by Kiese Laymon
And this is where it gets tricky, because by 1998 the South completely accepted its dirtiness. When Goodie Mob asked the question on his classic Soul Food, “What you niggas know about the Dirty South?” New York hip-hop’s honest answer should have been, “Yo, not a gotdamn thing, son. And we ain’t really trying to know that country shit, either.”
1998 was the year that the Calio Projects of New Orleans met hip-hop. Everything Master P and No Limit put out went gold and platinum. All over the country, people claimed to be “Bout It.” UGK, underground Southern glory at its rawest, was about to show Jay Z and the country how to Big Pimp. Outkast was a few years removed from driving a Southernplayeristic Cadillac from Atlanta to space and back with ATLiens, and they were about to redefine sonic chemistry with Aquemini. Far from crunk, but also far from the clean bounce of Kriss Kross, Goodie Mob released a follow-up to the critically acclaimed Soul Food that pronounced they were Still Standing.
Inside the library, D. Jakes and Rich were busy trying to create a magazine that mimicked New York hip-hop ciphers, but in the town of Oberlin, Ohio, and nearby cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and St Louis, folks were listening to and loving how Southern Black Boys were redefining hip-hop. Folks in these other cities watched these Southern artists learn what artists west of the Deep South had learned ten years earlier and Midwest artists like Bone learned four years earlier: they understood that imitating and interrogating New York hip-hop was fruitless without applying that imitation and interrogation to one’s local culture, one’s place. This understanding was at the core of the success of NWA, Bone, and eventually Outkast. As great a moment as this was for the South, was there anyone who thought that Southern hip-hop would move beyond the heights it reached in 1998? How could it?
That was then.
Rewind or fast-forward to 2013. I’m standing in the bathroom of Vassar College, a college sixty-five miles north of New York City. During the last five years, I sold two blues and hip-hop inspired novels and taught four different courses with hip-hop at their center, including one called “Shawn Carter: Autobiography of an Autobiographer.” Many of my students are New York-bred lovers of hip-hop. Around five years ago, I noticed that my kids were beginning to wear those white Lance Armstrong-style wristbands that say “I Love Hip-Hop.” Their love for hip-hop, interestingly, didn’t know what to do with Southern hip-hop or Mississippi. They didn’t love the South or Southern hip-hop and they weren’t sure that most Southern artists hadn’t stylized their Southern worlds into digestible, aesthetically acceptable terms for “real lovers” of New York hip-hop.
They were equally unsure how to deal with the fact that the South began to sell millions more albums and get way more spins than any other region in the country, while newish New York hip-hop created a number of young artists who actually sounded Southern. So many of my students, like many other so-called purists, dismissed Southern hip-hop as ignorant, catchy, pop, hollow, shameful. Most of my students knew, and wanted me to believe, that in addition to white suburbia’s uncritical devouring of the music minus culture and the countless emcees pandering to the black girl audience in the hallway and corporate America’s glossy detailing of hip-hop, the music was dying because Three-Six Mafia won an Oscar, Trina showed her booty, Mike Jones went platinum, Li’l Jon couldn’t rap, and Trinidad James was Trinidad James.
I honestly didn’t see any of this coming in that Central Mississippi B-Boy bathroom twenty years ago, but I did understand that loving New York hip-hop wasn’t enough. Isolated from caring and curious black girls in the hallway and a destructive white gaze in my Central Mississippi world, I loved New York and New York hip-hop through the likes of Kane, KRS, Rakim, and LL. But even in that safe space, in longing for hip-hop and loving what B. Dazzle represented, I couldn’t fully love my Southern self, Southern black girls, or the culture that created us.
The raggedy clinking of this essay should not contradict the fact that we Southern Black Boys and girls owe New York an almost unpayable debt. New York hip-hop literally gave us means to boast, critique, and confess ourselves into a peculiar existence, in ciphers and on the page. And really, it let us love its brilliance. For that, I will always respect New York ciphers, aesthetics, and sounds.
It’s taken me twenty years to understand why my uttering and writing the word “cipher” frightened me for so long. The “cipher” reminded me of the Southern Black Boy who longed, like Lil Wayne, Jay Electronica, and J. Cole a few years ago, for an artistic letter of acceptance from New York. Truth be told, the art of Big K.R.I.T, Charlie Braxton, Cassandra Wilson, and Margaret Walker Alexander helped me reckon with a fear that my work would never be significant without a stylization that accommodated what I believed were New York sensibilities. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s true.
I now accept the Black Boys, Invisible Men, Native Sons, and Blues People who grandfolked hip-hop into existence. And just like its grandfolks, I also accept that while it’s painfully brilliant, innovative, and inspiring at times, hip-hop hasn’t come close to meaningfully loving, accepting, and disagreeing with black girls; it’s kept their sensibilities, ears, eyes, and voices in the hallway and/or pandered to what we believe is their pussies, instead of asking and imagining what’s happening in their ciphers. It also hasn’t come close to faithfully disarming and laughing at white gazes. Nor has it even come close to gracefully mediating the space between the urban and the rural, the gaps between poverty and working poor, the difference between new money and wealth. And though it’s come closer to realizing and illuminating these relationships in more considerable ways than contemporary literature, punditry, television, movies, or any mass of critical citizenry, it probably never will.
But if it can’t do these things, or we can’t do these things through hip-hop, from what are we running when we proclaim a love for hip-hop? That’s the question. In and out of B-Boy ciphers, Black Boys like me have been asking a music and a so-called culture, as hokey as it sounds, to do the real work of the self, and the soul—really, work that black Southerners have been doing for decades.
We black Southerners, through life, love, and labor, are the generators and architects of American music, narrative, language, capital, and morality. That belongs to us. Take away all those stolen West African girls and boys forced to find an oral culture to express, resist, and signify in the South, and we have no rich American idiom. Erase Nigger Jim from our literary imagination and we have no American story of conflicted movement, place, and moral conundrum. Eliminate the Great Migration of Southern black girls and boys and you have no Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, or New York City. Expunge the sorrow songs, gospel, and blues of the Deep South and we have no rock and roll, rhythm and blues, funk, or hip-hop.
I am a black Southern artist. Our tradition is responsible for me, and I am responsible to it.
When Outkast won the The Source magazine’s “Best New Artist” award more than ten years ago at the Apollo, New York booed. Andre 3000 addressed the booing of “them closed-minded folks” with the defiant utterance that “the South got something to say and that’s all I got to say.” Up until this very point, I’ve agreed with Andre to death and hoped to God he was right. I now know that he was and he wasn’t. The South not only has something to say to New York; it has something to say to itself and to the world, and we’ve been saying it for years, decades, centuries. As hip-hop has grown way bigger than New York, and the new sound and art coming from New York ciphers and writerly circles have become more mimetic and less soulfully significant, New York and the rest of the country now has to listen, take note, and literally emulate us, even if they still don’t fully respect or understand from whence we come.
It’s okay.
I’m not sure that what Mississippi artists are saying today is the most meaningful work in the world. I know that it is the most meaningful work in my world. And without the historic and contemporary sounds, sayings, and doings of Southern Black Boys like Charlie Braxton,
K.R.I.T., Kamikaze, Mychal Denzel Smith, Tito Lopez, Skip Coon, Pyinfamous, Banner, Jay Electronica, and 3000, and Southern black girls like Jesmyn Ward, Missy Elliot, Imani Perry, Erykah Badu, Josie Pickens, Nathalie Collier, Beyonce, Jessica Young, Gangsta Boo, Regina Bradley, Josie Duffy, and Natasha Trethewey, hip-hop and American art would be sleek, conventional, heady, pallid, and paltry as the blank piece of paper on the last page of this book, and probably just as hollow as the center of the next cipher.
Shh…listen. Go ahead and listen hard. Can you hear us? Can you see us? Does that look like blue to you?
It don’t even matter no more, cousin. We hear us. We hear you, too. Exactly. And that’s all I should have ever had to say about that.
Echo: Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai, and Marlon
PEACE FAM,
I’m just waking up on the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, the birthday of Nina Simone, and I feel small. I’m not comparing my life’s accomplishments to either of them. I’ve learned enough to stop making that mistake. But I still compare myself to who I think I should be by now and the vision is incomplete.
I’m twenty-six now, and for the first time I feel comfortable enough calling myself a man, but can’t help thinking of all the years I was confused about what that meant. I got into an argument with my pops when I was twenty-one, I can’t remember what it was about, and he asked me, “Do you think you’re a man now?” and through my whimpering I admitted, “No.” I was answering on his terms. I was still in school. I didn’t have any real bills, or a job, a place of my own...you know, man shit. And the longer I went without any of those things, the less I felt like I would ever become a man, with his eyes constantly on me, asking without saying, “When are you going to get it together?”
Hell if I knew. I had this vague idea about being a writer because that’s the only skill I had (still is, but don’t sleep on my cookie-baking abilities), with no earthly idea of how to make that happen. The days I didn’t have an appointment with my therapist I spent in bed watching cable news and writing really horrible poetry. When I wasn’t having a panic attack, I was thinking about the last panic attack and anticipating the next. All the while, the disappointment in my pops’s eyes was palpable. He was wondering where he went wrong and I was being crippled by the thought that I’d never be enough of a man to make him proud.
I’m trying to pinpoint the moment I stopped worrying and started living. I can’t, really. I still worry, but it doesn’t overwhelm me. Something broke along the way and I’m free. I can call myself a man now because I love and feel loved. And for me that’s all it takes.
I think of all the time I wasted not knowing that and I feel small. I’m looking at my text messages now. Yesterday, my pops told me he loved me. I’m twenty-six, he’ll be fifty-two soon, and I think he’s told me he loves me more in the last year or so than during the entire rest of my life. I can’t help but think of what we missed.
I wish I had that time back. I wish I knew my worth a long time ago. But here I am.
With love,
Mychal Denzel Smith
***
DEAR MYCHAL,
I cannot help but think that this performance called “living” is the most radical act that we black men can commit ourselves to.
Unlike you, I did not (and still do not) spend a lot of time in therapy, even though I graduated with a master’s degree in clinical counseling, and even though I knew, the first time that I tried to end my life, that I needed help more than the helping profession needed me. But like you, I spent a lot of time in bed during my early twenties. Dreams, when I could actually sleep, were a welcome escape from…
Life: Staying awake, staying alive, meant that I needed to figure out how the hell I would persuade other folks in my life that I was straight and, therefore, acceptable and honorable as a black man. Fuck trying to live for my father, who didn’t know that I wanted to die…who didn’t know what undergrad institution I was in at the time…who didn’t really know me...probably because he too was most likely trying just as hard as me to live. Nah, I was too worried about living for the Father, that other God, who apparently hated me enough to let me burn eternally in hell because I preferred to love other men. Ain’t that torture? But my black mama knew best. She told me that I should not keep anyone in my life who refused to love me.
Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom’s advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable educational system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was made invisible by research lingo: “MSM,” otherwise known as “men who have sex with men”), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)…
See, this thing that we call “living” is as revolutionary as black gay Joseph Beam’s call for black men to love other black men, precisely because it is a command for us to counteract the very processes of annihilation that structural racism and patriarchy have taught us to love and replicate. We are experts in the art of killing because we know what it is like to be killed, maligned, have our spirits deadened, our bodies pillaged. We know. But we cannot demonstrate our knowledge by rearticulating the very violences that have been used to murder us.
I am a black man and I am still alive. And, yes, I am a revolutionary, because I daily choose to live! But I am a black man whose black mama’s body and spirit were terrorized by another black man’s hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay black man whose spirit was terrorized by other straight black men. Heterosexism and heteronormativity are not a part of our revolution. I am a black man who has ignored the plights of so many of my brothers. Separation because of difference and elitism based on class is not a part of the revolution. Indeed, my living is your living, is your father’s living, is my father’s living, is my mother’s living, is the stranger’s living, and it is the revolution.
If God needs to condemn anything to hell, it ought to be the idea of social death. Every day we commit an act of revolution, an act of treason, against a system that was never meant to guarantee our survival.
More love,
Darnell Moore
***
DEAR DARNELL AND MYCHAL,
Your letter to Mychal took me back to a Baldwin essay. In “Alas Poor Richard,” an essay that I still find a bit too brutalizing of Richard Wright, Baldwin wrote, “Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes can ‘knock’ the other’s ‘hustle,’ can give his game away.”
Long before I read the Baldwin essay, and long before I remember Tupac Shakur, Nasir Jones, and Dwayne Carter giving lessons on how our love for brothers and riches was always more important than our love of black women, I understood the gendered expectation of that hustle Baldwin writes about. No matter what another black man I cared for did to a woman or a group of women or his male partner, I was never to call him out or tell other people about his game.
I want to change.
The black man with whom I spent most of my life was not my father. This black man had an aneurysm two weeks ago. Bad books would call this black man “a father figure.” (Like both of you, I try not to write bad books.) This black man never told me he loved me. He never called me his son. He never told me I could be better. And, truth be told, I never wanted or needed him to do any of that shit. I liked him and I think he liked me.
That was enough.
Femiphobic diatribes and other bad books have gassed us with this idea that black boys need the presence of black father figures in our lives. I’m sure I’m not the only black boy who rea
lized a long time ago that my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother needed loving, generous partners far more than I needed a present father.
Mama disciplined me. She loved me.
Aunt Sue prayed for me. She loved me.
Grandma worked for me. She loved me.
That’s why I made it through the late 80s and 90s. That is why I am alive. Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.
Anyway, I believed this black man loved how my mother made him feel…until he didn’t. He loved her mind…until he didn’t. He loved her persistence…until he didn’t. I know my mother loved him, and loved what he tried to teach me. This black man tried to teach me that white folks were never to be emulated, that black life came from black farmers, and that a love of black people necessitated a love of the land we toiled, picked, and raked. This black man tried to teach me to own myself, Darnell, to never work for a white man. I learned later that owning myself was very different and, really, a lot easier than loving myself.
This black man physically and emotionally brutalized my mother. I fought him for that, but I never told anyone. My mother broke up fights between us. I wiped her tears, put ice on her swollen eyes and split lips, and never ever talked about what this man did to her. This black man was respected in our community and I could have knocked his hustle by telling the truth to him, to my mother, or to anyone who knew us, but I never did.
I knew not to. I knew that telling was not only spreading my mama’s business; it was also a form of knocking this black man’s hustle. And that, I believed, was not how one black man should love another.
Darnell, your letter really made me think about how not knocking another brother’s hustle was seen as black men loving black men. Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn’t matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal. Your letter reminds me that when you don’t let love breathe, you can’t be surprised when you and those around you suffocate. We black men have suffocated our partners and ourselves for a long, long time. We black men have been suffocating. For a long, long time. And I’d like it to stop. I want to work on loving you and Mychal and Kai and Marlon, and I want all of you to work on loving me. Please knock my hustle, Darnell. Please remain my friend when I knock yours. Please love me, brother, and encourage me to be a healthy part of healthy relationships, no matter what. There is no proof that most of this nation has ever really wanted us to live with dignity and equal access to healthy choices, so we have to take better care of ourselves. We have to change.
