Tag Archives: Black Abundance

The Ultimate Sacrifice

“Teaching wealthy white boys like him meant I was being paid to ratify Cole’s power. In return for his care, I’d get a monthly check.” (P. 191)

Kiese Laymon now finds himself to be an adjunct professor teaching at Vassar University. However, his demographic of students were wealthy white people who were the people he most despised. He finds it hard to find the passion and love to teach them as he feels like teaching them is enabling and continuing the unbalanced power dynamics between black and white people. Laymom then goes on to say that working for the white man in such a way is even worse than selling out and he feels as if he’s losing pieces of his newfound black righteous identity for a paycheck. A good teacher does more than just teach the subject they are assigned to teach. A good teacher is there for their students academically, socially and even emotionally. But it is hard to be this for someone that you don’t like as Laymon feels as if he’s getting paid to coddle wealthy cisgender, heterosexual white men, which is a big group that is responsible for the marginalization we experience today. When you have been oppressed for so long and then you end up having to be in a position where you cater to your oppressors, I can understand how that can be frustrating. In the end It all ties back to identity, with the big question being whether or not you want to sacrifice your values for a check, but on the other hand, you have to do what you have to do in order to make a living and provide for yourself and your family.

A women holding a mirror and closing her eyes. Her reflection can be seen.

Heavy: Identity & Social Expectations

In the second part of the book, black abundance, readers can see Laymon’s character development. We see his development as a writer when he began to use writing as a way to make sense of his life and what is going on around him. As he is revising, he is forced to sit down and reflect on those events.

Laymon is constantly surrounded by social expectations. As a black person in a predominately white private school, teachers and students expected him to be dumb. Laymon and his black friends would play into this by making up contractions and purposely saying them out loud. Laymon also faces social expectations as a black man to date a black girl instead of a white girl. His relationship with Abby Claremont was disapproved on both sides of the family and most likely race. It was interesting to see that Laymon was called a “sellout” by his friend as if his race was defined by who he dates and how he acts. Similarly, Taulsan also struggles with her social expectations as a male. As mentioned in Kevin’s Post on gender expectations, Taulsan was expected to be masculine. Hence, she would work out in the gym to have that idealized muscular body shape. Both Laymon and Taulsan tried to follow their social expectations but they are miserable as a result.

Manipulative Liar

The night Kamala Lackey told me her secrets, I promised I’d never sexually violate or sexually abuse any woman or girl on earth. The existence of that promise was enough to excuse myself for lying to Abby Claremont and any other girl who wanted to have sex with me.

Laymon, 2018, 103

This particular section was a lot to take on. Laymon discusses his relationships with women and how he treats them.  In the quote above, he touches on his promise to never secually abuse/violate women or girls. Throughout “Hulk” Laymon brings up all of the situations where the girls around him would want to have sexual intercourse while they were drunk and how uncomfortable it made him, “Usually, I said no because my body told me it was wrong” (94). His understanding of consent and how the lines get blurry when one is drunk made Laymon disregard all of the advances women made towards him while intoxicated. I wonder if a part of this came to be because of the things he saw occurring at Beulah Beauford’s house. While he was mindful of keeping his hands to himself during these moments, it didn’t stop him from hurting women in other ways.

Although Laymon promises to never hurt women sexually, he still allows himself to hurt them by becoming a liar. I feel like the most unnerving part about him lying was that he took pleasure in it. When Laymon is crying over Abby, he tells his mother that it’s because her and his father didn’t try to make it work. When she begins to cry and apologize, it makes him “smile and tell more lies” (98).  Now he’s lying to his mother and all the other women and girls in his life. He is being encased in toxicity and gets pleasure from it. Since no one knew the truth about what he was doing he was still allowed to be and looked at as a “good guy” (103). It’s shocking that he is only sixteen years old and doing all of this. The contrast between 12-year-old Kiese and 16-year-old Kiese is staggering. The signs of being a liar have always been there since he was young, back then he would lie to save himself from trauma and I think that his trauma is still shaping his actions at this stage, however, it doesn’t excuse the pain he is and will cause to others.

I don’t know what Laymon was trying to convey by explaining that he wouldn’t take advantage of women sexually, but that he was also a liar. I think that in a way this is to show that at the end of the day he is just a human who has flaws. He isn’t a superhero like Hulk, there will be many things that he does that are wrong from a moral standpoint. Also, since he is writing this memoir as a letter to his mother, it might serve as an exposé of sorts. He’s letting her know all of the harm that he caused people because he enjoyed lying to women. I wonder how long he will continue to thrive off of being a manipulative liar throughout this memoir.