That Black Abundance

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That Black Abundance Aisha Sabatini Sloan (bio) Heavy: An American Memoir Kiese Laymon Scribner https://www.simonandschuster.com 256 Pages; Print, $16.00 In 2006, while I was sitting outside a gay coffeeshop in Tucson, a man explained very calmly that America would soon begin to see more and more shootings like Columbine. He predicted something about the presidency I probably didn't even know how to hear then. It was like he was reading tea leaves. His world view was a little more Illuminati than I need to detail here (Condoleezza Rice is a lizard, etc.), but I think of his prediction all the time. He seemed to exist on a slower plane, looking at our national trajectory from a remove—older, white, HIV positive, self-healing, and an avid reader. In the film, Six Degrees of Separation (1993), written by John Guare, Will Smith plays a character who calls himself Paul and shows up at the door of a fancy New York apartment with a knife wound. He tells the wealthy white couple who live there that he is a friend of their children, from Harvard. He lets slip that his father is Sidney Poitier, initiating a seduction so skillfully attuned to the intricacies of white fear and desire that it could teach an alien how to identify a white liberal from outer space. At a peak moment, Paul describes a thesis he says he's writing about The Catcher in the Rye (1951). He notes how many famous killers cite the book as an influence, and recalls: "On page 22 my hair stood up. Remember Holden Caulfield—the definitive sensitive youth—wearing his hunter's cap?" Paul recalls Caulfield's realization that his hat is "a people-shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat." He says, "This book is preparing people for moments in their life I never could have dreamed of." Paul's character is based on an actual person named David Hampton who would eventually die of AIDS. Paul mystifies his hosts as he continues to talk about the way Caulfield succumbs to paralysis, unable to face the people he has come to despise, or himself: "To face ourselves, that's the hard thing. The imagination—that's God's gift to make the act of self-examination bearable." I want to talk about James Baldwin's constant attempt to call attention to the way that racism is a psychological problem, symptomatic of the fact that white people refuse to face their own culpability, which is to say, pain from selfactualizing. I want to talk about the way James Baldwin, John Guare, Kiese Laymon, and my Tucson friend so gracefully point out the obvious: that our numbness, our inability to face ourselves, is starting to have violent consequences, catastrophic, war-like blasts of self-annihilation. These writers all called it, call it, and keep calling it. But in Heavy, Laymon's is a world where white people barely factor into things, except that they do: "I didn't hate white folk. I didn't fear white folk. I wasn't easily impressed or even annoyed by white folk." His analysis of whiteness is practically incidental. His focus is on black abundance. From the sidelines, white folk are [End Page 5] frequently caught enacting extraordinary acts of everyday cruelty. When a teacher asks Laymon and his friend LaThon to tell their friend Jabari to bathe because he smells "gross," she adds, "you guys can understand how that is not good for any of you, right?" Laymon spends the rest of the section illuminating their dismay at their teacher's request, especially given the cause of Jabari's smell: "Ever since his mother died, there was just a different scent as soon as you walked in Jabari's house." The word "gross" reverberates for everyone, starts to take them down. And what's gorgeous about these actual small humans, eighth graders at the time, is how they enact such visionary kindness, such heroic compassion that their teacher's ugliness seems less and less small, taking on an almost mythic dimension. These boys ignore their teacher's request and instead work to make...