This is black excellence as an artful shield, a defense against the searing gaze of classmates and teachers who, as young Laymon explains to his mother, “kept talking to us the way you told me white folk would talk to us if we weren’t perfect, the way I saw white women at the mall and police talk to you whether you’d broken the law or not.” “Everything about y’all is erroneous,” one chants. The idea of excellence is a wire, sometimes barbed, often electrified, strung through nearly every page of Kiese Laymon’s memoir, “Heavy.” And that excellence is black: two middle-school boys killing time by taking their favorite vocabulary words - “erroneous,” “abundance” - and, with the cool verve of Gwendolyn Brooks or Terrance Hayes, weaving them into insults to taunt their white classmates. HEAVY An American Memoir By Kiese Laymon 241 pp.
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