by Kiese Laymon
The night Kamala Lackey told me her secrets, I promised I’d never sexually violate or sexually abuse any woman or girl on earth. The existence of that promise was enough to excuse myself for lying to Abby Claremont and any other girl who wanted to have sex with me. I was sixteen years old. I’d become something far more violent than a Hulk. I was a liar; a cheater; a manipulator; a fat, happysad, bald-headed black boy with a heart murmur; and according to you and the white girl I lied to every day, I was a good dude.
GUMPTION
Near the end of my senior year, I went with you to the house of your mentor, Margaret Walker. I was six-one, 230 pounds. I had $208 in my pocket after delivering phone books in Jackson with LaThon. I thought I was rich.
You’d spent the last few years helping Ms. Walker organize her notes for this massive biography of Aaron Henry. I watched you and Ms. Walker talk about the backlash in Mississippi that led to Kirk Fordice, a reactionary Republican who beat Governor Mabus a few months earlier. Ms. Walker’s house was the only house I’d seen in Jackson with more books, folders, African masks, and African lotions than ours. I loved how Ms. Walker seemed nervous and unsure of what she was supposed to be doing next. When I thought she was looking in a cabinet for one of her many folders, without even looking at me she said, “So you are Mary’s son, the young writer named after the great Miriam Makeba?”
“I’m not a writer,” I told her. “I just write editorials for the school paper. My middle name is Makeba. My first name is Kiese.”
“Own our writing, Kiese Makeba,” Margaret Walker told me. “Where is your gumption? Own your name. You are a seventeen-year-old black child born in Mississippi. Do you hear me?”
I heard her, but I wasn’t sure what she was really saying.
Ms. Walker was even more relentless with the speeches than you were, but not as smooth with the speeches as Grandmama was. She told me to value our communication and own our fight. Our communication, she said, is the mightiest gift passed down by our people. Every word you write and read, every picture you draw, every step you take should be in the service of our people. “Do not be distracted. Be directed. Those people,” she said, “they will distract you. They will try to kill you. That’s what they do better than most. They distract and they kill. That’s why you write for and to our people. Do not be distracted.”
I told Ms. Walker I understood her speech, but I was lying. I told her I’d read her poem “For My People” and loved it. I was lying about that, too.
“Have you decided on college? Your mama told me you don’t want to go to Jackson State because you don’t want her in your business.”
“I might be going to Millsaps College,” I told her. “They’re recruiting me for basketball.”
“Oh lord,” she said. “I’m talking about revolution and this child is talking about playing some ball at Millsaps.”
Ms. Walker marched over to a book on the floor in front of her bookshelf and handed it to me. Half of the book cover was faded pink and half of a woman’s face was facing the title, Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day.
“If you’re going to Millsaps,” she said, “I know you will need as much Nikki as you can get.”
On the way back home, I read Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day cover to cover. When I got to my bedroom, I started reading it again. My favorite part was:
I share with painters the desire
To put a three-dimensional picture
On a One-dimensional surface.
I wrote down what I remembered of Ms. Walker’s speech on the last page of the book and I kept coming back to the sentences “They will distract you. They will try to kill you. Do not be distracted. Be directed. Write to and for our people.”
I loved those sentences, but I didn’t understand the difference between “writing to” and “writing for” anyone. No one ever taught me to write to and for my people. They taught me how to imitate Faulkner and how to write to and for my teachers. And all of my teachers were white. When writing to you, I wrote in the hopes that what I wrote was good enough for me to not get beaten.
I went to the bookshelf and found “For My People.” The last words of the last stanza mesmerized and confused me. Margaret Walker wrote:
Let a race of men now rise and take control.
I wanted to write “martial songs” but I didn’t understand what a “race of men” looked like, or why Margaret Walker ended the poem hoping a group of men would rise and take control. A group of men hadn’t written “For My People.” A group of men hadn’t told me to write to and for my people. Most groups of men I knew were good at destroying women and girls who would do everything not to destroy them. If a group of men happened to rise and take control, I didn’t know where you or Margaret Walker would be when those men got mad at you.
The next day, on April 29, 1992, the night of the Rodney King verdict, you held me in your lap and would not stop rocking for two hours straight. We watched LA burn as cameras showed a white man pulled from a truck getting beat up by black and brown men at an LA intersection.
“I hope you see what they aren’t showing,” you said. “I want you to write an essay about what white folk feel tonight. I know they’re blaming us.”
I looked at you like your bread wasn’t done because the last thing I cared about was what white folk felt. I’d only been alive seventeen years and I was already tired of paying for white folks’ feelings with a generic smile and manufactured excellence they could not give one fuck about. I’d never heard of white folk getting caught and paying for anything they did to us, or stole from us. Didn’t matter if it was white police, white teachers, white students, or white randoms. I didn’t want to teach white folk not to steal. I didn’t want to teach white folk to treat us respectfully. I wanted to fairly fight white folk and I wanted to knock them out. Even more than knocking them out, I wanted to never, ever lose to them again.
I knew there was no way to not lose unless we took back every bit of what had been stolen from us. I wanted all the money, the safety, the education, the healthy choices, and the second chances they stole. If we were to ever get what we were owed, I knew we had to take it all back without getting caught, because no creation on earth was as all-world as white folk at punishing the black whole for the supposed transgressions of one black individual. They were absolute geniuses at inventing new ways for masses of black folk with less to suffer more. Our superpower, I was told since I was a child, was perseverance, the ability to survive no matter how much they took from us. I never understood how surviving was our collective superpower when white folk made sure so many of us didn’t survive. And those of us who did survive practiced bending so much that breaking seemed inevitable.
That night when you finally started snoring, I crept into the kitchen, opened the garage, got in your Oldsmobile, put it in neutral, pushed it out of the driveway. I didn’t go far, just a mile down the road to the grocery store. I waited in the parking lot for the bread truck to pull up. When the driver went in the store, I got out of the car, snatched as many loaves of wheat bread, white bread, hamburger buns, and cinnamon rolls as I could and took off back to my car. I sped away from the grocery store and drove to a parking lot overlooking the Ross Barnett Reservoir. I ate cinnamon rolls, hamburger buns, and white bread that night until I got the shivers and threw up.
The next morning, I served you some buttered wheat toast for breakfast in bed. You hugged my neck and told me thank you. You told me we would win our fight.
You never asked me where the bread came from.
A week later, I was in Coach Schitzler’s twelfth-grade English class. We were supposed to be discussing The Once and Future King for the fifth week in a row. I didn’t want to discuss The Once and Future King anymore so I pulled out Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. When Coach Schitzler saw me reading my book, he said, “Put that black-power mess down, Keece. Pay attention.”
I sat in my undersized wooden desk, my fist tucked into my lap, LaThon to my left, Jabari to my right, and began read
ing stanzas from Nikki Giovanni’s book over and over again, loud enough so Coach Schitzler could hear me.
“Look at husky Malcolm X over there,” he said. LaThon and everyone else were dying laughing. “Keece X, is that your new name? Well, Keece X, make sure you read that tonight when you see that Abby Claremont Y.”
“Oh shit,” LaThon said. “He wrong for that.”
Coach Schitzler saw I was getting upset. He told me he seriously loved the poem, and suggested I should use it for my final paper. He said he especially loved the end.
I believed him.
I decided to use Nikki Giovanni’s book and the work of Assata Shakur for my final for Coach Schitzler’s English class. Coach Schitzler, who hated writing comments, gave us recorded comments on these papers incorporating literature and literary devices we read in class, and books we read on our own. He commented on the papers on cassette tapes he handed back near the end of school. I thought he’d be even more generous with all of our papers since he was so late in getting them back to us. I didn’t love my paper, because I didn’t really want to be writing about Moby-Dick, but I thought my next-to-last paragraph was the best writing I’d ever done for Coach Schitzler. It had an allusion to Moby-Dick, alliteration, and some commentary on our nation. I tried to write that paragraph for our people, like Margaret Walker asked me to do, even though I had to write it to Coach Schitzler because he was grading me.
Though I agree with Assata Shakur that a “lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port,” I know tired, seasick American sailors and their families have absolutely no chance at health and dignified lives, unless some Americans first accept their responsibility, and work to calm the bruising brutality of our national sea.
I took the tape home, and just as I had with tapes I dubbed from LaThon, I put the tape in the little radio next to my bed.
“Keece Lay-moon,” the tape began. Ever since Coach Schitzler learned I was in a relationship with Abby Claremont, he said my name like I was some scraggly French dude he paid to cut his yard.
“Keece,” he said again. “I want to say first that you need to watch your weight if you want to play ball in college. You getting close to two-forty and there’s no way you can play even Division Three ball at that weight. You a shooting guard on the next level, not a power forward. The problem with this paper is it relies on faulty logic.” I could hear him flipping the pages. “Faulty logic on page three. Faulty logic on page four. The paper is all just a mess of faulty logic. I see glimpses of your argumentative mind, but you undermine it with faulty logic. Maybe you should get your mommy to help you with papers for class like she does with your newspaper editorials.”
Coach Schitzler saw everything as a quest, and every black boy as his potential hero. He saw black and white girls as darlings, damsels, or damned. I wanted him to see me as the young black Mississippi hero jousting with words, paragraphs, and punctuation. I wanted him to tell me how my writing had the potential to be some of the best writing to come out of Mississippi, or Jackson, or at least our high school.
The night I listened to Coach Schitzler’s tape, you kept coming into my room, asking me why I was crying. I told you I didn’t really know.
“You’re lying to me, Kie,” you said. “Tell me the truth.”
I rolled my eyes, handed you the essay, and played the tape for you.
“Fuck him,” you said after listening to a minute of Coach Schitzler’s response. “Do you hear me? Do not internalize their shit. I’m going to school with you tomorrow to put my whole foot off in that man’s ass.”
I made you promise you wouldn’t embarrass me by coming to school. You promised and sat next to me. You took my paper smudged with tears and you read it out loud. You told me what worked in the essay, and what didn’t work. You asked me questions about word choice, pacing, and something you called political symbolism. You asked me what I was really trying to say with the essay and suggested I start with saying exactly that. You challenged me to use the rest of the essay to discover ideas and questions I didn’t already know and feel. “A good question anchored in real curiosity is much more important than a cliché or forced metaphor,” you told me.
By the end of the night, you helped me revise the essay into a piece I was proud of, even though Coach Schitzler had already given the paper a C. I understood for the first time that day how Coach Schitzler, just like most of the grown black men I knew, wanted to set people’s brains on fire before situating himself as the only one who could calm the blaze. He wanted us to praise him for his tough love, which was really a way of encouraging students to thank him for not hurting us as much as he could.
“Internalizing their abusive bullshit will make you crazy, Kie,” you said before you went to your bedroom. “I love you so much and I hate seeing you hurt.”
I believed you.
The next day when I asked Coach Schitzler to explain himself, he said everything he had to say was on the tape. I said I didn’t understand the tape and that you read my essays but never wrote the essays for me.
“She’s a teacher,” I told him. “But she don’t write my papers.”
“You looking like you ready to jump,” Coach Schitzler said in front of the class. His gumption surprised me. He stepped from behind his desk. “If you jump at me like you grown, don’t be mad if you get knocked upside the head like you grown.”
I balled up my fists.
When Coach Schitzler got shoulder to shoulder with me, I didn’t say anything. I leaned most of my weight on his shoulder and hoped to God he swung, so I could cave in his chest.
He backed up and stepped behind his desk.
“You know your problem?” he asked, and pointed at me. “Besides arrogance and that silly argumentative mind, your problem, Keece Lay-moon, is that you ain’t got no daddy at home.”
Ms. Andrews, LaThon, and two other teachers had to peel me off Coach Schitzler that day because of what he said about you. I didn’t tell you what he said because I knew I’d have to peel you off him, too.
I ended Schitzler’s English class with the lowest D you could earn without failing. Thankfully, I won a few awards from the Mississippi Scholastic Press Association in high school, got recruited to play basketball, and did well enough on the ACT to get into Millsaps.
But my GPA was shameful.
With two weeks of school left, I wrote an essay for our paper about how the mostly black graduates of St. Joseph deserved so much more than having our graduation speaker be the reactionary Republican governor of our state, Kirk Fordice. When the school invited Governor Fordice anyway, I told LaThon, you, and my teachers I wasn’t going to graduation. No one believed me.
I didn’t go to graduation.
That decision, as much as any paragraph I’d written, was when I became a writer. And it wasn’t because I didn’t attend graduation. It was because the night before graduation, you made me write through all the reasons I didn’t want to attend graduation. The whole truth was that I felt trunk-loads of shame for graduating five places from the bottom of my class when I easily could have been near the top if I would have applied myself and stopped trying to punish both of us.
All my friends and family patted me on my back for having the gumption to skip graduation, except you and Grandmama. I sat in Grandmama’s dining room with both of you, eating my second plate of macaroni and cheese while LaThon and the rest of my classmates were walking across that stage in front of Kirk Fordice and Coach Schitzler.
When I reached for a third serving of macaroni and cheese, you told Grandmama I’d had enough.
“How you know I had enough if I still want more?” I asked you.
“Get up from the table,” you said. “Go outside and get a grip.”
I rolled my eyes, sucked my teeth, and went out on Grandmama’s porch.
“You wanna know the truth?” Grandmama said while we sat out on the porch. “After all them ass whuppings and child support payments that ain’t never com
e, I don’t reckon you wanted your daddy or your mama taking no joy in watching you walk across the stage. I don’t much blame you for it neither, Kie. But the problem is you hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you. God gives us five senses for a reason. You hear me? Use them. Stop hunting for distractions. Stop taking your own legs out. It’s enough mess out there trying to beat us down without you helping. I reckon your mama the least of your troubles. Did you at least tell your teachers in that schoolhouse thank you?”
I sat there thinking about all the teachers I had from first through twelfth grade. I’d gone to majority black schools all but that one year at St. Richard and that one year at DeMatha. Ms. Arnold, my fourth-grade teacher, was the only black teacher I had. Ms. Raphael, who taught us at Holy Family in sixth and seventh grade, loved us so much that LaThon and I once made the mistake of calling her Mama. The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: “economic inequality,” “housing discrimination,” “sexual violence,” “mass incarceration,” “homophobia,” “empire,” “mass eviction,” “post traumatic stress disorder,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “neo-confederacy,” “mental health,” or “parental abuse,” yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.
I loved all my teachers, and I wanted all my teachers to love us. I knew they weren’t being paid right. I knew they were expected to do work they were unprepared to start or finish. But I felt like we spent much of our time teaching them how to respect where we’d been, and they spent much of their time punishing us for teaching them how we deserved to be treated.