How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(3)

By that point, though, I believed I knew you. I assumed that you coped with the weight of a paroled life as a black man in Mississippi by laughing, acting a fool, relying on crack cocaine, alcohol, and the manipulation of women who were just as hopeless as you. And I assumed that you knew that I’d started coping in many of the same ways. One of the only differences between you and me was that I fell deeply in love with the possibilities of written and spoken words. I used words to create stories, essays, and novels I thought you’d want to read, hear, and see.

When I wasn’t writing things that you might have wanted or needed to read, hear, and see, I created fictive versions of you that were, sadly, more interesting and more loving than I ever allowed you to be in real life. You inspired thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of scenes, but I never showed you one single sentence. I was afraid to know for sure that you thought my work was my hustle—a shinny, indulgent waste of time. But more than that, I didn’t want you to know that I wanted you to be better at being human.

I didn’t want you to see that I saw in the real you someone I never wanted to be, a shiftless paroled “nigger” worthy of only hollow awe or rabid disgust, a smiling “nigger” who fought a few good rounds before getting his ass whupped by white supremacy and quaint multiculturalism over and over again. Uncle Jimmy, I knew that you were slowly killing yourself. And predictably, I knew that I would become you.

I hated you and me both for that.

This is a shameful admission, a confession that is even more sour with indulgent guilt when I acknowledge that all of the women in my writing who are partially based on the characters of Grandma, Mama, Aunt Sue, and Aunt Linda are far less moving, round, and paradoxical than the actual women themselves. And this has less to do with my writing than it does with my love and understanding of these human beings, and our love and understanding of each other. I loved the women in our family enough to ask them questions. They loved me enough to answer those questions, often with questions of their own. I wrote to them. They wrote back.

Echo.

Honestly, I don’t know if I ever asked you any real questions other than why you looked so happy in your Vietnam pictures, when I was ten, and why you said, “There’s some fine bitches on earth,” when you picked me up from grad school when I was twenty-four.

My creating interesting American characters based on you to fit the specifications of a paragraph doesn’t make me despicable; it makes me an American writer. What makes me despicable is that one of the responsibilities of American writers is to broaden the confines, sensibilities, and generative capacity of American literature by broadening the audience to whom we write, and hoping that broadened audience writes back with brutal imagination, magic, and brilliance.

Echo.

You can’t really explore the terror and wonder of being born, as Baldwin says, “captive in the supposed Promised Land” if one never conceives of the captives as the crucial critics, not simply consumers or objects, of one’s work. I started writing this book to you before you died. I was in desperate need of echo and I’d convinced myself that the only way to live was to write through what was helping me kill myself. I don’t only wish you could have read this book, Uncle Jimmy; I wish you could have written back to us.

Anyway, only a fool doesn’t actively regret. I wish we could have waded in the awkward acceptance that we are neither African nor conventionally American; neither subhuman nor superhuman; neither tragic nor comic; neither defeated nor victorious. I wish we could have affirmed our awareness that our blackness and our Southerness are both perpetual burden and benefit, and our masculinity and femininity something that must be perpetually reckoned with.

Mostly, Uncle Jimmy, I wish you could have told me that we are fucked up, and much of the nation has always wanted it that way, but we owe it to our teachers and our children to imagine new routes into beauty, health, compassion, citizenry, and American imagination. We owe it to each other to love and insist on meaningful revision until the day we die.

That’s what I needed to tell you when you were alive. That’s what I needed you to show me. That’s what I need help believing.

One night, while revising Long Division, I thanked God that you weren’t my father, while feeling like the luckiest nephew in the world because I could call someone as tortured as you my uncle. I wondered who and what I really would have become without you as my warning. I wondered how your life would have been different if I had told you I loved you. What would you have done differently with your life if you had really believed me? What would we have both felt? If you wrote truthfully to me, how would you start and end your letter? What senses would you write through? What would you discover?

Uncle Jimmy, no matter how I contort these words and squeeze the mess out of my memory and imagination, we will never ever know. This book is a love letter written a few years too late. I am sorry I didn’t love you.

Your nephew,

Kiese

***

Dear Jimmy,

Although you have transitioned to the other side of life, I still feel your presence and pray for you. Our nephew, Kiese, thinks he lives with your ghost. I try to tell him that he’s always lived with your spirit.

I have learned more about you in death than I knew in life. Little did I know that a young lady you used to smoke crack with has come to know Jesus and become a part of my ministry. We never know what our lives will bring to those we leave behind.