It’s there in Long Division, in which Citoyen is sent from the home he shares with his mother in Jackson to his grandmother’s house in the fictional Mississippi town of Melahatchie, only to discover a portal to the future and the past. Like Faulkner, whose one-time home is a stone’s throw from his, and whose fictional county, Yoknapatawpha, appears in multiple works, Laymon can’t get away from this place in his writing. Laymon’s early life and work is rooted in Mississippi. This month, the city of Jackson awarded him a key to the city for his “literary genius.” Heavy is already a finalist in the Kirkus Prize and has been long-listed for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. His nonfiction essays have evocative titles that linger long after you’ve finished reading: “ How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” (which became the title essay of his first collection, also published in 2013) “ You Are the Second Person” (about race and publishing) “ What I Pledge Allegiance To” (about the performance of American patriotism) “ The Worst of White Folks” “ I Am a Big Black Man Who Will Never Own a Gun Because I Know I Would Use It” (self-explanatory), and so on.

His debut novel, Long Division (2013), took on, among other topics, the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and the tyranny of the American school system. His writing - fiction and nonfiction alike - is all about the things he’s studied and known and lived through. It’s also been a throughline in a lot of his work. It’s called “Rebel Sunset.” Race in Mississippi has long been a complex dance - this was just another example. In the lobby hangs a 2008 piece by an artist named Alfred Nicols. A few minutes later, when we pulled up to the hotel I was staying in, Laymon smilingly pointed out the black wedding party making use of the Gertrude C. Then, eyebrows raised knowingly, he told me about the presence of a Confederate monument right in the town square.

“When black folks come to town, I just want to make sure they know where they’re coming,” he said. Driving past fields of juvenile cotton plants as we drew closer to Oxford, Laymon issued a quick note of caution about the “brutal niceness” of the town. En route, as we discussed the specific intimacy of knife crime, he obligingly lowered the volume on Solange and Lil Wayne so I could illustratively play him Ghetts’ verse from Stormzy’s “Bad Boys” (sample lyric: “big spear that a’ go through your belly”). He was almost apologetic when he extended the offer, but it stems from a well-honed generosity: Giving rides is a service he’s used to performing for out-of-town guests. To visit the writer Kiese Laymon in the town where he lives and teaches, you have to fly to Memphis International Airport in Tennessee and then, if you don’t drive, like me, hitch a ride from there to Oxford, Mississippi.

Heavy by kiese laymon