How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays

At Holy Family Catholic School, David Rozier invented the ritual of farting during Mass. One day, Rozier tapped Laymon on the shoulder, put his arm behind his back, and farted in his hand. He then shook the hands of faculty members and other students while Father Joe “rolled his eyes from the pulpit” (157).

Rozier reminded Laymon of his cousin Jermaine, who lived in Chicago. Rozier and Laymon, who looked very different from each other, had spent each day since fourth grade “calling and responding, daring each other to revise all the rules of Mississippi juvenile delinquency” (157). When they got called to the principal’s office, Rozier admitted to farting in his hand and spreading the gas. This was why Laymon started laughing during Mass, he reported. Laymon burst out in laughter again. A few minutes later, Laymon asked Rozier why he admitted to what he had done. He said that his grandmother and his coach told him that Rozier had to start being more responsible.

Rozier and Laymon got suspended. The two got spanked that night. They figured it was their “mothers’ way of keeping [them] out of Black gangs, Black prisons, Black clinics, [and] Black cemeteries” (159). This, Laymon now thinks, was their way of proving to the boys’ grandmothers that they, too, were responsible. While giving him his spanking, Laymon’s mother reminded him that white folks didn’t care if he died. He knew then that she was referring to “the worst of white folks” (159). These were not the actual white people Laymon knew, but a powerful “it” who reveled in Black suffering and degradation. His cousin Jermaine was just as familiar with “the worst of white folks” in Chicago as Laymon was with them in Jackson.

It was the mid-1980s. The beginnings of a reverse migration brought Chicago gangs into Mississippi. By the time Laymon and Rozier reached seventh grade, they heard that wearing the wrong colors or tilting one’s cap a certain way could earn one a beatdown. When Laymon was 14, his father took him to visit Jermaine, Laymon’s aunt, and some other cousins. Less than a decade after that visit, Jermaine’s younger sister was killed in Chicago. Several months later, Jermaine went to jail for manslaughter. Around 2012, Jermaine got off probation. He texted Laymon, asking if Laymon could help him and his daughters get settled in New York. Laymon told him that he would do what he could.

Laymon never sent for Jermaine, who is still in Illinois. A few years after David Rozier talked to Laymon about responsibility, he died. Half the boys in Laymon’s seventh-grade class at Holy Family died before turning 35. While listening to the nation discuss violence in Chicago in 2012, reducing the lives lost to numbers, Laymon spent a lot of time talking to his grandmother. He told her that he was thinking about attending a “Peace” basketball tournament—an event that would “promote an end to all the violence” (164). She asked if the mothers and grandmothers of the children lost would be at the game. Laymon didn’t know. She advised him to tell the audience that it would help to get the mothers and grandmothers there and to listen to them.

Laymon thought back to when David Rozier returned to school after their suspension. He started a game in which he would fart every time Henry Wallace mispronounced a word that began with “str.” Wallace, too, is now among the dead. Laymon, once again, laughed uncontrollably at Rozier’s antics, but did a better job of hiding it. At recess, he asked Rozier what had happened to all his talk about responsibility. Rozier dismissed him, saying that was yesterday. The two then tossed a ball back and forth, thinking neither about the day before nor the next. They were happy to be alive and in the moment.