As an eighth grader at a predominantly white Catholic school in Jackson in the 1980s, Kiese Laymon said he and fellow black friends sometimes had to remind themselves and each other they were “abundant.”
Reading from his memoir “Heavy: An American Memoir” at Mississippi University for Women’s Poindexter Hall Thursday night, Laymon said he and his best friend used to intentionally mispronounce and make inside jokes out of the previous year’s vocabulary words. After their mostly black school closed because of lack of funding, the two were some of a handful of students sent to the predominantly white school where his friend’s favorite vocabulary word, abundance, was one Laymon began to use to refer to black people when one of their white teachers would make them feel “less than” or “gross.”
On the first day of school, Laymon said, he and his friend were sent to the principal’s office after his friend used a plastic knife to cut grapefruit, prompting Laymon to remember advice from his mother, who Laymon addresses specifically in the book.
“‘Be twice as excellent and be twice as careful from this point on,’ you said,” Laymon read. “‘Everything you thought you knew changes tomorrow. Being twice as excellent as white folk will get you half of what they get. Any less than that will get you hell.’ … I thought you should have told me to be twice as excellent as you or Grandma, since y’all were the most excellent people I knew.”
Laymon’s reading opened the 31st Welty Symposium, an annual event in which writers from around the South visit and host presentations and readings at MUW. Laymon is this year’s keynote author, and his reading, given to a packed auditorium, was followed by a question-and-answer session where he joked with audience members and spoke about his childhood and why he decided to write the book to his mother.
“I wanted to honor my mother,” he said. “… She taught me how to read, she taught me how to revise, and if I was going to do this book justice — which to me is really a book about a black, Southern, Mississippi boy’s relationship to words — I had to direct it to the person who taught me how to use words. Particularly because I was taught in most of my schooling never to write to black people period, much less black people who made me. So I literally wanted to write to the black woman who made me.
“I wanted to see if I could pull off not a letter, but an actual book, written to somebody who doesn’t get centered much in American literature,” he added.
The passage Laymon read included more incidents of teachers treating black students differently — including one instance when a teacher asked him to talk to another black student about taking a shower before coming to school because people were starting to think he was “gross.” She said he and his friends should be able to see how that could be a reflection on all of them.
Despite these kind of experiences, Laymon said, he never felt like he or any of his black friends or family were somehow less than white people, which he credited to his mother and grandmother.
“I just knew that I came from incredible people,” he said “… That is a privilege to be the grandchild of someone who witnessed the worst of so many kind of different people and still managed to love. So I think that is partially why I could never really entertain the notion of us being less than or gross, because the most abundant person in the world to this day is my grandma. And if you think she’s gross, there’s something wrong with you.”
Laymon and more than 10 other authors will participate in further Welty events today at 1:30 p.m. and Saturday at 9 a.m. For more information on the Welty Symposium, go to https://www.muw.edu/welty.
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