How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Coleman is Laymon’s 90-year-old maternal grandmother. She is from Mississippi and has spent most of her adult life working at a chicken plant in central Mississippi, where she makes a meager income. Before that, Laymon suggests that she worked as a domestic servant in white people’s homes. She started working at the age of seven. She is the mother of four children—Jimmy, Linda, Mary, and Sue. She had at least one sibling—a brother named Rudy, whom she buried. Laymon notes that Coleman was 45 years old when he was born—the same age that Laymon is while writing and revising the essays in this collection. Despite being poor, Coleman owns the home in which she lives and exhibits an impeccable style. She is also the head of the usher board at her church, Concord Baptist. Because of the effects of diabetes, Coleman uses a wheelchair.

Coleman played a large role in Laymon’s upbringing, is a key influence in his life, and is someone with whom he remains very close. She is a source of wisdom; a model for living; and someone who, Laymon asserts, believed in his beauty when neither he nor anyone else could.

Along with his grandmother and his Aunt Sue, Laymon’s mother is one of the key matrilineal influences in his life. She is the sister of Aunt Sue and of Laymon’s Uncle Jimmy. Mama had Laymon at age 19, a year after she began dating his father. Laymon’s mother, whom he refers to simply in the text as “Mama,” is a political science professor at Jackson State University. She had a friendship with the poet and novelist Margaret Walker Alexander, whom she also assisted on a writing project.

Mama is what Laymon would consider a proponent of the politics of respectability. She admonishes him when he doesn’t speak grammatically correct English and worries about the trouble that his writing can get him into. Like Caroline Coleman, her mother, she worries about Laymon’s safety in Mississippi, particularly when he is in Oxford.

Brown is a professional basketball player from Poughkeepsie, New York. He is six-foot-five and plays with professional teams in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Mongolia. He doesn’t make much money and has no college degree, which is a point of contention between him and Laymon, but he insists that he is on the right path and is content with his life. Laymon met Brown while teaching at Vassar College. Brown reminds Laymon of his younger self and the younger selves of other Black men Laymon has known. They all entertained dreams of becoming basketball stars, despite not having the talent.

Brown attended Our Savior New American School in New York City after being scouted during Stony Brook basketball camp. He once played in a tournament in which LeBron James also played. He then transferred to Christian Missionary & Industrial School in Jackson, Mississippi. After a plan to attend Florida International University fell through, Brown returned to Poughkeepsie. He later enrolled at Indian River State College. At that time, he got a call from an agent, offering him an opportunity to play basketball in Mexico. He is happy to play professionally but still wants to be in the NBA.

Farley is Laymon’s 54-year-old editor at a publishing house (KenteKloth Books) that Laymon renames, just as he has renamed the actual editor who inspired the chapter, “You Are the Second Person.” Farley has been Laymon’s editor for five years and epitomizes what some would call a “sellout”—a notion that Laymon strongly suggests without actually using the term. Farley embodies this because he is deceptive, indifferent to Laymon’s work while pretending otherwise, and only interested in advancing his own career, even it if means stepping on the few other Black people who work in publishing. Laymon makes a point of Farley repeatedly calling him “bro,” which is both a facile attempt at camaraderie and a phony display of Black brotherhood and identity. This falseness correlates with Farley’s refrain that Laymon should become a “real Black writer.” Farley’s ideas about authenticity are rooted in imitation and the recycling of racist tropes.

Laymon portrays Farley as someone wholly without integrity but also someone whose approval is required for his work to get published. Farley is a stand-in for the New York publishing industry and the routine disrespect that Black writers often endure within it, sometimes even from other Black people. Farley operates in service of the industry’s racism, which is exhibited by his repeated reminders to Laymon that the latter’s work is too “Black,” which will make it unappealing, Farley assumes, to the mainstream.

Trimp is a 32-year-old white man who lived in an apartment above Laymon’s in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Trimp lived with three small boys, his wife, and his girlfriend. He had “a greasy brown mullet,” wore bleached Lee’s jeans, and often said “youse” (130). The name that Laymon gives his former neighbor is a play on Donald Trump’s surname. Laymon seeks to indicate a stereotypical member of the former president’s constituency. Laymon’s unstated assumption is that Trimp is the sort of voter with whom Donald Trump connected.

Jimmy was Laymon’s maternal uncle. He was born in the late 1940s and died in early July 2007 from complications due to crack addiction. He was Catherine Coleman’s eldest child and only son, as well as the only brother of Laymon’s mother and his Aunt Sue. He was the only one of Coleman’s children who did not become a teacher, though he tried to help others by informally ministering to them. Laymon dedicates the essay collection to his Uncle Jimmy, who was also a writer, albeit not a professional one.