How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Laymon covers an exchange between him and his mother via email. His mother announces that she’s tired when he asks how she’s feeling. She then asks if he hugged himself this morning. When he asks how he’s supposed to hug himself, she tells him that it’s really about “not allowing haters to distract you and […] believing in yourself” (68). When he writes “ain’t got,” she chastises him for his English, telling him that speaking and writing respectably is one small way to protect himself from those who seek to hurt him.

Laymon thinks about how proud his grandmother was when she first held his books, how she “smiled until she cried” (68). His mother, on the other hand, has been sending him titles for the books she wants him to write for more than 20 years. She never imagined what his work would actually become. She tells him now that, if he had children, he wouldn’t speak or write the way he does.

They talk about how Black women are treated in the United States. Laymon asks his mother if she thinks the nation or their state will ever focus on the lives of Black women and girls. While Black women have supported the president at a higher number than any other group, she reminds him, she knows that focusing on them wouldn’t have bought then President Obama any currency in the country.