by Kiese Laymon
Strange.
By age twenty-five, Tupac Amaru Shakur had recorded six albums and starred in five movies. Five bullets had entered his body and he’d gone to prison for eleven months. He’d travelled around the world, influencing the life and art of millions of people and talking about organizing a movement against poverty and police brutality. He had shot two white off-duty cops in Atlanta who were harassing a black man, and beat the case. By age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur had fought to stay alive for six days in a Las Vegas hospital after three new bullets entered his body. And less than three months after his twenty-fifth birthday, Tupac Shakur was dead.
Strange.
I kept longing for that spooky Tupac hologram from Coachella to make an appearance at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. I didn’t want the hologram to necessarily dis the president; I wanted the hologram to obliterate convenient notions of innocence, to truly democratize the audience it addressed, and to tell the truth. I literally wanted it to glide onto the stage right after President Obama riffed on citizenship. I wanted it to sit on the edge of that stage, dangling its twitching feet in front of the world with President Obama behind it.
When President Obama frowned, leaned toward the teleprompter directly in front of him, and used his disciplining-black-men voice to say, “Come on, Pac. What are you doing? Don’t be a jackass.” I wanted the hologram to say to President Obama what the actual Tupac Shakur had already said to us in “Smile.”
“What you lookin’ all sad for? Nigga, you black. Smile for me now.”
And as President Obama broke awkwardly into a worried smile before getting rushed off by Secret Service, the hologram would stand up, wink his eye at our president, and walk toward the podium.
And as Secret Service rushed the president’s podium and started haphazardly putting their hands, guns, and mace through the chest of the hologram, the hologram would smile and keep going. “They can’t touch me,” it would say. “There’s no way these people can own planes and there’s people who don’t have houses, apartments, shacks, drawers, pants!”
The stunned audience in Charlotte, unsure whether to clap, cry, smile, or run away, would keep staring up at the hologram. Still smiling, the hologram would keep going. With a smile still on his face, but odd-shaped tears dripping out of his eyes, the hologram would float through the roof.
I know it’s wrong, but I just wish the real Tupac Amaru Shakur could have never been touched. I wish we could have helped him run toward life a little while longer. Most of all, I wish we didn’t ever have to look up to see Michael Jackson, Bernie Mac, or Tupac Shakur smile again.
You Are the Second Person
You know that any resemblance to real places, spaces, people, time, or things is purely coincidental.
A LONE, YOU SIT ON THE FLOOR OF YOUR APARTMENT thinking about evil, honesty, that malignant growth in your hip, your dead uncle, letters you should have written, the second person, and stretch marks. You’re wearing an XXL T-shirt you plan on wearing the day your novel comes out. The front of the T-shirt says, “What’s a real black writer?” The back reads, “Fuck you. Pay me.” You open your computer. With a scary pain in your hip, you inhale and force a crooked smile before reading an email from Brandon Farley, your fifty-four-year-old black editor.
“The success of your book will be partially dependent on readers who have a different sensibility than your intended audience,” he writes. “As I’ve already said to you, too many sections of the book feel forced for the purpose of discussing racial politics. Think social media. Think comment sections. Those white people buy books, too, bro. Readers, especially white readers, are tired of black writers playing the wrong race card. If you’re gonna play it (and I think you should) play it right. Look at Tarantino. He is about to fool all these people into believing they are watching a black movie with Django. I guarantee you that whiteness will anchor almost every scene. That’s one model you should think about.
“Also, black men don’t read. And if they did, they wouldn’t read this kind of fiction. So you might think of targeting bougie black women readers. Bougie black women love plot. They love romance with predictable Boris Kodjoe-type characters. Or they love strong sisters caught up in professional hijinks who have no relationships with other sisters. Think about what holds a narrative like Scandal together. In 2012, real black writers make the racial, class, gender, and sexual politics of their work implicit. Very implicit. The age of the ‘race narrative’ is over, bro. As is, the only way your book would move units is if Oprah picked it for her book club. That’s not happening. Oprah only deals with real black writers.”
You begin typing, “Hey Brandon, this is my fourteenth thorough revision for you in four years. I know I’m not changing your mind and that’s fine. Thanks for telling me what real black writers do and what Oprah likes. You never told me you met her. Anyway, the black teenagers in my book are actually purposefully discussing ‘racial politics’ in awkwardly American ways. Their race and racial politics, like their sexuality and sexual politics, is somehow tied to every part of their character. My book is unapologetically an American race novel, among other things. I’m still not sure why you bought the book if you didn’t dig the vision.”
You push send on the email before opening up the word.doc you just defended. You jump to chapter nine. Thirty minutes later, a section of the book where an older queer coach tries to impart a strange “them/us” racial understanding to your narrator is cut because it “explicitly discusses racial politics.”
You call your editor names that hurt, muddied misanthropic names you pride yourself on never calling any human being, while looking out the tall window of your second-floor apartment in Poughkeepsie, New York.
A barefoot white boy with a red and black lumberjack shirt is outside sitting under an oak tree. He’s doing that walkie-talkie thing on his phone that you fucking hate. You can tell he’s telling the truth and lying at the same time.
“You fucking hurt me more than anyone in my whole life,” he says. “I couldn’t hate you…I just don’t trust you…You’re the second person who has done this to me. You’re the one who said you tell the truth…You started this.” The white boy is scratching his sack with the thumb of left hand and using his big toe to make designs in the dirt in front of him. “You ruined my life and hurt me way more than I hurt you. It’s always all about you.”
You wonder about the second person on the end of the phone. Is the second person a woman or man? Is s/he listening to the lumberjack on speakerphone? Is s/he wishing the lumberjack would hurry up and finish so s/he can run and get a two-for-one special on Peanut Buster Parfaits from Dairy Queen? You know far too well why a first or third person could self-righteously claim innocence in matters of love and loss, but you can’t figure out why the lumberjack is scratching his sack with his thumb and making dirt rainbows with his big toe.
Looking down at the browning “s” key on your keyboard, you think more hateful thoughts about your editor, your ex-girlfriend, skinny people, and fat young black men. These thoughts distract you from the pain in your hip, the dirt on your hands.
For five years, Brandon Farley, your editor, has had you waiting.
You remember the acidic sweetness in Grandma’s voice when you told her you’d just signed a two-book deal with “KenteKloth Books,” the most popular African-American imprint in the country. New York fall felt like Mississippi winter as Grandma came out of her second diabetic coma.
“We are so proud of you, baby,” Grandma whispered over the phone from Forest, Mississippi. “Just remember that God gave you five senses and whatever health you got for a reason. When they gone, they gone, but if you don’t use them best you can while you got them, ain’t a bigger fool in the world than that fool in the mirror.”
Six months before your first novel’s initial scheduled publication date of June 2009, you stopped hearing from Brandon Farley. He didn’t answer your calls or respond to emails. You gave up and called the publisher of Ken
teKloth in February.
“Oh, Brandon didn’t tell you?” his boss asked. “He’s no longer with us, but your book has been picked up by Nathalie Bailey. She’ll call you in a few days.”
Your lungs whistled, crashed, and slipped into the heels of your feet. You told yourself it would be okay. Then you trudged your sexy ass to the International House of Pancakes.
Three hours later, you were full, fatter than you wanted to be, less sexy than you were, and you had found a way to reach Brandon Farley at home. Brandon apologized for not telling you that he wasn’t seeing eye-to-eye with his boss. He promised you that Nathalie Bailey was a friend of his who would do right by both of your novels.
A week later, you got a call from Nathalie. “It’s a hard sell for black literary fiction these days,” she told you. “But I like what you’re doing. You’re on your way to becoming a real black writer. It’s a gorgeous book with big messy ideas and we’ve got to work hard and fast. But I’d love for you to let me take this book to publication. It’s a winner.”
You felt a comfort with Nathalie, but you didn’t want to be as impulsive as you had been with Brandon. “Can I have a few days to think about it?” you asked her. “Just to make sure.”
A few days passed and you planned on calling Nathalie at 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday. At 3:00 p.m., you got a call from a 212 number. Before you had a book deal, 917 and 212 numbers were like slimming mirrors; they made you think, Damn nigga, you ain’t that disgusting at all.
On the other end of 917 and 212 numbers were agents, editors, or an ex telling you she was sorry and she missed sharing a heartbeat.
“Hello,” you answered, trying to sound busy and country at the same time.
“Hi.”
It was Brandon Farley.
After a few minutes of spin where Brandon Farley showed you how much he remembered about your book and how happy he was to be the new senior editor of young adult fiction at the widely acclaimed “Duck Duck Goose Publishing Company,” he said, “…all that to say, we really want your book.”
“Word?”
“Word up, bro!” Brandon laughed. It was the first time any black man on earth had ever called you “bro” with a long “o.”
“Bro,” he said it again, “I will pay you more for one book than you got for two over at KenteKloth. I’ll want an option of first refusal on the second. But that’ll still give you the kind of flexibility you want.”
“Are you serious?” you asked. “Only thing is I’m a little worried about changing the subtext and the darkness and the metafictive stuff if it’s gonna be marketed as a young adult book. The ending ain’t really pretty.”
“You’d be surprised at the possibilities in young adult fiction,” he told you. “Listen, bro, young adults will read it. This is adult literary fiction with mass appeal. You won’t have to make many changes at all and we can get you a pub date of June 2010.”
“But what about Nathalie?” you asked.
“Bro, you’re the second person to ask me about her,” he scoffed, sounding like a hungry hip-hop mogul. You hated even imagining using the word “scoffed.”
“It’s business, bro. Never personal. You’ll have to get out of that contract over there. And I’ve got the perfect agent for you. She’s this wonderful fine sister over at Chatham Ward & Associates named Bobbie Winslow. Look her up. Bobbie’ll take care of everything if you decide to go with us.”
You smiled and forgave him for four or five “bro’s” too many.
Later that night, Bobbie, the perfect agent/fine sister, called from a 212 number and asked you to send her the other pieces you were working on. By 8:00 p.m., you’d sent her the book Brandon wanted, another novel, and a rough draft of some essays you’d been working on. By 3:00 a.m., she emailed you and said, “We want you. You’re the second person I’ve said this to in five years, but I think you could change the trajectory of African-American contemporary literature. You’ve got the makings of what Brandon calls, ‘a real black writer.’ I’m so excited about the new projects you’re working on. If you sign with Chatham Ward, we’ll have our lawyers get you out of the deal with Nathalie in the next week or so and Brandon says he can get us half the advance in three weeks. I’ll be in touch.”
You never contacted Nathalie, but a few days later, Bobbie, the perfect agent/fine sister did. “Nathalie is so fucking pissed,” she said a few days later, “but all’s fair in love, war, and business.” As you wondered whether this was love, war, or business, you and your perfect agent/fine sister waited and waited and waited for Brandon to deliver.
Six months later, three months after your initial publication date of June 2009, Brandon offered you substantially less money than he had promised and a publication date a year later than the one he verbally agreed to.
“Pardon me for saying this,” your perfect agent said over the phone from a different 212 number, “but Brandon Farley is a bona fide bitch-ass nigga for fucking us out of thousands of dollars and pushing the pub date back to June 2011. He’s just not professional. I’m wondering if this was just some ploy to get you away from KenteKloth. He’s been trying to take all his authors away from them as a way of fucking the company.”
“I don’t get it,” you said, shamefully exicted that your agent had used “fuck,” “bitch-ass,” and “nigga” in one conversation.
“So Brandon acquired this wonderful list of new literary black authors at KenteKloth, and they were all going to work with Nathalie after he was basically fired from the company. Nathalie and the house were going to get credit for a lot of his work. Do you get it now? We got caught up in some something really nasty.”
You finally got your first edit letter from Brandon Farley the following July. In addition to telling you that the tone of the piece was far too dark and that you needed an obvious redemptive ending, Brandon wrote, “There’s way too much racial politics in this piece, bro. You’re writing to a multicultural society, but you’re not writing multiculturally.”
You wondered out loud what writing “multiculturally” actually meant and what kind of black man would write the word “bro” in an email.
“Bro, we need this book to come down from 284 pages to 150,” he said. “We’re going to have to push the pub date back again, too. I’m thinking June 2012. Remember,” he wrote, “It’s business. I think you should start from scratch but keep the spirit. Does the narrator really need to be a black boy? Does the story really need to take place in Mississippi? The Percy Jackson demographic,” he wrote. “That’s a big part of the audience for your novel. Read it over the weekend. Real black writers adjust to the market, bro, at least for their first novels.”
By the time you found out Percy Jackson wasn’t the name of a conflicted black boy from Birmingham, but a fake-ass Harry Potter who saved the gods of Mount Olympus, you were already broken. Meanwhile, someone you claimed to love told you that you were letting your publishing failure turn you into a monster. She said that you were becoming the kind of human being you had always despised. You defended yourself against the truth and, really, against responsibility, as American monsters and American murderers tend to do, and you tried to make this person feel as absolutely worthless, confused, and malignant as you felt. Later that night, you couldn’t sleep, and instead of diving back into the fiction, for the first time in your life, you wrote the sentence, “I’ve been slowly killing myself and others close to me, just like my uncle.”
Something else was wrong, too. Your body no longer felt like your body, and you doubted whether your grandma would ever see your work before one of you died.
Two years after the original scheduled publication date for your first book, there was still no book. Questions fell like dominoes. Why would Brandon buy the book, you kept asking yourself. Why would that bitch-ass nigga get you out of a contract for a book he didn’t want, your perfect agent kept asking you. Why’d you promise stuff you couldn’t deliver, you asked Brandon on the phone.
“The book doesn’t just
have Duck Duck Goose’s name on it,” you told him, slightly aware of what happens when keeping it real goes wrong. “My name is on that shit, too. That means, on some level, it ain’t business. I feel like you want me to lie. I read and write for a living, Brandon. I see the shit that’s out there. I’ve read your other books. I see your goofy book covers looking like greasy children’s menus at Applebee’s. I ain’t putting my name on a fucking greasy Applebee’s menu. I’m not. Don’t front like it’s about quality. You, and maybe your editorial board, don’t think you can sell this book because you don’t believe black Southern audiences read literary shit. And that’s fine. Maybe you’re right. If you didn’t believe in it, why buy it in the first place? Look, I can create an audience for this novel with these essays I’ve been writing,” you tell him. “It sounds stupid, but I can. I just need to know that you’re committed to really publishing this book. Do you believe in the vision or not?”
After a long pause during which you could hear Brandon telling his assistant, Jacques, to leave the room and get him a warm bear claw with extra glaze, he said, “Bro, you’re the second person to complain to me this morning about how I do my job. The first person had a bit more tact. Honestly,” he said, “reading your work has been painful. It’s business. Take that folksy shit back to Mississippi. I did you a favor. Don’t forget that. You’re just not a good writer, bro. Good bye.”
The next morning you got an email from Brandon with the following message,
“Hey Wanda, I finished the revision this afternoon. It totally kicks ass. Congrats. I’ve sent back a few line edits, but it’s brilliant. Move over Teju and Chimamanda. There’s a new African writer on the scene showing these black American writers how it’s done. I’m so proud of you. Always darkest before the dawn, Wanda. It feels so empowering to work with the future of contemporary diasporic literature. Tell David hi for me. Best, Brandon.”