How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Laymon is living in a house owned by the University of Mississippi. The house is up the road from William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, also located in Oxford. A “raggedy American flag” hangs outside Laymon’s house (32). Laymon knows he should remove it, but he’s afraid to. Many of his neighbors fly Magnolia flags. This was the state’s official flag during the Civil War and it became the state flag in 1894. The Magnolia flag was Mississippi’s flag of secession. For Laymon, the American flag is worse than the Magnolia flag. The one that he flies has blue bleeding into purple; the red has faded to a pink, and the white has yellowed. Keeping the flag up is “a manageable fight to win outside” (34).

The cowardice of white Americans “created Black intergenerational poverty,” and that poverty is why Laymon accepted a job in Oxford and not in Jackson (34). Laymon knows the work of Faulkner, Oxford’s native son, very well. He had read all of the literary master’s work by the time he was 15. He knew Faulkner like he knew Ice Cube, Voltron, En Vogue, Good Times, and banana-flavored Now and Laters. But these other things felt like they belonged to him in a way that Faulkner didn’t. By the time he was 16 or 17, Laymon grew tired of trying to emulate white writers “who simply could not see, hear, love, or imagine Black folk as part of, or central to, their audience” (34).

Faulkner gave the eulogy at the funeral of his longtime maid, Callie Barr, in 1940. He praised her for her fidelity to his family without seeing how this fidelity is “a terrifying part of [the Black American] story in this nation” (36). Laymon’s grandmother, too, spent much of her life cleaning up after white people. Unlike Barr, Caroline Coleman never lived near white people. Callie Barr and her family lived just behind Faulkner’s house. Grandmama, on the other hand, owned both her shotgun house and her shotguns.

When writing about the murder of Emmett Till, Faulkner claimed that if the country had reached a point at which it could kill children, it didn’t deserve to survive. Laymon counters that there has never been a time in the nation’s history when adults “have refused to humiliate, abuse, and murder children” (37).

One August, Laymon goes to New Orleans for his family reunion. After the first night, Laymon meets up with his paternal uncle, Billy, who talks to him about politics. Laymon insists that white people benefited the most from President Obama’s policies and accuses the former president of not resenting the terror that white people have forced him and his family to endure. Billy agrees but insists that the fact that Obama is still alive is a win.

Laymon remembers how he received his first beating in public school for refusing to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The American flag and the Magnolia flag were side by side in his classroom. Whether Laymon chooses to continue flying the American flag outside his home or not, he knows that many white people expect him, other Black people, and other people of color to “remain passive, patriotic, and grateful for the limited choices we’ve been given” (42). This prompts Laymon to pledge that he will never be passive in response to American abuse. He also refuses to allow “American ideals of patriotism and masculinity” to harden him or make him abusive (42). Instead, he pledges allegiance to those who fought for freedom in Mississippi, all of whom made his pledges possible. He also pledges allegiance to the freedom fighters who are coming next.