Hey Mama

Hey Kie, I’m tired. I’m wearing the pearl bracelet that you gave me. It is so beautiful. This morning I managed to get it locked alone. Did you hug yourself this morning?

You hug yourself by not allowing haters to distract you and by believing in yourself. You hug yourself by practicing the speech of respectability.

Don’t say “ain’t got” Kie.

Or nothing. Just don’t say “ain’t got.”

It depends on the judges.

You are a grown man, but you’re still a black boy from Mississippi to people that want to hurt you. Speaking and writing in a respectable way is just one small way to protect yourself. How do you not understand this?

I have pictures of the look on my grandma’s face the first time she held my first two books. Grandma smiled until she cried. I haven’t had those kinds of moments with Mama. I do know that she wishes I’d share less in my work and that I’d never write anything with the words “nigga” and “ain’t got” in it. She has been sending me titles for the books she wanted me to write for over twenty years. I think she knew I’d write something, but I don’t think she imagined, or wanted, my first, second, fifth, or tenth book to be what Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America became.

I’m not talking about hiding. Public and private are different words for a reason. If you had children, I bet you wouldn’t talk or write the way you do. Maybe you should refrain from that Twitter and Facebook for a few weeks.

My friends tell me you write crazy-talk on that Facebook, and that Twitter. I hear something in your voice that’s worrying me. Whenever I hear this, you end up doing something destructive. Are you okay? Have you written about Jordan Davis yet?

What have you been thinking?

It hasn’t. And it won’t. Black girls and black women don’t really buy the president anything in this country, though we supported him with a higher percentage than any other group in both of his elections. But do we really want black girls added to what you called “cheap initiatives”? The state generally works to dismantle our right to dignity. That work of valuing our lives, sadly, has always, and will always, be done on the local level.

I learned about Mrs. Hamer from Leslie. Leslie had been a young student activist and had worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and Mrs. Hamer. I learned how she embraced young people and the SNCC folk who recruited her in Indianola, and how she joined the movement realizing that she would be kicked off the plantation and left homeless. I hurt for her all over again when I read and reread how she was sterilized and beaten in Winona, and how she did not have good healthcare during her bout with cancer. Even after all she did for our state, she died painfully, poor and penniless. She matters to me even now because she fought to help the nation and our state get closer to its creed. You love Mrs. Hamer as well. Why is that?

Margaret was a very complex woman. My best memories of Margaret are visits to her home, where she invited me to help her sort out materials for a book she wanted to write on Aaron Henry. I had taught her son Sigmund and knew her daughter-in-law and her elder son. So, I knew her well and enjoyed her stories. She, like you, was not fond of flying. Margaret and Eudora Welty were both Jacksonians and I always had the sense that Welty got the better end of the royalties and national attention because she was white. I often wondered how Margaret and Welty might have fared as friends and why the gulf was impermeable.

You are so crazy.

You are so crazy.

Have you talked to your father since Chokwe’s passing? My first date with your father was to the Republic of New Afrika House on the corner of Lynch and Dalton streets. I was eighteen. Across the street was my favorite chili dog restaurant, The Penguin. In any case, Chokwe was much respected and admired by your father. I was very new to the conversation but found it interesting. Inside the RNA House were tons of books, the smell of incense that I mistook for the smell of weed, and lots of candles. Later I would meet Chokwe and the late Imari Obadele. I actually adored Imari. The police raided the House around midnight and our date was over. Chokwe loved the name that we gave you. “Kiese Makeba.” We were so proud of that name. Chokwe spent his entire life using his skills to help dispossessed black people in the South and the Mid-West…

Black folks loving black folks in the South causes so much literal terrorism, yet black love is also the only place we could go to soothe the terror. Mama placed Mayor Chokwe Lumumba in a larger context of complicated freedom fighters committed to freeing the land. This was a part of our conversation that my mother made me promise not to share with the world.

…I do not want to believe that there was any foul play in Chokwe’s death, Kie. The possibility of that so disturbs me—to the point of having an existential crisis. All my life I have believed that people are basically good—this would change that belief.

I do not want to talk about that, Kie. I still see that girl’s bloodied face and hear the sound of that man punching her. I think we would have killed him if we caught him.

What’s the alternative, Kie?

If I had to raise a child now—no matter the gender—I would probably not choose Mississippi. There’s so much love and history of black excellence in our state, but the state’s structural commitment to black death is unparallelled.

I stayed there so long precisely because of the state’s commitment to black death and my commitment to my students. I loved my students because my teachers had loved and believed in me. Like you, I was only a few years older than my first class of students, so I was committed to advancing their life chances. I needed to do my part to ensure their sure-footedness in the next leg of their journey, whether they stayed in Mississippi or left.

I do not favor this move. Would you be moving without a job? Would you be moving for reasons that could easily change? What’s happening with you? Has Vassar asked you to leave? Is this your decision? Why?

And I’m asking you why you’re considering that after all you’ve been through.

They loved me, Kie.

That’s true.

I did not want you to destroy your life chances and I did not want racism to destroy you. That’s why I whipped you so much. As a child, you had enormous stubbornness, anger, and rage. And while you were able to channel it through sports and writing, it was never far from the surface. Sometimes I wonder if much has changed with you. I tried to establish rules and when talking did not help, I lost patience. I was nineteen when you were born. I am sorry, Kie. Please forgive me.

I never had a job or a bank account as a young woman and probably never learned to value money the way I should have. In any case, I earned $17,000 the year I began work at Jackson State. I immediately enrolled you in Christ the King. I think your father contributed $250 a month. After rent, your schooling, food, clothing, and utilities, there was very little left for purchases other than books. I feel like I never had enough money to give, spend, or save.

Kie, sometimes I think you’re afraid to have kids or get married because of mistakes your parents made. Is that true?

I wasn’t ready to answer that question honestly. Family, community, and my grandmother are central in nearly everything I’ve ever created, but there are huge gaps in my fiction and nonfiction where textured mothers, fathers, and partners are supposed to be. There’s the thinnest line between parental terror, parental shame, and parental intimacy, and I’m trying to understand how my parents drew and toed that line, and what the consequences are for children when those lines blur. I guess I’m mostly reckoning with whether I have the imagination and will to draw something other than scary thin lines for my children, and my partner. Scary thin lines poke. And people aren’t ideas. People bleed. Then they scar. I don’t want to be an abusive parent or partner. I’m not sure people should have kids if they’re unsure whether they themselves are really worthy of love. Anyway, I’m working on it.

If you have kids, especially if you move back home, protect my grandchildren and teach them that life is a series of choices, and whatever we choose, we lose something. Make sure you have children with a woman you’re madly in love with. Don’t ever be a whoremonger. Teach my grandchildren to read, write, sing, and dance. They will probably have a good set of windpipes and great hand-eye coordination. They will also be very beautiful. Teach them what you value most—the power of dignity and the complexity of love. Don’t be afraid that you’ll mess up or that they won’t love you. Loving you is not hard. I wish I showed you that more.

No, I’m not. Why would you want strangers without our best interest at heart to see that?

Thank you for talking to me.

You are so hardheaded.

I love you, Kie.

Kiese Laymon is a black Southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. He is the Author of How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and the novel, Long Division. Kiese Laymon is an Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Vassar College.

This piece was reprinted by EmpathyEducates with permission. We thank the Author, Kiese Laymon for his kindness and heartfelt wisdom. We are grateful for his mother and for the lessons that she and he teach us together.