Heavy

In eighth grade, Laymon’s Catholic school goes bankrupt, and he and handful of other black students transfer to a wealthy, predominantly white Catholic school on scholarship. They immediately feel the pressure of white language and white expectations.

Laymon remembers sitting with his brilliant, inventive, exuberant friend LaThon, sharing a grapefruit and playing with English-class vocabulary words. Between the two of them, they construct a private language in which “meager” is the go-to insult. LaThon uses his favorite word to ringingly describe what the white people around them can’t understand: “This that black abundance. Y’all don’t even know” (66). Then the two get in trouble for having a knife—the blunt butter knife LaThon is using to portion out a grapefruit. At home, their mothers beat them for getting in trouble. Here Laymon notes the spectrum of language to describe beatings: a “whupping” is child’s play, getting “beat the fuck up” is very bad news.

Laymon registers a lot of the racism he encounters at school in terms of language. He remembers a teacher distinguishing between the “bad real racism” of white slaveowners in Roots and the “quirky racism” of Eudora Welty. That same teacher gives an unwitting demonstration of this “quirky” racism when she gets the black students together to ask them to tell their friend, Jabari, that he has “gross” body odor and needs to shower more.