U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Memoir and African American Intellectual History

The release of Kiese Laymon’s newest work, Heavy, should be cause for reflection among historians. Laymon, the author of books such as the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, along with the novel Long Division, has crafted a memoir about his life in America. Specifically, Laymon tackles what it means to be a black Southerner living in Mississippi, and later, living and navigating academic life in New York. Heavy is sure to draw much attention–it has already garnered write-ups in places such as Time magazine, NPR, and even Entertainment Weekly. Laymon’s book, however, should receive attention from intellectual historians for its place in the canon of African American memoir.

The role of memoir and reflection in African American letters has a long and distinguished history. The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, the essays of James Baldwin, and the recent work of Ta-Nehisi Coates–all of these, and so many others, have over the years offered a peek to white Americans “behind the veil” as it were. These narratives have given an opportunity for African Americans to explain to the world the experience of being African American. While I am far from being finished with Heavy–and will write more about it once I am done–I do think it is important to point out a key theme in Laymon’s book.

In 2015, for our roundtable on Ta-Nehisi Coates, Andrew Seal noted the importance of Baldwin writing a letter to his nephew as being a key framing device in The Fire Next Time. Contrasting that with Coates’ book Between the World and Me, Seal noted the importance of Coates writing an ode to his son. Heavy is unique in that Laymon is writing to his mother, creating a new set of variables that he–and his mother–have to deal with. In fact, his mother actually responded to Heavy on Laymon’s website. The fact that she was also a university professor and also struggling to raise Laymon as a single mother in 1980s Mississippi also adds further contours to this story that I cannot wait to explore.

It is already clear that Heavy is going to be a book about early twenty-first century America that literary scholars and historians alike are going to have to wrestle with. I am eager to do so myself. But if you have not had a chance to pick up Heavy, it is clear from media coverage that it’ll be the next work of prose to spark plenty of conversations about race and the American experience in the weeks to come.