Writing About Lives

I haven’t even had this blog for more than two weeks and only now am I starting to see how useful it can be

Yesterday I got up to find this note from a reporter at the Pine Bluff Commercial.

“Hello — Saw your Web site and thoughts on Grady. Just wanted to let you know that the city will be marking its centennial on April 8 and a centennial celebration and all-time Grady School reunion is planned for April 28 and 29. I’m a reporter at the Pine Bluff Commercial and recently wrote a book on the history of Southeast Arkansas, including Grady. The book, “Bayou Country,” has a lot of photos from Grady, including many of blacks there in the 1920s and 1930s. A white woman by the name Cornelia Kirkley, who married W.F. “Bill” Foster, took assorted pictures of, collected recipes from and interviewed a number of blacks there at the time. Her works were put into a book entitled “Across the Horizon,” published 2006. It may include some photos of or information on some of your ancestors or family friends. The photos and book are now part of a black history display at the Arkansas History Commission in Little Rock. Her grandson-in-law works at the paper here, too. Hope you can make it down for the centennial celebration and reunion. I’ve never been to New York, but I can imagine what a vast difference there must be between Manhattan and Grady. The paper will have a story on the centennial and the book and photos in the April 8 edition. If you make it down this way, you can check out my book, which is on sale at the newspaper office. I appreciate you being devoted to your grandparents. All of mine are deceased now, and I miss them. Best of luck to you . . .”

He had apparently Googled “Grady, Arkansas” and my brief listing appeared. His note confirms for me that the remoteness of that little town is a timeless setting for my work, be they fictional or not. His book, should I get my hands on it, will help me frame my material more solidly.

I have yet to meet an Emily I didn’t like.

First of all, I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson whom I discovered when I was in high school.

Then there was a curly headed girl named Emily I met at the Missouri Botanical Garden between the summer of my junior and senior years at Southwest High School in St. Louis in 1983. We participated in an outdoor leadership program called ECO-ACT. She attended the prosperous Clayton High School and was the single most liberated, free thinking teenager I had ever met.

There was Emily a student I taught at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. She grew up in Amish country, which I didn’t know Indiana even had at the time. This Emily wrote a fearless story for the student newspaper about students getting drunk on a back country road in Putnam County. People were furious at her. She didn’t flinch. And when she made the leap to broadcast journalism, interning at NBC’s Today Show, she let me stay at her posh apartment for three weeks long after she had vacated. It was my first time living on the Upper West Side and my longest stint in the city. That period helped me become a denizen of uptown Manhattan and subsequently the Columbia University area.

And last summer I got to hang out with Emily, the daughter of a colleague from The Salt Lake Tribune. From the time that Emily was in junior high school in Layton, Utah all the way through her marriage to a guy who is destined for greatness in corporate America, she has called me “Uncle Samuel.” No one had ever called me that. It’s not likely that my sister will ever have children.

Now I want to introduce to you my newest; Emily Raboteau is the author of “The Professor’s Daughter,” and an assistant professor of English at City College of New York. The novel, loosely based on her life, is about a biracial young woman who happens to be the daughter of a Princeton professor. I’m a member of something called Our Word, a group which supports writers of color in Columbia’s MFA program. Our Word also allows us to meet one-on-one with published writers. It’s one of the rare times we get writers of color to give us a close reading and comment on our work. A few days ago I was scheduled to meet Emily at Max’s Cafe on Amersterdam, a popular hang out for Columbia students.

Because I had only seen her picture in the book, when I got there at about 11:40 a.m., I wasn’t sure she was there. I looked all around. I noticed a very petite white woman sitting outside on the patio. I surely didn’t want to approach some random white woman with some story about meeting a writer. Who would believe that? The woman on the patio looked like she could pass for a grad student.

Frantic that my hour was diminishing, I went outside and called Rowena, the Our Word coordinator, to make sure I was at the right restaraunt. As I stood outside, I looked over again and saw this tiny woman sitting in the corner. She reminded me of my mother’s neighbors in St. Louis. They are from New Orleans and for the longest time I thought they were white. If you’d just seen their skin under a light and didn’t have the chance to see their faces, you would have thought so, too.

“I know she’s there,” Rowena assured me on the phone.

The woman whom I had been eyeballing had strolled down the street. Couldn’t have been her. Five minutes later, she shows up at my table and asked me if I am Samuel.

We laughed and talked about not being sure who was whom. For the next 45 minutes she critiqued two of my short stories “Fassie’s Tale,” and “The Lancome Lad,” and had the most affirming things to say them both. Affirming things is an understatement. She was highly complimentary about my work, in a way I rarely experienced within the MFA program. As a nonfiction writer, writing fiction feels a little like walking on a high wire without a net. If I fall the splat will be grand. She was the second visiting writer to really enjoy these pieces because they are about boundaries, sexuality, race and religion. We talked about everything from James Baldwin to hypocrites in churches. The time zipped by. She told me to attend the Callaloo Writing Workshop in Texas, a place where writers of color get a lot of nurturing from published writers and that I should submit my work to their literary journal. I will indeed.

A few days later during a question and answer session that I led with Emily in front of a group of MFA students, she said that for every published piece she had in literary journals, she had hundreds and hundreds of pieces rejected. Hundreds. Ignore the rules about not submitting things simultaneously to literary journals or else it would “take years from your life,” she told us. She was brutal about how disgruntled she was with the first few book covers and the way the marketing division at Picador targeted blacks for her book. In the end, black women were her biggest readers, something which surprised her.

I thought she was a fearless funny woman because of her wonderous, bold prose and the relentlessness in the voice. But I knew she was a real spitfire when she opened her question and answer session with a comment about lesbian haircuts and nipples. (An insider Our Word joke that would take up too much space to rehash.)

I have yet to meet an Emily I didn’t like.

Well my friends, the treatment that Cupcake Brown and I had been working on based on her best-selling book, “A Piece of Cake,” is dead.

She and I befriended each other after I wrote a story for The San Diego Union-Tribune about her journey from drug and alcoholism abuse, prostitution and the Crips, to finishing in a top spot of the University of San Francisco’s Law School in 2001. The way readers connected with that story convinced me that people love reading about one another’s lives more than the mayhem presented in daily newspapers.

A year later she and I collaborated on a book proposal which got her a reputable agent in Los Angeles and a deal with Random House’s Crown Division. She wrote her own book, I just helped with the proposal and experienced the joys and pains of the editing process with her as an early reader. Now that the book has landed on The New York Times Bestseller list and made it all the way up to #1 on the Times of London, we had hoped we could ride the wave of interest into Hollywood.

It took us months to get a first draft of the treatment done. I’m in New York. She’s three time zones away in the Bay Area. After my Columbia professor who was kind enough weigh in with a fairly harsh critique, Cup felt that his comments were so on point that neither of us had the time to get a rewrite ready in time. We were also competing against two proven sceenwriters who have been made acclaimed films. There was no point in having our names attached to a product that couldn’t compete. I respect that given her potential franchise.

The aggravating thing is if we had had more time, maybe another week, we could have implemented his changes. Her life as an author-lawyer and mine in the last leg of my Columbia University graduate school experience, did not allow us to make the deadline her agent and the producers have for the treatments. I am barely learning the ropes of the publishing business. The script business might as well be on Pluto, no longer even another planet.

Thanks to all of my friends who have been extremely supportive – especially a well-placed movie industry insider and a Columbia professor who was relentless in his critique. After hearing the news that she had decided to not submit the treatment, in an email the professor welcomed me to “the crowd with unproduced treatments and scripts.” A 20-page treatment seals our membership.

In the meantime I will be focusing my energy on getting Grace Bumbry’s book proposal done, which will take me to Europe for three weeks and getting my thesis project polished for the committee. In the next few weeks I will be reading three times in New York, leading a panel discussion of writers and coming to the final arc of my course work. No time for pity.

And just maybe if those two treatments that have been submitted by pros bomb – which could totally happen, Cupcake and I could come back roaring and be in business.

The mood of this photo, taken back when I lived in San Diego, expressing how melancholy I have been feeling lately. I’m calling it the graduate school blahs. Barely keeping up with the assignments. Barely getting out the door on time. Barely, barely, barely. This too shall pass. I need sunshine desperately.

Thanks to all of you who have commented by voice mail, email and verbally to me about my blog. A special thanks to Suzanne and Jennifer for posting comments. Once I figure out how to share them with the world, I will; if that’s possible. It’s going to take some time getting used to posting something regularly and keeping a nice mixture of visual elements in the mix.

For the last two years I have been the only black male enrolled in nonfiction at Columbia University’s creative writing program. The only one. The semester before I arrived there was one more, a fellow refugee from newspapers whom I happen to know.

At first I thought it was just Columbia because of the expensive price tag. But I’ve seen blacks in fiction and poetry my entire time here. Even at the national Associated Writing Programs conventions where thousands of academics gather, there are only a few black people present and virtually none in nonfiction. The truth is there are almost NO blacks producing mass or literary nonfiction. In journalism I found a number of blacks writers at newspapers. And with the huge nonfiction career of James Baldwin, it never occured to me that there would be such a dearth with journalism’s distant cousin.

I have been in email contact with Jewell Parker Rhodes, the author of “An African-American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction,” and she confirmed it. Her book, while it highlights a lineage of black writers who have focused on history and culture, there has not been much of a market for non-fiction by and for blacks. Rhodes book is a road map for others to follow.

In preparing to write this entry, I was pleased to find this essay by a guy by the name of Harry Dunbar, of which I will quote liberally but credit. (www.queenhyte.com/dobb/dobb_archives/dobb_01/mar_01.htm) This really nails it.

“The black male nonfiction author faces formidable problems. His presumptive audience, other black males, has the reputation of being composed of neither writers nor readers. Blacks in general are not said to constitute much of a literary market. The conventional wisdom is that to hide something from black people one need only put it in a book and label it “nonfiction.” Against these odds, the wonder is not that the black male nonfiction writer does not produce a number of New York Times bestsellers, but that he produces at all.”

“We believe that the black male nonfiction writer must see himself in the way that academic writers see themselves. He must, from the start, see that his audience is small. He must believe, however, that it is a discerning one. If he cannot see himself and his audience in this way, he might as well turn to fiction and the concocting of fantastic stories that defy reality. There is obviously a large audience, black and white, which is looking for an escape mechanism. I am reminded of the experience I had at the Book Market of the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta in 1996. I was signing my book, A Brother Like Me: A Memoir, at a table alongside that of Omar Tyree. During a lull when neither of us had anyone before us, he decided to leaf through my book. When he finished, he asked me if everything in it was true. I told him that to the best of my ability it was. While I cannot remember the exact words of his reply, I recall very distinctly that he seemed amazed at running into an author who wrote nonfiction.”

Hundreds, if not thousands of black writers are choosing to tell their stories under the guise of fiction where, though the story may be true, the names, places and incidents are completely fictionalized leaving people guessing about what really happened. Very often fiction is truly the lie that tells the truth. It is the rare bird who can write dazzling fiction and nonfiction. Good fiction amazes me with the freedom of the prose. I wish I could do it. For now I have chosen non-fiction. Or maybe it has chosen me.

But with books like Cupcake Brown’s “A Piece of Cake,” Chris Gardner’s “Pursuit of Happyness,” and Ron Stodghill’s “Redbone: Money, Malice and Murder in Atlanta,” there are signs that times are a changing. I sure hope so.

sam@writingaboutlives.com

On a recent Sunday, a friend and I attended a very ecumenical church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We were sitting in the balcony and my friend pointed out a lovely older black woman with a full head of white hair. “Isn’t that Lorraine’s grandmother?” I squinted trying to see her but wasn’t sure. Throughout the hour-long service we both kept our eyes on her. When she got up and helped collect the offering, my friend leaned over to me and said. “I’m pretty sure that’s her.” Once the service ended we dashed down to the main lobby and greeted her. When she saw my friend, the older woman screamed my friend’s name and embraced her warmly. The woman wore a svelte red sweater with the most ornate collar that lay gently across her upper torso. The woman indeed was who we thought she was, the grandmother of a colleague of ours at Columbia University.

She looked ever so elegant with her tall, lean frame, appearing to be in her 70s or early 80s. There was something majestic about this woman, who smiled and carried herself as if she was a dignitary. When she spoke, words of beauty, kindness and gentility flowed from her lips. She had been involved in that church for years. She was waving and speaking to a lot of people as they exited that day. We were boasting of her beauty and gracefulness, which seems to defy age. She then told us she had been waiting in line at pastry shop a few days prior when a woman leaned over and said: ‘You know you look like you are just the embodiment of goodness that I am going to buy your pastry for you today.’ She lives on the Upper East Side, which has a certain upwardly mobile connotation to it. And she is not a maid, but rather involved in fundraising for charity and art. Dainty. Delicate. Tasteful. When I close my eyes and imagine the very image of an African-American grandmother, I get the image of Lorraine’s grandmother, someone who would bake cookies, wear reading glasses or knit scarves for people. But when I open my eyes, I will have to reckon with my very own is just the opposite of this woman. We call her Madea, an abbreviation for Mother Dear. She’s a lot more akin to Tyler Perry’s character Madea, the gun-wielding, big purse-carrying caricature than not.

One of the very first things I remember her saying when I was a small child visiting her in rural Arkansas was this. “Go to the yard and pick which switch you want me to beat your ass with.” For eight consecutive summers beginning in 1974 until 1981, my mother sent my sister and me away from our comfortable home in St. Louis 500 miles away to Grady, Ark., to stay with our maternal grandparents, Madea and Granddaddy Roy. This was a rural place where hogweeds and sunflowers were plentiful. We called it “going down south.” Granddaddy was gone all day working. We were forced to spend it with her, a frightening woman who sometimes locked us out of the house, with the flies and mosquitoes so she could sit quietly and watch soap operas, eat ice cream and use her sewing machine. “Chillun don’t belong in the house all day. Get your asses out there and play,” she would blurt out as she slammed the screen door shut. Even if we mashed our faces up against the window, she ignored us keeping her attention on Luke and Laura or Mrs. Chandler.

Madea is a church going woman, too, who often made us go accompany her to the Baptist church most Sundays. The services felt more like a funeral than celebration of life and victory. I remember once a woman named Ms. Dorothy was up testifying, which means sharing a story with the entire congregation in her Sunday best. Madea thought Ms. Dorothy was taking too much time. “Sit down Dorothy quit lying!” Madea blurted out. Dorothy sat down immediately.

When I was 12 years old, I stepped on a nail, which actually pierced my foot. I walked all summer with a limp. Meanwhile, King, my cousins’ German Shepherd had bitten my ten-year-old sister rather viciously. Fortunately the dog did not have rabies. My grandmother was sitting down watching television when I hobbled by leaning my weight on my left foot. My sister limped by nursing the wounds from the dog bite, when my grandmother spit out: “I don’t know why in the hell Elizabeth brings these lazy ass, no account, St. Louis chillun down here every year.” I thought it was a heartless, cruel thing to say. I came to hate my grandmother harsh ways and words enough to stay away for years. And I wasn’t the only grandchild who felt the adder’s sting.

My grandmother, now 87, has a severe case of osteoporosis that causes her to bend over as if she is about to touch the floor. She can’t navigate very many stairs at all. Yet her tongue remains as tart as hot peppers. It has taken me turning 40 years old before I could began to understand my grandmother. The fact is this, she was born in 1920, never had any schooling beyond the eighth grade, grew up in the Deep South as the mother of eight children and a infidel of a husband gave me a new understanding. She feels justified in spewing out bitter words. I can see now how the forces that have shaped her life have embittered her and it is pointless for me to begrudge her. In recent years she has been putting out the word that she wants to hear from her grandchildren before she dies. Few responded. I called her about a year ago. Unfortunately she has lost almost all of her hearing and refuses to wear a hearing aid.

“How you doing Madea?”
“Huuuuuuuuuhhhhh? Who is this on this phone?”
“Can you hear me? It’s Elizabeth’s son, Anthony?”
“It is? Boy how come you are mumbling on this damned phone?”
“Can you hear me now? Is this better,” I yelled into the receiver.

The phone conversation ends abruptly when she hands the phone to another person in the room and complains. I hear her mumbling in the background that she wishes that “crazy ass boy would speak like he had some sense.”

Grady, Ark. – This town of 523 residents has captured my imagination in recent months as I have been writing about my sister and my summers here as children. It’s so funny to come back to a place that remember vividly and see how it has changed. Or how much smaller the houses are.

My grandparents, known as Grandchild and Madea, who are 90 and 87 respectively, have spent all of their 70 years together living here or within a 15-mile radius of here in the nearby Mosco, Tamo and Linwood, all within Lincoln County.

Now that I live in New York City where subways, buses and taxis take me everywhere I want to go and there’s a Starbucks every few blocks, I had to reckon the difference between the rural and urban. The contrast doesn’t get much more stark than comparing Grady to Manhattan.

You can always respond at sam@writingaboutlives.com

Hello,

A few weeks ago I launched something called New York City dispatches. I wrote some very brief tales of things that have happened to me in The City and emailed it on a group distribution list to a handful of friends. They loved them and asked me to consider posting a blog. This is a response to them.

I named it WRITINGABOUTLIVES.COM because in my 13 years of print journalism and my continued development as an essayst, that’s what I seem to do best. This website will be a patchwork of observations from the writing life, pop culture and fun news snippets as I make a gigantic leap from Columbia’s MFA program and into that of a working writer. Ha, ha. Right. Stay tuned as I learn how to navigate this system and start blogging regularly. This will primarily be a blog.

As I become familiar with this, there will be links to my favorite sites, photos and much. Most of all I want this to be HIGHLY entertaining, engaging and an absolute blast of fun, or else, why do it?

A big shout out to Adam McClean, a DePauw University Media Fellow, who set this up within 30 minutes. Adam you are destined for great things and thank you very much for sharing your electronic excellence and above all your friendship.

Be Lifted.

Samuel