How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

Laymon prefaces the essay with a lyric from the Big K.R.I.T. song “King of the South.” Laymon is in Oxford, Mississippi. It is a Saturday morning in early September and he is standing in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium for the national anthem. It’s White-Out Day at the University of Mississippi, so tens of thousands of young white people are wearing white polos and white dresses. The football players wear blood-red uniforms. Many of the players are Black.

Laymon thinks back to when he was nine. His mother spanked him for wearing an Ole Miss jersey. In its left corner was a Confederate flag. Laymon didn’t understand why his mother was so angry until she explained that the Confederate flag was connected to a lineage of “lynching, racial terror, and multigenerational Black poverty in Mississippi” (55). That night, Laymon made the decision not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in any classroom that bore the Mississippi state flag or the Confederate one. He kept that promise until this football game.

When Laymon first visited Oxford two years before, his mother and grandmother made him promise to leave town before the streetlights came on. Now, he’s there as the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence.