How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(8)

The boy places his gun on my chest and keeps looking back and forth to the car.

I feel a strange calm, an uncanny resolve. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. He’s patting me down for money that I don’t have, since we hadn’t gotten our work-study checks yet and I had just spent my last little money on two turkey subs and two of those large chocolate chip cookies.

The young brother keeps looking back to the car, unsure what he’s supposed to do. Shonda and her friends are screaming when he takes the gun off my chest and trots goofily back to the car.

I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but a few months later, I have a gun.

A partner of mine hooks me up with a partner of his who lets me hold something. I get the gun not just to defend myself from goofy brothers in red Corollas trying to rob folks for work-study money. I guess I’m working on becoming a black writer in Mississippi and some folks around Millsaps College don’t like the essays I’m writing in the school newspaper.

A few weeks earlier, George Harmon, the president of Millsaps, shuts down the campus paper in response to a satirical essay I wrote on communal masturbation and sends a letter to more than 12,000 overwhelmingly white Millsaps students, friends, and alumnae. The letter states that the “key essay in question was written by Kiese Laymon, a controversial writer who consistently editorializes on race issues.”

After the president’s letter goes out, my life kinda hurts.

I receive a sweet letter in the mail with the burnt-up ashes of my essays. The letter says that if I don’t stop writing and give myself “over to right,” my life will end up like the ashes of my writing.

The tires of my mama’s car are slashed when it was left on campus. I’m given a single room after the dean of students thinks it’s too dangerous for me to have a roommate. Finally, Greg Miller, an English professor, writes a supportive essay about how and why a student in his Liberal Studies class says, “Kiese should be killed for what he’s writing.” I feel a lot when I read those words, but mainly I wonder what’s wrong with me.

It’s Bid Day at Millsaps.

Shonda and I are headed to our jobs at Ton-o-Fun, a fake-ass Chuck E. Cheese behind Northpark Mall. We’re wearing royal blue shirts with a strange smiling animal and “Ton-o-Fun” on the left titty. The shirts of the other boy workers at Ton-o-Fun fit them better than mine fit me. My shirt is tight in the wrong places and slightly less royal blue. I like to add a taste of bleach so I don’t stank.

As we walk out to the parking lot of my dorm, the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma fraternities are in front of the dorm receiving their new members. They’ve been up drinking all night. Some of them have on black face and others have on Afro wigs and Confederate capes.

We get close to Shonda’s Saturn and one of the men says, “Kiese, write about this!” Then another voice calls me a “nigger” and Shonda a “nigger bitch.” I think and feel a lot but mostly I feel that I can’t do anything to make the boys feel like they’ve made us feel right there, so I go back to my dorm room to get something.

On the way there, Shonda picks up a glass bottle out of the trash. I tell her to wait outside the room. I open the bottom drawer and look at the hoodies balled up on top of my gun. I pick up my gun and think about my grandma. I think not only about what she’d feel if I went back out there with a gun. I think about how if Grandma walked out of that room with a gun in hand, she’d use it. No question.

I am her grandson.

I throw the gun back on top of the clothes, close the drawer, go in my closet, and pick up a wooden T-ball bat.

Some of the KAs and Sigs keep calling us names as we approach them. I step, throw down the bat, and tell them I don’t need a bat to fuck them up. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My fists are balled up and the only thing I want in the world is to swing back over and over again. Shonda feels the same, I think. She’s right in the mix, yelling, crying, fighting as best she can. After security and a dean break up the mess, the frats go back to receiving their new pledges and Shonda and I go to work at Ton-o-Fun in our dirty blue shirts. We wonder if this is just kids being kids.

I stank.

On our first break at work, we decide that we should call a local news station so the rest of Jackson can see what’s happening at Millsaps on a Saturday morning. We meet the camera crew at school. Some of boys go after the reporter and cameraman. The camera gets a few students in Afros, black face, and Confederate capes. They also get footage of “another altercation.”

A few weeks pass and George Harmon, the president of the college, doesn’t like that this footage of his college is now on television and in newspapers all across the country. The college decides that two individual fraternity members, Shonda, and I will be put on disciplinary probation for using “racially insensitive language” and that the two fraternities involved get their party privileges taken away for a semester. If there was racially insensitive language Shonda and I could have used to make those boys feel like we felt, we would have never stepped to them in the first place. Millsaps is trying to prove to the nation that it is a post-race(ist) institution and to its alums that all the Bid Day stuff is the work of an “adroit entrepreneur of racial conflict,” as I am called in a letter to the editor in the Clarion Ledger.

A few months later, Mama and I sit in President George Harmon’s office. The table is an oblong mix of mahogany and ice water. All the men at the table are smiling, flipping through papers, and twirling pens in their hands except for me. I am still nineteen, four years older than Hadiya Pendleton will be when she is murdered in Chicago.