room table and chairs into the living room and hospice came in and set up one of those heavy, mechanical beds with cold metal side rails and a device that moved the head and feet up and down. It was an ugly bed. How many people before my mom had died in it, I wondered. It came with a sparse, lumpy mattress. My mom was skinny as a blade of grass by then and needed padding for her jutting bones. So we purchased an additional mattress to rest on top of her existing one; a mattress that would be hers alone, upon which no one, besides her, would die.

My parents grew up working class in London during World War II where they acquired a lifelong frugality. Inspire by one of the more popular war slogans, “Make Do and Mend,” they reused cooking oil, saved aluminum foil, and sewed up holes in our socks. So, it wasn’t a surprise to discover the Marimekko sheets of my late teen years in my parents’ linen closet. I was 54 then, but the background white on those sheets was still crisp and bright; the pinks and oranges and yellows of the flowers still exuberant. There were no other twin sheets in the house, so as my mom rested in her favorite velvet chair in the family room, my dad and I made up the bed with them. It was February, so we placed one blanket on top and folded another near where her feet, now tender in their slouchy socks, would rest.

And there it was: My mother’s death bed. All done up in my college dorm sheets.

My mind raced through the things that had happened on those sheets. Things that didn’t belong to this moment. I remembered my parents moving me into my college dorm in 1980. My mom always said that the moment all my belongings were in my room, I shushed them away. But I don’t think that’s entirely true. I remember unpacking my brand-new sheets, freshly laundered by my mom, and together, the three of us, making my bed. I remember them being so proud of me: There I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. My mom’s education had ended at age 12 when her school was bombed and my dad’s at 14 when he began his apprenticeship in the tool and dye trade. Such was England in those days.

I was struck by this repurposing of an object for a completely unexpected use. Back when I was 18, screwing my boyfriend on those sheets, slipping between them after a late night at the clubs, over-sleeping for classes sandwiched in them, eating junk food and studying for exams, books sprawled on top of them, sharing secrets with best friends with the sheets tucked around our knees, I could never have imagined my mom would die nestled between them.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

More Than Me “I am Abigail” campaign, 2012

This week, we’re sharing stories from Finlay Young, Katie Prout, Molly Crabapple, Sean Flynn, and Harley Rustad.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence

Illustration by Missy Chimovitz

Kathryn Smith | Longreads | October 2018 | 14 minutes (3,450 words)

 
I spent New Year’s in a hot pink temple shaped like a lotus flower, surrounded by 100 other people with their eyes closed and their legs crossed like pretzels. I had taken a vow of silence and not spoken to another human in three days. It was so quiet that I could hear the twinkly lights on the ceiling humming.

I’m a mid-30s white woman with a cat, a small apartment, and a mid-level office job. I don’t meditate, really. I vociferously hate chanting. I don’t know what I think about swamis in long orange robes who believe energy runs through everything and rocks have feelings — I have a 401K and a thoroughly sensible life.

But I went to an ashram because I thought it might fix something, and I think it kind of did.
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Greens

Author photo courtesy Simon & Schuster, Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Kiese Laymon | Excerpt adapted from Heavy: An American Memoir | Scribner | October 2018 | 20 minutes (4,158 words)

You were in Grandmama’s living room delicately placing a blinking black angel with a fluorescent mink coat on top of her Christmas tree while Uncle Jimmy and I were examining each other’s bodies in a one-bedroom apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. I was in my final year of graduate school. Uncle Jimmy and I were having a contest to see who could make their forearms veinier. “Shit, sport,” Uncle Jimmy said as he hugged me. “You eating a lot of spinach in grad school or what? You look like you training for the league.”

I was twenty-six years old, 183 pounds. My body fat was 8 percent.

Uncle Jimmy was six-three and so skinny that his eyes, which were nearly always yolk yellow, looked like they wanted to pop out of his head. He wore the same Chicago Bears sweatshirt, same gray church slacks, same church shoes he wore when he was forty pounds heavier.

When I asked him if anything was wrong, Uncle Jimmy said, “This blood pressure medicine the doctor got me on, it make it hard for a nigga to keep weight on. That’s all. Is it okay for me to say ‘nigga’ around you now? I know you’re a professor like your mama and shit now.”

I told Uncle Jimmy I was a graduate instructor and a graduate student. “That’s a long way from a professor. I think I wanna teach high school. But regardless, you can always say ‘nigga’ and any other word you want around me. I’m not my mama.”

On the way to Mississippi, we stopped at gas station after gas station. Uncle Jimmy went to the bathroom for ten minutes each time. I cranked up Aquemini and did push-ups and jumping jacks outside the van while he did whatever he needed to do. He eventually came back with pints of butter pecan ice cream and big bags of Lay’s Salt & Vinegar.

“Want some, nephew?” he asked.

“Naw,” I said over and over again. “I’m good.”

“You good?”

“I’m good,” I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day. I didn’t tell him I gleefully passed out the previous week in the checkout line at Kroger. I didn’t tell him a cashier named Laurie asked if I was “diabetic or a dope fiend” when I woke up. I didn’t tell him the skinnier my body got, the more it knew what was going to happen, just as much as it remembered where it had been.

Uncle Jimmy looked at me, with Lay’s Salt & Vinegar grease all over his mouth, like my nose was a fitted hat. “Let me find out you went from fucking a white girl to eating like a white girl.”

“I just love losing weight,” I told him. “That’s really all it is. I just love losing weight.”

“You just love losing weight?” Uncle Jimmy was dying laughing. “My nephew went to grad school and now he turning into a white girl. You just love losing weight? That’s damn near the craziest shit I heard in thirty years, Kie. Who say shit like that? You just love losing weight?”

Somewhere around Little Rock, Arkansas, we stopped at a truck stop. Uncle Jimmy started telling me a story about one of his friends he worked with at the Caterpillar plant. He said he and this friend served the same tour in Vietnam and had been to Alcoholics Anonymous three times each.

“So yeah, he always talking big about all the Martell he drank over the weekend and all the pussy he be getting,” Uncle Jimmy said. “Always talking about how the white man’ll do anything to keep a nigga down. And he start talking about spoiled-ass Bush. I told him we been known there ain’t nothing the white man won’t do. He said he agreed. But soon as the white boss man come around, this nigga tuck his head into his shoulders like a gotdamn turtle. Steady grinning and jiving them white folk to death.”

I asked Uncle Jimmy why his friend acted one way around him and another way around the white boss man. “Shit,” he said, nervously tapping his foot under the table, “you know how some niggas are, addicted to giving the white man whatever he want whenever he want it. Not me, though. You know that.”

Uncle Jimmy was right. I’d spent the last four years of my life reading and creating art invested in who we were, what we knew, how we remembered, and what we imagined when white folk weren’t around. For me, that vision had everything to do with Grandmama’s porch. Every time I sat down to write, I imagined sitting on that porch with layers of black Mississippi in front of and behind me.

While Uncle Jimmy was in the bathroom, I called Grandmama on the pay phone to let her know we were going to be home later than we expected.

You picked up.

“Hey,” I said. “What y’all doing?”

“Hey, Kie, we’re on our way to the hospital. Tell Jimmy to meet us there. Is he drunk?”

“Naw,” I said. “He’s not drunk. He’s in the bathroom right now. Is Grandmama okay?”

You told me Grandmama had fallen asleep in her chair after complaining of dizziness. When you went to take her wig off, you saw blood on the inside of the wig. You told me you looked at the back of Grandmama’s head and saw this infected hole oozing with puss.

“Please don’t tell Jimmy,” you said. “If he gets even a little stressed, he’ll start drinking like a dolphin.”

“I don’t think dolphins drink, though.”

“Just bring your ass directly to the hospital, Kie.”

When Uncle Jimmy finally made it back to the car, he was flying on something more than Hennessy or weed. He handed me a Black Ice air freshener he bought and told me to make the world smell this good. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “Drive this van, nephew. Drive this shit. Make the world smell this good.” Uncle Jimmy could barely open his eyes or close his mouth. “Don’t use the brakes like you did last time, nephew. Drive this shit all the way home.”

‘Please don’t tell Jimmy,’ you said. ‘If he gets even a little stressed, he’ll start drinking like a dolphin.’

* * *

I’d heard Grandmama whimper over the loss of her best friend and her sisters. I’d heard Grandmama yell at Uncle Jimmy for daring to disrespect her in her house. I’d never heard Grandmama scream while begging the Lord to have mercy on her until that night in the hospital.

Uncle Jimmy wasn’t as high anymore. He and HaLester Myers, Grandmama’s new husband, were sitting in the waiting room, avoiding each other’s eyes, watching news about Bush and the Supreme Court. You, Aunt Linda, and Aunt Sue were down the hall talking shit about Uncle Jimmy. You blamed whatever he was going through on what he saw and did in Vietnam. Aunt Linda blamed alcohol. Aunt Sue blamed all of us for not praying for him more.

I walked away from y’all and went to Grandmama’s room.

With one hand in the pockets of my mesh shorts, and one hand holding hers, I told Grandmama it was going to be okay. Grandmama said she had faith in the white doctor who was taking care of her. She kept calling him “the white-man doctor,” though he was really a short, light-complexioned black man with a dry, red Afro.

“The white-man doctor got my best interest at heart,” she said. “Grandmama will be fine directly.”

The black doctor with the dry red Afro asked me to leave the room because they had to do a small procedure. He said the infection was deeper than he thought. It started in the middle of her head and went down the back of her neck. “We’re gonna help her with this pain,” he told me. “The infection is seeping into her bloodstream.”

I walked out of the room but he didn’t close the door behind me. “Lord Jesus,” Grandmama kept saying before she screamed. “Please have mercy. Please have mercy.” I knew, but didn’t want to admit, why Grandmama was screaming, why the black doctor with the dry red Afro didn’t give her enough anesthetic, why he thought cutting a full inch and a half deep into the back of her scalp was for her own good.

Folk always assumed black women would recover but never really cared if black women recovered. I knew Grandmama would act like she recovered before thanking Jesus for keeping her alive. She would never publicly reckon with damage done to her insides and outsides at the hands of people who claimed to have her best interest at heart. She would just thank Jesus for getting through the other side of suffering. Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family’s superpowers.

I spent the night in the room sitting in a chair next to Grandmama’s bed and holding her hand. Grandmama didn’t say a word. She just looked out the window of the room, with her cheek pressed into the thin mattress until the sun came up.

The next morning, after I went for an early morning jog, Uncle Jimmy walked into Grandmama’s room. “These folk got me looking like a mummy, Jimmy Earl,” Grandmama said, before hugging Uncle Jimmy’s neck and talking about how skinny we’d both gotten since the last time she’d seen us. I told her she needed to do a better job of taking care of herself.

“You need to mind your business, Kie,” she said, “and don’t lose no more weight or your head liable to bop on down the road.”

“How can a head bop down a road, Grandmama?”

“You know what I mean, Kie,” she said, laughing at herself before directing her attention to Uncle Jimmy. “Why you ain’t eating, Jimmy Earl? You hear me?”

Grandmama looked at Uncle Jimmy and me standing side by side. She kept blinking her eyes in slow motion. The slow blinking was even worse than the eye twitching. Everyone in the family knew the slow blinking meant Grandmama was double disgusted with whatever she was looking at.

“I’m eating, Mama,” Uncle Jimmy said all of a sudden.

“What you eating, Jimmy Earl?”

Uncle Jimmy looked at me. “Gizzards,” he said. “Lots of spinach, too. All the spinach and gizzards I can eat.”

“Boy, you ain’t seen a leaf of no spinach. Why you ain’t eating, Jimmy Earl? Don’t get to lying off in this hospital.”

“I ate spinach the whole trip down,” Uncle Jimmy told Grandmama, while looking at me. “The whole trip down. Didn’t I eat spinach, Kie?”

Grandmama’s slow-blinking eyes dared me to lie so I kept my mouth shut and nodded up and down until I said, “Grandmama, what you think of Bush and them stealing that election?”

“Ain’t nothing the white man is too shamed to do, except do right by us. And it’s always some ol’ big-head black man who should know better trying to help the white man harm us.”

“Talking about Clarence Thomas?”

“Yeah, that ol’ big-head man know good and well these folk been stealing everything from us that ain’t nailed down since before I was born. I knew that man wasn’t right from when he sat on TV talking about a high-tech lynching when he got caught harassing that black woman. What her name is, Kie?”

“Anita Hill.”

“Right. Right. Anita Hill. All the education you got and you surprised they stole that election?” Grandmama asked me. “All that schooling, and you didn’t know what they was planning with all that gerrymandering? Kie, did Jimmy Earl eat spinach when y’all drove up here?”

I got up, stretched my calves, and weighed myself on the scale beside Grandmama’s bed. “I slept most of the way down here, but maybe,” I told her, and walked out of the room so Uncle Jimmy could tell all the lies he wanted to with no shame.

Stepping on the scale in Grandmama’s hospital room was the first time I’d stepped on a scale since leaving Indiana. The scale on the bottom floor of the gym at Indiana was the sleekest, sturdiest, most precise scale I’d ever stepped on. If I weighed myself, then took just a half sip of water or spit a few times, I could see a change in my weight. I weighed myself in the bottom of that gym before and after every workout, before and after every meal. I also got a tape measure to measure my waist every morning when I woke up. I came to Indiana with a thirty-three-inch waist and I managed to get it down to twenty-eight inches in two and a half years. Twenty- eight inches was good, and it was so far from forty- eight inches at my heaviest, but I knew I could get my waist even smaller if I worked harder.

If I weighed myself, then took just a half sip of water or spit a few times, I could see a change in my weight. I weighed myself in the bottom of that gym before and after every workout, before and after every meal. I also got a tape measure to measure my waist every morning when I woke up.

* * *

Grandmama was released from the hospital three days later. When I got to her house late Saturday night, Grandmama, Aunt Sue, Aunt Linda, and you were sitting around the TV watching The Color Purple in silence. Every time y’all watched it, it seemed like the first time. Y’all didn’t cry. Y’all didn’t move. Y’all just breathed deeply and made sure part of your body was touching the body of the woman next to you.

After the movie, while everyone in the living room was talking about how no good Clarence Thomas was for helping George Bush steal the election, you asked Aunt Linda and me if we wanted to go to the casino in Philadelphia. Aunt Linda, who lived in Vegas, swore that the Mississippi casinos were too country to hit, but she loved how reverential folk in those country casinos were to her.

“Vegas, honey,” she loved to say when folk asked about her elaborate wigs and her two-inch fingernails layered in ruby-red nail polish and studded diamonds. “I’m from Vegas, honey.”

I went in the bathroom to weigh myself before getting in the car, but Grandmama’s scale was gone.

Aunt Linda talked from Forest to Philadelphia about this video poker game and what she’d have to hit to get off the machine. When Aunt Linda asked you how much you’d have to hit, you didn’t answer her question.

The Golden Moon Casino in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was a windowless space of smoke, free alcohol, emergency lights, and ding-ding-dings. You didn’t have to play to hear the ding- ding-dings and see the emergency lights. I didn’t understand why anyone would put a dollar in a machine you’d probably lose when you could just watch folk, drink all you wanted, and listen to ding-ding-dings all night for free.

I sat in front of the machine across the casino floor from you, sipping diet pop, watching you spend every dollar you had in your pocket. I watched you rummage through your purse for enough quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies to take to the casino cage and get a few dollar bills. I watched you take those dollar bills and slide the money in the machine you were sitting at a few minutes earlier.

When you saw me watching you, I walked over and gave you the forty dollars Grandmama had given me for Christmas and the sixty dollars I had in my wallet. I watched you slide the five twenties in the same machine. In less than a minute, you walked over to Aunt Linda and sat next to her as she played. Neither one of you said a word. Aunt Linda eventually gave you what looked like another twenty and turned her back to you.

You went back to the same machine. When the money was gone, you looked over both shoulders and watched me watch you again. You walked over to me and asked if I brought my credit card. I told you I hadn’t had a credit card since somebody stole mine at Millsaps a few years ago.

“You need a credit card, Kie,” you said. “That’s how you build up your credit.”

I wanted to say so much, but we’d made it through Christmas without fighting and I didn’t know what I would do or feel if you slapped the taste out of my mouth after I’d given you my last money at a casino.

When we got home, you walked in Grandmama’s room, spread out across the foot of the bed, and told me to close the bedroom door.

“I don’t feel good, Ma,” you said to Grandmama.

“What you reckon it is?” Grandmama asked.

“Kie,” you said, “close the damn door.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why?”

“Because I said so, Kie. Just close the damn door.”

Grandmama looked at Uncle Jimmy and me standing side by side. She kept blinking her eyes in slow motion. The slow blinking was even worse than the eye twitching.


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Before I left for Indiana the next morning, Grandmama asked if I would go outside on the porch. Everyone else was either watching Tiger Woods beat white men in golf or they were in the kitchen assembling two-pound plates of food and slicing up German chocolate cake and sweet potato pie to take home. I sat in the same yellow peeling chair I sat in fifteen years earlier. I told Grandmama I couldn’t believe how full and green the woods looked when I was a kid. She told me no part of the world stops changing just because you leave it. “Why you tapping your foot like Jimmy Earl, Kie?”

I didn’t even notice I was tapping my toes on the porch.

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I probably need to go for a run. I want you to take better care of yourself, Grandmama. For real. Don’t wait until the last minute if something is wrong with your body. And don’t try to fix your body if you know someone else can fix it better. You getting enough exercise?”

“You gone exercise crazy,” Grandmama said. “You lost all that little fat and now you trying to coach folk? The worst kinds of teachers be the teachers that teach other folk how to be like them. We all got ears. We all know when folk talking down to us. My whole life, I been exercising. You seen them big ol’ bags of cans in the backyard? I walk up and down this twice a day picking up cans to take to the can man. Them nice Mexican folk off in the trailer park next door, they brang me some of they cans after seeing me walk up and down this road. So I get my exercise. Worry about yourself.” I laughed off Grandmama’s comment. “Listen, Kie. Something in the milk ain’t clean. I want you to call your mama and Jimmy Earl more.”

“I talk to Mama every few days, Grandmama.”

“Well, talk every day then,” she said. “Twice a day. Call your uncle Jimmy Earl more, too.” I looked at Grandmama, who was now playing with the bandages wrapped around her head. “Do you hear me? It ain’t but about one or maybe two ways to get a blessing. But it’s a million ways to give a blessing away. And some folk, they be so good at giving away blessings. You give away your blessings enough, one day the Lord will up and take whatever blessing you need and leave you with nan blessing at all.”

“Nan blessing, Grandmama?” I asked, bent over laughing. “You need your own show.”

“Nan blessing, Kie. I’m telling you what I know. And I ain’t just talking about no money. I’m talking about anything the Lord seen fit to bless you with.”

“I hear you, Grandmama,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“What is it, Kie? I’m not trying to talk about nothing crazy out here on this porch now.”

“I hear everything you’re saying about blessings and talking to Mama. I’m just wondering what happened to your scale?”

“Lord have mercy,” Grandmama said, and started slow- blinking her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if your bread is all the way done.”

“My bread is so done, Grandmama,” I told her. “I just really love losing weight.”

Grandmama’s eyes slowly and steadily blinked out on that porch that day.

On our way up to Indiana, I did not eat or drink. I had no way of knowing how much I weighed until I paid the dollar to weigh myself on the raggedy bathroom scale at a rest stop in Tennessee. According to the scale, I was 186 pounds, up two pounds from when I weighed myself at the hospital.

When we crossed the Arkansas state line, Uncle Jimmy stopped at a KFC and ordered some gizzards to go. A few miles down the road, we stopped at a grocery store that sold hot food. Uncle Jimmy told me to wait in the van. He came out with nothing and headed to another grocery store that served hot food. This time, he came out with two beige Styrofoam containers filled with greens and corn bread. He was trying to right his wrong.

“Want some, nephew?”

“Naw,” I told him. “I’m good.”

Uncle Jimmy sat in the parking lot of that grocery store eating what must have been a pound of greens and corn bread. When he was done with both containers, he told me Grandmama complained to the rest of the family that I’d been in school long enough. According to Uncle Jimmy, Grandmama said it was time for me to get a real job so I could help the family with money. Uncle Jimmy lied a lot, but I knew it was Grandmama’s style to tell the truth about whoever wasn’t in the room.

I told Uncle Jimmy I made about twelve thousand dollars a year at Indiana. After paying my rent and my bills, I had about two hundred and twenty dollars left every month. A hundred went to the student loans from Millsaps I defaulted on when you left all the notices in the mailbox. Forty went to Grandmama. Twenty went to savings. Sixty went to food.

“Mama said she want you to get a real job,” he said again. “So you should go ahead and get on that directly. Make some real money.”

I decided in Uncle Jimmy’s van that instead of working toward my PhD, I’d take my MFA and apply for a fellowship that placed grad students of color in liberal arts colleges to teach for two years. If I could get the fellowship, I’d revise the books I was working on while teaching, then I’d try to sell them and get a decent paying job somewhere else.

When Uncle Jimmy dropped me off, he didn’t hug my neck. He didn’t dap me up. He thanked me for not telling on him and told me he’d see me next year.

“Sometimes I wonder if maybe we could talk on the phone?” I asked him from outside the van.

Uncle Jimmy took off without responding to my question. I didn’t know exactly what Uncle Jimmy was putting in his body during our trip down to Mississippi. I knew on our trip back up to Indiana he’d eaten more greens than I’d ever seen a human eat in one sitting. After he dropped me off, I knew he was going to get back to flying and crashing because flying and crashing were what people in our family did when we were alone, ashamed, and scared to death.

After jogging up the stairs to my apartment, I got on my knees and thanked God I wasn’t flying and crashing like Uncle Jimmy, or crying and scratching crusted scabs out of my head like Grandmama, or moping and regretting all the money I lost in a casino like you. I rubbed my palms up and down my abs, searching for new muscles. I ran my fingers over my pecs, flexed both to see which one was more defined. I slid my hands into the gap between my hard thighs and squeezed as hard as I could. I traced the veins in my calves down to my ankles and back up behind my knees. Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I still saw a 319-pound fat black boy from Jackson. When I touched myself or saw how much I weighed or my percentage of body fat, I knew I’d created a body. I knew I’d made a body disappear.

I got off my knees and asked God to help y’all confront the memories you were running from. I asked God to help all of y’all lose your weight. I planned to do everything I could not to give my blessings away and provide for y’all. The first thing I had to do was sprint down to the gym before it closed. I wanted to know exactly how much I weighed so I could decide if it was okay for me to eat or drink before going to bed.

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From Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon. Copyright © 2018 by Kiese Laymon. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, Kiese Laymon, Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, is the author of the novel Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. He is also the author of the memoir Heavy.