Interview with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Kiese Laymon: Money,Racism,and Success

I don’t know if this has been y’all’s experience, but since getting the PhD, being professor, all these things, people I love and love me back tend to think I have way more money than I do. So how do you navigate these—I’m making an assumption so you can tell me if this is not true—but how do you navigate requests from people? I know I grew up in a family where if you love somebody, you give. You give to them. And so I’m wondering how y’all navigate all of that. How people might think you have more than you do, and then your “No” might take on a very different meaning because of what they think you have.

Girl. Yeah. I come from the same people, who I adore. And the thing is, on one level, they’re right. As my stepfather loves to say, I’m the richest person they know, which is just to tell you, first of all, how few people we know. But it’s also, in a weird way, true, it’s just that it’s not a reality. It is true, but it’s so relative, of course, that it’s useless.

I come, too, from the same way where we don’t just give, but I take on your problems. By the time you call me and tell me about it, I’m usually thought of as both the first line of attack and the last line of defense. By the time my cousins or my aunts or whoever call me, which they don’t call me directly, they call my mom. . .there’s a whole system that’s developed, apparently, so my cousin tells my aunt, my aunt drops the word to my other aunt, and whichever aunt they’re not fucking with at the time, because there’s three of them and two of them are best friends at any given time but not all three. Whoever is the one that’s in favor at the time gets to pass the message to my mom, who then passes it to me, and I know by the time I hear it they’ve tried everything they know to try, or they just think it would be easier for me to solve it.

And I’m going to tell you the truth about that one, I have not learned how to [manage] that, other than I do the best I can. If it is something I can fix, I fix it. But I have had to learn in the last six months . . . I have a real conversation happening with my past and future self right now. I don’t have any children; nobody’s going to take care of me when I’m old. I really do have to think about that kind of thing, because my knee hurts now, you know what I’m saying?

The very first time one of your joints hurts you, it becomes really real to you that at some point your whole body is not going to work the way it does. I’m not going to be able to stay up for 24 straight hours to hit a deadline to make that extra money, or I’m not going to be able to hop on the plane at short notice to go do the talk that brings me extra income or whatever. And I have to start thinking real practically.

I’ve probably only got X amount of years where I can keep the pay that has gotten me here. So for me to be prepared for when my family really needs me, which in my mind is when they’re truly old or sick, I’m going to have to tell them no in the short term so I can be ready for them long term, which is increasingly what I say, especially to my mom. I’m like, “Listen, I need you to hold steady for 10 years. Just manage it. Hold steady, because I know that’s when you’re really going to need me, and I got to go make whatever I can make now, to take care of y’all then.”

That’s real. That’s real.

And most of it is just that, they see the world I navigate in. To them, it’s really hard for them to understand that of course because of who I am, it doesn’t mean the same kind of money to me. And that’s before you even get into, listen, by the time I pay taxes and pay for all the stuff I got to pay so I stay upright so I can work, there’s very little left over that anybody could consider disposable.

I’m still negotiating, and I don’t know. I think every black person everywhere who’s ever gotten a foot outside of where their people were born gets a lot and can’t satisfy at all. It will kill you if you try to do everything, and then that defeats the whole purpose. And I’m taking it, right now, day by day, except I’m just thinking about it a lot.

Yeah. Man, that’s a good-ass answer. I don’t either. I wish I could make my shit nearly as poignant as that. If my family asks for it, they know I’m going to give it to them, and that is not the healthiest way to be for my family or me, but that’s where we are. And so much of that has to do with gender. I’m the only man.

I was the only boy/man in my family, and my family is progressive on a lot of issues, but they’re not when it comes to this notion of where the man or the boy should be. My grandmama would have me sit at the head of the table when I was 12, because I was the only man at dinner. I actually left grad school to go [work]. I was in an MFA/PhD program. I got my MFA and then my grandmama literally was talking shit about me to my family, saying, “Damn, ain’t Kie ever going to get a job?” Then I heard that shit and it hurt my feelings and so I went and got a job.

You went and got a job.

Yeah. Treated a nigga like he was Calvin and shit. I was like, “Motherfucka, I kinda got a job. I’m in grad school.” But she was like, “Is he ever going to get a job?” And my grandmama, again, because I’m the boy, she adores me, you know what I’m saying? And she would never say that to my face. So I left and went and got that job at Vassar, and so yeah, man. My first book deal was some old bootleg-ass shit, like $17,000, talking about way back. Soon as I got that shit, I knew I was going to put some money down on a Subaru for my mama.

In some way, I’m just a statistic. I’m that nigga who gets money and thinks about what they gon’ do with it, and this was before I started gambling. There was no part of me that was like, “I’m going to save that shit, then I’m going to save that shit.” You know what I’m sayin’? You know what I’m sayin’? A check was a fucking down payment on . . . I wouldn’t ever buy shit for myself. I don’t know why, I just didn’t feel like I deserved it or something, but anyway.

So I found myself really trying to be the partner to my mama, to my grandmama, to my auntie, trying to be the partner that they always wanted. And in their mind, they wanted partners who were going to take some of that load off . It’s not a healthy relationship, I’m not going to lie to you. It was cute at first, but when your family understandably sees you as an ATM, it’s hard for them to see you as a person who might need stuff.

I love my family, like more than [anything] and I think they know that if they need anything, I will try to give it to them. But I don’t think that’s been good for our relationship, to tell you the truth. It hasn’t been. I don’t know how to say no to my family. I will never say no to my family. They know I won’t say no, and here we are. That’s it.

That reminds me of how there are these analyses, especially in our academic circles, around capitalism, and I think the critiques of capitalism are really important.. But hearing y’all talk, it reminds me of how when we talk about capitalism, there is this very potent cost on a daily basis, and some of that cost is yes, we work more than we should, we’re always tired, all [of] that. But it’s also this cost to the relationships we have with other people, who have also been worked nearly to death and don’t have nothing to show for it, and therefore our relationships become about these exchanges.

Exactly.

Because we need stuff. And I think there’s this thing that I’m always reminding myself about my own family and relationships is that inherently, people are trying to get their needs met. That’s a thing I say to myself probably daily, because it reminds me that this other person is human, even if in this moment it feels like they are just trying to get something from me, they are trying to get a very human need met.

[A need that] has so long been denied. Yeah, and I get that. I just want to be–and this is more about my emotional makeup and psychological makeup—I want to be able to ask somebody for some shit. As readily as I give, I ain’t asking nobody for shit, and that shit fuck my body up, it fuck my mind up, it fucks my friendships up, it makes me resentful, and ultimately I have to resent myself because I’m not asking.

So I’m saying all that to say there’s a part of me that absolutely adores that my grandmama or my mom or my auntie can ask me for frivolous-ass shit, you know what I’m saying? And ask me for fucking mortgage money. But I think it’s hard to have those transactional relationships and really see people’s interiority both ways. I’ve started to see some people in my family as just people who ask. They’ve started to see me as somebody who just provides. But we’re so much more than that. But the consistency of the transactions that are necessitated because all these people bust they ass and don’t have nothing in savings, not because they didn’t work hard. Black women bust they ass. We let it bankrupt the integrity of our relationships, I ain’t going to lie. I don’t know how to do it. I would love to see another model of how it works, and maybe the model . . . Maybe you have to say no or some shit, or I don’t know how it can work better.

I don’t know. I’m going to be real. Somebody circulated something online the other day about how many people are in therapy learning how to set boundaries when really it’s everybody else in their life that needs to learn how to set the boundary. The person who needs the therapy least is the one going to get it, because everybody else is just fine running over [them]. What it does do is it reduces the work of trying to come up with a better model to the person who has the least, I think, cognitive load available to do that.

We ain’t supposed to be here. I don’t know. I’m not going to speak for you, Kie, but I feel like I’m not supposed to be here this way, and I know that the world likes to let me know it. No, I know it, and I get it. We having a little standoff, me and the world.

But it is true that I got away with a little bit more than the world thought I was supposed to have, and the problem is I know because I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve been with my mama cleaning the bathrooms at the bank as part of her third job, you know what I’m saying? I know what my aunts and those did. They kept me in the summers when, for years, I thought that was just about family. It’s because, where I come from, can’t nobody afford summer daycare, so you went to whoever’s aunt’s house had somebody there to watch you.

And because I’ve seen that up close, I feel ridiculous not eking out what I have and not understanding when they see me as an economic resource, even though it hurts. It does hurt, but the joke in the family becomes, “All right, y’all know you better ask Tray.” We laugh, but at the bottom of everything funny in the dozens is a truth. That’s why we make it the punchline. We’re really good at that, my folks. And you can learn how to set the boundary, the problem is, unless everybody else is learning how to not only set their own, but to respect the boundary, I don’t know yet how to do that and still save my family, which is probably why I just end up giving it. I don’t know how to do that and then still have Thanksgiving.

Right, right, right.

I don’t know. And things that matter to me, whatever the holiday or the gathering is, I needed to be there when I need to get away from white folks. So I feel a responsibility to keep both of those spaces functional even if they’re not healthy.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

That reminds me of a line from [your book], Tressie, where you say your mom used to say, “People who can must do.”

Yep.

The first time I read that I paused, because I remember from very different periods of my life where the weight of such words resonated in my body. I think you both—not even just in these latest two books, but across the work that you both have done—[grapple with] this tension around responsibility and what that means, not just economically but who we become in our families, what having extra income—“Extra,” again, in scare quotes—means, how that transforms the emotional work we do in our families then too. Not that it’s better than any other emotional work that other people are doing, but it is different and it’s tied to money.

And when you say that, I think about also tying that to what it means to leave home, because to survive in any place if you leave home you have to cultivate some sort of community, or one might call it a family, somewhere else. So for me, when I left home and I was up there in New York, and for lots of different reasons, I got my job when I was 26, initially my community was my students because they were 21 and 20, you know what I’m saying? I had more in common with them than I had with them motherfuckas who was 70 and 60 and 50 and blah blah blah.

But then I was like, “Alright, this ain’t healthy.” Your emotional fucking whatever can’t depend on whether students come to your office hours and kick it with you. . .Then I used the internet to connect with Darnell Moore, Marlon Peterson, and Mychal Denzel Smith, and then those friend networks got so much bigger because I was so much more . . . I needed them, and I was so much more vulnerable.

So [Kiese], you talk about when suddenly your name could sell something and how scary that is. What’s that about? Because it means you made it. It means you made it, or whatever that means, right?

Yeah, but I just have absolutely, positively no trust in the entities that you might call the magazines or publications or whatever the fuck who are trying to buy or extract art. Because at some point, I used to have to create art to get on. Now, motherfuckas think, (I think they overthink) “Oh, we put this person’s name on this magazine or this article, not [only] will it sell units, but it’ll give us the appearance of being thoughtful and not fucked-up white people.”

And so because we’re not independently wealthy, not hardly any of us, sometimes you just have to decide when you give your name, really our name, or your likeness to something. Because sometimes these motherfuckas don’t want art, you know what I’m saying?

Yeah. I was going to say, yeah, no. Honestly, they sometimes resent it, I think, when you give them art.

Oh, so resentful. Yes, yes, sir. Yes. Because they really, at the end of the day . . . Again, this sounds base and I’m painting everybody with a broad brush, but whatever. But I think a lot of times they want to put your name to some idea that they already have. But when their ideas are bankrupt, when they haven’t done the fucking work . . . And this is why sometimes a lot of dope-ass writers . . . You see this in the [New York] Times a lot. A lot of dope writers get really un-dope when they write for the Times, you know what I’m saying?

Oh, yeah.

And that’s not because them niggas ain’t dope. It’s because these motherfuckas affix you . . .And they take the art out of it, they take the southern, I think they take the blackness out of a lot of that shit, because all they want is that name. They want the name.

Yeah, no. They’ll sell your shit so fast. I did the . . . maybe I won’t name the magazine but maybe I will. I don’t care. Who cares? New York Times Magazine. This has been the editorial process every time. “Oh my god, we love you so much. We just know that you’re so important. You’re such an important voice,” and blah blah blah. Okay, I’ll sing and I’ll pitch the idea of what we talked about and give a little draft, whatever.

“Yeah, we don’t know about your use of [this] word here. You said something about being gangster about something, but there’s really no mention of gangs. And I said to her, “I don’t think you’re qualified to edit me.” You could tell literally nobody had ever told her that. And we’ve been through this five times. I won’t even take their emails anymore because I’m just like, don’t waste my time. You don’t really want [this work].

But it’s that. They want to strip [the southerness and the dialect.] No, what you’re really saying is you don’t like my voice. You can’t hear anything when it’s my voice. But you start conversation with how much you love my voice. Which tells me you don’t even know what that is, because this is what I do and it’s certainly what I understand that I do. I refuse to speak in another voice.

I’ve done that before, parroted the voice that a publication needs or that an audience needs, and to me that’s copywriting and I don’t want to copywrite. I’ve had to do that before for money in a previous life, you know, sound like the car company, sound like the whatever business, and make something sound cute, and I’m like, I don’t do what I do and put myself through what I put myself through to copywrite white people’s voice. I don’t want to do it, so I’m like, yeah no.

But that’s exactly what happened. . . They strip everything meaningful out of it.

Everything, chile.

That’s how you get in those publications, yeah.

And they still have the currency of having you be in the publication.

That’s right. Which is all they wanted you to give.