October 24, 2019 • 43 mins
Kiese grew up in Oxford, Mississippi —the only child of a single mother, a black boy who struggled with weight. His childhood and adolescence were marked by two daily assaults: that of American racism, and America’s obsession with weight.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is the production of I Heart Radio. I
cared about the way you get your teeth when you
beat me for not being perfect. I cared about girls
at school seeing my welts. I cared about you days
and often hours before you beat me. You touched me
so gently. You told me you loved me. You called
(00:22):
me your best friend. You forgave me for losing the
Kinnis to the house. You codd the ashy cracks in
my face with vasiline slick palms. You use your w
thumbs wet with saliva to clean and sleep out of
my eyes. You made me feel like the most beautiful
black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn't.
(00:45):
That's Kisa Layman reading a passage from his masterful memoir Heavy,
a memoir that has been receiving just about every accolade
a book can get. I sat down with Kis on
a chilly summer morning in the mountains at the Aspen
Ideas for staff. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets.
(01:14):
The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. Whoa you
start big huh? The landscape of my childhood. So that's
a great question. You know, my my parents were nineteen
(01:36):
and twenty when I was born on the campus of
Jackson State University. My mom claims the first time she
had sexually got pregnant. My father claims the first time
he had sex, they got pregnant, and then they went
on to go to grad school University Wisconsin. When when
they went there, I was there for a little bit
and I want to stay with my grandmother and that
rule black town majority black town called far Ast, Mississippi.
(01:59):
And then when my mother and my parents my father
got separated, my mother moved to Jackson, and then I
came up from Forest, Mississippi to stay with her in
Jackson around eighties, so like six or seven. Um, So,
like my early early childhood was like partially in Jackson,
a little Tason, Wisconsin. And most of my memories of
my childhood are in Farest, Mississippi, partially because of my grandmother. Mean,
(02:23):
the landscape was kind of cool, but my grandmother was
just you know, complicated. She was just really good at loving,
really good at record being, really good at keeping secrets. Um.
So for me, she is my She is the landscape
of my childhood. And then when when my mom came
and got me, moved to Jackson, Um, you know, she
was very young single, so you know, I watched her
(02:45):
the young black woman in Mississippi go through with a
lot of young black single women in Mississippi go through,
lots of heartbreak, lots of economic procarity. We moved around
a lot. The only thing that was actually solid was
just her pushing book and writing on me and disciplined
me if I didn't do with the books and writing
what she wanted to. So my landscape is like it's
(03:07):
filled with Grandma is ms, is filled with my mom
pushing education. I don't really have many memories of my
father being there. I know he was there, you know. No.
One memory I do have is that he froze a
snowball when we lived in Wisconsin for a little while
and he broke it back out in the summer. We
had a snowball fight. That's the only member I had
with my father before I was eight. But he was there.
I just don't remember him unless pictures trigger some memory.
(03:30):
But I don't know if that's make believer actual. And
then the rest of my sort of childhood is just
living with Mama, just trying to watch her go from
like really a girl to a young woman to a
to a woman, and watch her teach while I was
just trying to do it. Most kids are trying to do,
you know, figure out life, deal with puberty, figure out
my feelings from my mother. We were so tight. I
(03:52):
was a big boy. People always thought that was my sister.
Man would always come up to me and asked me
for my sister's numbers. I would get upset up about that,
but yeah, we were very close. Variants. We slept in
the same bed for a long time, do you know
what I'm saying? And I think that sort of heightened
a lot of the things that came post essays. Mother
(04:14):
is an academic, a college professor. She's consumed with elevating
Kisa and protecting him. She insists that he speaks proper English,
the King's English, because that's how educated people, white people speak.
She's not just Kissa's mom, she's his teacher. She gives
him assignments to write papers, for instance, one about the
(04:36):
politicians Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, and another to
read the first chapter of William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom and
then imitate Faulkner's style, and Kisa knows he'd better complete
those assignments in a timely manner or else that's just
(04:57):
gonna have to laugh and always have to laugh before
I talk about that, right, Like, it's not even it's
just it's just bodily. You know. When I was really
young and she gave me lots of assignments. If I
got them wrong, she sit down with me and we
would revive we get it right. Um. But when when
when she moved back to Jackson for a few years
and I met a man that she would fall in
(05:17):
love with, who's a really powerful man in my city. Uh,
the or else is became a lot more physical and
a lot more emotionally abrasive. I think sometimes it made
this distinction between physical abuse and emotional abuse, but I don't.
I've got lots of whims in my life, and they
were all emotional in addition to being physical. And when
people have emotionally abused me, or if I've been emotionally
(05:40):
abusive to people have seen the physical manifestations of it.
So I'm saying, yeah, there's a lot of physical abuses,
emotional abuse, and some of it had to do was
because she was afraid that if I didn't master she
called the King's English, the white people, white police, white teachers,
what whatever, would go harder on me. That was definitely
something she believed. She got that from her grandma. And
then it was just a lot of like, my life
(06:01):
isn't fucking shambles, Like this dude is terrorizing me. I
cannot effectively terrorize him. I go home to this big
black boy who was my son, who I love more
than by in the world. He's kind of hard head.
He's not doing what I wanted to do. And you know,
I don't want to mythologize. The beatings are whippings. I
don't have children. Part of the reason I don't have
children because I'm afraid. I don't want to punish my children.
(06:23):
Never ever, ever would put my hands on my kids.
But I just noticed a lot of different ways to
use people other than that, and so my mother she
just started to, like, you know, beat me a lot
um for things that she said I was doing wrong.
But also when she and her partner got into it,
I just knew I was gonna get it, you know.
And and sometimes it was because I didn't do my homework.
(06:43):
Sometimes it would be like key, when I was away,
I noticed that my bed wasn't made up. Did you
get in my bed? Were you in the bed with
the babysitter? And this was actually before I was in
bed with the babysitter, and I was like, no, I
wasn't in bed with the babysitter. Mama, yes you were.
But I realized early that my mom had a hard
time with her partner. I was gonna get it somehow
(07:04):
or another. She was gonna take it out on me.
And and then after I got it, she was gonna apologize,
She was gonna hold me tight. We were gonna she
was gonna, you know, and that I always am. I
tell her that I said this in a book. That
was the confusing part, because I loved him more than
anything in the world. I was my first teacher, my
best friend, anything you can imagine, you know what I'm saying.
And I just was like, man, I would never ever
(07:25):
strike my mother. And at that point I was as
big as she was. And then I was like, I
don't really want to hurt my mom at all. At
that point. But when I you know, when I got
to high school, like most high schoolers, I was like, Okay,
I'm gonna get you back by doing stuff like trying
to have sex with my girlfriend in her bed when
she wasn't there, you know, breaking into the house, getting
(07:46):
terrible gray like all of these things that I know
would hurt her without physically, And I would never cuss
out anything, but you know, I was trying to hurt her.
I was trying to retaliate for what I felt was
like unfair treatment, and I want be held accountable for
that tool do you know what I'm saying? Not just
as I'm not saying it's the same sort of abusiveness,
but I was definitely trying to hurt my mom without
(08:08):
touching her. Do you think you knew that then or
do you know it now? I mean I want to
say I didn't know what I was doing, but I
knew what I was doing. Do you know what I'm saying? Like,
there's so many seas, you know, there's so many I mean,
this is all families. There's so many secrets. But my
mother and I never talked about sex, and she had
(08:28):
a hard time, like keeping money, so we were the
type of family who are like, we'd have cable TV
one month out of the year and then she wouldn't
pay the bill and then the ship would be gone. Right,
But when we had it, Remember one time she called me,
I don't know if you remember this, but if you
if you did not have cinemax and you turn the cinemax,
it would be all blurry. Do you know what I'm
(08:49):
skinnamax dudel kind of make out Nikki people in there.
So one time she saw me watching cinemax. Really, I mean,
it wasn't you coudn't see anything? She said, what are
you watching? Keep I'm like nothing, And then she kind
of a us sort of conversation with me about pornography,
and I was like, oh, my mama doesn't like me
to watch NIKKEI things so right. So we didn't have
a VCR. I brought my my friends VCR. His father
(09:13):
had all these porn tapes. I brought him to my house,
snug him in my room, and watched something that night.
But I left it there in my room. Of course,
I wanted her to see it, and when I got home,
I got it. Do you know what I'm saying? Changed
his schools in middle school and ends up one of
a small number of black students in a predominantly white school.
(09:35):
Well we knew, I mean, you know, we we're never
going to school with white kids before and in the Mississippi,
you know, whiteness, a particular kind of whiteness, is pervasive.
And we all had televisions and we went to the movie,
so you know, we weren't unfamiliar with whiteness and white people.
We were we were unfamiliar with real white people. And
because we didn't have any contact with real white folks,
(09:57):
you know, we knew Jack Tripper and Laverne as surely
and all the cartoons. You can imagine. It isn't a
happy situation. And k s A's grades start falling. His
mother gets his report card and becomes physically abusive, but
she only strikes him in places on his body where
bruises won't be seen. This is something Kis and his
(10:20):
friends the other black students have in common. They talk
openly with each other about the difference between getting a whooping,
getting a beating, and getting beaten the funk up. I mean,
I wasn't the only kid who went from getting those beatings,
like where you could come to school and you can
see the wells on people's bodies. And again, my culture,
(10:42):
and I think American culture generally even didn't one admitute
like we use human to kind of sue. Right. So
back with other school we would come to school and
we'll be like, yo, you got a web in his morning,
you know, like laughing. And at St. Richard to school
I went to. If I acted up and my mom
daught I acted up, you know, she would get me
in play is. It's complicated because we also had to
(11:02):
wear uniforms, so you know there were long sleeve shirts
and stuff like that. But she definitely would not get
me on my neck, you know, she wouldn't get me
anywhere in my face because she didn't want those white
people to think to pathologize her and us, and she
didn't want them to be like, oh, look at these
poor black kids come to school with wels on their body.
And that happened to me, and that was and that
(11:24):
happened to a lot of people. But what's important is
that you know, by eighth grade, you know, I played
a lot of sports. I was like eighth grade, I
was like five ten, two oh five, five eleven, two
oh five. My mom was five four hundred, So I
just think it's something very very very unspoken and intimate
about the ways. I don't know how much of it
has to do with race either, but like sometimes smaller parents,
(11:47):
you know, beat up on bigger kids, and for me,
like I was bigger than her partner too, you know,
so she was part of me. Thinks she thought she
could not hurt me. That's what I want to believe,
that she was hitting me like that because she thought
it was so big and she couldn't hurt me. But actually, no,
that's not true, because I let her know early on
that it did hurt. But then after a while it
stopped hurting and stopped hurting because I was so angry
(12:08):
she tried to hit me. I just catched a belt.
Just look at her. She keep on doing I just
catched the belt, and you know, one point, I called
her not threw it, and I looked at her in
a way for the first time my life where I
was like, nah, it's not gonna happen again. I was
never gonna touch my mom, but I just wanted her
to know that, like, you know, I'm You're not just
gonna beat me I mean, I'm done. I'm letting you
(12:30):
beat me, right, you know you can. You can keep
trying to beat me, but it's not gonna work anymore.
You know, it strikes me as you're talking about this
that there was something that there's like an element of
it that was like ritual, absolutely, because you each had
these different roles to play and and both were controlled.
Like your mom was controlled in that she didn't hit
(12:53):
certain parts of your body. She wasn't out of control.
You know, it's so profoundly complicated at it because in
the dynamic between k. S A and his mom, she's
acting out of a kind of maternal terror, but that
maternal terror actually terrorizes her son. She knows what can
happen to young black men, and so she tries to
(13:15):
teach k. S A to write and learn and think
his way towards protection. But protection isn't possible, so she
beats him. It makes all kinds of sense and no
kinds of sense, something he explores in his book Heavy.
I think the story is much more complicated. Right then,
young black mother beats big black son. Big Black Son
(13:38):
becomes a writer and writes about the beatings. Right. The
book is about much more than that. But but, but
the odd part about it is that my mom's fear
was that that the nation and my state, white supremacy,
white power manifested in my state in the nation, would
harm me in ways she could never and she wanted
to protect me. Like I grew up in the era
where police officers would come to your school. They'd be
(13:59):
called officer, and they bring up sometimes the biggest kid
in the school, make an example of him. If you
don't do right, this is how we're gonna treat you. Okay, fine,
But you know I had a lot of problems in
high school. I didn't but drinking wasn't one of my problems.
Smoking wasn't one of my problems. I saw how addiction
ravaged my family. I wasn't about to do that. But
cops still jack me up saying I had cracked. Cops
(14:21):
still would be like, I saw you throw crack out
of a window. You know what I'm saying. Cops would
still like have me embarrassed outside of the road, handcuffed
in front of people. And I know how people think
people dry body said a big black boy in handcuffs,
They're gonna be like, oh, that mocker there's something wrong.
Often I never I'm not trying. Ian. I am not
somebody who bleeds innocent. I'm not innocent, but I am
definitely innocent of ever doing anything or police officers that
(14:43):
I did, But that didn't stop me from calling them
negative and stopped them from putting guns to my face
guns to my head several times before I was eighteen
years old. This reminds me of something kiss mother says
to him before he starts school at St. Richard's. Here's Kisa.
I sat in the principal's office thinking about what you
told me the day before we started, saying, Richard, be
(15:05):
twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this
point on. You said everything you thought your new changes tomorrow.
Being twice as excellent as white folks will get you
half of what they get. Being anything less will get
you hell. I assume we were already twice as excellent
as the white kids at St. Richard's, precisely because their
library looked like a cathedral and ours was an old
(15:27):
trailer on cinder blocks. I thought you should have told
me to be twice as excellent as you, my grandmama,
since y'all were the most excellent people I knew. I
got kicked out of school for taking a library book
out of the library. And I just think it's interesting
because my mom's belief was that, like, if you immerse
yourself in books, you can protect yourself from them. And
(15:50):
what I learned, like eighteen nineteen, is that sometimes sometimes
the appearance of being like well read or uppity or
whatever to police officers or white folks don't have your
best interests at would make them punish you more. You know,
I got I got kicked out of school, literally for
taking the library book out of the library that I
paid to go to and taking it back. It was
all on the news, so it embarrassed my grandmama because
(16:11):
it looked like her grandson got kicked out of school
for theft. That was the most painful thing to happen
in my family at the time because it was so
public and it was and I didn't do I didn't
I took a library book and I brought it back.
You know what I'm saying something. My point is she
was right that these people won't do whatever they could
to harm and hurt me and people who look like me,
But she was wrong in that, like the meetings would
help because when that should happen to me, what I
(16:34):
wanted to do is fight them. I wanted to I
wanted to physically fight them. When you put handcuffs on me,
I'm gonna try to. I am gonna try to fight back.
And that's gonna make it worse. Do you see what
I'm saying, Because I was talking like you do fight?
You fight? You fight when people do things wrong, do
you fight. You can't fight the police unless you have guns.
I didn't have guns. We're going to take a short break.
(17:08):
His mom tries hard to control the unruly son she
loves so much, pushing him to read right, speak quote
unquote properly. But then there's another way she tries to
control him, having to do with food, what and how
much he eats. My mama was somebody who just like
(17:28):
his adamant and she was that I read all these books.
She was equally admit that I don't eat um, not
that I start myself, but like I only eat it
like asparagus, and I mean when I'm like between eight
and fourteen years old asparagus. And she like Brussels sprouts.
And her money was really weird too, so she would
buy like all this booty food we really couldn't afford
at the beginning of the month. I lives in fucking
(17:49):
pump and nickel brow, Like no twelve year old, I
didn't know. I didn't know what's over? Who want to
eat that kind of ship? And I definitely didn't want
to eat that um. But it's signified the same thing
as the King's English. Absolutely, she really believed that if
you ate light white people, read light white people, walk
like white people, you can protect yourself a white people.
But she raised a kid who was like sort of curious,
(18:11):
you know, I always just I was like, my look
at dr King like they blew his damn head off,
damn near and he was. He dressed well, he had
like a beautiful Southern twine, but he was one of
the most eloquent speakers ever. Right, look at you, Mama,
like you do speak to kings English in public, and
I can see you suffering. So this sort of like
deprivation in the hopes that the deprivation will make you
(18:35):
less scary. I don't know. Maybe it works, but it
didn't work for me. So when I left my mama's house,
partially because the food she she did have in the
house if we have food was not it was kind
of like not gross, it was gross, you know what
I'm saying to me? And I go to my friend's
house yea, and they have you know, Golden Graham and
(18:55):
like all kind of like those little frozen hamburgers in
the box you can sizzlin and that. So I would
just I just I just eight and eight and eight.
Whenever I left with my grandmother, who cooked a lot
of healthy food because she had a massive garden, but
she also like like to cook cars and cake. Did
she encourage me to eat? And I never heard the
word fat in her house from her, Do you know
(19:16):
what I'm saying. So I'm going to say, yes, I
was trying to protect myself, but also part of me
was trying to push back. I guess my mom's like
I think easy mode of discipline, which was like a
kind of like deprivation. There's a way in which I
think certain things lodge in the body, right, Like I
have a long time yoga practice, and one of the
(19:37):
things that the yogis won't say is that certain emotional
states actually live in the body. Like if you do
like a a hip opening pose eventually, if you stay
in it long enough, grief will like start to rise
to the surface. You know, you'll actually start to cry.
I mean, I've experienced like the ways in which certain
emotional states kind of sit dormant, you know, but like
(20:02):
their stories, they're complete. The Yogis called them some saras or,
which also translates a scar interestingly, like they live within us.
And I think when we are driven or there's a
kind of undercurrent of shame that most of us experienced
some degree or another, whether we're in touch with it
(20:23):
or not. That is kind of like the river beneath
you know, sort of our our daily existence. It manifests
itself in somewhere or another. And how we feel about
our bodies, and in your case, to the becoming bigger
and the way that on the one hand it sort
of afforded you a certain kind of weight, you know,
(20:45):
of protection, and on the other hand seemed to also
have go along with it a not feeling great about
your body, or feeling like, you know, girls wouldn't want
to be with you because of your body, yea, or
or that they would because they were scared, which was
I mean, And and there's no there's no evidence to
(21:07):
substantiate it, but that's what I felt, do you know
what I mean, Like even to this day. I mean
I was an interview and I said this before, so
I guess I can say it here. It's just like,
you know, I never felt comfortable even when we would
play like these games when we were like eight. It
was called high talked about this but kind of go
getting you go, you hide, and then whoever it was
a person has has to confine people. And the whole
(21:28):
point is that like young people are in the closets
or hallways and it's dark and you get to touch people.
I was just always afraid to touch anybody one because
I was just bigger, and but I wasn't afraid to
want to be touched. But you know, when I started
to get older in hip puberty, like most people, like
you know, desire was a thing, but I just never
felt comfortable. Um what did they used to call it?
(21:51):
Making a move or passing a note? Did you like me?
Circle yes or no? Like you know, none of that
kind of shif. It was just I just thought that people,
if if particularly if young girls you know, who were
twelve my age liked me at the time, I thought
it was because they thought I was going to hurt them.
But there's no reason for me to think that other
(22:11):
than I mean, there are reasons for me to think that, right,
But I never had anybody be like I thought you
would hurt me if you didn't blah blah blah. Well,
and of course you also equated, you know, loving and
being hurt. So k s A gets kicked out of
school for theft of a book. Even with his complicated
academic history, he manages to transfer from his first college, Millsaps,
(22:35):
to Oberlin, a school that recognizes his gifts his potential,
but it's all coming at a high price. In his
desire to change himself, he starts to radically change his
body in unhealthy ways at the highest in Millsaps. In
my first college, I was like three nine pounds. By
(22:56):
the time I get to Old Milan, I'm two hundred
and nine pounds, Like first day of school, and nobody
looked at me and thought that I could ever been.
I was like a very athletic two nine pounds, and
then I started to lose more ways. They're not going
to nine or one nine nine? What was the turning point?
What was what do you remember about the moment where
you're like, I'm now going to start eating differently, exercising,
(23:20):
and I'm gonna I'm gonna lose that weight. I'm gonna
go in there and be this smaller person. I just
wanted absolute control over my body because my body was
in Oberland, Ohio, because some white man decided that he
didn't want me at his school. Do you see what
I'm saying? And there weren't enough people around who all
(23:41):
saw that the ship was wrong, who fought enough to
make it happen. That meant, like I had, I needed
to protect myself somehow. And so it wasn't just the eating,
but my writing ritual kicked up. You know, started writing
two hours before nine a row, three in the morning,
three to night. I read. I ran in the morning,
I ran at night, and then you know, I got sick.
I got up. That's what Seeing that the number go down,
(24:02):
it felt so good. I played back. You know, it's
Captaine the basketball team. I weighed myself before the games.
I wash myself after the game. If I didn't lose
eight pounds of water weight during the game, I go
on the song and run more. I just was like, yo,
I can control, and I was trying to hurt myself,
like I'm not trying to put this on other people.
But you know, if you play any sort of athletics
(24:23):
in college B A, D, three D two or three one,
they're gonna run you to death. And if you run
on top of that, it's not gonna be good for
your body. Do you know what I'm saying? And I
just I wanted to be smaller. And then I just
started to get all of this crazy attention from not
just women, but women, from queer boys, from supposed straight
(24:45):
bowl a people were just like, oh my god, you
look so good, and I would I was dysmorphotuld I
was like, what, you know, I still thought I looked
like I looked at three pounds. And then one day,
you know, we're looking at tape for basketball, and I
saw myself on tape, and you know, I was like,
(25:06):
I'm gonna look good. But you know, I was very
musculine and very lean and very fast. And I just
remember sitting in that room with those my friends and
just like crying in your back because I was just like,
what the like, you just created a body without even
know when you created a body. But at what what cost.
People just stopped treating me like I was fat. That's
(25:27):
why I can't even imagine what it feels like for
women to be treated that way, because I think men
get treated a lot nicer. But I just people stopped
treating me like I was fat. So they stopped treating
me like a particular kind of threat, which meant that
I could do much more harmed at people because they weren't.
They weren't they were disarmed because oh this guy, so
you know what I'm saying. So that's when I started
to realize that sometimes those kinds of people could do
(25:49):
the most harm to different people, like those really attractive,
supposedly well read people who listened. And that's who I was.
I was a great in a great shape. I read
a lot books. I love to listen, And then no
one would have known what was going like what was
going on, you know, inside of you. And there's this
there's this line in your book right around the time
(26:09):
you get to Oberlin, I will not tell those friends
what my body remembered. I will become a handsome, fine
together brother with lots of secrets. There's also this line,
flying and crashing were what people in our family did
when we were alone, ashamed and scared to death flying
and crashing. You know, it's kind of what we've been
(26:29):
talking about too, right, It's like both you can't fly,
you can't just fly, not okay, not possible to just fly,
trying to find a way to crash. I'm trying to
embody like. To me, at that point, that was like
passing judgment on my family for being fat and for
being gambling addicted, and for my grandmother like she was
(26:51):
a cutter, like she used to hurt herself. So at
that point in the book, I'm saying, I'm so happy
I'm not like them. While that whole chapter is about
it's about body is morpha is about it and erected
about beliemia. There's a recurrent line in that chapter, I
just love losing weight. So, you know, I wanted people
to understand that the book was not passing judgment on
my family, But that's how fucked up I was, Like
(27:13):
I'd gotten out of that. I'm the skinny dude, I'm
in grad school, I'm about to go to teach Vasser. Here,
my grandmama is in the hospital, she can't take care
of herself. Here, my mama is. She can't take care
of her money. Here, my whole family is are all
you know, according to doctors, morri Lee obese. But here
I am in great shape, grad school, got everything going
on for me. But I'm just trying to disappear, you know,
(27:35):
just trying hard as I can to disappear. But I
didn't have that language. So ks A graduates from Oberlin
and gets his first teaching job. His mother has instilled
in him not only a sensitivity to words and language,
but to teaching as a vocation, and he lands a
great position at Vassar College. Now, Vasser is about as
(27:56):
far landscape wise from Jackson, Mississippi as you can get
while still staying in the United States. It's a culture,
I know well, a small liberal arts college in New
York State's Hudson Valley, all red brick buildings, white columns, arches,
and shady paths. It's here at Vasser that kas eating
disorder grows even more dangerous. You're six one and you're
(28:20):
a d pounds and you're running, you know, dozens of
miles a day, checking my body every day, checking your
body fat. It's at one point, it's two. So during
those years at Vasser. There's a moment where your mother
comes visits you. She's very proud of you, you know,
(28:41):
And which is interesting too, because it's so much about
what do we see when we see other people. What
she sees when she sees you at Vasser is that
it all, It all works. Everything she ever wanted, It
all works. Institution and all that disciplining and reading that
she did. What your mother sees when she sees you
(29:04):
in Poughkeepsie is that. But of course that's not what
it is at all. Oh No, I mean the hard
part about all of that is that some of that
coincides with the Obama ascensionvention. Thing about Obama is that,
like there was no imadinitive template for him before he
becomes president, right, nobody's like that, or we want this
guy with his African name from Chicago, used to be
(29:26):
community organized and married, beautiful black woman, um to be president.
Nobody's talking about that ship, right, But that's what she wanted.
She wanted she I mean when I say that, she
wanted in terms of his body, in terms of how
he speaks, in terms of how he manages white people,
like we've rarely seen Obama. I think honestly respond to
(29:47):
some of the white terret it has been put on
his back, right. And as soon as O, Mamma gota
like that, she starts crying because she's like, they're gonna
kill him. But I'm like, Mama, that's who you wanted
me to be. You wanted me to be this dude,
so like something doesn't make sense, Okay, just be safe,
do you see what I'm saying. So life was incredible
at Vaster because of my relationship with my students. You know,
(30:08):
I get the job at Vaster when I'm almost twenty six.
Most of my colleagues are older than my grandmama. That's
no distourd that that I'm trying to dis the grandmama
age people. What I'm saying when you're twenty six and
you come in, you know, you're talking about isolation and
a loneness. I went there alone, and the people I
had the most uncommon with were my students, right, And
(30:32):
lots of those students had never been taught by a
professor who was not white, and they definitely have been
taught by like a young black person. So they, I mean,
lots of the white ones did, but lots of the
folks of color, particularly black students like found safety and
me right. And I was teaching James Harlan, which is
ironic because bad one is always talk about teaching us
we need to record with our past. Our past has
(30:53):
never passed. It is always in us talking about love
and all my classes. Meanwhile, I'm like, I'm literally trying
to disappear. I'm literally trying to kill myself right, And
the only reason I did not it's because of my
body stopped working by like my legs stopped. I could
not run anymore because if I could have run, I
would have run myself into nothingness. But my legs stopped.
(31:15):
But the most shameful part of it to me is
that while I'm teaching these creative writing courses and teaching
these English lit courses, teach the African American led courses
to these students who would listen and believe anything I say,
I'm being wholly dishonest to them, coolly dishonest to them.
And I just if I could do it over again,
(31:37):
I would doubts what I would do over again. I
don't think I was fair to those kids. I know
those kids love me, and like I wanted, I'm not
saying they wanted me to sit down and give him
my whole life story. But I was just lying to
them all the time. I just lied every I mean
just teaches that a lot of teaches a lot of kids.
But but they expected more for me. And you know,
those students love me, they care for me. Um. But
I didn't do right by them, partially because personally, because
(32:02):
I was sick and I needed them a lot more
than I let on. I didn't want to be hanging
with the fucking sixty five year old white dudes with
the beards and ship talking about what kind of new
vest they were gonna wear next week. That wasn't what
I was interested in. As I listened to k S,
I can't help but think he's being too hard on himself.
(32:22):
I've been teaching all my writing life as well, and
it's a complex dance we teachers do, modeling what you
can impart as a teacher. It's not as simple as
you're either walking the walk or you're not. Sometimes you're
trying to impart something to your students from a place
of your own longing, a place of be better, be
better than I am. Right now, let me be clear
(32:44):
about they want to because I'm kind of talking around
what I what I really want to say. They would
want to hear me say I know what you're feeling
because I've been there, and I would not. I would
talk to them about a lot of things that at
them in the parts of who I was. But when
they started talking about like their relationships with eating disorders,
(33:06):
their relationships with sexual violence, their relationships with parental abuse,
and they would ask me, I literally would say, you know,
I don't have that experience, but I definitely hear you.
I would literally lie. And part of that as big pedog, actually,
I wasn't sure what you you know, like do you
give that or do you But what you don't do
is lie. And what I should have done is been like,
you know, I've experienced that kind of stuff too, but
(33:29):
I'm not sure that this relationship can hold my giving
that to you, so if you want to continue, and
what I really should have done, it's like there's a
counselor center right over there. Let me hold your hand,
let's walk over there together. My students would come be like,
you know, like I did this, you know, And because
I wanted to be everything to them, I never was
like I don't know how to help you now, but
these people do. So that's what I'm trying to say
when I'm saying they were open to me partially because
(33:51):
of my age, because of how I look, because I'm
a race, because I did care, but they gave me
opportunity after opportunity to talk about the stuff. I talked about.
It heavy, and I'm not saying I should have put
that on them, but I don't know if I should lie.
This is one of the things I hear again and
again when it comes to family secrets, whether it's the
people who have been coming to my events for Inheritance
(34:13):
or my guests on this podcast. So often folks who
have been part of a secret end up becoming secret
keepers too. So Key say is keeping his own secret,
which is that he's not okay. I mean, he's really
not okay. There's this way in which all of these
(34:34):
things were tied up together for you in this really
complicated stew and then it becomes like the work of
a lifetime. I mean, that's the way that I think
of it is. We like Hollywood endings, we like fairytale endings. Um,
we like the whole idea that there's like some kind
of bright line between you know, before and after. And
and that's something you were trying to do with your
(34:55):
body too, righte Like now pounds, nothing's going to touch me.
And meanwhile, you're mean the same exact thing, it just
looked different on the outside. We're going to take a
quick break. So when Kisa's mom makes that visit to
(35:24):
vass her, it ought to be a triumphant moment, a
transcendent moment. He's done it right. Her son is an accomplished,
tenured professor, a published writer, a thin, elegant black man
who speaks the King's English, all of which makes him untouchable,
right right, kiss mother takes him shopping and insists on
(35:47):
buying him expensive furniture for his home. He doesn't want
her to do it, but she does. And then when
she returns home to Jackson, she starts asking him for money,
more and more money. And he'd be ends to wonder
if she has a gambling problem. I mean, it wouldn't
surprise him. He could imagine anyone in his family being
an addict, crashing and flying, crashing and flying. What he
(36:13):
couldn't imagine was that his mother might be stealing from him.
But then she asks him for money for house repairs
and something doesn't seem quite right. Nothing in the world
she could ask me for it that I would say, no, nothing.
She could ask me for fifty g s if I
had forty nine, I go get the other g from
somebody and give it to it. And when that situation
(36:33):
happened at the house, when she was asking me for
some money to fix the foundation and to fix a chimney, uh,
the first time in my life, I questioned. I was like, Okay, well,
can I just talk to the contractor guy so I
can try to get the price down? And she hung
up the phone. And then she calls back and she's like, hey,
I need the money. You don't give it to me
not And I was like, uh, Mama, can I just
(36:53):
talk to the person to see where the money is going?
She hung up the phone again, so I called Grandma. Grandma.
Mama said that the needs breaking in the foundations messed up.
Grandma was like, no, I'm just over there. Ain't not
going on all day. I mean, thank goodness, children can
be this sort of like, I don't believe in innocence,
but I think sometimes we can really believe that our
parents would not attempt to do financial harm to us.
(37:16):
And I don't know how to explain it, but like,
ain't nothing in my heart broke like that in my
life when I realized, Oh, my mom, for for reasons
that are beyond her, is still in for me, and
still in from my Grandma, the two people on earth
who would never ever, ever ever still from her, who
(37:38):
would do anything possible to give to her. I didn't
understand gambling addiction at the time. He s A has
no idea how long his mother's gambling has been going on,
but as he thinks back through their history, it starts
to make sense that it's been there for a long time,
in the background. After the whoopings, the beatings, the various
(38:00):
minds of abuse, this realization that his mother had been
stealing from him makes him crazy his word, that's how
he describes it. He rethinks some of his history with her,
and at the same time, his body is breaking down.
He has herniated discs from all the punishing physical exertion,
and an abnormal growth on his left hip. But still
(38:22):
he tries to burn calories, moving his arms, trying to sweat,
trying to control the life that's burning all around him.
So one of the reasons I wrote that book was
because I think my mother and my father have had,
like lots of parents in this country have had different
relationships with addiction, but most of the ones I know
have never attempted to publicly articulate that journey, not just
(38:46):
for readers, but two people they love. I told I
was writing it too. She told me she didn't think
that was a good idea. Asked lots of questions that
we never talked about. She answered some she dinna answer some,
I'll talk to my grandmother, And my grandmother pretty much
answered all the questions that I add that I had
the nerve to ask. And then I just had all
(39:08):
this stuff, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna trying
to create a piece of art, not like a tell all,
because there's so much, like the most dramatic stuff in
that that that I think happened in that time period.
The three most dramatic things are not in that book.
But you know, it's just like an artful rendering, but
also an artful attempt to get us to love each other,
to save each other, to not give our money away,
(39:29):
to know that we're valuable enough to at least talk
through pain, which is something I just think we are
not good at. We don't know how to talk through pain.
You alluded to it, but when when you realize that
you're you think your mother was trying to just basically
steal from you. That coincided with your body falling apart
around that same time, and then you began putting weight
(39:52):
back on. Yeah, I mean yes, that struck me as
actually a good thing for you. When I got to
that part, it is like, oh, he's gonna let this
go now, like this form of masochistic you know, self
destructive body punishing. Um. Did it feel that way to you? No,
(40:15):
In a moment, it felt just shameful because everybody because
only people, because the people who knew me there, they
only knew me as a skinny person. So they were
just like, what's wrong with you? Do you know what
I mean? And this is when like they this is
when I went from one fifty nine, one eight nine
or one seventy nine, they'd be like, are you okay?
And I'm like, I'm good. What that literally, I'm not
(40:36):
gonna this is not hyperboly. That's just say my life
by that ship means the one to punch of his
body breaking down, and his discovery that his mom had
been stealing from him. This was the lowest point at
which it became possible to begin again. If my legs
(40:57):
allowed me to, I would have run myself into disappearing,
is no doubt. And and so I did not get
healthy because I started to like just try to punish
myself with food. But I mean should I wouldn't have
been here right now had that not happened. I just
want my mother to be better at loving one another,
and I want us supposed to be better at talking sincerely.
(41:18):
I don't think sincerity is something that we don't talk
about enough in his college Sincerely about joy, sincerely about pain.
The day before K. S. A And I had this conversation,
he received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
This award is a big deal in the literary world,
and kiss Mom was in the audience. As he accepted
(41:40):
the award, he asked her to join him on stage.
I wish I could have seen it. This remarkable mother
and son who continue, because of everything, despite everything, to
stumble toward one another in all their humanness. I wrote
this book as offering being Mama, can we talk? And
(42:01):
sometimes she says yes, and most of the times she
says no. But at least Lease is out there and
we've got opportunity. Now. I'd like to thank my guest K.
S A. Lehman for telling his story. You can find
out more about his book Heavy at K. S A.
(42:23):
Lehman dot com. That's Key I E S E l
A Y m O N dot com. I'd also like
to thank the Aspen Institute Arts Program and Aspen Words,
where this interview was recorded. Family Secrets is an I
Heart Media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Lowell
(42:44):
Bolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Right, and
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod.
(43:05):
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
(43:28):
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is the production of I Heart Radio. I
cared about the way you get your teeth when you
beat me for not being perfect. I cared about girls
at school seeing my welts. I cared about you days
and often hours before you beat me. You touched me
so gently. You told me you loved me. You called
(00:22):
me your best friend. You forgave me for losing the
Kinnis to the house. You codd the ashy cracks in
my face with vasiline slick palms. You use your w
thumbs wet with saliva to clean and sleep out of
my eyes. You made me feel like the most beautiful
black boy in the history of Mississippi until you didn't.
(00:45):
That's Kisa Layman reading a passage from his masterful memoir Heavy,
a memoir that has been receiving just about every accolade
a book can get. I sat down with Kis on
a chilly summer morning in the mountains at the Aspen
Ideas for staff. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets.
(01:14):
The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we
keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. Whoa you
start big huh? The landscape of my childhood. So that's
a great question. You know, my my parents were nineteen
(01:36):
and twenty when I was born on the campus of
Jackson State University. My mom claims the first time she
had sexually got pregnant. My father claims the first time
he had sex, they got pregnant, and then they went
on to go to grad school University Wisconsin. When when
they went there, I was there for a little bit
and I want to stay with my grandmother and that
rule black town majority black town called far Ast, Mississippi.
(01:59):
And then when my mother and my parents my father
got separated, my mother moved to Jackson, and then I
came up from Forest, Mississippi to stay with her in
Jackson around eighties, so like six or seven. Um, So,
like my early early childhood was like partially in Jackson,
a little Tason, Wisconsin. And most of my memories of
my childhood are in Farest, Mississippi, partially because of my grandmother. Mean,
(02:23):
the landscape was kind of cool, but my grandmother was
just you know, complicated. She was just really good at loving,
really good at record being, really good at keeping secrets. Um.
So for me, she is my She is the landscape
of my childhood. And then when when my mom came
and got me, moved to Jackson, Um, you know, she
was very young single, so you know, I watched her
(02:45):
the young black woman in Mississippi go through with a
lot of young black single women in Mississippi go through,
lots of heartbreak, lots of economic procarity. We moved around
a lot. The only thing that was actually solid was
just her pushing book and writing on me and disciplined
me if I didn't do with the books and writing
what she wanted to. So my landscape is like it's
(03:07):
filled with Grandma is ms, is filled with my mom
pushing education. I don't really have many memories of my
father being there. I know he was there, you know. No.
One memory I do have is that he froze a
snowball when we lived in Wisconsin for a little while
and he broke it back out in the summer. We
had a snowball fight. That's the only member I had
with my father before I was eight. But he was there.
I just don't remember him unless pictures trigger some memory.
(03:30):
But I don't know if that's make believer actual. And
then the rest of my sort of childhood is just
living with Mama, just trying to watch her go from
like really a girl to a young woman to a
to a woman, and watch her teach while I was
just trying to do it. Most kids are trying to do,
you know, figure out life, deal with puberty, figure out
my feelings from my mother. We were so tight. I
(03:52):
was a big boy. People always thought that was my sister.
Man would always come up to me and asked me
for my sister's numbers. I would get upset up about that,
but yeah, we were very close. Variants. We slept in
the same bed for a long time, do you know
what I'm saying? And I think that sort of heightened
a lot of the things that came post essays. Mother
(04:14):
is an academic, a college professor. She's consumed with elevating
Kisa and protecting him. She insists that he speaks proper English,
the King's English, because that's how educated people, white people speak.
She's not just Kissa's mom, she's his teacher. She gives
him assignments to write papers, for instance, one about the
(04:36):
politicians Benjamin Franklin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens, and another to
read the first chapter of William Faulkner's Absalom Absalom and
then imitate Faulkner's style, and Kisa knows he'd better complete
those assignments in a timely manner or else that's just
(04:57):
gonna have to laugh and always have to laugh before
I talk about that, right, Like, it's not even it's
just it's just bodily. You know. When I was really
young and she gave me lots of assignments. If I
got them wrong, she sit down with me and we
would revive we get it right. Um. But when when
when she moved back to Jackson for a few years
and I met a man that she would fall in
(05:17):
love with, who's a really powerful man in my city. Uh,
the or else is became a lot more physical and
a lot more emotionally abrasive. I think sometimes it made
this distinction between physical abuse and emotional abuse, but I don't.
I've got lots of whims in my life, and they
were all emotional in addition to being physical. And when
people have emotionally abused me, or if I've been emotionally
(05:40):
abusive to people have seen the physical manifestations of it.
So I'm saying, yeah, there's a lot of physical abuses,
emotional abuse, and some of it had to do was
because she was afraid that if I didn't master she
called the King's English, the white people, white police, white teachers,
what whatever, would go harder on me. That was definitely
something she believed. She got that from her grandma. And
then it was just a lot of like, my life
(06:01):
isn't fucking shambles, Like this dude is terrorizing me. I
cannot effectively terrorize him. I go home to this big
black boy who was my son, who I love more
than by in the world. He's kind of hard head.
He's not doing what I wanted to do. And you know,
I don't want to mythologize. The beatings are whippings. I
don't have children. Part of the reason I don't have
children because I'm afraid. I don't want to punish my children.
(06:23):
Never ever, ever would put my hands on my kids.
But I just noticed a lot of different ways to
use people other than that, and so my mother she
just started to, like, you know, beat me a lot
um for things that she said I was doing wrong.
But also when she and her partner got into it,
I just knew I was gonna get it, you know.
And and sometimes it was because I didn't do my homework.
(06:43):
Sometimes it would be like key, when I was away,
I noticed that my bed wasn't made up. Did you
get in my bed? Were you in the bed with
the babysitter? And this was actually before I was in
bed with the babysitter, and I was like, no, I
wasn't in bed with the babysitter. Mama, yes you were.
But I realized early that my mom had a hard
time with her partner. I was gonna get it somehow
(07:04):
or another. She was gonna take it out on me.
And and then after I got it, she was gonna apologize,
She was gonna hold me tight. We were gonna she
was gonna, you know, and that I always am. I
tell her that I said this in a book. That
was the confusing part, because I loved him more than
anything in the world. I was my first teacher, my
best friend, anything you can imagine, you know what I'm saying.
And I just was like, man, I would never ever
(07:25):
strike my mother. And at that point I was as
big as she was. And then I was like, I
don't really want to hurt my mom at all. At
that point. But when I you know, when I got
to high school, like most high schoolers, I was like, Okay,
I'm gonna get you back by doing stuff like trying
to have sex with my girlfriend in her bed when
she wasn't there, you know, breaking into the house, getting
(07:46):
terrible gray like all of these things that I know
would hurt her without physically, And I would never cuss
out anything, but you know, I was trying to hurt her.
I was trying to retaliate for what I felt was
like unfair treatment, and I want be held accountable for
that tool do you know what I'm saying? Not just
as I'm not saying it's the same sort of abusiveness,
but I was definitely trying to hurt my mom without
(08:08):
touching her. Do you think you knew that then or
do you know it now? I mean I want to
say I didn't know what I was doing, but I
knew what I was doing. Do you know what I'm saying? Like,
there's so many seas, you know, there's so many I mean,
this is all families. There's so many secrets. But my
mother and I never talked about sex, and she had
(08:28):
a hard time, like keeping money, so we were the
type of family who are like, we'd have cable TV
one month out of the year and then she wouldn't
pay the bill and then the ship would be gone. Right,
But when we had it, Remember one time she called me,
I don't know if you remember this, but if you
if you did not have cinemax and you turn the cinemax,
it would be all blurry. Do you know what I'm
(08:49):
skinnamax dudel kind of make out Nikki people in there.
So one time she saw me watching cinemax. Really, I mean,
it wasn't you coudn't see anything? She said, what are
you watching? Keep I'm like nothing, And then she kind
of a us sort of conversation with me about pornography,
and I was like, oh, my mama doesn't like me
to watch NIKKEI things so right. So we didn't have
a VCR. I brought my my friends VCR. His father
(09:13):
had all these porn tapes. I brought him to my house,
snug him in my room, and watched something that night.
But I left it there in my room. Of course,
I wanted her to see it, and when I got home,
I got it. Do you know what I'm saying? Changed
his schools in middle school and ends up one of
a small number of black students in a predominantly white school.
(09:35):
Well we knew, I mean, you know, we we're never
going to school with white kids before and in the Mississippi,
you know, whiteness, a particular kind of whiteness, is pervasive.
And we all had televisions and we went to the movie,
so you know, we weren't unfamiliar with whiteness and white people.
We were we were unfamiliar with real white people. And
because we didn't have any contact with real white folks,
(09:57):
you know, we knew Jack Tripper and Laverne as surely
and all the cartoons. You can imagine. It isn't a
happy situation. And k s A's grades start falling. His
mother gets his report card and becomes physically abusive, but
she only strikes him in places on his body where
bruises won't be seen. This is something Kis and his
(10:20):
friends the other black students have in common. They talk
openly with each other about the difference between getting a whooping,
getting a beating, and getting beaten the funk up. I mean,
I wasn't the only kid who went from getting those beatings,
like where you could come to school and you can
see the wells on people's bodies. And again, my culture,
(10:42):
and I think American culture generally even didn't one admitute
like we use human to kind of sue. Right. So
back with other school we would come to school and
we'll be like, yo, you got a web in his morning,
you know, like laughing. And at St. Richard to school
I went to. If I acted up and my mom
daught I acted up, you know, she would get me
in play is. It's complicated because we also had to
(11:02):
wear uniforms, so you know there were long sleeve shirts
and stuff like that. But she definitely would not get
me on my neck, you know, she wouldn't get me
anywhere in my face because she didn't want those white
people to think to pathologize her and us, and she
didn't want them to be like, oh, look at these
poor black kids come to school with wels on their body.
And that happened to me, and that was and that
(11:24):
happened to a lot of people. But what's important is
that you know, by eighth grade, you know, I played
a lot of sports. I was like eighth grade, I
was like five ten, two oh five, five eleven, two
oh five. My mom was five four hundred, So I
just think it's something very very very unspoken and intimate
about the ways. I don't know how much of it
has to do with race either, but like sometimes smaller parents,
(11:47):
you know, beat up on bigger kids, and for me,
like I was bigger than her partner too, you know,
so she was part of me. Thinks she thought she
could not hurt me. That's what I want to believe,
that she was hitting me like that because she thought
it was so big and she couldn't hurt me. But actually, no,
that's not true, because I let her know early on
that it did hurt. But then after a while it
stopped hurting and stopped hurting because I was so angry
(12:08):
she tried to hit me. I just catched a belt.
Just look at her. She keep on doing I just
catched the belt, and you know, one point, I called
her not threw it, and I looked at her in
a way for the first time my life where I
was like, nah, it's not gonna happen again. I was
never gonna touch my mom, but I just wanted her
to know that, like, you know, I'm You're not just
gonna beat me I mean, I'm done. I'm letting you
(12:30):
beat me, right, you know you can. You can keep
trying to beat me, but it's not gonna work anymore.
You know, it strikes me as you're talking about this
that there was something that there's like an element of
it that was like ritual, absolutely, because you each had
these different roles to play and and both were controlled.
Like your mom was controlled in that she didn't hit
(12:53):
certain parts of your body. She wasn't out of control.
You know, it's so profoundly complicated at it because in
the dynamic between k. S A and his mom, she's
acting out of a kind of maternal terror, but that
maternal terror actually terrorizes her son. She knows what can
happen to young black men, and so she tries to
(13:15):
teach k. S A to write and learn and think
his way towards protection. But protection isn't possible, so she
beats him. It makes all kinds of sense and no
kinds of sense, something he explores in his book Heavy.
I think the story is much more complicated. Right then,
young black mother beats big black son. Big Black Son
(13:38):
becomes a writer and writes about the beatings. Right. The
book is about much more than that. But but, but
the odd part about it is that my mom's fear
was that that the nation and my state, white supremacy,
white power manifested in my state in the nation, would
harm me in ways she could never and she wanted
to protect me. Like I grew up in the era
where police officers would come to your school. They'd be
(13:59):
called officer, and they bring up sometimes the biggest kid
in the school, make an example of him. If you
don't do right, this is how we're gonna treat you. Okay, fine,
But you know I had a lot of problems in
high school. I didn't but drinking wasn't one of my problems.
Smoking wasn't one of my problems. I saw how addiction
ravaged my family. I wasn't about to do that. But
cops still jack me up saying I had cracked. Cops
(14:21):
still would be like, I saw you throw crack out
of a window. You know what I'm saying. Cops would
still like have me embarrassed outside of the road, handcuffed
in front of people. And I know how people think
people dry body said a big black boy in handcuffs,
They're gonna be like, oh, that mocker there's something wrong.
Often I never I'm not trying. Ian. I am not
somebody who bleeds innocent. I'm not innocent, but I am
definitely innocent of ever doing anything or police officers that
(14:43):
I did, But that didn't stop me from calling them
negative and stopped them from putting guns to my face
guns to my head several times before I was eighteen
years old. This reminds me of something kiss mother says
to him before he starts school at St. Richard's. Here's Kisa.
I sat in the principal's office thinking about what you
told me the day before we started, saying, Richard, be
(15:05):
twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this
point on. You said everything you thought your new changes tomorrow.
Being twice as excellent as white folks will get you
half of what they get. Being anything less will get
you hell. I assume we were already twice as excellent
as the white kids at St. Richard's, precisely because their
library looked like a cathedral and ours was an old
(15:27):
trailer on cinder blocks. I thought you should have told
me to be twice as excellent as you, my grandmama,
since y'all were the most excellent people I knew. I
got kicked out of school for taking a library book
out of the library. And I just think it's interesting
because my mom's belief was that, like, if you immerse
yourself in books, you can protect yourself from them. And
(15:50):
what I learned, like eighteen nineteen, is that sometimes sometimes
the appearance of being like well read or uppity or
whatever to police officers or white folks don't have your
best interests at would make them punish you more. You know,
I got I got kicked out of school, literally for
taking the library book out of the library that I
paid to go to and taking it back. It was
all on the news, so it embarrassed my grandmama because
(16:11):
it looked like her grandson got kicked out of school
for theft. That was the most painful thing to happen
in my family at the time because it was so
public and it was and I didn't do I didn't
I took a library book and I brought it back.
You know what I'm saying something. My point is she
was right that these people won't do whatever they could
to harm and hurt me and people who look like me,
But she was wrong in that, like the meetings would
help because when that should happen to me, what I
(16:34):
wanted to do is fight them. I wanted to I
wanted to physically fight them. When you put handcuffs on me,
I'm gonna try to. I am gonna try to fight back.
And that's gonna make it worse. Do you see what
I'm saying, Because I was talking like you do fight?
You fight? You fight when people do things wrong, do
you fight. You can't fight the police unless you have guns.
I didn't have guns. We're going to take a short break.
(17:08):
His mom tries hard to control the unruly son she
loves so much, pushing him to read right, speak quote
unquote properly. But then there's another way she tries to
control him, having to do with food, what and how
much he eats. My mama was somebody who just like
(17:28):
his adamant and she was that I read all these books.
She was equally admit that I don't eat um, not
that I start myself, but like I only eat it
like asparagus, and I mean when I'm like between eight
and fourteen years old asparagus. And she like Brussels sprouts.
And her money was really weird too, so she would
buy like all this booty food we really couldn't afford
at the beginning of the month. I lives in fucking
(17:49):
pump and nickel brow, Like no twelve year old, I
didn't know. I didn't know what's over? Who want to
eat that kind of ship? And I definitely didn't want
to eat that um. But it's signified the same thing
as the King's English. Absolutely, she really believed that if
you ate light white people, read light white people, walk
like white people, you can protect yourself a white people.
But she raised a kid who was like sort of curious,
(18:11):
you know, I always just I was like, my look
at dr King like they blew his damn head off,
damn near and he was. He dressed well, he had
like a beautiful Southern twine, but he was one of
the most eloquent speakers ever. Right, look at you, Mama,
like you do speak to kings English in public, and
I can see you suffering. So this sort of like
deprivation in the hopes that the deprivation will make you
(18:35):
less scary. I don't know. Maybe it works, but it
didn't work for me. So when I left my mama's house,
partially because the food she she did have in the
house if we have food was not it was kind
of like not gross, it was gross, you know what
I'm saying to me? And I go to my friend's
house yea, and they have you know, Golden Graham and
(18:55):
like all kind of like those little frozen hamburgers in
the box you can sizzlin and that. So I would
just I just I just eight and eight and eight.
Whenever I left with my grandmother, who cooked a lot
of healthy food because she had a massive garden, but
she also like like to cook cars and cake. Did
she encourage me to eat? And I never heard the
word fat in her house from her, Do you know
(19:16):
what I'm saying. So I'm going to say, yes, I
was trying to protect myself, but also part of me
was trying to push back. I guess my mom's like
I think easy mode of discipline, which was like a
kind of like deprivation. There's a way in which I
think certain things lodge in the body, right, Like I
have a long time yoga practice, and one of the
(19:37):
things that the yogis won't say is that certain emotional
states actually live in the body. Like if you do
like a a hip opening pose eventually, if you stay
in it long enough, grief will like start to rise
to the surface. You know, you'll actually start to cry.
I mean, I've experienced like the ways in which certain
emotional states kind of sit dormant, you know, but like
(20:02):
their stories, they're complete. The Yogis called them some saras or,
which also translates a scar interestingly, like they live within us.
And I think when we are driven or there's a
kind of undercurrent of shame that most of us experienced
some degree or another, whether we're in touch with it
(20:23):
or not. That is kind of like the river beneath
you know, sort of our our daily existence. It manifests
itself in somewhere or another. And how we feel about
our bodies, and in your case, to the becoming bigger
and the way that on the one hand it sort
of afforded you a certain kind of weight, you know,
(20:45):
of protection, and on the other hand seemed to also
have go along with it a not feeling great about
your body, or feeling like, you know, girls wouldn't want
to be with you because of your body, yea, or
or that they would because they were scared, which was
I mean, And and there's no there's no evidence to
(21:07):
substantiate it, but that's what I felt, do you know
what I mean, Like even to this day. I mean
I was an interview and I said this before, so
I guess I can say it here. It's just like,
you know, I never felt comfortable even when we would
play like these games when we were like eight. It
was called high talked about this but kind of go
getting you go, you hide, and then whoever it was
a person has has to confine people. And the whole
(21:28):
point is that like young people are in the closets
or hallways and it's dark and you get to touch people.
I was just always afraid to touch anybody one because
I was just bigger, and but I wasn't afraid to
want to be touched. But you know, when I started
to get older in hip puberty, like most people, like
you know, desire was a thing, but I just never
felt comfortable. Um what did they used to call it?
(21:51):
Making a move or passing a note? Did you like me?
Circle yes or no? Like you know, none of that
kind of shif. It was just I just thought that people,
if if particularly if young girls you know, who were
twelve my age liked me at the time, I thought
it was because they thought I was going to hurt them.
But there's no reason for me to think that other
(22:11):
than I mean, there are reasons for me to think that, right,
But I never had anybody be like I thought you
would hurt me if you didn't blah blah blah. Well,
and of course you also equated, you know, loving and
being hurt. So k s A gets kicked out of
school for theft of a book. Even with his complicated
academic history, he manages to transfer from his first college, Millsaps,
(22:35):
to Oberlin, a school that recognizes his gifts his potential,
but it's all coming at a high price. In his
desire to change himself, he starts to radically change his
body in unhealthy ways at the highest in Millsaps. In
my first college, I was like three nine pounds. By
(22:56):
the time I get to Old Milan, I'm two hundred
and nine pounds, Like first day of school, and nobody
looked at me and thought that I could ever been.
I was like a very athletic two nine pounds, and
then I started to lose more ways. They're not going
to nine or one nine nine? What was the turning point?
What was what do you remember about the moment where
you're like, I'm now going to start eating differently, exercising,
(23:20):
and I'm gonna I'm gonna lose that weight. I'm gonna
go in there and be this smaller person. I just
wanted absolute control over my body because my body was
in Oberland, Ohio, because some white man decided that he
didn't want me at his school. Do you see what
I'm saying? And there weren't enough people around who all
(23:41):
saw that the ship was wrong, who fought enough to
make it happen. That meant, like I had, I needed
to protect myself somehow. And so it wasn't just the eating,
but my writing ritual kicked up. You know, started writing
two hours before nine a row, three in the morning,
three to night. I read. I ran in the morning,
I ran at night, and then you know, I got sick.
I got up. That's what Seeing that the number go down,
(24:02):
it felt so good. I played back. You know, it's
Captaine the basketball team. I weighed myself before the games.
I wash myself after the game. If I didn't lose
eight pounds of water weight during the game, I go
on the song and run more. I just was like, yo,
I can control, and I was trying to hurt myself,
like I'm not trying to put this on other people.
But you know, if you play any sort of athletics
(24:23):
in college B A, D, three D two or three one,
they're gonna run you to death. And if you run
on top of that, it's not gonna be good for
your body. Do you know what I'm saying? And I
just I wanted to be smaller. And then I just
started to get all of this crazy attention from not
just women, but women, from queer boys, from supposed straight
(24:45):
bowl a people were just like, oh my god, you
look so good, and I would I was dysmorphotuld I
was like, what, you know, I still thought I looked
like I looked at three pounds. And then one day,
you know, we're looking at tape for basketball, and I
saw myself on tape, and you know, I was like,
(25:06):
I'm gonna look good. But you know, I was very
musculine and very lean and very fast. And I just
remember sitting in that room with those my friends and
just like crying in your back because I was just like,
what the like, you just created a body without even
know when you created a body. But at what what cost.
People just stopped treating me like I was fat. That's
(25:27):
why I can't even imagine what it feels like for
women to be treated that way, because I think men
get treated a lot nicer. But I just people stopped
treating me like I was fat. So they stopped treating
me like a particular kind of threat, which meant that
I could do much more harmed at people because they weren't.
They weren't they were disarmed because oh this guy, so
you know what I'm saying. So that's when I started
to realize that sometimes those kinds of people could do
(25:49):
the most harm to different people, like those really attractive,
supposedly well read people who listened. And that's who I was.
I was a great in a great shape. I read
a lot books. I love to listen, And then no
one would have known what was going like what was
going on, you know, inside of you. And there's this
there's this line in your book right around the time
(26:09):
you get to Oberlin, I will not tell those friends
what my body remembered. I will become a handsome, fine
together brother with lots of secrets. There's also this line,
flying and crashing were what people in our family did
when we were alone, ashamed and scared to death flying
and crashing. You know, it's kind of what we've been
(26:29):
talking about too, right, It's like both you can't fly,
you can't just fly, not okay, not possible to just fly,
trying to find a way to crash. I'm trying to
embody like. To me, at that point, that was like
passing judgment on my family for being fat and for
being gambling addicted, and for my grandmother like she was
(26:51):
a cutter, like she used to hurt herself. So at
that point in the book, I'm saying, I'm so happy
I'm not like them. While that whole chapter is about
it's about body is morpha is about it and erected
about beliemia. There's a recurrent line in that chapter, I
just love losing weight. So, you know, I wanted people
to understand that the book was not passing judgment on
my family, But that's how fucked up I was, Like
(27:13):
I'd gotten out of that. I'm the skinny dude, I'm
in grad school, I'm about to go to teach Vasser. Here,
my grandmama is in the hospital, she can't take care
of herself. Here, my mama is. She can't take care
of her money. Here, my whole family is are all
you know, according to doctors, morri Lee obese. But here
I am in great shape, grad school, got everything going
on for me. But I'm just trying to disappear, you know,
(27:35):
just trying hard as I can to disappear. But I
didn't have that language. So ks A graduates from Oberlin
and gets his first teaching job. His mother has instilled
in him not only a sensitivity to words and language,
but to teaching as a vocation, and he lands a
great position at Vassar College. Now, Vasser is about as
(27:56):
far landscape wise from Jackson, Mississippi as you can get
while still staying in the United States. It's a culture,
I know well, a small liberal arts college in New
York State's Hudson Valley, all red brick buildings, white columns, arches,
and shady paths. It's here at Vasser that kas eating
disorder grows even more dangerous. You're six one and you're
(28:20):
a d pounds and you're running, you know, dozens of
miles a day, checking my body every day, checking your
body fat. It's at one point, it's two. So during
those years at Vasser. There's a moment where your mother
comes visits you. She's very proud of you, you know,
(28:41):
And which is interesting too, because it's so much about
what do we see when we see other people. What
she sees when she sees you at Vasser is that
it all, It all works. Everything she ever wanted, It
all works. Institution and all that disciplining and reading that
she did. What your mother sees when she sees you
(29:04):
in Poughkeepsie is that. But of course that's not what
it is at all. Oh No, I mean the hard
part about all of that is that some of that
coincides with the Obama ascensionvention. Thing about Obama is that,
like there was no imadinitive template for him before he
becomes president, right, nobody's like that, or we want this
guy with his African name from Chicago, used to be
(29:26):
community organized and married, beautiful black woman, um to be president.
Nobody's talking about that ship, right, But that's what she wanted.
She wanted she I mean when I say that, she
wanted in terms of his body, in terms of how
he speaks, in terms of how he manages white people,
like we've rarely seen Obama. I think honestly respond to
(29:47):
some of the white terret it has been put on
his back, right. And as soon as O, Mamma gota
like that, she starts crying because she's like, they're gonna
kill him. But I'm like, Mama, that's who you wanted
me to be. You wanted me to be this dude,
so like something doesn't make sense, Okay, just be safe,
do you see what I'm saying. So life was incredible
at Vaster because of my relationship with my students. You know,
(30:08):
I get the job at Vaster when I'm almost twenty six.
Most of my colleagues are older than my grandmama. That's
no distourd that that I'm trying to dis the grandmama
age people. What I'm saying when you're twenty six and
you come in, you know, you're talking about isolation and
a loneness. I went there alone, and the people I
had the most uncommon with were my students, right, And
(30:32):
lots of those students had never been taught by a
professor who was not white, and they definitely have been
taught by like a young black person. So they, I mean,
lots of the white ones did, but lots of the
folks of color, particularly black students like found safety and
me right. And I was teaching James Harlan, which is
ironic because bad one is always talk about teaching us
we need to record with our past. Our past has
(30:53):
never passed. It is always in us talking about love
and all my classes. Meanwhile, I'm like, I'm literally trying
to disappear. I'm literally trying to kill myself right, And
the only reason I did not it's because of my
body stopped working by like my legs stopped. I could
not run anymore because if I could have run, I
would have run myself into nothingness. But my legs stopped.
(31:15):
But the most shameful part of it to me is
that while I'm teaching these creative writing courses and teaching
these English lit courses, teach the African American led courses
to these students who would listen and believe anything I say,
I'm being wholly dishonest to them, coolly dishonest to them.
And I just if I could do it over again,
(31:37):
I would doubts what I would do over again. I
don't think I was fair to those kids. I know
those kids love me, and like I wanted, I'm not
saying they wanted me to sit down and give him
my whole life story. But I was just lying to
them all the time. I just lied every I mean
just teaches that a lot of teaches a lot of kids.
But but they expected more for me. And you know,
those students love me, they care for me. Um. But
I didn't do right by them, partially because personally, because
(32:02):
I was sick and I needed them a lot more
than I let on. I didn't want to be hanging
with the fucking sixty five year old white dudes with
the beards and ship talking about what kind of new
vest they were gonna wear next week. That wasn't what
I was interested in. As I listened to k S,
I can't help but think he's being too hard on himself.
(32:22):
I've been teaching all my writing life as well, and
it's a complex dance we teachers do, modeling what you
can impart as a teacher. It's not as simple as
you're either walking the walk or you're not. Sometimes you're
trying to impart something to your students from a place
of your own longing, a place of be better, be
better than I am. Right now, let me be clear
(32:44):
about they want to because I'm kind of talking around
what I what I really want to say. They would
want to hear me say I know what you're feeling
because I've been there, and I would not. I would
talk to them about a lot of things that at
them in the parts of who I was. But when
they started talking about like their relationships with eating disorders,
(33:06):
their relationships with sexual violence, their relationships with parental abuse,
and they would ask me, I literally would say, you know,
I don't have that experience, but I definitely hear you.
I would literally lie. And part of that as big pedog, actually,
I wasn't sure what you you know, like do you
give that or do you But what you don't do
is lie. And what I should have done is been like,
you know, I've experienced that kind of stuff too, but
(33:29):
I'm not sure that this relationship can hold my giving
that to you, so if you want to continue, and
what I really should have done, it's like there's a
counselor center right over there. Let me hold your hand,
let's walk over there together. My students would come be like,
you know, like I did this, you know, And because
I wanted to be everything to them, I never was
like I don't know how to help you now, but
these people do. So that's what I'm trying to say
when I'm saying they were open to me partially because
(33:51):
of my age, because of how I look, because I'm
a race, because I did care, but they gave me
opportunity after opportunity to talk about the stuff. I talked about.
It heavy, and I'm not saying I should have put
that on them, but I don't know if I should lie.
This is one of the things I hear again and
again when it comes to family secrets, whether it's the
people who have been coming to my events for Inheritance
(34:13):
or my guests on this podcast. So often folks who
have been part of a secret end up becoming secret
keepers too. So Key say is keeping his own secret,
which is that he's not okay. I mean, he's really
not okay. There's this way in which all of these
(34:34):
things were tied up together for you in this really
complicated stew and then it becomes like the work of
a lifetime. I mean, that's the way that I think
of it is. We like Hollywood endings, we like fairytale endings. Um,
we like the whole idea that there's like some kind
of bright line between you know, before and after. And
and that's something you were trying to do with your
(34:55):
body too, righte Like now pounds, nothing's going to touch me.
And meanwhile, you're mean the same exact thing, it just
looked different on the outside. We're going to take a
quick break. So when Kisa's mom makes that visit to
(35:24):
vass her, it ought to be a triumphant moment, a
transcendent moment. He's done it right. Her son is an accomplished,
tenured professor, a published writer, a thin, elegant black man
who speaks the King's English, all of which makes him untouchable,
right right, kiss mother takes him shopping and insists on
(35:47):
buying him expensive furniture for his home. He doesn't want
her to do it, but she does. And then when
she returns home to Jackson, she starts asking him for money,
more and more money. And he'd be ends to wonder
if she has a gambling problem. I mean, it wouldn't
surprise him. He could imagine anyone in his family being
an addict, crashing and flying, crashing and flying. What he
(36:13):
couldn't imagine was that his mother might be stealing from him.
But then she asks him for money for house repairs
and something doesn't seem quite right. Nothing in the world
she could ask me for it that I would say, no, nothing.
She could ask me for fifty g s if I
had forty nine, I go get the other g from
somebody and give it to it. And when that situation
(36:33):
happened at the house, when she was asking me for
some money to fix the foundation and to fix a chimney, uh,
the first time in my life, I questioned. I was like, Okay, well,
can I just talk to the contractor guy so I
can try to get the price down? And she hung
up the phone. And then she calls back and she's like, hey,
I need the money. You don't give it to me
not And I was like, uh, Mama, can I just
(36:53):
talk to the person to see where the money is going?
She hung up the phone again, so I called Grandma. Grandma.
Mama said that the needs breaking in the foundations messed up.
Grandma was like, no, I'm just over there. Ain't not
going on all day. I mean, thank goodness, children can
be this sort of like, I don't believe in innocence,
but I think sometimes we can really believe that our
parents would not attempt to do financial harm to us.
(37:16):
And I don't know how to explain it, but like,
ain't nothing in my heart broke like that in my
life when I realized, Oh, my mom, for for reasons
that are beyond her, is still in for me, and
still in from my Grandma, the two people on earth
who would never ever, ever ever still from her, who
(37:38):
would do anything possible to give to her. I didn't
understand gambling addiction at the time. He s A has
no idea how long his mother's gambling has been going on,
but as he thinks back through their history, it starts
to make sense that it's been there for a long time,
in the background. After the whoopings, the beatings, the various
(38:00):
minds of abuse, this realization that his mother had been
stealing from him makes him crazy his word, that's how
he describes it. He rethinks some of his history with her,
and at the same time, his body is breaking down.
He has herniated discs from all the punishing physical exertion,
and an abnormal growth on his left hip. But still
(38:22):
he tries to burn calories, moving his arms, trying to sweat,
trying to control the life that's burning all around him.
So one of the reasons I wrote that book was
because I think my mother and my father have had,
like lots of parents in this country have had different
relationships with addiction, but most of the ones I know
have never attempted to publicly articulate that journey, not just
(38:46):
for readers, but two people they love. I told I
was writing it too. She told me she didn't think
that was a good idea. Asked lots of questions that
we never talked about. She answered some she dinna answer some,
I'll talk to my grandmother, And my grandmother pretty much
answered all the questions that I add that I had
the nerve to ask. And then I just had all
(39:08):
this stuff, and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna trying
to create a piece of art, not like a tell all,
because there's so much, like the most dramatic stuff in
that that that I think happened in that time period.
The three most dramatic things are not in that book.
But you know, it's just like an artful rendering, but
also an artful attempt to get us to love each other,
to save each other, to not give our money away,
(39:29):
to know that we're valuable enough to at least talk
through pain, which is something I just think we are
not good at. We don't know how to talk through pain.
You alluded to it, but when when you realize that
you're you think your mother was trying to just basically
steal from you. That coincided with your body falling apart
around that same time, and then you began putting weight
(39:52):
back on. Yeah, I mean yes, that struck me as
actually a good thing for you. When I got to
that part, it is like, oh, he's gonna let this
go now, like this form of masochistic you know, self
destructive body punishing. Um. Did it feel that way to you? No,
(40:15):
In a moment, it felt just shameful because everybody because
only people, because the people who knew me there, they
only knew me as a skinny person. So they were
just like, what's wrong with you? Do you know what
I mean? And this is when like they this is
when I went from one fifty nine, one eight nine
or one seventy nine, they'd be like, are you okay?
And I'm like, I'm good. What that literally, I'm not
(40:36):
gonna this is not hyperboly. That's just say my life
by that ship means the one to punch of his
body breaking down, and his discovery that his mom had
been stealing from him. This was the lowest point at
which it became possible to begin again. If my legs
(40:57):
allowed me to, I would have run myself into disappearing,
is no doubt. And and so I did not get
healthy because I started to like just try to punish
myself with food. But I mean should I wouldn't have
been here right now had that not happened. I just
want my mother to be better at loving one another,
and I want us supposed to be better at talking sincerely.
(41:18):
I don't think sincerity is something that we don't talk
about enough in his college Sincerely about joy, sincerely about pain.
The day before K. S. A And I had this conversation,
he received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.
This award is a big deal in the literary world,
and kiss Mom was in the audience. As he accepted
(41:40):
the award, he asked her to join him on stage.
I wish I could have seen it. This remarkable mother
and son who continue, because of everything, despite everything, to
stumble toward one another in all their humanness. I wrote
this book as offering being Mama, can we talk? And
(42:01):
sometimes she says yes, and most of the times she
says no. But at least Lease is out there and
we've got opportunity. Now. I'd like to thank my guest K.
S A. Lehman for telling his story. You can find
out more about his book Heavy at K. S A.
(42:23):
Lehman dot com. That's Key I E S E l
A Y m O N dot com. I'd also like
to thank the Aspen Institute Arts Program and Aspen Words,
where this interview was recorded. Family Secrets is an I
Heart Media production. Dylan Fagin is the supervising producer, Lowell
(42:44):
Bolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com, and you
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Right, and
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod.
(43:05):
For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com.
For more podcasts. For my Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to
(43:28):
your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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