How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
A long ride home, over an hour. Two lines and both with long delays because of trains stalled on the tracks ahead of them. It gives me time to listen to a podcast, the latest episode of Errthang, called How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. It’s a reading of a narrative about growing up Black in the South. Normally I listen to my home-bound podcasts with distractions: daydreaming, dozing, playing games, checking email. But today, from 5 minutes in, I am held by it. It begins:
I’ve had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself.
The story is a deeply powerful one. I stand staring blank and heavy-hearted out the train window, where the sun is setting on Brooklyn and the graffiti and murals are vibrant in the gold light. And I am left with several thoughts. Primarily that there is so much that Black people rarely share. The sadness — the sadness that comes with growing up Black in America. We talk about it in terms of anger, of jokes, of political theory. But all of those things are posturing and at the heart of them all is this sadness. And unfiltered sadness is something we have a real hard time with — expressing it or hearing it. It cuts us quick. Out of survival, out of hopelessness, out of convenience, we set the sadness aside. Like a sickroom for an ill man, where he finds no solace in thinking of his sickness and his family knows not what to say, so he lays silent or spins stories while they busy themselves trying to allay his pain, with everyone feeling powerless over the cause of it.
Likewise there is this shared narrative, this common wound in America, and here is the writer, Kiese Laymon, the stricken man speaking plainly of the sickness, as he has felt it.
This story is sad. It is unfiltered. It is one of those stories of which there are countless but which are rarely told so directly, when told at all. I’ll leave off with a long excerpt from the end, and a recommendation that you pick a quiet moment and listen to the whole thing.
My saying yes to life meant accepting that…parts of my state, much of my country, my heart and mostly my own reflection, had beaten the dog shit out of me. I still don’t know what all this means but I know it’s true.
This isn’t an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don’t want to lie.
I want to say and mean that remembering starts not with predictable punditry, or bullshit blogs, or slick art that really ask nothing of us; I want to say that it starts with all of us willing ourselves to remember, tell and accept those complicated, muffled truths of our lives and deaths and the lives and deaths of folks all around us over and over again.
