How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Laymon covers an exchange between him and his mother via email. His mother announces that she’s tired when he asks how she’s feeling. She then asks if he hugged himself this morning. When he asks how he’s supposed to hug himself, she tells him that it’s really about “not allowing haters to distract you and […] believing in yourself” (68). When he writes “ain’t got,” she chastises him for his English, telling him that speaking and writing respectably is one small way to protect himself from those who seek to hurt him.

Laymon thinks about how proud his grandmother was when she first held his books, how she “smiled until she cried” (68). His mother, on the other hand, has been sending him titles for the books she wants him to write for more than 20 years. She never imagined what his work would actually become. She tells him now that, if he had children, he wouldn’t speak or write the way he does.

They talk about how Black women are treated in the United States. Laymon asks his mother if she thinks the nation or their state will ever focus on the lives of Black women and girls. While Black women have supported the president at a higher number than any other group, she reminds him, she knows that focusing on them wouldn’t have bought then President Obama any currency in the country. She also asks Laymon if it makes sense to add Black women and girls to what Laymon terms “cheap initiatives” that don’t really tackle problems but only scapegoat.

They talk about Fannie Lou Hamer, who died “poor and penniless” despite all the work she had done for Mississippi (71). They also talk about Laymon’s mother’s relationship with writer Margaret Walker Alexander and how Mama visited the writer’s home and helped her sort through materials for a prospective book on Aaron Henry. She asserts that, though both Margaret Walker Alexander and Eudora Welty were from Jackson, Welty made more money and got more national attention because she was white.

They talk, too, about a family friend named Chokwe who opened the New Afrika House in Jackson. Mama’s first date with Laymon’s father was there. She was 18. She remembers that there were many books there and the smell of incense. Chokwe spent his life trying to help disenfranchised and dispossessed Black people in the South and Midwest. She tries not to believe that there was foul play in Chokwe’s death, for that would change her belief that all people are basically good. She says, too, that if she could do it over, she wouldn’t choose Mississippi as a place in which to raise a child. While there is so much Black excellence in the state, its “structural commitment to Black death is unparalleled” (74). She remained only because of her commitment to her students. She is also against Laymon’s decision to return to the state to teach.

Laymon asks his mother why she spanked him so much while he was growing up. She tells him that she was afraid that he would destroy his life chances with his stubbornness and anger. She also reminds him that she was only 19 when she had him, which made it easier for her to lose patience. She apologizes for not having been better. She also recalls not having much money. With the little that she earned after starting work at Jackson State, she enrolled Laymon at Christ the King.

Mama then asks Laymon if he has refused to marry and have children because of the mistakes that she and his father made. This isn’t a question that Laymon is prepared to answer. He knows that, in his fiction, he has not created “textured mothers, fathers, and partners” (77). If he does have children, she advises him to teach them about the nature of choices; to teach them “to read, write, sing, and dance”; and to choose a woman whom he’s “madly in love with” (77). She tells him not to be a whoremonger. She also reminds him that he’s not a difficult person to love and that she wishes she had shown him that more.