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