Long Division

“I looked at LaVander Peeler. He looked at me. And for the first time, his look asked me what I thought. All I could really think about was what he saw when he looked at me. I know he saw ashy hands and a wave brush. But I knew in that second that he couldn’t hate me. He didn’t have to like me, but he definitely couldn’t hate me when there was so much work for both of us to do in the next three hours. We had to show everyone, including white folks, chubby jokers with tight waves, and skinny jokers with suspect fades, just what was possible.”

The Can You Use That Word in a Sentence competition changes City’s outlook on his relationships, his culture, his history, and himself. City and LaVander’s conversation backstage before the competition particularly challenges City to consider the cultural significance of the contest and the media’s exploitation of him and his friend. In turn, City begins to relate to LaVander as an equal rather than a rival, ushering City toward personal growth. However, City still does not quite grasp his situation: He believes it’s possible to turn the competition to his advantage, but ensuing events suggest that Black Americans cannot win in a rigged system, as even an apparent victory is a defeat.

“‘I ain’t playing myself. Shoot. What was I supposed to do?’ I said to everyone one more time. ‘Bet you know my name next time, And I bet you won’t do this to another little n**** from Mississippi. Shout out to my Jackson confidants: Toni, Jannay, Octavia, Jimmy, and all my country n*****: Shay, Kincaid, and even MyMy down in Melahatchie just trying to stay above water. I got y’all. Death to all our opposition. President Obama, you see how they do us down here while you up there calling us thugs? You see?’”

City’s speech on stage at the competition marks a turning point in his character arc. Before the contest, City doesn’t understand the true significance of his and LaVander’s participation. City’s outburst reveals his desire to claim and defend his identity amid a hostile cultural moment; he particularly criticizes other Back people (e.g., Obama) whom he sees as placating white supremacy to get ahead.

“I didn’t get it until that second. It wasn’t at all that we were there just for decoration, like LaVander Peeler Sr. said. LaVander Peeler and I, or LaVander Peeler or I, were there to win the contest. They’d already decided before the contest even began that one of us needed to win. The only way they could feel good about themselves was if they let us win against the Mexican kids, because they didn’t believe any of us could really compete. Yeah, we were all decoration in a way. But it was like LaVander Peeler, specifically, was being thrown a surprise birthday party by a group of white people who didn’t know his real name or when his birthday actually was.”

Watching the end of the sentence competition on television helps City to understand how the media and American culture writ large exploit Black Americans. By rigging the contest so that LaVander will win, the organizers “prove” that the US is not a racist country—that anyone can succeed with hard work. In practice, however, this both uses LaVander as “decoration” while expressing contempt for his abilities; as City notes, the contest’s organizers do not believe a Black teenager could win.

“See, that’s your problem, Wide Load. You play too much. White man see your big ass acting a fool on TV, and he gon’ have a reason to take away the rights we done worked so hard for. Y’all gotta learn how to manage that freedom we got for y’all. You see what I’m saying. Ain’t enough to be free. What you gon’ do with that freedom?”

Coach Stroud complicates City’s understanding of his cultural and racial identities by criticizing him for buying a watermelon in the presence of MyMy, a white girl. City often shuts down when adults tell him to change his behavior in accordance with his surroundings. However, Coach Stroud’s words challenge City to understand the ways in which history and culture shape others’ perception of him. At the same time, the novel suggests it is counterproductive to worry too much about how a white supremacist society views one’s actions, as such a society does not need a “reason” to oppress Black people.

“But this was so different. For example, when I was going off on that stage at the contest, on the computer, I looked like I wanted to kill that Mexican girl from Arizona when really I didn’t even know her. I was just desperate to find something to make them feel pain and be sad and embarrassed like I’d been embarrassed on national TV. But when I saw the video, there were so many white kids around that I could have said mean things about and I didn’t say hardly anything directly to them. Also, I never thought I was super cute but I didn’t realize how much my thighs rubbed together and how the back of my head was bigger than every other head in all the videos. Even though I felt all of that strange stuff, I can’t even lie: the thing I still felt the most was famous.”

City’s online research at the library complicates his coming-of-age journey and his relationship to his race. On the one hand, seeing himself on video helps him recognize his own complicity in racism; in lashing out at the Mexican girl for her supposedly more privileged position, City played into the hands of white supremacy. At the same time, the novel suggests that the Impact of Media on Self-Perception is not entirely healthy. The video makes City self-conscious but it also makes him feel famous, which suggests that modern media preys on people’s vulnerabilities and desires—particularly when those people are marginalized to begin with and therefore accustomed to feeling invisible.

“I had found out that there were actually two Long Division books, the one I kept in the house and the one I decided to leave in the work shed with Sooo Sad. But the existence of at least two books was less confusing than the words in the books.

Maybe the book wasn’t a book at all, I thought. Maybe the book was the truth. If it was the truth, I had to figure out what it had to do with me. And if Baize wasn’t actually missing, but maybe just time traveling, that meant that Sooo Sad hadn’t really hurt her at all.”

City’s Long Division book becomes his proverbial map and helps him to navigate his increasingly confusing world. The book can’t answer all of City’s questions, as it’s not a completed work. However, City’s participation in the writing of the book clarifies how he sees and understands himself.

“After reading the craziest chapters yet of Long Division and sitting there with Sooo Sad, I started to understand the sad that he was feeling. There were some red, green, yellow, white, or orange sprinkles in the sad I felt, but mostly, the sad was all just layers and layers of the thickest blue you’d ever seen in your life. Whenever I’d come close to feeling that blue before, I’d pick scabs, or I’d turn off the light and get nice with myself, or I’d come up with a plan about how to get some shine in homeroom at Hamer, or I’d troll the internet with the screen name Megatroneezy, or I’d post something inspirational or something extremely ratchet on Facebook, or I’d eat bowls of off-brand Lucky Charms until I got severe bubble guts. For some reason, I didn’t want to do any of that since I had lost at the contest.”

City’s experiences talking and reading to Sooo Sad teach him about love and empathy. As a 14-year-old, City is caught up in the dramas of his youth. However, Long Division and Sooo Sad help him to see others differently, to gain a new awareness of himself, and to learn new coping mechanisms to combat trauma—including inherited trauma. Whereas his grandmother and uncle have trapped Sooo Sad in the shed in retaliation for his complicity in white supremacy, City ultimately decides to practice forgiveness.

“‘But you were perfect,’ I told him. ‘You know what I mean? You were better than them. You were better than me. You coulda won that whole thing. for real.’ He just looked at me, ‘I mean, if they gave you a real chance, you coulda won. You know that.’ He started tearing up again, so I put my hand on the top of his back.”

City and LaVander’s experiences at the sentence competition grant them a newfound understanding. In the wake of the contest, the classmates reunite in Melahatchie for City’s baptism and relate over their shared experience of racism. The contest unifies them and teaches them the importance of friendship and connection.

“I wondered if what I’d caught was the same Holy Ghost that Lily Mae and them caught every Sunday. I wasn’t trying to catch nothing. I just wanted to live and breathe and keep my heart beating and be free, but maybe that’s what they were doing when they went crazy, too. I doubted it, but I figured everything was possible.”

City’s baptism changes how he thinks about his past, present, and future. City isn’t sure he wants to be saved or if he believes the same things Grandma believes. However, the baptism awakens him to a new version of himself and gives him perspective on his former and his coming experiences.

“She squeezed my hand tighter and looked me right in the eyes. ‘Really, it ain’t no difference, City,’ she said. ‘Because unless you use both of them [the fictional and real versions of oneself] the right way, they just as bad or just as good as you want them to be. But you lead both of them,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘And don’t take no ass-whupping or no disrespect from no one in your own house or your own dreams, you hear me? Do whatever it takes to protect you and yours,’ she said. ‘Especially in your dreams. Especially in your dreams, because you never know who else is watching.’”

Grandma acts as one of City’s archetypal guides. Grandma doesn’t always talk to City about the trauma she’s lived through. However, she encourages City and challenges him to be strong, brave, and wise, shepherding him throughout City’s coming-of-age experiences. Here, she addresses the tension between City’s internal sense of who he is and who he is in his interactions with the broader world (the latter being shaped by forces beyond his control, such as systemic racism); regretful of her treatment of Sooo Sad, she urges City to choose compassion and forgiveness.

“If you want me to be honest, everything I’m telling you is only half of what made the story of Shalaya Crump, Baize Shephard, Jewish Evan Altshuler, and me the saddest story in the history of Mississippi. And it’s really hard to have the saddest story in the history of a state like Mississippi, where there are even more sad stories than there are hungry mosquitoes and sticker bushes. It really is.”

City uses his love for writing to claim autonomy over his story. He introduces his authorial relationship to the Long Division story at the start of Part 2, foreshadowing how City will use story to control his past and future. However, the metatextual elements of the novel are deliberately ambiguous; this passage seems to suggest that the 1985 City wrote the book that 2013 City is reading, yet other moments—e.g., 1985 City’s discovery of a book entitled Long Division—imply just the reverse. This paradox—the fact that the novel seems to have been written by both and neither of them—points to how interconnected past and present are.

“I didn’t know what to focus on when I looked at the computer—the machine carrying the pictures and the words, or the pictures and the words themselves. I had never felt anything like that before. I just wanted to talk to someone who would also understand none of what I was seeing and all of what I was feeling. And that someone [Shalaya] was across the road peeking her slow/fast-blinking eyes through green and orange and brown leaves.”

City experiences many unexpected encounters and events during his travels through time; here, he is awestruck by Baize’s laptop. Shalaya’s presence throughout these experiences helps City feel safe while also challenging him to be bold, ultimately allowing him to navigate his inherited trauma.

“‘City’s right,’ she said. ‘We don’t know a thing about having granddaddies. Even if we did, I mean, what happens if we change our future by changing the past? It’s impossible to not change the future if you change the past, right? More would change than just us having granddaddies.’”

City and Shalaya’s travels through time teach City about how the past impacts the present and future. Shalaya’s words foreshadow what the friends will learn about how their ancestral past relates to their personal futures—e.g., how changing the past will also erase Baize.

“I realized when I stopped talking all big and bad that a heavy whiff of sad like I’d never felt before was getting closer and closer to my neck. Reading about my family and other Black folks not being able to pee in a good bathroom was different than seeing a white folks’ bathroom locked and a colored bathroom just open for anything that wanted to come in. It said ‘colored’ on the door, but it might as well have said cats, spiders, possums, coons, and roaches, ’cause it was open to them just like it was open to us.”

City’s experience at The County Co-op helps him to understand his ancestral trauma. Before visiting the co-op, City only encounters the past in Mama Lara’s recollected asides or in fleeting passages in history books. Traveling through time deepens City’s understanding and changes his perception of the past and of what Black Americans have suffered.

“In 1985, every little thing we did in front of white folks had to be perfect, according to Mama Lara. And if I acted like I wasn’t perfect around them, Mama Lara would tell me to go get her switch and she’d give me twelve licks. I didn’t know if Mama Lara had ever been beaten by a white man in a sheet. I did know she had walked by the locked white folks’ bathroom, though. She had seen and felt what I was feeling in that Freedom School, whether she’d had her legs stomped to rubber bands or not. I wondered if Jewish Evan Altshuler’s people knew the same feeling.”

City initially agrees to venture into the past and future because he wants to be with Shalaya. However, these adventures grant City perspective on his loved ones’ trials and his family’s future. In particular, experiencing the segregation and racist violence of Jim Crow America helps City understand why his older relatives are so concerned with performing Black identity in particular ways. While the novel suggests that this effort is in some ways misguided—distancing oneself from certain expressions of Blackness, as LaVander does, undermines solidarity without fully protecting one from racism—it is sympathetic to the motivations of characters like Mama Lara. For a Black person in the Jim Crow South, acting “perfect” could be a matter of life and death, as the lynching of City’s grandfather demonstrates.

“It was weird, because up until that point, I hated any folks who were skinnier than me and taller than me and smarter than me and funnier than me and sweated less than me. And I hated folks from different states and folks who had shinier penny loafers and folks who had rounder heads than me, and folks who didn’t like as much tartar sauce and hot sauce on their catfish as me. But right then, I didn’t even hate those folks. I did, however, hate this future—I mean, Klan-hate. After I saved Shalaya Crump, I wanted to do everything I could to come back to the future and make it suffer for helping me embarrass myself.”

Participating in Baize’s spelling bee helps City relate to people differently. The spelling bee from Part 2 parallels the sentence contest from Part 1 and reveals how the media exploits Black participants for its own gain. When 1985 City witnesses this dynamic, he’s eager to combat such exploitation and to defend his friends and himself. He rejects hatred of other people in order to do so, underscoring the novel’s message about the necessity of solidarity, compassion, and forgiveness.

“I just kept looking at Baize wondering how what she said about her parents being City and Shalaya could even be true. I hadn’t seen any pictures of us in her house, but then again, maybe we looked completely different eighteen years older. Or maybe I was too focused on other things to look for pieces of myself in her place. Or maybe she took down all the pictures because it made her sad.”

Baize’s revelation about her parents alters the narrative stakes. Before Baize announces that City and Shalaya are her parents, City is focused on making Shalaya love him. After Baize’s announcement, he empathizes more with Baize’s experience and reassesses his relationship with Shalaya. This passage foreshadows what the characters will have to sacrifice to make larger cultural change.

“But after she said all that about fighting off the Klan and almost getting shot in the shoulder and meeting Jewish folks who were forced to act like they were in the Klan, my time together with Baize in 2013 seemed super boring. It really did. You really never know what other folks are doing when you think you’re having the craziest experience of your life.”

City’s experiences with Shalaya, Evan, and Baize grant him newfound empathy. As a 14-year-old, City is preoccupied with youthful dramas until he starts traveling through time with his friends. These experiences help him to contextualize his experiences in terms of broader history and to create room for others’ experiences too.

“‘That’s us,’ I told her. ‘We disappear, Shalaya Crump. You couldn’t find you in 2013 because there is no you. You’re dead in 2013. And so am I. We disappear in 2005.’

I wanted to just slump to the floor and cry, but what I said sounded so crazy, I didn’t even know how to slump to the floor right after saying it. Not when directly in front of us was a dead relative with a hole the size of a Coke can in his back. I just wanted to go home to 1985 and slump by myself in the year that I knew the most about. Maybe we all did.”

At this climactic juncture of the novel, City could return to the hole and try to forget everything he experienced while traveling through time. However, the revelation that he and Shalaya die in 2005 reveals that turning his back on the suffering of other generations would not only be selfish but futile; ignoring the existence of systemic racism will only result in his own erasure. Instead, City faces his intergenerational trauma with resilience and courage.

“‘We was just trying to save our family,’ his brother said, ‘That’s what y’all were fixing to do, too. If it’s right for y’all, it’s right for us, ain’t it?’ It was so odd to hear a teenager’s voice coming from under a Klan sheet. ‘Some of these folks hate anyone who ain’t them. If you ain’t the right kind of white or you ain’t Christian or you ain’t Southern or you ain’t whatever they want you to be, you might as well be a Negro, especially with that Freedom Summer coming.’”

Evan and his family’s experiences grant City perspective on his own personal and familial experiences. Evan’s brother’s pleas change how City has understood his ancestral past and suffering and deepen his capacity for empathy; although he points out that he and other Black Americans would never have the chance to save themselves as Evan’s family has done (by complying with the Klan), he finds it hard to deny that he would do the same if he could.

“I’d have two front covers with the words ‘Long Division’ in the middle and below ‘Long Division’ would be an ellipsis. That ellipsis is me if it’s my book. It’s our book, though. We’d all be inside the book, too, with those other characters already in the book and we’d all fall in love with each other.”

The characters’ relationships with the Long Division book reflect the novel’s explorations of history, story, autonomy, and freedom: Reading and writing the book helps City, Baize, and Shalaya understand their pasts and seize control of their futures. The ellipsis in particular encapsulates the novel’s attitude toward time and trauma; it implies continuity, including the continuity of suffering, but it also implies continuation and thus survival. It also suggests that healing from trauma (as an individual, a family, or a nation) is an ongoing process—something the lack of a back cover (also a feature of Kiese Laymon’s book) underscores. To the extent that this process does have a goal (i.e., an end point), it is love for one’s fellow humans, which explains Baize’s remark that they would “all fall in love with each other” in her book.

“‘No,’ Mama Lara said. ‘This ain’t it. You know how movement works now. You know how love and change work. And you know that sometimes, just sometimes, when folks disappear, they come back, don’t they? Did you do your bonus question?’”

Mama Lara leads City through the final stages of his personal growth journey, her wisdom and gentleness helping City to combat his trauma and encouraging him to use his strengths to rewrite history and thus the future.

“I wanted to walk out of that museum ready to explore, knowing that I’d done new things with my hands and new things with my imagination. Maybe I could find Shalaya Crump and Evan tomorrow, I thought. There was so much I wanted to explore. But before I could go forward, I had to go back under. Again.”

City’s newfound awareness of the intersection between past, present, and future inspires him to sacrifice his comfort for others. Instead of pursuing his own desires, City sacrifices his time and energy to memorialize and to honor his friends.