How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

“The existence of the song is proof that even if we could not bring as much material suffering to white folk as they did to us, we could memorialize and channel the spirits of those beaten and killed by nasty-ass cheaters. Mama’s greatest worry is that I will be shot out of the sky by these cheaters. She is right. One day, I will not get up off the ground. Mama knows that in my dreams, we soar, bullet-proof […] In my actual dreams, I run like Ahmaud. I shoot midrange jumpers like George. I heal like Breonna. I rap every lyric to ‘Fuck tha Police’ in a Monte Carlo packed to the brim with them and Mignon and Tim and Henry and David fiending for new ways to love each other.”

Laymon meditates on the significance of N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” as an anthem of resistance. He names Black people who were murdered by police and vigilantes—“cheaters” driven to annihilate Black people out of fear of coexisting with them. Laymon thinks of those who were killed in the context of what they did in life, particularly the passions they pursued. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by two vigilantes while jogging. George Floyd played basketball throughout high school and college. Breonna Taylor worked as an EMT.

“Queer antagonism, like trans-antagonism, like anti-Blackness, is an addiction broken only by honest reckoning, consistent practice, and the welcoming of radical spirits.”

Laymon explicitly rejects the queer-phobia that has plagued hip-hop and Black communities. He likens the systemic and social rejection of queer people to that of Black people. Then he asserts that only the active pursuits of love and acceptance can melt this antagonism.

“They are not haunted by phantoms. They are dedicated ghouls, spirit-repellant patriarchs who use each other and a muddled understanding of Jesus Christ to ensure the suffering of the most vulnerable.”

Laymon criticizes then-president Donald Trump, Mississippi governor Tate Reeves, and other powerful white men like them. Many such men claim to be Christian or Christian-affiliated while pursuing political and economic policies that injure those who are most disadvantaged by existing social structures and systems. Laymon points out both the hypocrisy and the spiritual vacuousness exhibited by such men.

“I am wandering around the spiritual consequences of materially progressing at the expense of Black death. I want to be courageous.”

Laymon questions whether he is the best person to comment on Black life in Mississippi when he has spent so much of his adult life north of the Mason-Dixon line. He fears he could be exploiting his Black community and what they have suffered. He wonders if subsidized courage morphs into cowardice. In the end, he knows that what he wants, like any writer, is to bear genuine witness.

“The worst of white folk will not be persuaded; they can only be beaten. And when they are beaten, they fight more ferociously. They bruise us. They buy us. That is why we are so tired. That is why we are awakened. We are fighting an enemy we’ve shown exquisite grace, an enemy we’ve tried to educate, coddle, and outrun, an enemy that never tires of killing itself, just so it can watch us die.”

Laymon uses the phrase “the worst of white folk” to refer to a generic “it,” as he later identifies the group, which operates to oppress and, when that is not enough, to destroy non-white lives that do not serve its interests. He refers to the ways in which Black people, particularly, have tried for centuries to educate members of this group about the error of their ways, to love them despite themselves, and to avoid them. However, this group’s commitment to white supremacy often means that it will embrace policies that are just as detrimental to its own existence as they are to the groups of people whom it seeks to eliminate.

“Most of us had no idea where, specifically, in Africa we were from, but we knew we were the old and young descendants of African mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters brought to Mississippi to serve the economic and moral needs of powerful white folk. We knew we were not brought here to be equally protected under the law. We knew we were brought here to be subservient, to be hardworking, and to die.”

These are Laymon’s reflections after he describes a family reunion where his cousin Willie, as usual, pokes fun at his Afrocentric given name. That name was his parents’ attempt to reconnect with a history that had been stolen from them. Unfortunately, much of what African Americans know about their past starts with the Middle Passage, followed by centuries of subservience and existing only to cater to others. Though overt, sanctioned slavery ended some time ago, the psychological reasoning that allowed for the chattel system persists and still impacts, for example, how Black people are treated in the workplace.

“I am a Black Mississippian. I am a Black American. I pledge to never be passive, patriotic, or grateful in the face of American abuse. I pledge to always thoughtfully bite the self-righteous American hand that thinks it’s feeding us. I pledge to perpetually reckon with the possibility that there will never be any liberty, peace, and justice for all unless we accept that America, like Mississippi, is not clean. Nor is it great. Nor is it innocent.”

Laymon rejects the Pledge of Allegiance and the nation’s idolization of the American flag in favor of pledging allegiance to truth and being endlessly critical of a nation that does not respect some of its most devoted citizens. Laymon identifies himself as Black first, then places that Black identity within the contexts of his state and his country. His connection to these places imbues him with the authority to challenge their policies toward him and those like him.

“This stank wasn’t that stink. This stank was root and residue of Black Southern poverty, and devalued Black Southern labor, Black Southern excellence, Black Southern imagination, and Black Southern woman magic. This was the stank from whence Black Southern life, love, and labor came.”

Laymon describes the genesis of the concept of “stank”—a colloquialism from African American vernacular, but specifically from Southern vernacular. It plays on a word that denotes uncleanliness and turns the insult back on those who hurl it. Laymon embraces both the adjectives “Black” and “Southern” to reclaim their value and to show the creative energy the region has produced, despite the debased living circumstances of so many Black Southerners.

“American—not simply Southern or Mississippian—investment in the pilfering of Black American life, labor, and liberty is the injury on which our nation feeds. It just is. We do not have a chance in hell of ‘fixing’ or reforming that national truth with a local lie.”

Laymon claims that white American prosperity was and is built on the oppression of Black people. Though the problem may be exacerbated in the South, it is not unique to the South. He argues that the problem can only be solved by reckoning with a legacy of oppression within an often brutal capitalist system that has depended on racial hierarchies.

“The state generally works to dismantle our right to dignity. That work of valuing our lives, sadly, has always, and will always, be done on the local level.”

Laymon’s mother dismisses his hopeful notion that anything can be done at the federal level to improve the lives of Black girls and women in particular. Instead, she believes that communities have to work at the grassroots level to uplift each other. She feels that grassroots work is especially critical in efforts to help those most at risk of falling behind.

“We were on our way to realizing that we were blues people, familiar in some way or another with dirt. There were no skyscrapers and orange-brown projects stopping us from looking up and out. We didn’t know what it was like to move in hordes, with enclosed subway trains slithering beneath our feet. And we liked it that way.”

Laymon distinguishes Black Southern life from the lives of Black people in New York. He embraces the South’s blues tradition, rooted in plantation life. Laymon sees Southern Black people as people of the soil, not of concrete. He contrasts their lives with the distinctly urban lives of Black New Yorkers without devaluing the latter. Black Southerners like their lives, he contends, and do not wish to or feel compelled to pretend to be from elsewhere.

“We Black Southerners, through life, love, and labor, are the generators and architects of American music, narrative, language, capital, and morality. That belongs to us. Take away all those stolen West African girls and boys forced to find an oral culture to express, resist, and signify in the South, and we have no rich American idiom. Erase N***** Jim from our literary imagination and we have no American story of conflicted movement, place, and moral conundrum. Eliminate the Great Migration of Southern Black girls and boys and you have no Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, or New York City. Expunge the sorrow songs, gospel, and blues of the Deep South and we have no rock and roll, rhythm and blues, funk, or hip-hop.”

Laymon solidly locates the development of African American culture, which has permeated global arts and culture, in the American South. His mention of morality is ambiguous: The US has embraced expressions of Black Christian life but has also exhibited moral turpitude toward Black people, which it has justified with false ideas about what it means to be Black. Laymon launches into the issue of moral degeneracy by mentioning the Middle Passage but also noting that Black vernacular culture emerged from the conditions of slavery. He goes on to argue that a multitude of American cultural touchstones would not exist if Black people had never been captured and forced into slavery in the American South.

“If white American entitlement meant anything, it meant that no matter how patronizing, unashamed, deliberate, unintentional, poor, rich, rural, urban, ignorant, and destructive white Americans were, Black Americans were still encouraged to work for them, write to them, listen to them, talk with them, run from them, emulate them, teach them, dodge them, and ultimately thank them for not being as fucked up as they could be.”

This quote is particularly significant in light of Laymon’s exchanges with Trimp. Laymon is arguing how white supremacy established a ubiquitous system of servility that forcibly boxes Black people into a passive and codependent position with the white people who rely on their own presumption of Black subservience to maintain their white supremacy. Trimp’s comments to Laymon did nothing so much as to loudly demonstrate how fully Trimp expected Laymon’s gratitude for his uninvited evaluation of Laymon.

“We are real Black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.”

This quote comes from a draft of Laymon’s first novel, Long Division. Laymon includes this quote to refute both Trimp’s racist presumptions about Black people and Brandon Farley’s empty prescriptions about what Black writers can produce. Laymon refuses to write for the white gaze or to write stories—fictional or nonfictional—that are palliative or that will help anyone hide from the toxicity of racism.

“Really, we’re fighting because she raised me never ever to forget I was born on parole, which means no black hoodies in wrong neighborhoods, no jogging at night, hands in plain sight at all times in public, no intimate relationships with white women, never driving over the speed limit or doing those rolling stops at stop signs, always speaking the King’s English in the presence of white folks, never being outperformed in school or in public by white students, and, most important, always remembering that no matter what, the worst of white folks will do anything to get you.”

Laymon analyzes how he and his mother became so disconnected from each other that she pulled a gun on him. Believing that Black men are condemned to ill treatment if they do not present themselves flawlessly, Laymon’s mother grows angry at his refusal to adhere to the politics of respectability. However, the irony of being perfect is that being on one’s best behavior is, ultimately, no protection from being condemned or killed.

“I’m so sad and I can’t really see a way out of what I’m feeling but I’m leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled Black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.”

Laymon admits to his depression and is able to see that his way out of it is to excavate his origins and, in tandem, his country’s origins. He lists his unhealthy coping mechanisms along with those of others. In this way, he illustrates how slippery and inevitable the many paths to self-destruction can be.

“Without saying anything, we know that whatever is in the boys in that car has to also be in us. We know that whatever is encouraging them to kill themselves slowly by knowingly mangling the body and spirit of this shivering Black girl, is probably the most powerful thing in our lives. We also wonder if whatever is in us that has been slowly encouraging us to kill ourselves is also in the heart and mind of the shivering Black girl on the couch.”

Laymon thinks about what it means to be both predator and prey, to be both an aggressor and a victim, and sees that he and his two friends can encompass both. In this instance, they have come to the aid of a Black woman who was raped and beaten by her boyfriend and two other men. They know that she is the one to protect and that the men are the ones to condemn, but Laymon acknowledges that he understands what could have possessed those men to brutalize this woman. Both her pain and the potential to inflict it exist within him and his friends.

“I want to say that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really asks nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell, and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths, and the lives and deaths of folks all around us, over and over again.”

Laymon asserts that the act of remembering and contending with history means getting uncomfortable. He dismisses the punditry, a fixture of cable television, that has passed for legitimate discourse. He dislikes those blogs that avoid wrestling with topics honestly, like saleable but irrelevant art. He argues that the only way to build a more fruitful and less racist future is by talking about why Black life seems so disposable in the West and addressing the roots of that condition.

“I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a failure, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I’m a child of this nation.”

As part of his commitment to fiercely face into the truth of his experience, Laymon embraces the messy complexity of his being. He acknowledges facets of both his self-discovery and his self-expression. In the process, he reveals and claims the sometimes maddening complexity of his country.

“The worst of white folks, I understood, wasn’t some gang of rabid white people in crisp pillowcases and shaved heads. The worst of white folks was a pathetic, powerful ‘it.’ It conveniently forgot that it came to this country on a boat, then reacted violently when anything or anyone suggested it share. The worst of white folks wanted our mamas and Grandmamas to work themselves sick for a tiny sliver of an American pie it needed to believe it had made from scratch. It was all at once crazy-making and quick to discipline us for acting crazy. It had an insatiable appetite for virtuoso Black performance and routine Black suffering. The worst of white folks really believed that the height of Black and brown aspiration should be emulation of itself. White Americans were wholly responsible for the worst of white folks, though they would make sure it never wholly defined them.”

Laymon describes the most rabid and virulent expressions of white supremacy, encapsulated in the convenient phrase “the worst of white folks.” This is intended to be ironic because many white and white-identified people—that is, those who identify with white supremacist values, though they may not belong to the racial group—also exhibit behaviors that reify the ideas that Laymon outlines here. This description is another powerful example of how Laymon illuminates the untenable circumstances of white supremacy.

“I never imagined I could make a life of writing, but I knew I’d always need writing to wander under and above life.”

In a letter to his late Uncle Jimmy, Laymon talks about what inspired him to become a writer. For him, it was hard to imagine writing as a profession, though it was something that, like his uncle, he felt compelled to do to make sense of his life and his world. His unique phrase “to wander under and above life” vividly communicates the vast perspectives he gains through writing.

“I didn’t want you to see that I saw the real you in someone I never wanted to be, a shiftless paroled ‘n*****’ worthy of only hollow awe or rabid disgust, a smiling ‘n*****’ 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.”

Laymon admits to his fear that he would succumb to the same vulnerabilities that destroyed his uncle. He acknowledges that refusing to discuss the truth only sped up Uncle Jimmy’s self-destruction. He recognizes how others, himself included, often simplified Uncle Jimmy as a caricature of pain and not a human being.

“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.” 

Laymon admits to using his uncle for inspiration, which is what writers do. His flaw, he thinks, is that he writes with the desire to become part of a literary legacy. He nods to the specific legacy of African American literature by alluding to the title of Cornelius Eady’s collection of poetry, Brutal Imagination. Eady’s collection is especially relevant here because it is a study of the ways in which Black men have been demonized by racism.