by Kiese Laymon
Your name was not and never will be “Wanda.”
You opened up Facebook to the News Feed page and found that Brandon, your Facebook friend, had posted the covers of recently published and forthcoming books he’d edited. Wanda’s book, and all the other covers, really did look like greasy children’s menus at Applebee’s. Your eyes watered as you googled the published authors Brandon had signed two years after he signed you. You wanted your name on an Applebee’s menu, too.
Even though you were fatter than you’d ever been and the joints in your hip got rustier and more decayed every day, parts of you were a rider. Yeah, Brandon bombed first, you thought, but right there, you felt determined to get your novel out by any means necessary so you could thank him in the acknowledgments:
“… And a special thanks to that shape-shifting cowardly ol’ lying ass, Brandon Farley, the untrustworthy editing-cause-he-can’t-write-a-lick-ass Tom who’d sell out his mama for a gotdamn glazed bear claw as long as the bear claw had been half eaten by a white librarian named Jacques or Percy Jackson. I know where you live. And I got goons. Can you see me now? Goooood. Congrats, BRO.”
Instead you wrote, “Not sure why you sent that email intended for Wanda, Brandon. I hope we both appreciate the distinction between what’s marketable and what’s possible. Glad you’re having success with some of your authors. I think you should give my books a chance to breathe, too. Thanks for the inspiration. Tell Wanda congratulations.”
Brandon never responded to your email.
You stayed in your bedroom for weeks writing essays to your dead uncle, your grandma, the son and daughter you didn’t have. Outside of that bedroom, and outside of your writing life, you’d fully become a liar unafraid to say I love you, too willing to say I’m sorry, unwilling to change the ingredients of your life, which meant that you’d gobbled up your own heart and you were halfway done gobbling up the heart of a woman who loved you.
One Tuesday near the end of Spring, you couldn’t move your left leg or feel your toes, and you’d been sweating through your mattress for a month. You knew there was something terribly wrong long before your furry-fingered doctor, with tiny hands and eyebrows to die for, used the words “malignant growth.”
“It won’t be easy,” the doctor told you the Friday before Spring Break. “You’re the second person I’ve diagnosed with this today, but there’s still a chance we can get it without surgery. You said you’ve been living with the pain for three years? Frankly, I’m worried about you,” the doctor said. “You seem like you’re holding something in. Fear is okay, you know? Do you have any questions?”
You watched the doctor’s eyebrows sway like black wheat. They looked like a hyper four-year-old had gone buckwild with a fistful of black crayons. “I like your eyebrows,” you told the doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just want my grandma to think I’m a real writer.”
“I’d actually like to recommend therapy in addition to the treatment,” the doctor told you before he walked you out the door.
For the next few months, you took the treatment he gave you and prided yourself on skipping the therapy. You told no one about the malignant growth in your hip, not even the person whose heart you were eating. Though you could no longer run or trust, you could eat and you could hate. So you ate, and you ate, and you hated, until sixty-eight pounds and five months later, you were finally unrecognizable to yourself.
One Sunday near the end of Spring, after talking to your two family members who were both killing themselves slowly, too, you made the decision to finally show the world the blues you’d been creating. You also decided to finish revising the novel without Brandon.
“The whole time I’d been in those woods,” you wrote in one of the last scenes in the book, “I’d never stopped and looked up.”
You spent the next four months of your life skipping treatments for your hip and getting a new draft of the novel done. You didn’t dumb down the story for Brandon, for multiculturalism, or for school boards you’d never see. You wrote an honest book to Paul Beatty, Margaret Walker Alexander, Cassandra Wilson, Big K.R.I.T., Octavia Butler, Gangsta Boo, your little cousins, and all your teachers.
You prayed on it and sent the book to Brandon in July. You told him that you had created a post-Katrina, Afrofuturist, time-travel-ish, black Southern love story filled with adventure, meta-fiction, and mystery. You wanted to call the book Long Division after one of the characters’ insistence on showing work in the past, present, and future.
“It’s a book I’m proud of,” you wrote in the letter attached to the manuscript. “It’s something I needed to read when I was a teenager in Mississippi. Shit, it’s something I need to read now. I’m willing to work on it. Just let me know if you get the vision.”
Brandon responded the same day that he would check it out over the weekend and get back to you with his thoughts.
Four months later, he finally sent an email: “Ultimately, the same problems exist in this draft that were in the other drafts.” Brandon ended the email, “We need more traditional adventure. We need to know less about the relationships between the characters, less racial politics, and more about the adventure. You need to explain how the science fiction works, bro. No one is going to believe black kids from Mississippi traveling through time talking about institutional racism. It’s way too meandering. Kill the metafictive angle. You haven’t earned the right to pull that off. This is still painful. I’m convinced you really do not want to be a real black writer, bro. The success of your book will be partially dependent on readers who have a different sensibility than your intended audience…”
Still too ashamed to really reckon with your disease or your failures, and too cowardly to own your decisions, you stretched your legs out on the floor of your living room and cried your eyes out. After crying, laughing, and wondering if love really could save all the people public policy forgot, you grabbed a pad and scribbled, “Alone, you sit on the floor…”
After writing for about two hours, you wondered why you started the piece with “Alone, you…” You are the “I” to no one in the world, not even yourself.
You’ve eviscerated people who loved you when they made you the second person in their lives, when they put the relationship’s needs ahead of your wants. And you’ve been eviscerated for the same thing.
You’re not a monster. You’re not innocent.
You look down at the browning “s” key on your keyboard. You don’t know how long you’ll live. No one does. You don’t know how long you’ll have two legs. You know that it’s time to stop letting your anger and hate toward Brandon Farley and your publishing failure be more important than the art of being human and healthy. You know it’s time to admit to yourself, your writing, and folks who love you that you’re at least the second person to feel like you’re really good at slowly killing yourself and others in America.
“Sorry your reads have been so painful, Brandon,” you start typing. “I want to get healthy. That means not only that I need to be honest, but also that I’ve got to take my life back and move to a place where I no longer blame you for failure. I’ve thought and said some terrible things about you. I’ve blamed you for the breaking of my body and the breaking of my heart. I really believed that you and your approval would determine whether I was a real black writer, worthy of real self-respect and real dignity.
“There was something in my work, something in me that resonated with your work and something in you. We are connected. I’m not sure what happens next. No young writer, real or not, leaves an iconic press before their first book comes, right? Whatever. I can’t put my name on the book that you want written and it’s apparent that you won’t put your company’s name on the book I want read. We tried, Brandon, but life is long and short. I’ve written my way out of death and destruction before. I’m trying to do it again. I think I’m done with the New York publishing thing for a while. I’m through with the editors, the agents, and all that stress. No hate at all.
It’s just not for me. I can’t be healthy dealing with all of that. I’ve been cooking up a lot of stuff. I’ll get my work out to my folks and if they want more, I’ll show them. If not, that’s fine. I’m a writer. I write.
“I’m sorry and sorrier that sorry is rarely enough. God gave me senses and a little bit of health. It’s time for me to use them the best that I can. Thanks for the shot. Good luck. I hope you like the work I’m doing. Not sure if it’s good, but I know it’s black, blue, Mississippi, and honest. I’m a not a bro, Brandon. You ain’t either. Thanks again for everything.”
You look up.
You close your eyes.
You breathe.
You look down and you keep on writing, revising, and imagining, because that’s what real black writers do.
Epilogue
My First Teachers—A Dialogue
DEAR KIESE,
I thank God for you. I thank him for the boy you were, the man you are, and the teacher you are becoming.
You have been a good son to your parents; you have been a great grandson and a wonderful nephew to me. What I love the most about you is that you have been a role model for young black men and black women. You have always had the courage to step over, look over, and at the same time, address with courage the wrongs in your life.
I know you have great faith in God. I love it when you call me and ask me to pray for you. It reminds me that your faith in God has not faded because of the evilness of the adversary. Always remember that what the enemy sent for bad, God will turn it for your good if you believe and keep the faith.
I have challenged you to not use profanity because you have such a reign of the English language. I know you can articulate your thoughts without cursing. In this season, you must be a voice of clarity and truth. Never be afraid to share your heart, but I want you to always guard your heart, too. Never be afraid to tell your story, but remember to tell it with grace. Never be afraid to share your pains and struggles, but share them first with God in prayer. Let him guide you as to who is entitled to the most intimate parts of you. I worry that you share with people who do not have your best interest at heart. Please be more deliberate. You will understand one day.
Set goals, write visions, dream big, and know that all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord. Never allow bitter people to make you bitter. Haters will hate. The man of courage is not the man who did not face adversity. The man of courage is the man who faced adversity and spoke to it. The man of courage tells adversity, “You’re trespassing and I give you no authority to steal my joy, my faith, or my hope.”
Ten seconds is too long to dwell on the negative. After nine seconds, cast your cares toward heaven and ask God to take your problems and you keep on pressing.
Psalm 91
You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday.
This scripture has carried me through the most difficult seasons of my life. I hope it will bless you on your travels in life. I love you and thank God for you. It is my prayer that the blessings of God will overtake you in all of your endeavors as you allow God to order your steps. Remember, no matter what, God expects teachers to teach and learn every day of their lives. You have no choice. Reach out to your mama. She needs to hear your voice.
Love always,
Aunt Sue
DEAR MAMA,
When you pulled that gun on me at nineteen, I knew that it was because American life was eating you up from the inside, and you wanted me to live. Five years after getting kicked out of school, I was offered a teaching job at Vassar College. As Aunt Sue has said thousands of times, “The devil is a liar.”
After a fourteen-hour drive from Bloomington, Indiana, I drove directly to the main gates of Vassar College and instead of going through what I knew would be the hassle of security, I thought about what you would want me to do. I turned around and found my way to Alumnae House, the college hotel.
Alumnae House was the first hotel I’d ever been in that had no televisions in the room. What Alumnae House lacked in televisions, it made up for in spooky pictures of little beady-eyed white children. All through Alumnae House, I found myself being looked at by the hollow gazes of little Brody, Chad, and Hannah.
I called Grandma from the room and told her that Vassar didn’t feel like home, that I didn’t like the way the little white kids were looking at me, and that I didn’t like how Vassar looked like a guarded castle. Grandma said that Northern rich white folks loved to put ghost-looking pictures of white children on the walls and that I didn’t drive fourteen hours to “…find no home or judge no white folks’ pictures. You have a home,” she told me. “You up there to get a job. Those white folks are lucky to have you applying for that job. But it’s still a blessing. So get that blessing, create blessings for yourself and our people, and don’t get caught up in no mess.”
I got that blessing, Mama, and I also got caught up in the kind of mess that would need at least two hundred more pages to explore.
When I was twenty-five, you told me to confront failure and mediocrity with honesty, humility, and imaginative will, and to show a little more restraint with my anger since I had students of my own who would look to me as a model.
I’m still working on that.
In and out of the classroom, my kids have asked hard questions, and risked intellectual and emotional shame and fatigue. After graduating, some led renewal efforts in New Orleans; some graduated from law school; a few became producers; tons have gone on to seek MFAs and PhDs; plenty have become journalists; others are doing the colossal (and colossally underpaid) work of teaching middle school and high school. But more than anything, they’re creating generative work in the world and being honest about their joys and failures. They are doing their jobs to make a crazy-making nation less crazy-making and more morally just.
I get why teachers get tired, Mama. I get why teachers punish themselves. But I also get how the students fuel us, teach us, keep us committed to life. Any supposed success I’ve had since I left home has been because of the prayers of my family, my memories of home, my imagination, and mostly my students. Of course, some of my students are trifling as hell, but most have accepted that they would not have the choices they have, or sturdy moral centers, were it not for the committed students who came before them. This is what you taught me. This is what I’m trying to teach my students. This is what my students teach each other.
Last week, I got an email, a tweet, and phone call from my favorite emcee, my favorite writer, and my favorite academic. It felt so good, Mama, to know that I somehow managed to live long enough to inspire folks who have spent a lifetime inspiring me. But that truth was cotton candy compared to the joy of watching Cordelia and Ocasio ask some of their one-of-a-kind questions, or Alitasha patiently breaking down the rituals of Easter at Coney Island in her thesis, or Sharon sitting in the president’s conference room telling a roundtable of mostly white folks that black and brown women of color deserve more care and honesty from the institution.
I get why you teach, Mama. And I get that the love you have for your students and that your students have for you is one of the most lasting loves in the world. I didn’t understand that as a child. And I hated that you were rarely home, and how we had more books than bill money, but now I get it. You had one child, but you had hundreds of students with thousands of pounds of passion. You were changing the world, and allowing yourself to be changed and loved, one student at a time.
I love you, Mama. My insides bruise easily and I’m prone to addictive tendencies when my heart hurts, just like you. I have looked fleshy, complicated love in the face and convinced myself I wasn’t worthy of love or loving. I have lied. I have cheated. I have failed and I have maimed myself and others close to me. But I believe in transformation, and for the first time in my life, I really get how transformation is impossible without honest acceptance of who you are, whence
you came, what you do in the dark, and how you want to love and be loved tomorrow. Baldwin wrote years ago that the only real change is a moral change.
After finishing this book, I finally get what he means.
I hope you can read this book and know that I listened and I watched. I want you to be proud of the teacher, writer, and worker that I’ve become. Thank you for being my first teacher. I learned, and I’m doing everything I can do to stop slowly killing myself and others in America. I’m sorry I was bad at being human for so long. I love you and I just want you, Grandma, Aunt Linda, Aunt Sue, Nicole, little Amiel, my father, my students, my state, and our people to choose life even though our nation has perfected making murder so easy.
I don’t want to be a murderer any more, Mama. I choose life.
Your child,
Kiese
Acknowledgments
A VERSION OF “HIP HOP STOLE MY SOUTHERN BLACK Boy” appeared in the anthology Longman’s Hip Hop Reader. A version of “Kanye West and HaLester Myers Are Better at Their Job” appeared in the literary journal Mythium. Versions of “We Will Never Ever Know,” “Our Kind of Ridiculous,” and “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” appeared on gawker.com. A version of “The Worst of White Folks” appeared on ESPN.com. A version of “Eulogy for Three Black Boys Who Lived” appeared on Esquire.com. Versions of all of these pieces first appeared at kieselaymon.com.
I’d like to thank my aunt Sue Coleman for her contribution to my life and this book. Thank you for praying and willing yourself and our family through the sour and sweet times.
I want to thank my brothers, Darnell Moore, Kai Green, Mychal Denzel Smith, and Marlon Peterson for blessing the pages of this book with clarity, brilliance, love, and literally making our word bond.