“Meager,” the opposite of LaThon’s favorite word, was my favorite word at the end of seventh grade. We looked at each other, shook our heads, and kept cutting our grapefruit slices. Reeves looked like a much older version of Wendy from the Wendy’s restaurants. Reeves, our white homeroom teacher, pointed at LaThon and me. While LaThon was cutting his half into smaller slices, he looked at me and said Seth six-two and them didn’t even know about the slicing “shhhtyle” he used. LaThon’s favorite vocab word in seventh grade was “abundance,” but I’d never heard him throw “black” and “that” in front of it until we got to St. I nodded up and down as LaThon shifted and looked right in Seff 6’2’s eyes. “Seth, whatever your last name is, first of all, your first name ends with two/s from now on, and your new name is Seff six- two because you five-four but you got the head of a nigga we know who six-two.” LaThon sucked his teeth and rolled his eyes.

“It’s like galore,” I told him, and looked at LaThon. He asked both of us what “gal-low” meant.

Seth spent the first few minutes of the first day of school silent-farting and turning his eyelids inside out. Seth Donald, a white boy with two first names, looked like a dustier Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, but with braces. “Plus, you act like I got grapefruits gal-low up in here. “Matter of fact, tell me one thing you eat that don’t got butter in it. “Nigga, you don’t eat grapefruits,” LaThon said. “These white folk don’t even know that you an oT grapefruit-by-the-pound-eating-ass nigga. “These white folk know we here on discount,” he told me, “but they don’t even know.”

LaThon, who we both thought looked just like a slew-footed K-Ci from Jodeci, and I sat in the back of homeroom the first day of school doing what we always did: we intentionally used and misused last year’s vocabulary words while LaThon cut up his pink grapefruit with his greasy, dull butter knife. Richard, students had to wear khaki or blue pants or skirts and light blue, white, or pink shirts.

Unlike at Holy Family, where we could wear what we wanted, at St. Richard.Īll three of us black boys from Holy Family were placed in another. Richard Catholic School in Jackson, Mississippi, because Holy Family, the poor all-black Catholic school we attended most of our lives, closed unexpectedly due to lack of funding.Īll four of the black girls from Holy Family were placed in one homeroom at St. These white folk watched us toss black vocabulary words, a dull butter knife, and pink grapefruit slices hack and forth until it was time for us to go home. You were on your way back from Hawaii with Malachi Hunter while LaThon Simmons and I sat in the middle of a white eighth-grade classroom, in a white Catholic school, filled with white folk we didn’t even know.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon