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I know it’s a mistake soon as I say it. I should have said something else, anything else: Greenwood or Itta Bena or Natchez, but Parchman is all that comes.
The handcuffs are on me before the n is silent.
In this passage, Leonie and Michael have just been pulled over by a police officer. The officer asks where she and her family are coming from, and she responds truthfully that they’re returning from Parchman. She immediately regrets this, because it instantly sets him on high alert. This tense interaction with the police officer reflects the dangerous reality of being a Black person in a racially charged environment. The mere mention of Parchman immediately begins a series of negative responses from the officer. Leonie hasn’t done anything wrong by leaving Parchman and driving Michael and her family home; the officer doesn’t know that she’s swallowed a bag of drugs and is gradually overdosing. The fact that she has to watch what she says so closely points to the protective self-censorship Black folks are sometimes compelled to enact. The police officer doesn’t care what else she has to say; as soon as she mentions Parchman, he’s suspicious.
I would throw up everything. All of it out: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones, and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this skin, not this body. Maybe Michael could step on my heart, stop its beating. Then burn everything to cinders.
Leonie stands in the last place on earth she wants to be: Big Joseph’s house. She’s listening to him shout bigoted bile at her boyfriend Michael about their relationship, Jojo, and Kayla. To make matters worse, she’s still coming down from her near overdose. She feels muddled and nauseous as she stands there, passively absorbing the hate. This quote is full of the gruesome language of expulsion, as her disgust with Big Joseph turns to disgust with herself and the situation. Leonie describes wanting to vomit out "everything…food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus.” She knows that Big Joseph only hates her children because of their Black skin, and she’s suddenly revolted by her body. She wants to have Michael “step on her heart, stop its beating” so she can die and be rid of her flesh. Even this doesn’t seem like enough, and she wishes that someone would come along and burn “everything to cinders” so that it could all disappear. Her drugged brain is emotional and hyperbolic, making an already horrible situation seem worse than it is.
Because I wanted Michael’s mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.
Leonie and Michael’s relationship is a difficult one, largely disapproved of by both their families and a source of danger on many occasions. However, their love is also one of the only pure things in Leonie’s life. Michael sees her as a whole person with emotions just as important and complex as his. He loves her for more than her dark skin and eyes. Indeed, she thinks that he doesn’t care how she looks, that he mostly wants to save the “walking wound [she] was” from the hurts she experiences. She calls him her “balm,” as though his presence were a soothing ointment for her pain. Leonie is always more conscious of their different races than Michael is, which she knows is one of the ignorance that white privilege grants. The imagery in this passage, with Leonie’s "skin the color of unmilked coffee" and "lips the color of plums," underlines these racial differences in her mind. “Loving across color lines” was and is dangerous in the American South, but Leonie bravely chooses to love Michael anyway.
