How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

When Laymon was 24, he lived in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, under the second-floor apartment of a man named Trimp who lived with three little boys, his wife, and his girlfriend. Laymon was in Pennsylvania working on his graduate thesis. His girlfriend at the time, a woman named Nicole, was interning at Rodale Press. His time in Emmaus was Laymon’s first contact with poor white people. Trimp’s children ran wild and were often dirty.

In his apartment, Laymon often played music from Lauryn Hill, OutKast, Joni Mitchell, and Curtis Mayfield, while Trimp loudly played Led Zeppelin. The screams of his children and noise from the Cartoon Network also emanated from his second-floor apartment. One July weekend, someone got shot in the building next door. Trimp and Laymon walked over to investigate the situation. On the way back, Trimp asked Laymon how to pronounce his first name. He had heard his children call Laymon “Keith.” Laymon said “Keith” would work fine. After asking Laymon if he could borrow ten dollars, Trimp asked Laymon if people got shot where he came from. Laymon ignored Trimp’s question, which triggered thoughts of a friend of his who had murdered a young woman in Central Mississippi, and “asked him about Pennsylvania amusement parks, Italian ices, and when he planned on getting a job” (132). After Trimp answered Laymon’s questions, he leaned in very close to Laymon and said that Laymon should move to town permanently. He told Laymon that he was different from the rest of his kind. Laymon then asked Trimp if “his two in-house partners […], his white BéBé’s kids, and his belief in n****** made him different than his kind” (134). Trimp refuted the notion that he was racist. He then walked back to his apartment and slammed the door.

Trimp avoided Laymon for the rest of the summer. His children, however, still left their muddy handprints on his screen door. Then Trimp’s youngest child walked into Laymon’s apartment and started rearranging the word magnets on Laymon’s refrigerator. Laymon arranged the sentence “wash your dirty face and hands sometimes boy” for the child to read. The child excitedly and proudly said that he couldn’t read a word. Laymon laughed in the child’s face. Thinking back on it now, he feels evil for having laughed.

A month later, two of Nicole’s friends visited. One was from rural West Virginia but tried hard not to sound like it. The four of them went to a Lilith Fair concert in Hershey. Laymon didn’t see other Black people at the show, but he was still happy to be there. After the concert, the four got into Nicole’s car and headed back to Emmaus. Just after Laymon reminded Nicole to turn on her headlights, they heard a police siren. A young white cop walked over to the driver’s side and pointed a flashlight at Laymon in the passenger seat. An older white cop approached Laymon’s side. The pair then talked for a moment in front of Nicole’s car before they told him to get out of the car, accusing him of throwing crack out the window. Laymon dismissed the accusation, telling them he didn’t even drink alcohol or eat meat. They patted him down anyway and handcuffed him before putting him in the back of the cop car. Meanwhile, Laymon watched drunk white people drive out of Lilith Fair on their way home. He was also watching the cops “[touch] the women in ways that they would never touch [him]” (137). He wondered if Nicole now believed that he had thrown crack out of the window. Laymon wondered if he had actually thrown crack out of the window.

One of the cops came to the car and ordered Laymon to get out. Laymon’s eyes were teary. He told the cop to go find the crack he had supposedly thrown away or let him go. The cop warned him about his mouth. Laymon asked why the cops stopped him and his friends. He kept seeing cars of white people passing and wondered if Trimp was in one of them. The cops insisted they were just doing their job. When Laymon got back in the car, Nicole drove home eight miles per hour under the speed limit.

Back home, their screen door was covered in new muddy handprints. Laymon went to his bedroom. Nicole knocked on the door and asked if he was okay. She looked at him as though she wanted to tell him that everything would be okay. He wanted to tell her that they were “the collateral damage of a nation going through growing pains” (140). Instead, he told her that he just wanted to read and write before going to sleep. He decided he was going to use the day’s events to write about four children from Mississippi “who time-travel through a hole in the ground” (140). Time-travel, they concluded, was the only way to make Mississippi and their country love itself and the children who would be born after them.