How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Laymon’s focus on his grandmother and mother eschews the patriarchal lineage that society expects him to take up because he is a man. By embracing Grandmama, Mama, and his Aunt Sue within the text, Laymon rejects the misogynoir that permeates the things that Laymon loves, particularly hip-hop.

Laymon’s grandmother, Caroline Coleman, is the book’s moral compass. Her lessons, acquired from having survived a lifetime of forced, racist subservience, anchor Laymon in his life and in his writing. Grandmama has unwavering pride in herself, despite having first worked as a domestic servant and then as a line worker in a chicken factory for decades in exchange for meager wages. Laymon describes Grandmama’s style as “fresh.” She lacks the funds to buy herself new clothes, so she regularly deconstructs old pieces and sews them into new ones. During Laymon’s childhood, she rose at 4:30 each morning and bathed, powdered herself, and put on freshly pressed clothes to go to work in a place where she would only get exceedingly dirty (the chicken slaughterhouse). Laymon wondered about the reasoning behind this as a boy. As an adult, he understands, though he doesn’t state it explicitly in the text, that this was Grandmama’s way of maintaining personal dignity in an undignified situation. This lesson appears to have served Laymon well as he faced racism in both academia and publishing.

In addition to Grandmama, Laymon embraces Black women writers as much as he does his Black male influences—James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Charlie Braxton. Similarly, jazz singer Cassandra Wilson is as important an artist to Laymon as is Big K.R.I.T. Laymon’s mother was friends with Margaret Walker Alexander. Laymon and Mama both contend that Walker Alexander was as important as her contemporary, Eudora Welty, though Mama asserts that the latter got more money and accolades because she was white. Laymon learned Welty’s work, as well as William Faulkner’s work, while in Mississippi schools. However, he insists that Walker Alexander’s novel Jubilee, which was based on her family history, is as important as some of the South’s more canonical texts. The tendency to overlook texts like Jubilee, which goes into detail about the plantation system and the ways in which freed Black people were disenfranchised during the Reconstruction era, is in keeping with the country’s willful denial of its racist legacy. Without the influence of Octavia Butler, whose work melds science fiction and African American history, Laymon might not have had the idea for his first novel, Long Division. He wrote the first lines of the book in the blank pages of one of Butler’s best-known novels, Kindred.

Laymon also centers Lauryn Hill’s pivotal album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which offered a corrective to the misogynoir prevalent in hip-hop culture since the late 1980s and exacerbated by the rise of the music video. In particular, Laymon credits Hill for enabling him to recognize the ease with which the Atlanta-based hip-hop duo OutKast engaged in misogynoir, though he also acknowledges that OutKast corrected themselves on later albums.

Laymon understands that no sincere effort can be made to dismantle white supremacy without addressing the specific forms of oppression that Black women face. These forms are rooted in the commodification of Black bodies and Black women’s role as the producers of a free labor pool. Black men have internalized the notion that Black women have value based only on their sex characteristics. This is what allows Black rappers to disparage Black women in music, and, in the most extreme expression of misogynoir, it was what allowed three Black men in one of Laymon’s essays to rape and beat a young Black woman. Laymon knows that the misogyny that those three men internalized exists in him and his friends, too. Laymon asserts that his responsibility, and theirs, is to acknowledge the specific ways in which Western civilization has dehumanized both sexes and made Black men agents of their own undoing by encouraging their objectification of Black women.

Laymon identifies himself as a Black Southern writer. He knows that his embrace of this specific identity placed him outside of New York City-based hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s and that it placed him outside of Manhattan-based mainstream book publishing. Yet he also considers himself conflicted about the South because he spent a number of years north of the Mason-Dixon line, and he lays bare the winding paths he took to being able to truly claim his Southern identity.

Laymon’s Southern heritage is as diverse as Grandmama’s simple wisdom about how to live and love in the midst of white supremacy and his identification with OutKast. A strong influence on Laymon, OutKast was a re-discovery that happened for him, ironically, after he left the South to attend Oberlin College in Ohio. It almost seems that Laymon needed to escape the toxicity of Southern white supremacy to open his ears to the liberating yet rooted sounds that André 3000 and Big Boi offered.

Laymon focuses particularly on the influences that are specific to his hometown of Jackson: Charlie Braxton, Margaret Walker Alexander, and Cassandra Wilson. In doing so, he shows readers the richness of a place that they might be inclined to overlook. Laymon mentions the importance of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, whose literary ghost seems to hover over Laymon in Oxford. Laymon also considers the Faulkner family’s relationship to their longtime maid, Callie Barr, and contrasts Barr’s life with Grandmama’s. Though both women were forced into a lifetime of servility, Caroline Coleman insisted on maintaining a life that was separate from the white people whom she served. Laymon notes that she owned her shotgun house and her shotguns. Grandmama also lived away from white people, while Barr and her family lived on a small property directly behind the Faulkner house. Laymon explains this without denigrating Barr. Barr’s influence in Faulkner’s life and work is visible. Faulkner, however, to maintain his social position, could not deal with Barr and those like her in a humane and holistic way.

Being Black and Southern for Laymon means knowing that much of the country’s literary and oral culture originates in the Middle Passage and antebellum plantation life. It also means, as Laymon reminds us, that some of the nation’s most important cities—and the world’s—would not exist in their current incarnations if the Black Migration had not occurred in the early part of the 20th century. The great waves of Black people who left the South created distinct cultural markers elsewhere, such as New York hip-hop and the West Coast sound that emerged in the late 1980s with N.W.A. At the same time,  the Black people who migrated north remained blues people.