Heavy by Kiese Laymon

The author is s professor at a well respected university, and this is his story. As memoirs go, this is a well told story , but it is very hard to read. It is chock full of unwelcome truths about what it is to grow up black in America. Violence is the everything everywhere all at once. His father’s mother was raped by a sheriff in Enterprise, Mississippi. His own mother goes to bed with a gun beneath her pillow. Laymon understands violence as a social system in the most memorable quote of the book: “Parents were trained to harm children in ways children would never harm parents, babysitters were trained to harm kids in ways kids could never harm babysitters. My body knew white folk were trained to harm us in ways we could never harm them.” He was sexually and physically abused as a child, often by people who either loved or took care of him. You can see how hard it would be to move beyond it, even though his mother was a highly educated professional and wanted the same for him. This emphasis is on truth telling rather than sugar coating – turning it into a kind of guiding principle –and it is a heavy burden. And heaviness is at the center of his autobiography. He himself is heavy: the book begins with the 11-year-old Laymon weighing 208lb. Later he will get bigger, at one point reaching 319lb. and he struggles with his weight throughout his childhood and young adulthood. But the title also refers to history, to the unfinished legacies of slavery, to the burden black Americans have to bear from living in a country that distrusts, demonizes and all too often destroys them. Who would want to face up to that heaviness?