How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(22)

“Look up here, man,” he said and lit another Newport. “I been know’n Kanye. His mama come over to the Public Museum when I was working security in Milwaukee around 1986, I believe it was. I been told her little Kanye was go’n be a prophet. On one hand,” Les slung out his right hand, “you got Kanye telling the white man the truth about what the black man deserve, see?”

He put down the Black and slung out his other hand.

“On the other hand, look up here, you got Obama deciding who deserve to get what in America. White man can’t stand that. Obama and Kanye, they the same, though, son. Yes they is.”

I was confused. “Wait,” I told him. “So Obama is deciding what white folks deserve and Kanye is telling white folks what black folks deserve? And you’re saying white folks hate both of them for that?”

Les tapped me on my knee and bent at his waist until he was inches away from my face. The Newport smoke, his Crown Royal Black breath, and that eighty-three-year-old tartar confused me even more. I couldn’t figure out whether to breathe through my nose or my mouth.

“Fifty years ago,” he said, “I’m saying that the white man woulda hung both of them niggas over yonder in that field just for thinking about doing what they did. Yes he would, too!”

It wasn’t until Les asked the question, “Kanye sang them songs, don’t he?” that I knew for sure that Kanye West had never sculpted a beat, never sung a hook, and never rapped a bar in the mind of HaLester Myers. Les had never heard of Taylor Swift. He didn’t know Kanye’s mother had passed and definitely didn’t know that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye’s most acclaimed album, had just been released a few weeks earlier.

To Les, Kanye West was simply the young black man with the goatee and the boxed jaw, who told the world that black folks drowning in poisonous water deserved more from the president of our country.

“The white man give Kanye that microphone ’cause he ain’t think there was no way he could tell the truth,” Les told me and sat down. “After all them Afghanese that Bush killed, now he claim Kanye the worst thing that happened to him in eight years? White man’ll say anything, you hear me?” Les said and stood up again. “Look up here, man. Anything! He believe everything he say, too. Just like Brett Favre...”

At this point, even though it was cold for Mississippi, Les started to sweat. I knew I was supposed to ask Les another question about Brett Favre, but I’d heard the Brett Favre set of lies two Christmases in a row. I wanted the Kanye West set of lies for this Christmas.

Les put his Black back down again and pulled a rag out of the front pocket of his overalls. I watched him wipe from the middle of his George Jefferson all the way down to the base of his thick neck.

“You okay?” I asked him.

“I reckon I am,” he said and picked up his bottle again. “You ain’t hot, son?”

“I’m good,” I told him. “Back in the day, you think the white man would hang a black woman for saying the same thing Kanye said?”

Les looked up at me and took a few more drags off that Newport. “Naw,” he said in his best inside voice that was both formal and afraid. “Naw. I don’t reckon he would, but you never know. I ain’t one for guessing what a female gon do.”

I wasn’t sure how Les moved from never knowing if a black woman would have been lynched, to guessing what a “female” would do, but I just nodded and kept listening.

“You got a better chance of winning every dime they got off in them Indian casinos.” He blew the smoke toward his work boots. “Expect the unexpected from a female, son. Care for them like you care for your cat. Just don’t never trust na one if you can help it. If you do, that’s the end of you...”

I stood up and looked down at Les. He kept his slowly blinking eyes directed at the Mexican trailer park next to Grandma’s house.

I felt like smacking Les in his heart for implying that my Grandma should be treated like a cat. But mostly, I felt a healthy heaping of something else, a superbly satisfying something else that I hadn’t needed to feel since the day Kanye’s latest classic, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was officially released.

The day the CD drops, I’m invited to give a talk at Columbia Law School on black literary imagination for Kimberle Crenshaw’s class, “Colorblindness and the Law.” I had the bootleg of the CD for two weeks, but my boy, Hua, and I still dart to Best Buy in between classes to get two originals.

On my way to the train station in Poughkeepsie, I play the first minute of the actual CD in my car.

Then I replay it.

Shit is just too good.

I play the last minute of the album in the parking lot of the station. And I replay it.

Mercy.

I love that Kanye West, the self-and society-anointed international asshole, not only frames his album with the questions, “Can we get much higher?” and “Who will survive in America?” but also borders his fantasy with the faux British voice of Nicki Minaj and the grainy revolutionary voice of Gil Scott-Heron. Within this frame, with all the guest verses and distorted vocals, it’s obvious Kanye West believes that plenty of voices other than his own also deserve to be explored in his beautiful dark twisted fantasy.

I step on the Metro North and folks are in their usual pre–New York states of mind. Heads nearly down. Fists almost clenched. Purses, backpacks, empty McDonald’s bags, and pleather briefcases damn near snug against puffy coats, blouses, and suit jackets.