How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

Laymon prefaces the essay with a lyric from the Big K.R.I.T. song “King of the South.” Laymon is in Oxford, Mississippi. It is a Saturday morning in early September and he is standing in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium for the national anthem. It’s White-Out Day at the University of Mississippi, so tens of thousands of young white people are wearing white polos and white dresses. The football players wear blood-red uniforms. Many of the players are Black.

Laymon thinks back to when he was nine. His mother spanked him for wearing an Ole Miss jersey. In its left corner was a Confederate flag. Laymon didn’t understand why his mother was so angry until she explained that the Confederate flag was connected to a lineage of “lynching, racial terror, and multigenerational Black poverty in Mississippi” (55). That night, Laymon made the decision not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in any classroom that bore the Mississippi state flag or the Confederate one. He kept that promise until this football game.

When Laymon first visited Oxford two years before, his mother and grandmother made him promise to leave town before the streetlights came on. Now, he’s there as the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence. When he stops at the Ajax Diner on the Courthouse Square, he marvels at how white people in Oxford eat Black food and talk like Southern Black people. When he goes back out to his car, he sees two Confederate flags attached to cars—one a pickup, the other a silver Prius. He marvels, too, at how few Black people there are downtown. He wonders if he has the right to be so critical of Mississippi, given how long he’s been away.

During his second week in Oxford, Laymon reads a letter from John Grisham and some other prominent Mississippians published in the Clarion-Ledger. Grisham and others who sign the letter advocate changing the Mississippi state flag because of its prominent inclusion of the Confederate battle flag. Laymon contacts Skipp Coon, a Jackson native and local artist. Coon says that changing the state flag is “a false solution” (58). Black people’s material reality won’t be altered after the state flag is changed. This makes Laymon wonder what the writers of the letter think the problem is.

Noel Didla is an English professor at Jackson State University and introduced Laymon to Skipp several years earlier. Didla thinks that symbols matter but that “justice, equity, structural change, and truth should be the values on which undoing racism is founded” (58). She demands a paradigm shift. But, Laymon wonders, how can they have that when so many assume that his presence in Oxford as Writer in Residence serves as evidence of that paradigm shift?

As the weeks progress, Laymon finds himself getting excited for football season at Ole Miss. The day before the football game, he meets with three women who work at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. They are Melody Frierson, a Black Korean woman, and two white women, April Grayson and Jennifer Stollman. They talk about the slow change at the university. They also talk about the intersectional work at the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and the Southern Foodways Alliance.

The next morning, Laymon and a companion go to the Grove, where students and alums have gathered to tailgate. One group of older white people offers them food and insists that they take bottled waters. A band plays a mash-up of “Amazing Grace,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Dixie,” a Confederate song with roots in antebellum minstrelsy.

During a conversation with his grandmother that he has some days after this game, she announces that she’s not coming to Oxford for Christmas. Grandmama has never visited Oxford. She thinks of Oxford in the context of James Meredith trying to integrate the University of Mississippi and wonders why Meredith “fought to learn next to folk morally beneath us” (65). Laymon asks her why she has remained in Mississippi when she is so afraid to travel around parts of the state. She insists that Black people worked too hard on the land to leave it. She insists, too, that white people know what Black people worked for and what they took from Black people.

At the Brooklyn Book Festival, Laymon decides to talk about James Baldwin. He also thinks about the debate over compensating the football players at Ole Miss. Instead, Laymon wants to write about them performing under a degrading state flag for a team that has nicknamed itself the “Rebels.” Laymon concludes that the football players shouldn’t play but that this is also such a small part of what needs to change.

Back in Oxford, Laymon is trying to get his grandmother to reconsider her decision about coming for Christmas. He wonders if tickets to the next game, against Vanderbilt, will change her mind. She says that it would be too difficult for her to attend a game in her wheelchair. She decides to watch the remainder of the Ole Miss games on television, hoping and believing that the team will win every game. She concludes that, for all “those boys have been through, and all the work they put in up there in Oxford, they deserve to win it all” (67).