Meeting a Murderer

I wrote this a few weeks ago:

Sometimes writing it like being lost.  Not turned around or momentarily confused.  It is like being seriously, frighteningly lost, uncertain of which is way is up, how to get out, how far or how deep or wide the thing is that I’m inside of.  Sentences don’t do this to me, although, a paragraph has been known to leave me stumped.  A chapter can definitely make me feel lost.  Sometimes, however, I am lost in an entire book.  What once seemed like the perfect layout now feels sophomoric.  The story itself can start to feel thin and pointless.

When I’m lost I’m usually also exhausted, physically and mentally.  I can’t remember why I started and I just want to stop.  For lots of reasons, I can’t.  

At some point, I’ll usually remember the last time that I was lost, and the time before that, and the time before that.  With relief, I’ll recall that each time I was lost before I didn’t find my way out, the way out found me.  Sometimes a person will make a comment in passing about the weather or life in general and I’ll realize that their statement is the answer to my writing challenge.  Sometimes someone will read my work and make a simple statement that changes everything.  Other times, I just wake up one morning and know what needs to be done.

Today, I am lost and tired.  1% of my brain knows that it won’t last.  Change is on the horizon and I will find a way out.  99% of my brain is convinced that there is no way out.  Like being locked in a coffin I am anxious, sweating, desperate, and unable to remain calm.  I want to move, act, talk, eat, change my clothes, anything, I just have to keep going because the weight of being lost is heaviest when I am still and silent. 

I am fried and late and lost. 

I wrote the above piece because the ending of my book was lame.  In the first half of my book I learn about my grandfather and all about Greenwood, and then the second half  of the book is about me trying to uncover the story of his murder.  Then the book switches gears and sort of ends.  In the final chapter I write my theory about the murder and talk about how I’ll continue to research it.  Blah, blah, blah.  

Last year I was supposed to go visit Cork, the man who murdered my grandfather (I think).  I chickened out.  Read this and this.  Recently though, out of the fog of confusion I've felt about the ending to my book I realized something.

My book is unfinished because the story is unfinished.

In an excel file I have a list of chapters and the other day I added a new one called “Meeting a Murderer,” then I put a certified letter in the mail to Cork, asking him if I can meet with him.

Part of me doesn’t want to meet him because Cork may say or do something that marks the end of the road.  It's like I've been racing down a freeway that doesn't have a speed limit and meeting Cork is a brick wall falling into my path.  My work to understand my grandfather’s life and the murky circumstances surrounding his death may stop on a dime with the words of a man who could be insane.  Was he hired?  Did he do it for no reason or the oldest reason?  All of my questions might get answered when I sit across from a murderer.

But pushing that meeting off into infinity is not fair to the readers who will follow my quest.  It’s also not fair to Booker Wright.

In October I'm traveling to Mississippi and, if Cork agrees to it, I am meeting with a murderer.  Typing that feels profound.  I’m setting my plans in stone and this time, I will not turn back.  

Untethered

During the past year I've spent a lot of time thinking about family.  One of the early ideas that was floated around about the documentary, "Booker's Place: A Misssissippi Story", was focusing the doc on the reason I was searching for Booker Wright in the first place, the answers to which were buried deep in a host of family memories.

In an early draft of my book I wrote:
Family is the cord that keeps us tethered to the earth.  Its memories, habits and secrets are woven together to form a thick rope that both anchors us and makes us relevant.  Everything we do eventually floats away on aimless currents, but maybe there is something in us, impossible to name or pinpoint that renders us inexplicably unforgettable to family. 

"Family is the cord that keeps us tethered to the earth."  Looking back I realize that, growing up while feeling so disconnected from family left me with the belief that, if I could construct a sense of family or if I could I find a place to belong, "where everybody knows your name," that I would somehow be complete.

Many of my life choices were governed by a quest to find family.  My choice of friends, where to worship, who to marry, what groups to join were all determined by the level of family I hoped to build with strangers.  I didn't allow these relationships or choices to happen organically.  I was always thinking of the long term, always looking down the line 10 or 20 years into the relationship.  I was planning, calculating, even scheming to win hearts and find a place so that I wouldn't have to float, untethered.

At 37, I am finally realizing that this doesn't work.  Yes, I need to make choices for myself, but not based on a fear that I will one day be alone.  I have to spend a little time in my life, truly being untethered, to prove to myself that I can.  It's like I'm running from loneliness, but I always end up lonely because I chose my crowd for the wrong reasons.  I heard someone say once that, in life, it's just me, God, and the dirt.  I'm trying on that life for awhile.

Stained.

I'm sitting at my laptop studying photos of Booker's Place.  They were taken by the Greenwood Police Department the morning after my grandfather was shot.  My eye kept going back to something on the floor.  It looks as though he had concrete flooring, but part of it looked strange.

I realized that it was wet.  There's a long, wide path of moisture as if someone had tossed buckets of water on the floor.  In the middle of the water stain is a thin, red circle. It looks like an outline from a blood puddle that someone tried to wash clean.

I feel like I might throw up.

No More Homeschooling

I'm not homeschooling anymore.  Just typing that was like lifting the world off of my shoulders and watching it crash into the ground.  An Atlas shrug.  I can list a thousand reasons why I stopped, but then it would be like I was trying to justify my decision to you.  Suffice it say, it was a decision long in the making.  It was painful.

Homeschooling was more than a school choice, it was a way of life.  It was the sound of feet pounding through my house all day.  It was spontaneous hugs, kisses, and cuddles.  Now, it's gone.  Of course, my kids aren't gone. I still get to have them with me in the afternoons.  I enjoy them even more because now, I get to miss them.

Maybe they'll go to school for one year or ten.  I don't know.  What I do know is that I feel better.  Slower, refreshed, and less like the entire future of my children's lives is resting on how I spend every moment of every day.  It turns out that I'm not the mom I thought I was.  I strove to be her, but she was always just beyond my grasp. I really am this other mom.  A mom who wants a career.  A mom who can say good-bye to her kids every morning.

I have to be honest and authentic or I will be crazy.  So, here I am, doing what I love to do, doing what I have dreamed of doing - I am writing, and the only sound in the house is the whirring water that's racing in circles inside of my dishwasher.  I miss my children, but not enough to bring them back home, yet.  Which mom am I, again?  Oh, yeah, I'm the happy one.

Literacy

My son was recently diagnosed with dyslexia.  This came after I'd spent years homeschooling him and trying every reading method that I could get my hands on. At first I thought the problem was him, that he wasn't trying hard enough because he preferred to play with his toys than to do school with mommy.  Then, I thought it was me, and that I was just not a good enough teacher.  Finally, I became convinced that I just needed to find the right curriculum.

One day last year, we were doing school and it was like I was seeing him for the first time.  Something was wrong and it wasn't me, it wasn't him, and it wasn't the curriculum.  He could read on grade level, and he had excellent comprehension, but it was devastatingly difficult for him.  To read an entire paragraph he had to hit himself, pinch himself, and would usually cry out, but only after first exhibiting reluctance and anger.

In my house, dyslexia looks like a bad little boy.  It looks like ADD.  It does not look like a bonafide disorder.  When it was first recommended to me that I take him in to get tested for dyslexia, I was taken aback to discover that neither my insurance, or our local school district, recognized it as its own individual disorder.  We would have to pay out of pocket to save our son from illiteracy.

Thankfully, we can.  We're not rich, but we have investments and excellent credit. We could lose our house paying for his treatments, but we can still pay.  For some families, the cost may as well be in the millions as opposed to the thousands. Some families would never, ever be able to come up with the hourly rate required to get their children the help that they need.

I tend to feel sorry for myself.  When bad things happen, I often look to the sky and wonder what I've done to deserve the most recent calamity that's come into my life. The older I get, the more that I realize it's not all about me.  Nevertheless, when my son received his diagnosis I fell into a sad and fear-filled silence.  For days I wanted to ask why this had happened to my boy.  Why was such a sweet, smart child afflicted with a disorder that makes most people believe that they're dumb.

As I was having these thoughts, I was also thinking about the best way to build the board for Booker's Place, the new non-profit that I'm planning to launch this year, with the help of Lynn Roer from Ogilvy and Mather.

There are two grown men in my family who cannot read.  Booker was also illiterate, that makes three (one of them is a blood relative of Booker's).  There are some who believe that dyslexia is genetic.  I have to wonder if it runs in my family? I read here that African-American dyslexics are more likely to be misdiagnosed as being mildly mentally disabled than their white counterparts.

Are dyslexics whose skin is a little darker and whose families have little money, less likely to get a proper diagnosis?  The doctor who diagnosed my son charged $190 an hour.  They said there was a chance insurance may not cover it.  The testing lasted four hours.  How many families can afford that?

The timing of all of this - getting the diagnosis while starting Booker's Place, has made me wonder if I can incorporate dyslexia treatment into the free services we provide.  School supplies are great and necessary, we will still do that.  Learning to read, in this society however, is like learning to breathe.  It's all but impossible to thrive without it.

I am finding myself having another wildest dream.  What if I could hire a dyslexia specialist or a reading specialist to work in a city and travel between Booker's Place locations, providing specialized reading programs to underprivileged kids?  Maybe they could even make house calls.  It would be really expensive, but it would change the world, one struggling reader at a time.  It may also be what Booker Wright would do.

Booker's Place: The Movement

I'm learning that in life, it's important to dream big dreams.  Five years ago, I said that I wanted the world to know about Booker Wright.  This past July, Dateline NBC aired an hour long special about him.  There's talk about partnering with an educational company to make our movie, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, available for schools to purchase.  That means that kids around the country might be taught the story of Booker Wright while they're learning about Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks.  My wildest dream is coming true.  So, why stop there.  I'm having another, incredibly wild dream.

Blogging about it now feels incredibly nuts, because this dream is in its infancy. The edges of it are fuzzy and none of the details have been worked out.  But, like I've said more times than I can count, this blog space is nothing more than a record of my Booker Wright journey.  So, here's my new dream:

A couple of weeks ago, a woman who is now my HERO, called with an amazing idea.  Her name is Lynn Roer and she is the Director of Moving Images, Alternative Content and Events at Ogilvy and Mather (whew, that's a mouthful) - Ogilvy and Mather partnered with Raymond De Felitta to help produce our film.  Lynn had this great idea about turning Booker's Place into a place for school children who may need school supplies, a bite to eat, or even free tutoring.

This is the perfect way to honor my grandfather's legacy for one reason - he was all about education.  Booker Wright didn't get to go school because he had to work to support his family.  He entered adulthood without literacy.  Not being able to read never sat well with him.  I've heard that, a few years before he was murdered, Booker hired a tutor and he finally achieved his lifelong dream of learning to read.

I've met scores of adults who knew Booker when they were kids and they all describe a man who was a broken record when it came to talking about the importance of getting an education.  He even held back money from the paychecks of some of his employees, only to hand them a wad of cash when it was time for them to go out and buy school supplies.  He bought a bus to drive kids from outlying farming towns into Greenwood so that they could attend Head Start and on and on.  You see why I love him, so.  He was a great man, even when no one was watching.

The original idea was to re-open Booker's Place in Greenwood, Mississippi.  The wild idea is to have a Booker's Place in every state and, one day, in every major city.  Booker's Place could be a corner or a bookshelf in a library with free school supplies.  It could be a place to call and make an appointment for free tutoring.

The point is that lots of kids slip through the cracks because they can't even come up with the basics.  My kids recently went to public school for the first time and I was amazed at all the stuff I had to buy for them - it was not cheap and I know that a lot of families simply can't carry the financial burden.

So, come on, let's start a movement.  Please don't think that all you can do is provide money.  Talk about this.  Facebook about it.  Get the people you know energized.  We'll need supplies, volunteers, ideas, and influence, but more than anything, we'll need you to care and to stay engaged.

Click here to sign up for my newsletter.  I'll be sending out updates on Booker's Place each month to let you know how we're doing and to ask your help in getting the word out.

Shouldn't every kid get a fair shot at an education?  Join with me, to do all that we can to make that happen.