Heavy Quotes
"You best know about Master Tom Mo’. He’s one of them white mens that likes nigger women . . . Reckon he be bothering you most every night now. Used to bother me, but no mo’."
"Because some men do not care if they hurt other people’s bodies. Some men want to feel what they want to feel when they want to feel it because it hurts other people, not in spite of it hurting people."
"You’re my best friend. I’m sorry," you said as you fell asleep with the covers over the swollen, slick parts of your face. "I’m sorry for all of this."
"If you didn’t write the essay or the story, what did you do?" You actually stood there, with an encyclopedia in hand, waiting for an answer. "Answer me, Kie. Don’t tell a story either."
"It ain’t about making white folk feel what you feel. It’s about not feeling what they want you to feel. Do you hear me? You better know from whence you came and forget about those folk."
"I be telling them whatever it takes to get they little money and take care of my family."
"My mama don’t let me shoot squirrels in the head. I’m not allowed to shoot guns. I’m good."
"I’m glad Mabus won, but hearing about it every day is just kinda mee-guh."
"We understand, Ms. Stockard. We will tell Jabari to take more wash-ups before he comes to school."
"You ain’t gross. You just a heavy nigga who quicker than most skinny niggas we know. You ain’t gross. You hear me? You you."
"Every word you write and read, every picture you draw, every step you take should be in the service of our people. Do not be distracted. Be directed."
"The most important part of writing, and really life, is revision."
"If you have a heart attack dodging their bullets, they will hide they guns and say you killed yourself."
"But in the long run, correct English will save a black man more than it will hurt you."
"We can be mad, but we can be other stuff, too."
"America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts."
"You can’t call white folk who think they’re liberal or enlightened ‘racist’ in Mississippi and not expect violent backlash."
"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety."
"I thought about the safety I found in eating too much, eating too late, eating to run away from memory."
"I legit feel like my penis is shinier since I lost all that weight."
"Nobody who wants to kill you is ever going to threaten you. They will kill you, or they won’t."
"If I made that little three hundred thousand, I’m still the only nigga with money I know, you see?"
"Thanking Jesus for getting us through situations we should have never been in was one of our family’s superpowers."
"Sometimes I wonder if maybe we could talk on the phone?"
"I would come into that meeting knowing the illest part of racial terror in this nation is that it’s sanctioned by sorry, overpaid white bodies that will never be racially terrorized, and maintained by a few desperate underpaid black and brown bodies that will."
"Neither that day, nor the day I was stuck on the floor, hoping you’d answer the phone, would I have the will to imagine the night a detective from Poughkeepsie asks my 319-pound body to come by the precinct."
"I will understand that I am a heavy black boy from Mississippi, which means that I am vulnerable. But unlike most heavy black boys from Mississippi, I have a solid check coming in every month for the rest of my life."
"The detective will walk out of the interrogation room, and I will sit there looking at the handcuffs on the table in front of me. I will wonder how coming up for tenure at Vassar College landed me in an interrogation room."
"I am sprawled out on the floor of my apartment, looking at the shiny brown leather couch. I call you again and hope you answer so I can tell you, for the first time in my life, that I need your help."
"I watched strangers frame crooked smiles when I won. I watched strangers frame crooked smiles when I lost. Like you, I did not know how to win."
"Flora Wadley never stepped foot in a casino before meeting me. She spent the rest of her life knowing the people you valued most could never abandon you if you always prepared to be abandoned."
"I was a new kind of sick. I was an old kind of sick. I couldn’t run but I could gamble."
"I walked into the casino with ten dollars in my pocket, wearing wrinkled camouflaged shorts, a thin 3X black hoodie, no socks, and black Adidas."
"I wanted you to be gentle. I wanted to remember being your child."