I would describe my southernness as Southern Comfort - smooth, brown, and warms your chest with the option to choke your throat. I fall short of that wave a confederate flag kind of southern pride, but my southernness is legit, cuh (�cousin� for you uninitiated folks in southernology). But even in my contemporary southern swagger I looked to the history of blacks in the south as a gauge of who I am. I pitted my southern experiences against those of my equally southern Jim Crow era grandparents. Their stories of the Klan, working behind the scenes making signs and sandwiches for Civil Rights marchers in Albany, and my grandfather carrying a rifle in his truck�s back window to send an equally menacing promise � Paw Paw never threatened, he promised � to the white folks who lived up the road but followed him home every night didn�t quite resonate with my experiences growing up in the post-Civil Rights (never postracial) south. I was part of the generation that old southerners low key wanted to showcase as �progressive,� as �multicultural,� as amended from the dark and dank past of southern race relations. You know, shit like that. Don�t get me wrong. I appreciate Nana Boo and Paw Paw sharing their stories of triumph and trauma with me to give me a foundation for my identity as a Down South Georgia Girl who loved Keds, going to the skating rink with the folk on Saturday nights, and oversized bright colored FUBU shirts. I was a young black southerner with ruts (�roots�) in Jim Crow but branches in hip hop. And Kiese Laymon�s novel Long Division FINALLY gave me something to grab onto to explore what that means.


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Long Division has a lot going on. While the novel breaks ground for narratives in what some scholars dub the New South Laymon knowingly and subconsciously pulls from the influence of �old south� writers: i.e. a nod to Richard Wright�s efforts to capture the coming-of-age of southern black boys and an Ellisonian �Battle Royale� remix of performing blackness and intellectual prowess in the �Can You Use That Word in a Sentence� competition. Laymon�s ability to fluctuate between a teenage boy(s) voice from different eras and his own grown-man stance that seeps through the text reminds me of Ernest Gaines� storytelling in �The Sky is Gray� from his Bloodline collection. Laymon uses Jackson, Mississippi as a touchstone to blend his coming-of-age experiences in the �Sip with those of his protagonist Citoyen �City� Coldson but goes Faulknerian by creating Melahatchie, Mississippi. It�s like Yoknapatawpha for Negroes. Melahatchie signifies the need for imaginary spaces to work through those less-than-pleasant racial and cultural experiences that the South continues grappling. The overlap of historic, racial, traumatic experiences in the south presents the need of an imaginary space where the work dissecting race relations can take place. Indeed, it does take place, in dark and often uncomfortable ways that leave the reader unaware of whether or not the novel is in the present or in the past.  How does this work take place? Time travel, of course, which adds yet another intricate layer of black folks� story telling vis-�-vis the styling of Octavia Butler�s Kindred. Laymon masterfully weaves these influences together to create a more than accurate portrayal of contemporary southern black folks� struggle to walk the line of respecting the past and embracing the future. Long Division signifies southern culture and history as cyclical instead of linear. Southern history�s intersections with race and culture breathe and slide, they do not bend to the will of those who would rather view the south as a stagnant space incapable of remorse, incapable of love, and incapable of letting the stank out. There it is in one sentence, City.

Photo courtesy of Celest Ngeve
The novel�s stank is what ultimately made me uncomfortable with it. Long Divisionfinally gave me what I�ve wanted to see in contemporary southern literature. For years I�ve complained about no recent accounts of black southerners in American Literature. It goes down in southern rap � which we�ll get to in the following paragraphs � but in literary studies it�s always been the old guard: Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Alice Walker (I swear, if I read �Everyday Use� in one more class I�d quit life). Long Division basically told me �sit down and shut the hell up. Here it is. Here�s what you wanted.� Laymon�s references to (Post) Hurricane Katrina and the death of Trayvon Martin were particularly jarring because of their close proximity to the window of southernness through which I operated. These references forced me to confront the idea that as proud as I was to be southern I too often authenticated its favorability in my memory and those closest to me. Returning to my grandparents, their interpretation of the South is what spring boarded my own, much like City�s understanding of southernness is formed by his grandmother/Mama Laura. The history never leaves, it makes rounds.

History�s breathability takes center stage in both novels � the actual book itself and the book connecting the two City characters� stories together. The play on the meme of the �Talking Book� is brilliant. It blends not only the black oral tradition but marks its current manifestation via (southern) hip hop.  Laymon cites the influences of southern rappers like Outkast and Big K.R.I.T.  For example, when I read a line from Andre 3000�s verse on �Aquemini� serving as the novel�s opening epithet I got comfortable. As I read the first few lines, I heard Outkast�s �Da Art of Storytelling part 1.� Whenever City interacts with Baize Sheppard or Shalaya Crump, I heard Dre�s line from �Da Art of Storytelling:� �I said what you wanna be she said, �Alive�/I thought for a minute and looked into her eyes/I coulda died.�  When City talks about listening to Big K.R.I.T.�s track �Something,� I heard it with him. Southern hip hop�s push for acknowledgement � as lyricists and as storytellers � runs parallel to [both] City�s push to establish his voice. Consider City�s dope sentences that he spits in front of an audience of his classmates in order to diss and one-up LaVander Peeler. Their exchange signifies the hip hop cypher, a gathering of the minds ready to engage each other in lyrical and intellectual warfare. I would go so far and suggest that the novel departs from the traditional frame story � story within a story � and reads like a cypher within a cypher. Each section of the story and narrative Laymon presents stays ready, bobbing in and out of the story only coming in when its right and their lines are ready. The stream of consciousness Laymon presents signifies the readiness of a rap battle: the audience may not be ready, but the delivery is ever primed with the smallest plot shift. Long Division is so hip hop that it fulfills Andre 3000�s demand �the South [still] got something to say!� City and his peers� status as �OutKasted� propels the novel forward: their literal and figurative inability to �stay put� dismisses the labels being forced upon them by other characters and the spaces they simultaneously occupy.

Yet the novel�s ending gives me pause. It is dizzying, tragic, and awkward. I appreciate the awkwardness. It gives the feel of real life as something that cannot be easily cleaned or wrapped up. The ending of the book could have been the beginning. I�ve read the last 50 pages three times and I know I still miss something painfully important. Every character�s trauma, anxiety, and loves blends together to the point that it becomes impossible to pick out which year or cypher the characters represent. The speed at which the reader reaches the end is like a toddler being yanked forward by an anxious adult � a firm grip on the wrist to drag the toddler forward, no questions asked and no questions answered. I was breathless and shaken.  It forced me to confront my own investment in being black and southern: was my southernness all that different from my grandparents? What part of the cycle of southern black identity am I in or do I represent? Like the book, I had no concrete conclusions nor did I expect any.

Long Division is not just a must read. It�s a game changer. Kudos to Kiese Laymon for his vulnerability, wit, and keen eye for the complexities of southern (black) life that too often get flattened for the sake of normalcy. It�s the shot of Southern Comfort that America needs.