How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

For 5 days a week, for 30 years, and for nearly 12 hours per day, Catherine Coleman has worked at a chicken factory, pulling out the guts of dead chickens. When Laymon was growing up, she rose at 4:30am each morning, bathed, and then prepared a breakfast of grits, smoked sausage, and pear preserves for her family. Laymon marveled at how “she got so fresh, so clean, just to leave the house and get dirty” (43). When she arrived home, she would greet him and go to “wash [the] stank off [her] hands” before hugging him (43).

On Saturday nights, Grandmama often stayed up late sewing pieces of old clothing together to make new outfits. Laymon didn’t fully understand his grandmother’s “stank or freshness” until he started listening to the hip-hop duo OutKast. He heard the music from their album ATLiens coming from a friend’s dorm room in college in 1996. By this time, Laymon had already decided that he would become a writer. His English instructors encouraged him to find his voice, while he knew that he, like anyone, had many voices. He figured that his teachers wanted “the kind of voice that sat with its legs crossed, reading the New York Times” (47). After listening to ATLiens, reading the work of Charlie Braxton, and finding out about Toni Cade Bambara’s Southern Collective of African American Writers, Laymon decided to write fiction. He remembers when André 3000 said at the Source Awards that the South had something to say, which meant that, artistically, the region would no longer copy New York. To do so would be to disregard their particular stank. Instead, within OutKast, André and his musical partner, Big Boi, “carved out their own individual space” (48). ATLiens made Laymon love the things that were unique to him and where he came from.

After graduating from Oberlin College, Laymon discovered Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The album helped him realize that, despite the contrast between André 3000 and Big Boi, they both shared a penchant for misogynoir. Hill’s album made Laymon “[expect] a lot more from [his] male heroes” (50).

Then, OutKast released Aquemini. Around this time, Laymon read Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Both works gave him the idea of writing a metatext written by a Southern Black girl whose parents go missing. He wrote notes for the book in the blank pages of Kindred while Aquemini played in the background. It was in this way that his first novel, Long Division, was born.