The Musty by Kiese Laymon
The Musty
Kiese Laymon
Author’s note: Kiese’s and Courtney’s names are intentionally misspelled in “The Musty” because the idea is that these are versions of us in this narrative world, not the actual one we inhabit.
The following is an unredacted transcript of a conversation between authors and friends Courtnay Baker and Kiese Layman.
They are talking about their friend and colleague O.F.
, who is currently missing. We, here at the investigative journal NOMMO, are holding the transcript as evidence until the trial begins.
“I’m just not the social type and campus life is crazy.”
—Aubrey Drake Graham
K: Hey Courtnay, I’ma start in the middle because the beginning and the end feel super far away.
C: What’s going on?
K: Our friend at Jackson State asked me to hop on a Zoom and talk with him about the new work he’s been doing on Black Death, Black Romance, and Black Madness.
C: That thing he started when we were at Harvard together in the nineties. He always said he wanted to go back to his alma mater and do his research.
K: Jackson State?
C: Yup.
K: So I read a bit of his project he calls “The Musty.”
C: (laughing) Can you explain the Musty to me because I still don’t think I get it.
K: Our friend contends that nearly half of all rhetorical ingenuity in the United States is rooted in a twenty-mile radius between Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Greenville, Mississippi.
He says it’s undeniable that “cappin’,” “talk to the hand,” “holler at your boy,” “hating,” “trippin’,” “I know she didn’t,” and the words “jazz,” “blues,” “funk,” all came from the Musty.
C: That just always seemed odd.
K: Odd is a sweet way to put it. I’ve been worrying about our friend for a minute. So I was on this Zoom where he was giving this lecture to like fourteen people and I get a private Zoom message from him during the Q and A portion.
C: While you’re listening to him talk?
K: While I’m listening to him talk, chile. Listen.
C: What did it say?
K: It said The Candy Lady and the Sharecropper need the Plug and the Imagination for Black Madness.
C: What are you saying?
K: I look back up on the screen and our friend is shivering. We had to cut the Zoom short.
He’s sweating. And honestly, I assumed it was because he’d been told earlier that he was denied tenure by Jackson State and the decision is now in the hands of the president. Plagiarism.
C: I assumed that too.
K: It broke something in him when he went home and he saw the restaurant from the kitchen.
C: I don’t get it.
K: The JSU he went to and the JSU he worked at were two different places. He had no idea that the entire place was run by a committee of folks picked by the Republican governor, Tate Reeves.
C: Of course he did. He’s brilliant. But running the whole place can’t mean the whole place is truly run by Republican white folks. What about the Sonic Boom?
K: Okay, so this where it gets a little complicated. You know how our friend tried to grapple with your work in his tenure manuscript.
C: Grapple?
K: I mean, you wrote, “Instead of unilaterally championing the spectacularizing of suffering and death, I track the ways that the visual display of the body has been used by proponents of black freedom and dignity.”
And our friend wrote, “Instead of unilaterally championing the spectacularizing of suffering and death, I track the ways that the visual display of the body has been used by proponents of black freedom, dignity, and reparation.”
C: So “grapple” might be way too generous.
K: Yeah, he jacked your work and added the word “reparation.” And he got caught.
You wrote, “I am absolutely not considering these manipulations and utilizations of the black body in pain and death to be a consequence of black people’s intuitive response to suffering and injustice.
Quite to the contrary. I am insisting that these choreographies of humane insight are deliberate. ”
Our friend wrote, “I am absolutely not considering these manipulations and utilizations of the black body in pain and death to be a consequence of black people’s intuitive response to suffering and injustice.
Quite to the contrary. I am insisting that these choreographies of humane insight are deliberate and must be imitated. ”
C: That’s wild. That’s why he got denied tenure, right?
K: Right. He jacked you and Therí Pickens. And it’s like he wanted to get caught. But why? Can you tell me why you think he did it and whether or not it makes sense to use your theory as the linchpin of his work?
C: Um, no. I don’t understand what his work is because he just uses my work and adds a few words at the end. Black man shit.
K: That makes sense. That’s kinda why I drove all the way up there from Mississippi a few weeks ago when he told me there had been an accident and he needed my help. And when I got there, Courtnay, I mean, some stories are way too big to tell.
C: Can you make it like a graphic novella but maybe more the SparkNotes version of that, and no pictures?
K: Yeah, I can try. After I tell it, will you tell me what happened at Harvard with those vampires?
C: He told you about that?
K: He told me about that.
C: I can try.
K: I get to the parking lot of our friend’s apartment at like four-thirty. It’s not dark but it ain’t light either. He lives in Baker Hall. I text him and tell him I’m in my car.
He comes out, moping. Head down, mask sagging below his nose, hands in his sweatpants pockets.
It was the first time I hadn’t seen him with his glasses on.
I asked him where his partner, Dionne, is. He says, “Dionne didn’t come home. Dionne hasn’t spent the night at home in the past three weeks.”
Our friend went in his backpack and pulled out this blue book. “So yeah,” he says, “someone slipped this blue book under the door.” He handed it to me. “And when I opened the door, the person was gone.”
Name: Don’t Worry About It
Subject: I Been Known You’re a Cheater
Instructor: Dionne’s Boyfriend
Section: in his lies
Date: Today
Grade: (F)u(c)ke(d)
I’m looking at the blue book, absolutely confused.
He starts talking about this woman, Mama Rose. According to O.F., Mama Rose went to JSU way back in the day. She ended up doing all this work on something called fugitive pedagogy. After college, Mama Rose got more radicalized.
Erline Rose was a schoolteacher in Clarksdale, Mississippi, during the days and at night, she worked in the house of the Hills, the wealthiest white family in town.
Samantha Hill, the baby of the family, got accepted to Vassar College, in New York.
Her family did not want her to go so far for an education and said she could only attend Vassar if Erline came with her.
Back then, it was not common, but it was possible for Black-women-help to accompany monied white girls to schools.
They often stayed in the slave quarters of the dormitories.
At Vassar, Erline caught the eye of Danielle Baker, the person credited with being the first Black woman to attend Vassar. At the time, no one knew Danielle was Black except Erline.
When Danielle was a student, she lived in Kendrick, the same dorm where Erline and Anne Scott lived.
Initially, all the young women in the dorm were extremely kind to Erline.
At night, from the hours of six to nine, Erline’s quarters became a little store where young women would buy sweets, pickles, chips, candy.
They’d eventually start to call her “the Candy Lady.”
The white girls had no idea that Erline was the Candy Lady when she attended Jackson State, too.
Danielle Baker and Erline bonded over candy, then conversations about science. One night when everyone was asleep, Danielle and Erline went to the lab where Danielle had started doing all these experiments. Before long, Danielle and Erline spent every night in the lab.
The white women loved Erline. One day after eating their nighttime treats from the Candy Lady, all of the women get brutally sick.
They blame their illness on the Candy Lady.
The college’s president demanded that Danielle and Erline tell them everything. They said they had enough evidence to throw them in jail.
C: Evidence of what?
K: Right. Right. That’s the question.
They burst into the lab and tell them they have evidence that they intentionally poisoned the girls in the dorm. Danielle is given the option of either withdrawing or getting kicked out and going to jail.
Erline watches Danielle walk in the hallway with the administrators.
Erline doesn’t wait for what she knows is inevitable.
Danielle will blame all of what happened to the white women on Erline.
She bolts out of that lab and sprints back to the dorm to get her damn bag and pocketbook.
One by one, the doors on her floor open and fatigued white women come out of those rooms with scissors, pencils, pens, fabric.
Anne Scott is one of the women.
According to our friend, that was the last any white person saw the Candy Lady. But you know white folks. They erased what actually happened and then turned around and named the dorm after Erline and Danielle. That’s why it’s called the Rose Baker.
C: Wait. Why did he tell you that story? It’s super important. But why tell it?
K: Okay, so our friend and I walked back across that quad. We stood outside of his apartment. Our friend explained to me that there is no way to honor the dead if you neglect the folkways that kept them alive. He contends that storytelling and science are how they lived, and why they died.
Therefore, he asserts, we have to use storytelling and science not to bring the dead back but to feed pleasure to the dead.
The Black Dead want to feel good. And they rely on the Black living for pleasure.
They want us to feel so good, responsibly.
They, in turn, bless us. So we’re really in a romance with the Black Dead.
Sounds simple. I mean, simple if you believe in such shit.