This article reads Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir (2018) as a critique of education in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s. Through an interrogation of Laymon’s own experiences as a student and an educator, Heavy demonstrates how desegregation set Black students up to suffer in new and unique ways. Equally important, the text shows how Black students and families worked to sustain each other in the face of the harmful pedagogies they were offered. In contrast to the “meager” pedagogical approaches that the narrator endures, Heavy presents a model of teaching and learning that seeks to sustain what Laymon calls “black abundance.” Pedagogies of Black abundance, Heavy shows, draw on Black vernacular culture and ways of teaching practiced in all-Black schools of the early twentieth century in order to sustain the intellectual curiosity, physical well-being, and spiritual wholeness of Black students. While Heavy ultimately refuses to say whether it is possible to revise the toxic pedagogies that became entrenched during Laymon’s middle and high school years, the text’s vision of Black abundance gestures toward ways of being together in the classroom that have the potential to sustain Black students in the current day. © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
