Kiese Laymon: Letter from Home

I do not want to disappoint God, Mississippi, or home with this letter, but I have to disappoint God, Mississippi, and home with this letter. I am currently succumbing to evil.

Last year, I went to the doctor to get a referral for two long overdue hip replacements. The week leading up to my doctor’s visit, I tried not to eat up all the sugar in the house. I prayed a lot. I assumed the worst. And the worst, at that point, was that this doctor, all the way up in New York, would tell me I had an incurable disease and I was going to die.

They checked my weight, my heart, my head. They asked me to pee in a cup. The nurse then came and stuck a needle in my arm, extracting three vials of blood.

I left the doctor, proud because I’d trust fallen and let someone trained take a bit of responsibility for my health, which felt like allowing someone trained to take responsibility for my death, which — in a pitiful powerful empire — too often feels like love.

Two days later, I logged in to the patient portal and saw my results. Under something called a PSA, I saw the number 15. The number was in red. Next to the red 15 were the words, “normal range” and the numbers 4.0-5.0.

I didn’t know what any of the numbers technically meant, but I knew that having a number three times a normal range number was not good.

As I was googling PSA, the doctor called. He told me that he’d talked to an oncologist friend of his who could see me tomorrow because, “that 15 number, that’s a really scary prostate number.”

Over the next few weeks, I took all of my clothes off a lot. I wondered if the finger that just exited my booty stank a lot. I got a lot better at not squeezing my booty too tight when someone was checking my prostate a lot. I had biopsies. I pissed blood. I shitted blood. I came blood. I pissed blood. I shitted blood. I came blood.

“You have cancer.”

The oncologist set up a PET scan so we could see how far the cancer had spread. I’d written this book Heavy about confronting yesterday with the rigor of art and love and Black abundance. Nothing, and everything I wrote in that book, prepared me for the feeling of walking out of that doctor’s office after being diagnosed.

I sat in my truck in the parking lot, and I cried into my hands. I didn’t want anyone who loved me to feel, or know, about the diagnosis. I was in the middle of making a book about my grandmama — a 95-year-old central Mississippian who was given a few weeks to live over eight years ago — and how a home training rooted in artful care, artful sharing, artful hard work, fairness, never taking anything from the least of these, and the promise of violent comeuppance for disrespect from the powerful, was the bedrock my grandmama’s gospel.

“Come in and discuss the results of the PET scan.”

There were more questions about some malignancy in my rib cage. I took more tests. The day I took my last test, I went for a long drive down I-86 in upstate New York. As I did since the beginning of the pandemic, put my COVID mask around my ears and let it hang below my chin when I got in my car.

I considered cancer, compartmentalization, and disposable income as I passed a police car chilling in the median of I-86. My speedometer read that I was actually a few mph under the speed limit. The police officer proceeded to drive up beside my truck in the passing lane. He looked me dead in the face, then slowed down and got behind me before turning on his siren.

As I pulled over, I looked in the back to make sure there was nothing the cop could confuse as a gun. There was a Louisville Slugger on the floor. There was an empty baby seat. There was a cup I kept in the car to piss in when I couldn’t hold my pee anymore.

The cop — long, lanky, surprisingly soft-spoken — proceeded to tell me that he was stopping me because it looked like I had on headphones. He said that he thought the elastic string holding up my COVID mask was the cord hanging from some headphones, and drivers were not allowed to wear headphones while driving in New York state.

But you see it’s not headphones, I told him.

I can see that now, he said. I still need to see license and registration.

For what? I asked him. You can see that I’m not wearing headphones.

I do not believe in guns. I do not believe in prisons. I do not believe in killing. But in that moment, I wanted to kill that police officer and his family in about 16 different ways. And I partially wanted to kill him because he had less money than me.

While I do not believe in guns, prisons, or killing, I wholly believe in the power of words to build, blur, humiliate, and destroy.

I sat in my seat exploring the skin underneath the officer’s eyes. I called the police officer a motherfucker. “Motherfucker,” I told the officer, “if you don’t get away from my car, I’m gonna buy you.”

I had no idea what I meant, but I knew I meant what I was saying. And the cop knew I meant what I was saying.

Because, for the first time in my life, I saw an absolute fear of death in a police officer’s eyes. And that fear, for whatever reason, didn’t make the cop grab his gun, or call for backup, or pull a taser.

The long, lanky, surprisingly soft-spoken cop backed away, tucked his head, did not ask for my license or registration, and got back in his car.

I watched his car pull off before me, and instead of feeling the joy to still be alive and/or not arrested that I usually felt after engagements with the police, I felt absolutely, positively, purely evil.

And feeling absolutely, positively, purely evil in that truck, in that moment, with presumably a body full of cancer and a bank full of money, I felt so American.

Though I did not want to actually own that human being, I wanted him to feel owned and humiliated because owning stuff and humiliating people feels good in America, especially after a lifetime of humiliating encounters with police officers, with loan officers, with teachers, with doctors, and with the worst of white folks.

But my home training, which is actually far more tactile and superb than my religiosity, teaches me that we have to look the humiliation directly in the face, and describe what we see. And question what we feel. How is this nation “gifting” any nation in this world hundreds of millions of dollars in violence or “defense” against poor missile-less people when it owes my grandmama — a poor missile-less American worker, a granddaughter of the enslaved, a survivor of Jim Crow, Ross Barnett, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Trump, an architect of impeccable home training — all the healthy choices, all the second chances, and the sincere question of what can we do to repair what we have destroyed?

I refuse to believe that the height of human being, which is really the act and art of being human, in this nation, is our capacity to kill, to incarcerate, to systemically humiliate, to discipline or to own people most efficiently. I believe that the height of human being in Mississippi, in New York, in Gaza, in Israel, in Sudan, everywhere on Earth, can be our ability to atone, restore, share, and vigorously accept when we have succumbed to evil.

I learned that first from a Black woman born in 1929 in Forest, Mississippi, named Catherine Coleman. Catherine Coleman learned that from her grandmother and a Jewish Palestinian character named Jesus Christ.

I celebrated, and buried, my grandmother last week in central Mississippi. She died two weeks after getting her leg amputated, and one week before my 50th birthday.

I’m writing this letter from a hotel directly across from a cancer center in Houston, Texas.

My grandmother is dead, and I do not know where home training goes when home is gone. ◊

Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, and the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University in Houston. Laymon is the author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. His best-selling Heavy: An American Memoir won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. His new book, City Summer, Country Summer, will be published April 2025.

Patrick Cray (aka yungpainkiller) is a photographer based in Buffalo, New York. He also works as a documentarian with the Just Buffalo Literary Center.