How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(25)
“You gotta pee?” I asked him.
“Three-fif sheh-bilm,” he said.
“357?”
I reached for the front of Les’s overalls and slowly opened the pocket. “Hide it from the white man,” he slurred.
I pulled out a loaded .357.
I put the gun in my coat pocket. Even after all he’d said the night before and all he’d done this night, it fucked me up that Les was still worried about the white man.
“Les, gotdamn, man,” I said to him. “You gotta do better than this.”
“I know,” he mumbled in the smallest, most terrifying voice I’d ever heard him use. “I know.” Then he pulled me closer and whispered in my ear, “I’m shorry, man, for what I shed.”
I pulled away from Les and just looked at him. He wasn’t in his right mind, but even in his wrong mind I wondered if he knew that what he said the day before about females being like cats was wrong. Maybe he actually knew that part of me wanted to bust his head to the whitest of white meat for indirectly talking mess about Grandma. Or maybe he really knew that most of me was an opportunistic coward always in search of instant deliverance.
The next night, my grandma—the tiny, complicated, hard-headed woman responsible for whatever integrity and freedom I have—fell into a diabetic coma. The same white EMTs came to the house, took her to the hospital, and placed her one room down from where Les was the night before.
When Grandma finally regained consciousness, I lied to Les and told him that she wanted to see him. I sat in the chair next to Grandma while Les, in those same blue overalls, came in and held one of Grandma’s hands in between both of his.
“Doctor say you ain’t doing what you supposed to do,” he told her.
“I did what I was supposed to do,” Grandma said with a weak voice and slow twitching eyes. “Mary and them had something to say about everything I ate, so I end up not eating enough.”
“Okay, okay. Just telling you what the doctor said to me,” Les told her. “That ain’t my voice. That’s the doctor.”
HaLester Myers wasn’t lying.
And with that, Les stood there in those same stanky blue overalls, shamefully looking down into the eyes of my grandma—a supposed cat, an untrustworthy female, a blamed bitch, a few babies’ mama, a ho who should run away. Les stood, not saying a word, knowing right there that my grandma deserved every bit of whatever care he had left in him. I sat there, too, looking at Les, trying hard to shake my head in slow motion.
It wouldn’t move.
If I had any guts, I would have asked Les if he was holding the hand of Catherine Coleman, a human being he loved, a human being who loved him better than anyone on earth. If I were less of a man, I would have asked Les if Kanye West, he, or I deserved to ever have our hands held by a woman.
If I would have asked, HaLester Myers would not have told a lie.
Reasonable Doubt and the Lost Presidential Debate of 2012
October 29, 2008, 2:15 a.m.
“I’m not wearing anything with Barack Obama’s name on it,” my mother tells me over the phone.
I’m at work in upstate New York. Mama is at home in Central Mississippi.
“I’m serious,” she says. “I’m not trying to have some redneck knock me upside my head, or run my car off in the Pearl River over a damn Obama bumper sticker.” Mama wants me to say something. “And you shouldn’t either, Kie.”
I make myself laugh until my throat burns, but Mama doesn’t even chuckle.
“I know you,” she says. “And I know you’ll do whatever I tell you not to do, but a hardhead makes a soft behind when you’re dealing with entitled folks who never learned how to lose.”
My mother is being my mother.
As long as I can remember, Mama has slept with a .22 under her pillow, closed her blinds at 6:00 p.m., and refused to answer the door unless she has invited you a day in advance.
But that’s just a millimeter of my mama’s story.
One expects to hear this kind of stilted racial paranoia over Obama shirts and bumper stickers from a typical American voter, not a woman who has been a political analyst and a professor of political science for almost thirty years.
On Election Day, November 4, 2008, Mama will be on some local station in Jackson, Mississippi, prognosticating her ass off. Mama won’t lie to Mississippians watching her on election night, but she damn sure won’t tell them the truth either.
Whether talking about Brown v. Board, the Montgomery bus boycott, Meredith enrolling in Ole Miss in 1962, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s bum-rush in 1964, the Civil Rights Act in the same year, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Swann decision in 1971, or the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, Mama taught me that black Americans have always borne the brunt of domestic economic terrorism after supposed policy and political wins.
As Mama talks to me on the speaker phone about how resentment and backlash will find a way to shrink opportunities to escape poverty for black and brown Americans during an Obama presidency, I’m mm-hmm-ing her to death and looking for a T-shirt in my closet.
Hanging next to the fifteen-year-old brown polyester suit she bought for my high school graduation and a sky-blue Jackson State hoodie is the sickest Obama T-shirt you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s black pre-washed cotton with a huge red, black, and green picture of Obama’s face on it. Obama’s face is liquid aluminum, like a contemplative red, black, and green Terminator 4. On the bottom, in that played-out Times New Roman, are the words, “Yes We Can.”