by Kiese Laymon
I get out of the cab, Yeezy’s reupholstered pussy behind me, wondering if this is really still Harlem and thankful that I’m from little ol’ Jackson, Mississippi. I make my way upstairs.
Kim’s class is beyond gratifying. We break. We listen. We build. We wonder. I bounce.
On the way out, Kim asks two of her students, one a Korean-American woman and one an Iranian-American man, to hail a taxi for me. It’s a loving, pragmatic gesture, she assures me, because cabs ain’t got no love for black men going uptown.
Once we’re out on 116th, Kim’s students decide they can be more effective if each goes to either side of the street. I think about “Blame Game,” “Runaway,” and “So Appalled,” and I ask the woman what side I should go to. I’m wondering if she thinks my talk was typical academic bullshit. I’m hoping the woman remembers the comment I made about packaged misogyny being more lucrative than rhyming about slanging dope if you’re a rapper, and nearly as lucrative as uncritically using guns, gunshots, and criminal tactics to sell movie tickets if you’re not.
The woman tells me to stay on her side of the street. I can’t tell if she’s giving me rhythm but I’m leaning toward maybe. I look across the street at the Iranian-American cat, then look down at her one more time.
“I should probably wait over there with him,” I tell her.
It feels so good to walk away from this woman, believing not only that she thinks I’m slightly dope, but that she also thinks I’m unlike all those other men when it comes to spitting game.
Across 116th, the Iranian-American cat and I wait. And the taxis pass. And we wait. And I wave and smile at the Korean-American woman. I act like it doesn’t all sting and feel so good at the same time.
Finally, I’m in a dollar cab headed back to 125th and ultimately back to Poughkeepsie, wondering how to explore with colorful profundity the absurd privilege and policing that exists around the delicate shadows of grown American black boys. It isn’t until the next day in front of a computer screen that I realize that intentionally and unintentionally, just maybe, Kanye has done that and so much more with his beautiful dark twisted fantasy.
Instead of standing up and saying all that to Les that night, I continue looking down on him, watching his chest heave in and out. I want to tell him that if he really listened to Kanye West, he would hear that Kanye wants maligned folks to get what they deserve.
Poor black folks from New Orleans deserved more, so Kanye said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
Beyonce deserved more, so Kanye said, “Taylor, I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the greatest videos of all time.”
Queer brothers deserved more, so Kanye said, “I been discriminating against gays…and I wanna come on TV and tell my rappers, just tell my friends, Yo, stop it, fam...”
Black kids in Chicago deserved more, so Kanye said, “Man, killing’s some wack shit.”
Listeners of American popular music deserved more than formulaic noise, so Kanye West offered us eight years of GOOD music. In those eight years, Kanye managed to collapse, carve, and distort disparate sounds rooted in the black musical traditions into newly shaped inescapable musical experiences. His work did more than challenge conventional composition. Whether it’s College Dropout, Late Registration, 808s and Heartbreak, or Watch the Throne, Kanye’s work literally dared us to revise our expectations of sound.
Precisely because Kanye is able to give us so much more than we actually deserve, I need to tell Les that Kanye West, that box-jawed American virtuoso who told the white man the truth, is eons better at his job than Les is at lying, and I am at writing, but when it comes to exploring women (you know, “females,” “cats,” “bitches,” “hoes,” “pussies,” “Kelly Rowlands,” “hood rats,” “good girls,” “sluts,” “light-skinned girls,” and now “Perfect Bitches”), Kanye West ain’t really using his voice or his art right.
This actually makes him just like almost every other virtuoso and mediocre American man I’ve ever read, watched, or heard.
Kanye West is better than those jokers, though.
He has proven himself good enough, brave enough, conceptually genius enough, compassionate enough, and now rich enough to use his voice to explore, with prickly honesty and dramatic irony, what black women deserve—as well as the ways he is encouraged to obsessively dismember, soulfully mutilate, and straight dis the fuck out of women in order to move units and feel like a manlier man.
I get where it comes from. We were all fed the same thing. As inspirational as we found Dre’s music, Snoop’s flow, and Cube’s criticism, an articulated fear and hatred of black women was part of what made them so nationally attractive. Like nearly all of our lyrical pedagogues, the MCs that came a generation before Kanye practiced a form of spectacular psychological and/or emotional dismantling of black women passed down by the practices, policies, and patriarchy of America.
Chuck D and Flav told us all that women were “blind to the facts” of who they were because they watched the wrong television shows. Slick Rick warned us to pre-emptively treat women like prostitutes since all they did was “hurt and trample.” Too Short painted the freakiest of tales and constantly reminded us that the correct pronunciation of the words “woman” and/or “girl” was “bitch.”
Big Daddy Kane and Nice and Smooth let us know that no matter what we heard from Too Short, pimping was never easy. The Geto Boys showed us how to kick a woman in the ass if she claimed to be pregnant with our baby. Before we elected a modern Falstaff with hoish tendencies to the White House, MC Ren taught us how to gang-rape the fourteen-year-old daughter of a preacher and sodomize any women “saying that they never would suck a dick.”
So yeah, that’s what we were taught, but at what point does listening to artists obsessively encourage manipulative relationships, sociopathic deception, and irresponsible sex with women doubling as accessorized pussy become not just destructive, but really, really boring? If Kanye West won’t, or maybe even can’t, explore the meat of that question, isn’t he still too great to exploit it?
That’s some of what I wanted to tell Les after he said that thing about treating females like cats. Instead of saying any of it, though, I just hovered over him in his runaway spot, feeling extra good about myself for wanting to say any of it at all.
A month or so later, I sat in front of a computer screen in New York and wrote a piece critiquing both Les for reducing my grandma to a cat and Kanye for the destructive gender politics in his art. I ended the piece with what I thought was a harpoon to Les’s gizzard: “I should have asked Les if he deserved to ever have his hand held by a woman.”
The essay generally, and that sentence specifically, helped me run away from the truth, from reckoning, from meaningful change.
I don’t want to run any more.
I am better at fucking up the lives of a few women who have unconditionally loved me than Les is at lying and Kanye West is at making brilliant American music. And even worse than the bruising parts of Kanye’s art, the paranoid femiphobia of HaLester Myers, the pimpish persona of Stevie J, the abusive gender politics of Paul Ryan and Todd Akin, and the thousands of confused brothers out there who think “misogyny” is the newest Italian dish at Olive Garden, I have intimately fucked up women’s lives while congratulating myself for not being Kanye West, HaLester Myers, Stevie J, Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, or the brothers who like that misogyny with a few breadsticks.
Even before this essay, I wanted the fact that I’ve read, and taken notes on, everything ever published by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Imani Perry, dream hampton, and Rebecca Walker to prove to everyone—especially women I’m interested in—that I’m way too thoughtful to be a dickhead. I wanted folks to know that I’ve made my male students reckon with being born potential rapists, and that I’ve defended black girls in need of abortions from rabid pro-lifers at abortion clinics in Mississippi. I wanted women to know that I was a man who would always ask, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to do th
is?”
I couldn’t wait to tell some men—but only when in the presence of women—how sexism, like racism and that annoying American inclination to cling to innocence, was as present in our blood as oxygen. When asked to prove it, I’d dutifully spit some sorry-sounding mash-up of Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and Mark Anthony Neal. But just like them, I never said that I know I’m sexist, misogynist, and typical because I have fucked up the lives of some women in ways that they would never fuck up my life. I never said that I’ve used black feminism as a convenient shield, as a wonderful sleep aid, and as a rusted shank to damage others who would do everything to avoid damaging me.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. And of course there are all kinds of qualifications and conditions I want to explore. But beneath all of that conditional bullshit is a lot of ugly.
This is what I refused to admit, not only when I looked down at Les for making his comment about females and cats that night, but also the following day, Christmas Day, when Les sat across the room from me in Grandma’s pink throne and wouldn’t wake up.
Grandma looked up at me with a fear I’d never seen in her eyes as I rubbed melting ice cubes on Les’s temple and his bottom lip.
As Les was laid out on a stretcher and lifted into the back of an ambulance, his eyes still didn’t open, but huge tears dripped slowly into his ears. With his eyes still closed, Les cried that cry that comes from way deeper than hurt.
He cried all the way to the hospital.
After we were at the hospital a while, the doctors said Les’s blood alcohol level was almost .35. He had nearly drank himself to death. When Grandma went in the room with him, she told Les that she had a strap in her purse and she was going to whup his ass if he ever scared her like that again.
When Grandma left the room, I hugged her as tight as I could. She kept saying into my chest, “I don’t know why, Kie. I just don’t even know.” Then I went in and gripped Les’s thick fingers. He mumbled something about a “seven” and clutched the front of his overalls, which were now drooping around his belly button.
“You gotta pee?” I asked him.
“Three-fif sheh-bilm,” he said.
“357?”
I reached for the front of Les’s overalls and slowly opened the pocket. “Hide it from the white man,” he slurred.
I pulled out a loaded .357.
I put the gun in my coat pocket. Even after all he’d said the night before and all he’d done this night, it fucked me up that Les was still worried about the white man.
“Les, gotdamn, man,” I said to him. “You gotta do better than this.”
“I know,” he mumbled in the smallest, most terrifying voice I’d ever heard him use. “I know.” Then he pulled me closer and whispered in my ear, “I’m shorry, man, for what I shed.”
I pulled away from Les and just looked at him. He wasn’t in his right mind, but even in his wrong mind I wondered if he knew that what he said the day before about females being like cats was wrong. Maybe he actually knew that part of me wanted to bust his head to the whitest of white meat for indirectly talking mess about Grandma. Or maybe he really knew that most of me was an opportunistic coward always in search of instant deliverance.
The next night, my grandma—the tiny, complicated, hard-headed woman responsible for whatever integrity and freedom I have—fell into a diabetic coma. The same white EMTs came to the house, took her to the hospital, and placed her one room down from where Les was the night before.
When Grandma finally regained consciousness, I lied to Les and told him that she wanted to see him. I sat in the chair next to Grandma while Les, in those same blue overalls, came in and held one of Grandma’s hands in between both of his.
“Doctor say you ain’t doing what you supposed to do,” he told her.
“I did what I was supposed to do,” Grandma said with a weak voice and slow twitching eyes. “Mary and them had something to say about everything I ate, so I end up not eating enough.”
“Okay, okay. Just telling you what the doctor said to me,” Les told her. “That ain’t my voice. That’s the doctor.”
HaLester Myers wasn’t lying.
And with that, Les stood there in those same stanky blue overalls, shamefully looking down into the eyes of my grandma—a supposed cat, an untrustworthy female, a blamed bitch, a few babies’ mama, a ho who should run away. Les stood, not saying a word, knowing right there that my grandma deserved every bit of whatever care he had left in him. I sat there, too, looking at Les, trying hard to shake my head in slow motion.
It wouldn’t move.
If I had any guts, I would have asked Les if he was holding the hand of Catherine Coleman, a human being he loved, a human being who loved him better than anyone on earth. If I were less of a man, I would have asked Les if Kanye West, he, or I deserved to ever have our hands held by a woman.
If I would have asked, HaLester Myers would not have told a lie.
Reasonable Doubt and the Lost Presidential Debate of 2012
October 29, 2008, 2:15 a.m.
“I’m not wearing anything with Barack Obama’s name on it,” my mother tells me over the phone.
I’m at work in upstate New York. Mama is at home in Central Mississippi.
“I’m serious,” she says. “I’m not trying to have some redneck knock me upside my head, or run my car off in the Pearl River over a damn Obama bumper sticker.” Mama wants me to say something. “And you shouldn’t either, Kie.”
I make myself laugh until my throat burns, but Mama doesn’t even chuckle.
“I know you,” she says. “And I know you’ll do whatever I tell you not to do, but a hardhead makes a soft behind when you’re dealing with entitled folks who never learned how to lose.”
My mother is being my mother.
As long as I can remember, Mama has slept with a .22 under her pillow, closed her blinds at 6:00 p.m., and refused to answer the door unless she has invited you a day in advance.
But that’s just a millimeter of my mama’s story.
One expects to hear this kind of stilted racial paranoia over Obama shirts and bumper stickers from a typical American voter, not a woman who has been a political analyst and a professor of political science for almost thirty years.
On Election Day, November 4, 2008, Mama will be on some local station in Jackson, Mississippi, prognosticating her ass off. Mama won’t lie to Mississippians watching her on election night, but she damn sure won’t tell them the truth either.
Whether talking about Brown v. Board, the Montgomery bus boycott, Meredith enrolling in Ole Miss in 1962, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s bum-rush in 1964, the Civil Rights Act in the same year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Swann decision in 1971, or the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, Mama taught me that black Americans have always borne the brunt of domestic economic terrorism after supposed policy and political wins.
As Mama talks to me on the speaker phone about how resentment and backlash will find a way to shrink opportunities to escape poverty for black and brown Americans during an Obama presidency, I’m mm-hmm-ing her to death and looking for a T-shirt in my closet.
Hanging next to the fifteen-year-old brown polyester suit she bought for my high school graduation and a sky-blue Jackson State hoodie is the sickest Obama T-shirt you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s black pre-washed cotton with a huge red, black, and green picture of Obama’s face on it. Obama’s face is liquid aluminum, like a contemplative red, black, and green Terminator 4. On the bottom, in that played-out Times New Roman, are the words, “Yes We Can.”
Mama doesn’t know about my RBG T4 Obama shirt.
Anyway, I wear the shirt three times a week and I’ll definitely rock it tomorrow morning when I vote. Tonight, I’m imagining wearing the shirt while driving home to Mississippi for Christmas:
RBG T4 Obama shirt and I are hauling ass through Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama, in late Decem
ber, our backseat covered with fifteen folded RBG T4 Obama shirts I plan on giving away to my family and friends in Jackson. I’m bumping this Mahalia Jackson/Andre 3000 duet as I pull up to a dusty Amoco in Northern Alabama. I open the door of my truck as fourteen working-class white locals look at me and my Obama shirt with hate in their mind, envy in their hearts, and “Niggers these days” on the tips of their thin wet lips.
Within seconds, the locals are wearing my Obama shirts, sipping on Faygos, and talking that good shit with some other black Alabamans and me about the underrated importance of moral imagination and local activism in carving the policies that will mitigate the economic and social problems of our region in 2008. We’re also coming up with a list of real questions we want to ask at the next presidential election in 2012.
I hardly sleep, but love to dream.
When I was younger, Mama said that lack of moral imagination on the part of most white folks was exactly why black girls and boys needed to be twice as good to get half as much of white Americans in our country. She said you have to pity an entitled group of people who believe black and brown folks are getting more than they deserve when they themselves have twenty times more wealth, better access to good health care, are far less likely either to go to prison or to grow up in poverty, and are five times more likely to go to college. “Don’t ever let them beat you,” Mama and Grandma repeated with their daily, “I love you.”
Both neglected to tell me there was also a bruising, terrible price to pay for being better than intellectual white folks drunk off of American white liberal entitlement.
I learned that on my own, way up at good ol’ liberal Vassar College.
“Mama,” I say over the phone. “I gotta go, but I hear you.”
I hang in the grainy silence, hoping that Mama will change the subject to Serena Williams or my insomnia or her recent surgery. I’m hoping Mama will tell me that God won’t give us anything we can’t handle or some other bloated cliché.