This fall I did a series of calls to students in my “The ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture” and Blackness and Digital Life courses. I did a call almost every week until my body wouldn’t allow me to do so anymore. I recorded them in one take, so there are imperfections in them all. I was doing the best I could. Lectures such as these served as the call, and then selected students would offer an in-depth response, and then the rest of the class would constitute the choir, singing on the themes for that particular week. After the call, response, and choir, we would convene synchronously to discuss. All of this was happening in the digital spaces of Canvas message boards and Google Docs and Zoom. This is one such lecture for “The ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture.” The previous week we had read Raquel Gates’ Double Negative. For this week, we read selections from Elizabeth Alexander’s The Black Interior, the entirety of Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, and students could choose Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy or Moonlight to watch. You can listen/watch here.

The fall Mama’s Gun came out two of my three boyfriends found out about each other and got to fighting in the hallway outside my dorm room. I played “Green Eyes” over and over and wailed and sobbed like I had been the one cheated on. It was all such an embarrassing ordeal because I lived on the quiet hall and had a white roommate who wanted to be an actuary and didn’t know anything about Black girl broken hearts.

When I got over my inverse hurt I cut my hair off with some kitchen scissors for the first but certainly not the last time and put a cinnamon incense stick in my mouth. I lit it like a cigarette and stepped out into that world with the jazz albums and five percenters and NOI cats and conscious rappers and crate diggers and headwrapped folks with stretched earlobes and musicians and niggas who was painting. I went to the African imports store and the Caribbean open mic with the good wings and the bookstore with the six books where the nigga said we descended from reptiles and the bookstore in the Black mall and the other African artifacts store and all the places with shea butter. I talked about Ghana and memory and oceans and time. Folks changed they names, building and talking science and the day’s mathematics. I orbited but didn’t linger. I ain’t fight with the Sunday School teacher over patriarchy at age 9 just to subject myself to these patchouli and Champa smelling ass niggas tryna have a revolutionary baby and talmbout we came from some gotdamn snakes.

That was freshman year of college. Freshmen year of high school I had one boyfriend and was playing Baduizm and Baduizm Live over and over in whatever spaces there were for sound in the house. I played them so much Mama found herself unconsciously singing, sometimes saying, sometimes threatening, “you better calllll Tyrone.” When she wanted to show she was paying attention to what I was listening to, she’d come to my door and pop her fingers, Temptations two-step, and sing, “I gotta real sharp pain,” which is how she heard “I want a rimshot, hey.” I only corrected her once and it didn’t even take. Anyway almost a quarter century later “I gotta real sharp pain” doesn’t seem so wrong after all.

Fall of my senior year of college I was climbing over the railroad tracks to an evening class and there was the orangest moon hanging over there to the west. I knew I was pregnant. The moon did not tell me this because I already knew I was pregnant. I knew it the moment I got pregnant. But it did question me about what I was doing with that life in my belly, what kinda Mama I was gone be, what kinda gun I was gone have. I sucked my teeth and said hmph and kept stepping.

Mama’s Gun was a woman’s experience from a woman’s perspective, one woman’s experience from one woman’s perspective, the woman’s experience from the woman’s perspective, a sonic autobiography, an instruction manual to a new son and to peripheral daughters, a hey, don’t forget what your Mama told you, a glimpse into a Black woman’s interior life, a womanish poem, a love weapon, a Mama’s weapon, a pistol, and on and on. I, too, remembered how I felt the day I first started my period. And I was cleva. I wanted somebody to walk up behind me and kiss me on my neck. I had tried to move but lost my way. I was so in love. I hurt my back dragging all them bags like that but didn’t yet know how to pack light. I made plenty wrong turns back there somewhere. The world made me so mad and sad about Amadou Diallo and my cousin Boo. A couple times I couldn’t leave because it was too late. Sometimes my eyes was green. I needed a Mama’s gun and I ain’t have nan but this one.

I had the habit of playing things over and over because that’s how you did it when you were learning a new piece of music. You played it over and over. Like a baby acquires language by listening, you listen to your piece until you can sing it and know it and feel it in your spirit. Only then can you try to play it. Like all things, I listened to Mama’s Gun over and over while I was pregnant. Before the baby talked her eyes got big and she got real still when Mama’s Gun was on. She was trying to remember it and I was trying to understand. Growing up with it these past 20 years, as a Mama for nearly 18 of those, I finally understand something that’s mine about southern Black mothers and children and what they mean and need and how they love. I’m learning over and over again. I tote my own. I’m so glad the baby was born with a head start for knowing even though remembering is a difficult of a different kind.

***

I suppose you always think on some frequency, some level, from subconscious to outright fret, about what kind of Mama you are. And you think about your Mama and her Mama and your Daddy’s Mama and her Mama. And you think of your Mama’s grandmother and hers. And you think about what kind of weapons you have given your children for this world. And you wonder if the love you have given will be sharp enough, if it will have the caliber that will hit that evil flesh and burst right open in a dozen pellets like a firework, if it can crush, kill, and destroy to defend itself. And you wonder if it has been patient enough because you have not been patient sometimes because few folks are patient with you.

You wonder if you’ve taught them to visualize the pink light and wrap themselves in it when they are scared. To ask for help from all sides, above and below, past and future. To discern. To pray. To turn on the hallway light. To stretch and flow and flex. To sit with change and sadness and grief and heartbreak when they come visit as they always do.

And then you look up and see them in the streets toting that thang and they are near grown. Smarter than you were when you conceived them, a thought far bigger and fleshier than your mean mind would allow you to think you deserve. They out there with your memories and your Mama’s memories and your granny’s memories shining on they hip. And every day you breathe and they breathe you can learn a new way and fashion a new kind of thing for them to take into the world, to put on their other hip, on their chest, under their tongue, at the back of their throat, in the pit of their stomach. And they will come up on your porch and give you your own pistol back so you can remember, too, and begin again. 2020.

It is the last day of the year now, and HEAVY is still the Big Bang, the beginning, three lifetimes of ebó, the Genesis, Old Testament, New Testament, Future Testament, and Revelation of books–books in general, Black books, Black southern books, books, of just books, mane, of just all the books, mane. It is a book about where we’ve been, where our bodies have been, where we say we have been, and where and how far we can go with each other if we commit to getting heavier–more rigorously loving and honest with the people closest to us, and more especially with the folk we open our mouths to say love. It is about more, too: at least sixteen more rivers of inquiry and their innumerable tributaries are there. But it seems that getting heavier is the stillest one, and thus the one that most urgently requires our investigation.

This is my conversation with Laymon about his gift of a new beginning to us at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee on the night of the 2018 midterm elections. Dive in and don’t float.