Heavy.

When I was at Iowa, Kiese Laymon was there doing a casual reading from a stack of papers, and I remember thinking his work was really good. He’d surprised me with it, considering his no-big-deal walk up to the stand, one writer in a lineup of writers, even though he’d already published by then, and I think Heavy was already sold, getting ready to be out in the world. 

It is a very personal book. It’s written to his mother, who’s abused him in more ways than one, and he very delicately and expertly navigates the tension that can be there with family between resentment and a desperate kind of love. Heavy discusses sexual abuse, Laymon’s own and that of the people he grew up with, like the girl who was told that she couldn’t go swimming until she went into a bedroom with a group of older boys. Laymon writes, “Up until that point, I’d never really imagined Layla being in one emergency, much less emergencies. Part of it was Layla was a black girl and I was taught by big boys who were taught by big boys who were taught by big boys that black girls would be okay no matter what we did to them.” 

He talks about how often Black girls are not okay, and how Black men—and Black boys—are often the ones to make them that way. One thing I love about this memoir is how Laymon articulates and feels for a Black masculinity that does not hinge on sexism and homophobia to be secure. His work reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me in that sense, this searching for, if not finding, a way to be a straight Black man who does not harm the rest of the Black community—or consider himself above them—in order to feel some sense of power. 

John Singleton’s Baby Boy does this too. I’m thinking especially of when Jody’s mom asks him, “You ever look at it from her point of view?” and that’s perhaps what these texts all have in common—Coates, Singleton, Laymon—they consider “her point of view” in a way that creates more room for everybody. 

Audre Lorde talks about Black solidarity in Sister Outsider a lot, and one thing she says that I really like is that homophobia and sexism are linked to racism, and Black men (anybody, really) can’t successfully fight racism when they’re feeding other mouths of the same monster. 

I like that Heavy does not do that, feed the other mouths, that Laymon, in it, does not find his sense of self-worth through his perceived superiority over others. He looks at it, in moments, “from her point of view,” and he also lingers to investigate and articulate his own pain, something that masculinity does not encourage, but that he does anyway, strikingly and bravely. 

He slips between these heavy moments and lighter ones, praising Black language and the Black family and the culture that, while not perfect, is something to be proud of, something that can continually grow brighter and stronger and more beautiful the more we work toward including everybody, working out our own trauma instead of paying it forward. 

It is a hopeful book without being naive. It’s funny without being flippant, and it’s gorgeously brave and tenderly masculine, forging a way forward that privileges honesty and care. 

I tend to find myself maybe more ready to defend Black masculinity than average, especially considering I’m a feminist and grew up in a matriarchal home. I love hip hop and I love Boyz n the Hood and Baby Boy and New Jack City. I love what a group of people who are a part of my people have been able to make despite the constant threat of death that everybody in the Black community faces, either very literally or more abstractly. I definitely understand the hesitance to rally for the kind of Black man who is readily homophobic, transphobic, sexist, rude. I don’t support any of that. I don’t agree with or encourage the kind of masculinity that needs to feel superior to everyone else to matter, that needs to look down on any kind of difference. I guess I’m rooting for the people underneath those attitudes though, the people who have picked up the same tools that are used to keep them down so that they, in turn, can keep down other people. I’m sort of hoping that with enough exposure to people different than them, enough reading and movie-watching, enough open-mindedness, they’ll put those tools down.

I love this book for showing that it’s very possible to change your mind, to change the way you treat people. I love it for how it shows that there is a better, stronger, more noble masculinity underneath all this old school sad stuff, for how it seems to say that to really protect anyone, you have to be able to look at it from their point of view. 

Image: NPR & Scribner