How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

  Copyright 2013 Kiese Laymon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Laymon, Kiese.

  How to slowly kill yourself and others in America / by Kiese Laymon.

  pages cm

  Includes index.

  Summary: “A collection of essays on family, race, violence, celebrity, music, writing, and other topics”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-57284-726-2 (ebook)

  1.Laymon, Kiese. 2.African American novelists--Biography. 3.African American teachers--Biography. 4.Jackson (Miss.)--Biography. I. Title.

  PS3612.A959Z46 2013

  813’.6--dc23

  [B]

  2013019503

  Bolden Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information, visit agatepublishing.com.

  For my family, my students, and Mississippi.

  Table of Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: We Will Never Ever Know

  The Worst of White Folks

  How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

  Our Kind of Ridiculous

  Hip-Hop Stole My Southern Black Boy

  Echo: Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai, and Marlon

  Kanye West and HaLester Myers Are Better at Their Jobs…

  Reasonable Doubt and the Lost Presidential Debate of 2012

  Eulogy for Three Black Boys Who Lived

  You Are the Second Person

  Epilogue: My First Teachers—A Dialogue

  Acknowledgments

  “Morally, there has been no change at all,

  and a moral change is the only real one.”

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  Author’s Note

  I STARTED WRITING THIS BOOK NEARLY SIX YEARS AGO. My first novel, then titled, My Name Is City, had been picked up by a major New York publisher, but I slowly understood that the novel I wanted read would never be published. I put everything I ever imagined into the novel because I couldn’t see myself living beyond thirty-two years old.

  While the editorial process slowed, picked back up, and eventually stopped, I was getting worse at being human. One cold night in New York, someone I loved told me that I was precisely the kind of human being I claimed person to despise. I defended myself against this truth and really against responsibility, as American monsters and American murderers tend to do, and I tried to make this person feel as absolutely worthless, confused, and malignant as I was. Later that night, I couldn’t sleep, and for the first time in my life, I wrote the sentence, “I’ve been slowly killing myself and others close to me.”

  A year or two after I started this book, I realized I wanted my work to be a site of the catastrophic and pleasurable, the intellectual and the everyday, the public and the private, the awkwardly destructive and the wholly sublime. Instead of imagining standard “literary” audiences, I knew that I wanted to question traditional literary fictive trajectory by writing to folks (or sensibilities) who don’t read for living and those folks (or sensibilities) who are paid to read for a living, in everything I created. I knew that I wanted to create work that explored, with colorful profundity and comedy, the reckless order of American human being, especially since so much of the nation was in a dizzying rush to crown itself multicultural, post-racial, and mostly innocent.

  I didn’t know much of what I wanted in the way of shape from the book, but I knew I didn’t want my voices to be the only voices in the book. I couldn’t find literary models of what I wanted to do but I had plenty of musical models. Like a lot of black men who made it through the 80s and 90s, I always wanted to be an emcee. For me, this was partially because most American literature, unlike lots of American blues, soul and hip-hop, did not create an echo. Most American literary classics were not courageous, imaginative or honest enough to imagine our people, our experiences as parts of its audience. These classics were lauded, canonized, but I rarely found them genius, responsible, or even interesting. Conversely, Black American musical genius necessitated that we work with it, so much so that our experiences and imaginations almost became indistinguishable from the actual musical work itself.

  But when I did find brilliant soulful courageous black American literature, it imagined us as its readers, and those literary echoes saved my life. As much as hip-hop and the blues inspired me, my most meaningful discoveries about the act of being human have come through the solitary act of listening to turning pages, rereading clumsy passages, and marking up the sides of shifty text. It wasn’t the text alone that did the work; it was the reading, and rereading, of the text that necessitated the work. Rereading The Bluest Eye taught me how to see. Rereading The Fire Next Time taught me how to love. Rereading Going to the Territory taught me that “human being” was a verb. Rereading Kindred taught me to will myself beyond spectacle and into generative imagination that needed to look forward and back.

  While hundreds of my favorite songs and albums reminded me that I was not alone, that American genius was real, that American sound could be this magical communal site of resistance and activism, listening to black American music seldom made me want to be better at being human. This has everything to do with me what I chose to listen to, and very little to do with the totality of our music. I know, for example, that the music of Mahalia Jackson kept my grandma, mother, and aunts alive and committed to love. I know that without Black American music, particularly the music of the black church in the Deep South, we would have been killed and/or continued killing ourselves a lot faster.

  Still, I wanted to produce a book with a Mississippi blues and gospel ethos. And I wanted to shape the book in the form of some of my favorite albums. I thought of the essays as tracks. I thought of some of the pieces in the book as songs with multiple voices and layered musicality. I thought of ways to bring the ad lib, riff, collaboration, and necessary digression to the page. I wanted a book that could be read front to back in one setting. I wanted to explore the benefits and burdens of being born a black boy in America without the predictable literary rigidity. And I wanted young black Southerners, particularly, to generate art in response to this text while working with the essays at being better at being human. The hardest part, of course, is that I wanted to be honest about my family, my nation, my region, my memory, and me.

  I’m not sure I’ve done anything I hoped to do, but I’m thankful you’ve given the voices and sentences in my blood, a chance to work with you. This is how to slowly kill yourself and others in America.

  Kiese Laymon

  May 17, 2013

  Prologue

  We Will Never Ever Know: Letters to Uncle Jimmy

  DEAR UNCLE JIMMY,

  As a black boy growing up in Mississippi, I learned that there was a rickety bridge between right and wrong. And I learned that I would be disciplined more harshly than white boys for even slightly leaning toward the wrong side. But like you, Uncle Jimmy, I sadly didn’t give a fuck. I broke bets I made with myself, got kicked out of high school a number of times, was suspended from college, and had run-ins with police that broke Mama and Grandma’s heart. Unlike you, though, I did all of this in close proximity to a lanky, living, breathing warning.

  Uncle Jimmy, that warning was you.

  On July 4, you threw down your crack pipe, scrubbed yourself clean, and bought my grandma some meat. “This Mama’s meat,
” you wrote in loopy black letters on a bloody paper sack. When your sister, my mama, called me in my office at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, she had no idea that the Fourth of July would be the last day she would see you alive.

  You joked with your sisters before taking little Tre to get more bottle rockets. Reeking of that familiar mix of sour scalp and Jordan cologne, you probably blinked those huge webbed eyes more than usual and actually asked questions of our family.

  As with many of Mama’s stories, you weren’t the star, but you were the precocious, literally paroled man on whom our family’s emotional stability truly rested. There was a terrible clarity in Mama’s voice when she told me the story of July 4. Mama’s voice sounded like this any time you followed a crack binge or a run-in with the police with something graceful like leading a Sunday school session or using your pension to buy that house over off Highway 35.

  “You driving my sister crazy now,” Aunt Sue told me, more than twenty years ago, the night I drove my mama into a nervous breakdown. “You heading down that same road as Jimmy.”

  I learned that night that the Uncle Jimmy road ran adjacent to the refined, curbed avenues that nearly all sisters, aunts, mamas, and grandmas want their black boys to travel. Aunt Sue and Mama wanted me to know, without a doubt, that whatever consumed you would eventually consume me unless I prayed diligently, obeyed the law, remained clean, and got out of Mississippi by any means necessary. But even as I sprinted away from Mississippi to Ohio, then Indiana, and now New York, if I looked down I could never really distinguish your footprints from my own.

  That’s what I felt before July 7.

  On July 7, three days after you toted that bag of meat to Grandma’s house, I got a call. Grandma was looking for you. She drove over to your house because you wouldn’t answer the phone. Grandma opened the screen and pounded on your door that evening. She yelled your name over and over again, but you didn’t answer.

  You couldn’t.

  On July 12, eight days after you brought Grandma her bloody meat, your sisters walked into Mapp Funeral Home and readied your body, the body of Grandma’s first child, and their only brother, for public viewing. My mama made the funeral director change your shirt.

  Your sister, Sue, the most mesmerizing preacher in Mississippi, eulogized you in Concord Baptist Church. We were all baptized there. At the core of Sue’s eulogy were three ideas: 1) “Niggers” do not exist. 2) Perfectly sanitized, wholly responsible black people do not exist. 3) You, Jimmy Alexander, were equally wicked and wonderful and had far more in common with us than we wanted to admit.

  Aunt Sue made the church know that you lived a life of bad; not bad meaning good, or bad meaning evil, but bad meaning bad at being human. In traditional Old Testament style, she explored justice and recreated in you someone who had prepared himself for death by finally accepting and earning life in the days before your passing. Sue told the church the story of your bringing that meat to Grandma’s house. She told us that you had gotten your finances in order.

  “Jimmy wasn’t that different from anyone in this church,” she told us. “No better or no worse. And that’s what we have to accept. He was racing toward death, but he was a part of our family. He was all of our brother.”

  While Sue stood in the pulpit teaching us about acceptance of our badness, I realized that you were the only child of Grandma’s who did not become a teacher. If you had taught for a living, you might not have been any physically or emotionally healthier, since we know that occupations are never shields from reckless sex, drug abuse, cowardice, deceptiveness, and desperation. But Grandma would have found far more peace on the day of your funeral if she knew her oldest child, a big-eyed black boy born in the late 1940s, taught somebody somewhere something before he died.

  As Grandma’s youngest daughter gave the church words to lean on, your mother, our teacher, the thickest, most present human being either of us has known, folded up at the end of the pew. Grandma cried herself breathless as your bloodless body lay right over the site of your baptism. I held Grandma, though, Uncle Jimmy. I held her just like she would have wanted you to hold her if I were stretched out in that casket.

  I needed you, Uncle Jimmy. I needed you the day of your funeral. And when we were both alive, I needed you to be better than you were, but I never loved you enough to tell you. I could have shown you by calling you more, or walking with you down Old Morton Road when I visited during the summer and at Christmas. We could have wondered about the widened roads and the huge dying trees we both imagined fighting off Godzilla and Starscream. We could have joked and tossed ironic jabs back and forth as some nephews and uncles do.

  Then, if we really cared, we could have harnessed the courage to knock each other’s hustles.

  I could have finally said, “Uncle Jimmy, you drowning yourself with that crack and all that hate. Ain’t nothing really behind your smile, man. I love you and I need you to live.” And you could have told me, “There’s more than one way to drown, nephew. You looking pretty wet yourself. I know I’m under that water. You know where you at?”

  But those words were never said. We talked, but we didn’t reckon with each other. Hence, all of our communication created no meaningful reverberation outside our speculations about each other. The last thing you said to me the Christmas before you died was, “No matter how much right you try to do, white folks do everything they can to make a nigga remember they owned us.” There was a silence after that sentence, and I filled that silence with a mechanical nod of my head and a weak, “Yeah. I hear that.”

  By that point, though, I believed I knew you. I assumed that you coped with the weight of a paroled life as a black man in Mississippi by laughing, acting a fool, relying on crack cocaine, alcohol, and the manipulation of women who were just as hopeless as you. And I assumed that you knew that I’d started coping in many of the same ways. One of the only differences between you and me was that I fell deeply in love with the possibilities of written and spoken words. I used words to create stories, essays, and novels I thought you’d want to read, hear, and see.

  When I wasn’t writing things that you might have wanted or needed to read, hear, and see, I created fictive versions of you that were, sadly, more interesting and more loving than I ever allowed you to be in real life. You inspired thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of scenes, but I never showed you one single sentence. I was afraid to know for sure that you thought my work was my hustle—a shinny, indulgent waste of time. But more than that, I didn’t want you to know that I wanted you to be better at being human.

  I didn’t want you to see that I saw in the real you someone I never wanted to be, a shiftless paroled “nigger” worthy of only hollow awe or rabid disgust, a smiling “nigger” who fought a few good rounds before getting his ass whupped by white supremacy and quaint multiculturalism over and over again. Uncle Jimmy, I knew that you were slowly killing yourself. And predictably, I knew that I would become you.

  I hated you and me both for that.

  This is a shameful admission, a confession that is even more sour with indulgent guilt when I acknowledge that all of the women in my writing who are partially based on the characters of Grandma, Mama, Aunt Sue, and Aunt Linda are far less moving, round, and paradoxical than the actual women themselves. And this has less to do with my writing than it does with my love and understanding of these human beings, and our love and understanding of each other. I loved the women in our family enough to ask them questions. They loved me enough to answer those questions, often with questions of their own. I wrote to them. They wrote back.

  Echo.

  Honestly, I don’t know if I ever asked you any real questions other than why you looked so happy in your Vietnam pictures, when I was ten, and why you said, “There’s some fine bitches on earth,” when you picked me up from grad school when I was twenty-four.

  My creating interesting American characters based on you to fit the specifications of a paragraph doesn’t make me despicable; it makes
me an American writer. What makes me despicable is that one of the responsibilities of American writers is to broaden the confines, sensibilities, and generative capacity of American literature by broadening the audience to whom we write, and hoping that broadened audience writes back with brutal imagination, magic, and brilliance.

  Echo.

  You can’t really explore the terror and wonder of being born, as Baldwin says, “captive in the supposed Promised Land” if one never conceives of the captives as the crucial critics, not simply consumers or objects, of one’s work. I started writing this book to you before you died. I was in desperate need of echo and I’d convinced myself that the only way to live was to write through what was helping me kill myself. I don’t only wish you could have read this book, Uncle Jimmy; I wish you could have written back to us.

  Anyway, only a fool doesn’t actively regret. I wish we could have waded in the awkward acceptance that we are neither African nor conventionally American; neither subhuman nor superhuman; neither tragic nor comic; neither defeated nor victorious. I wish we could have affirmed our awareness that our blackness and our Southerness are both perpetual burden and benefit, and our masculinity and femininity something that must be perpetually reckoned with.

  Mostly, Uncle Jimmy, I wish you could have told me that we are fucked up, and much of the nation has always wanted it that way, but we owe it to our teachers and our children to imagine new routes into beauty, health, compassion, citizenry, and American imagination. We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.

  That’s what I needed to tell you when you were alive. That’s what I needed you to show me. That’s what I need help believing.

  One night, while revising Long Division, I thanked God that you weren’t my father, while feeling like the luckiest nephew in the world because I could call someone as tortured as you my uncle. I wondered who and what I really would have become without you as my warning. I wondered how your life would have been different if I had told you I loved you. What would you have done differently with your life if you had really believed me? What would we have both felt? If you wrote truthfully to me, how would you start and end your letter? What senses would you write through? What would you discover?