Rules for Writers

1. When you're writing at Starbucks and someone says, "You're still working on your book."  Remind them that crafting a provocative, powerful, yet delicately beautiful narrative, that also sticks to the absolute truth of humanity is not as simple as drafting an email.
2. When you meet someone who says, "I'm a doctor now, but I'm going to write books when I retire."  Cock your head to the side and say, "I'm a writer now, but I'm going to perform a few cardiothoracic surgeries when I retire."  
3. When people say, "These days you can write almost anything, it's the editors who put it all together and do all the work."  Hit them on the noggin, turn, and run really fast in the other direction.
4. When someone says, "Yeah, I'm going to write a book one of these days," but then can't name a single book they've ever finished reading, you should do the following.  Tilt your head back and laugh out loud for at least a full minute.  
5. When some random person takes the time to not only read your work, but to tell you how it moved them, remember that moment for the rest of your life. A writer creates a structure made out of words that are reluctantly pulled together, slowly, one at a time.  If you manage to complete your word structure and then find that it has inspired the soul of a complete stranger, then something miraculous has just occurred. The ability to do that is a gift, one that only God can grant.
6. Every day work as if you have the aforementioned gift.  Hope against hope that you are one of the precious few who can bring life to death, set hope alight, and remove the blinders that keep us from seeing our true selves. That's what it is to be a writer.  The only two requirements are that you nurture your own capacity to dream and that you never, ever give up.  Even when it feels as if people have run out of their ability to believe in you, you must never give up.  

Anthony Bourdain - Parts Unknown

I found out a little late that Booker's story, or at least part of it, was going to be included in one of Anthony Bourdain's food shows.  Parts Unknown is the name of the show.  I'm hoping to be able to get my hands on  the episode to see it for myself, but I did hear that they aired Booker's monologue.

I'm thrilled, beyond thrilled really, because more people are learning about his story. No one in my family even knew my grandfather made those statements until about seven years ago.  He protected his daughters and my whole family from his thoughts and feelings about his work at Lusco's.  When we finally found the footage it brought both joy and heartache.  Joy because we could see him, moving and speaking and laughing.  Heartache because of how much shame he endured every night just to make a living.

I read Anthony's blog post about the Delta.  Yes, it is an amazing place.  It's virtually impossible to measure all the things we have as Americans that originated there.  But like an Achilles heel, the history of slavery and the legacy of segregation will always be a part of the South's rich inheritance.  The story of man's subjugation to man is written all over the Delta.  It's painted on people's faces, it's in the space that often still separates whites and blacks, it's in their laws, their customs, and is an integral fiber in the every day lives of today's Mississippians.

If you find yourself interested in the Mississippi Delta's rich, tragic past try not to gawk as though observing a car wreck or even a horrifyingly beautiful work of art.

Howard Zinn, one of the nation's most beloved historians, said the South is a mirror.  When we look at her, we're seeing a concentrated version of the rest of the nation.  The Mississippi Delta is not some random, scandal-ridden anomaly, a stain on our nation, and the excuse for why the state ranks last in almost every barometer that measures quality of life.

The Delta is none of those things.

What is it?  It's us.  It's all that we're capable of - good and bad.  It's what is beautiful and tragic about the human spirit.

It's really not all that different down there after all.

Kanye West and the Race Problem

The other day I saw a news story about something called Bound 3, a spoof on Kanye West's Bound 2 music video.  Bound 3 features James Franco and Seth Rogen acting out the parts of Kanye and his girlfriend, Kim Kardashian.  The video had me in stitches.  What cracked me up most, what was seriously hilarious, were the lyrics coming out of Franco's mouth.

He talks about how he is tired and the girl in the song must be tired as well because apparently they've been hurt in love, etc.  At one point Franco sings: "I'm tired, you're tired...Jesus wept."  And then puts his arms out to the sides as if he is on a cross.  I laughed so hard that I almost peed my pants.

I decided to check out West's original video to see which parts Franco and Rogen had grossly exaggerated. To my complete and utter shock, the answer was: none.  Every body movement was the same and the lyrics were the same.  I started Googling  "lyrics Bound 2" because I was sure that something must be wrong with my computer.  Maybe Kanye's video was up but Franco's singing was in the background?

No, those were the real lyrics.  At one point, West actually says, "I want to f--- you on the sink and then give you something to drink."  Also, for no apparent reason other than maybe needing a rhyme, he says, while rubbing his head "Got a fresh cut straight out the salon b----." If you don't believe me, Google the lyrics for yourself.  Also....Here's a side-by-side version of the two videos.

I honestly, sincerely could not believe how Kanye West could take himself seriously.  Then, I theorized that maybe reporters act captivated when he talks and so he believes that he is some sort of genius, a prophet, Shakespeare no less.  In case you don't want to follow those links, all of these are things he's said about himself.  Then, I thought that maybe he is surrounded by assistants and handlers who are impressed with his money and good looks and he reads that as them being in awe of his "theories."

That's the conclusion I came to.  Ultimately, I didn't care, I had some really good laughs that night.  He won't be the first or the last person to be polluted by celebrity.  I didn't think anymore about it, until I read "In Defense of Kanye West," an article by Rawiya Kameir.

I think one of the people who commented put it best when they said that calling every criticism of a black male "racist" dilutes the term.  I am a black woman who makes a living writing and speaking about issues of race, class, and privilege.  This is my wheelhouse and Kameir, you got it wrong.  Your heart is in the right place, but with this article you are hurting the movement, hindering progress, giving people an excuse to keep the phrase "playing the race card" in our vernacular.

Being racially sensitive is not about giving blacks a pass to act idiotically.  The bar of logic, sanity, art, genius, or anything else doesn't get lowered for us because our ancestors were slaves.  Being able to take criticism and respond to it point-by-point is what it means to be grown up.  It's what it means to be in the arena, to be a businessman, to be equal.  That's what we wanted, right, equality?

It's okay if some people think West is a genius.  They can love his music.  They can even believe that he is a radical, a visionary.  Historically, when someone has gone way outside of the box there have always been those, and will always be those, who laugh at them, ridicule them, call them crazy.  So, if you believe that Kanye West is some sort of musical messiah, go for it, but don't call me a racist for thinking he is nothing more than comic relief.

Kameir, if you need a Kanye-related soap box to stand on, why don't you theorize about the reasons why Bound 2 uses the phrase "b----" four times.  As a woman, that is something I do have a problem with.

Facing My Fears

Only a few people in the United States (I think the number might be 2) hold a degree in library science AND have a genealogy certificate.  I spent my morning with one of these experts today.

There are details about my grandfather's life that I need to confirm.  One of the possibilities is mind-boggling and amazing, but unlikely.  One of the others is downright scary.  It's kind of the 11th hour.  I've known that I need to nail down these pieces for some time now.  I have to finish this book, ideally by the end of the year, so I'm running out of time.  I won't to go to print without diligently completing my research.

People have memories.  I've relied on those memories to construct a story, a story that's been painful to bear at times, but that has redefined my entire life.  But I'm making a public statement in the form of a book and I can't do that without knowing for sure that every stone has been turned over.  But I feel so afraid.

A few summers ago I was in Mississippi and I was learning things about my grandfather.  Even though he'd been dead for 38 years he was still a volatile figure.  People (both black and white) still loved or hated him.

How can you hate someone whose been dead for 38 years?  There were people who couldn't wait to come out of the woodwork to share their stories about what a horrible man he was.  I was devastated.  Looking back I don't know why.  Nobody is perfect.  But somehow I had let myself believe that his excellence would rub off on me, that he would shine bright from the beyond and that I'd be able to feel his rays warming me when I needed him most.

When people shared those negative things about him two years ago I was shattered.  I remember being in Greenwood and having to remind  myself to walk, to exhale, because all I wanted to do was curl up in a dusty cotton field and waste away.  My tongue felt heavy on the rough of my mouth, my palms were sweaty, lips shaking.  I'd worked so hard to construct a hero and he was being torn down, in part, because of my own research.

I'm kind of in that place again, only in some ways it's worse.  Now I'm not just up against people's memories, but facts.  It's a good thing.  I have an incredibly talented and generous woman helping me.  But I'm still afraid.

A Delta Discussion

I've been working hard to bring Greenwood to life on the page, and it's working.  I have an amazing research assistant who tirelessly scours digital archives and reaches out to professors in an effort to get the most accurate data we can.  The more that I learn about Greenwood in the 1960s, the more amazed I am.  There's so much about what happened in that small town that sheds light on how regular, everyday people could seemingly ignore systematic, sustained societal racism.

When the documentary about my grandfather premiered in New York City in April, 2012, someone from the audience asked how I would respond to black Christians who hate homosexuals.  He seemed to feel that it was hypocritical for blacks to talk about the oppression of yesterday if they were actively engaged in oppressing homosexuals today.  I agreed with him, but then I explained that every group has their jihad.  Every group has that subset of extremists.  Just because a person is a member of a group, doesn't mean that they represent all of the other members of that group, or that they agree with every idea that comes from that group.

In towns like Greenwood, there were men and women who made it their mission to maintain a segregated state.  What blows me away is the lengths that they went to in order to achieve their goals.  Very, very, very few books talk about this, but there was a newsletter called "A Delta Discussion" that was distributed door to door.  The newsletter was filled with dire predictions about what would happen if the schools were integrated.  They included stories from far off communities that had tried to integrate and then had incidents of violence.  These newsletters also included the names of white store owners who were enforcing the Civil Rights Act, by allowing blacks to patronize their establishments.  Whites were encouraged to stop going to these stores all together.

It's important to remember that Greenwood was a small town, surrounded by plantations.  Most whites in Greenwood had known the other whites in Greenwood for all of their lives.  These relationships had been establishments generations before the civil rights movement came along.  Most whites had grown up with a distorted view of blacks.  They were too close to it to question it.  Then people from the outside (from the Northern states) began to question how Southern blacks were being treated.  Those questions were challenged, not by strangers, but by the neighbors.  Whites who were racist in Greenwood had an enormous amount of influence over other whites because of the familiarity between the two groups.  

Imagine having someone come into your town for a visit and tell you that your wife is unhappy in your marriage.  Your friends tell you not to listen to this stranger.  They can all but prove to you that your wife is happy  Your wife is silent.  Most blacks over the age of 25 were relatively silent on civil rights until the tide started to turn.  Pretending that things weren't as bad for blacks as Northern whites were describing was pretty simple to do.

The efforts to maintain segregation became a complex, intricate, and expertly executed campaign.  The campaign struck people where they would feel it the most.  The average Greenwood citizen was made to believe that if they let integration occur that they would lose their children.  Their children would marry blacks who, according to the campaign were beast-like illiterates.  Many believed that blacks were more sexual than whites.  Why did they believe these things?  Do you believe the earth is round?  How do you know?  Have you personally conducted science experiments to prove it or do you just know because that's what someone in authority told you?

Obviously, I don't support or condone racism or people who ignore racism.  But if I seek only to distance myself from the "white Southerner" and lump then all in with Byron De La Beckwith, then I'm missing an opportunity to learn an important lesson about human nature.  I've forced myself to really ponder whether or not I would have the eyes to see past the rhetoric and see the oppression of the people around me if I was a white middle class person living in Greenwood in the 1960s.

What I know is that Booker Wright provided that opportunity for many Greenwood whites.  He did something that removed their blinders.  And for that, I am thankful.

Family Silence

A few weeks ago I was in Alaska and someone in the audience asked a question that comes up a lot.  "How has this experience impacted your family...are they proud..has it brought them joy....?"  I tried to briefly explain how every step we take to honor Booker Wright comes with the a deepening knowledge of what was lost. So, it's been painful.  The audience was satisfied.

If they only knew.

Sometimes the tiniest details can bring out the strongest reactions in my family. Person A will say that Person B did XYZ.  Person B's cousin will wonder why Person B never mentioned doing XYZ to them.  The cousin feels hurt, left out, and they question why Person B kept this from them.  Even if XYZ is a small detail, it makes the cousin question other things about Person B.  The cousin doesn't know how to feel about the relationship they once had.  Was it all a lie?  They can't get to the bottom of it because Person B is dead.  An unanswerable question has been planted in the cousin's mind and the only way to get rid of it is to forget.

The cousin becomes a lot less talkative.  They stop returning my calls and may even discourage others in the family from talking to me.  Person A will start to feel guilty about stirring up pain and will also pull away from me or, at a minimum, show extreme caution the next time .

Every time I get on the phone with someone in my family they act like anything they say might appear in my book.  The fact is, they're right.  I'm collecting all of these stories for a reason.  So, part of me understands their discomfort.  Part of me has a hard time with it, though.  I'm trying to get as close to the truth as possible.  There are so many things about Booker that I will never know.  But I want to get the details that I can correct.  I don't want to be wrong.

Multiple this by 20 details, one hundred conversations, countless moments and lots of dead ancestors with skeletons in their closets.

One of the topics that comes up again and again when I talk to audiences about my grandfather's story is the idea of family silence within communities of color.  So many adults simply don't know their family stories, oftentimes because those stories are ones of humiliation and pain.  Aside from details here and there, a knowledge of a place of birth, a marriage, a death, so many of us don't know the ins and out, the stuff that glistens from the nooks and crannies.  We don't know and we don't think to ask.  We live with each other day in and day out unconcerned about what came before us.  Until someone comes knocking and unearths it all.

People change their stories.  Loved ones hide from me.  I don't always know why.

I do know that losing someone you love is indescribably painful.  Finding out later that they weren't who you thought they were is something else altogether.

Guilt

I keep writing about this meeting that I’m going to have on Sunday because I feel numb every time I think about it and in my mind, feeling numb means covering something up.  I think, or I hope, that in these writings I am getting closer to the core of what’s eating at me.

Last night I was sitting on a friend’s couch trying to find the words to describe my apprehension.  Whenever I express concern about going, people usually remind me that there will be guards, etc.  But I’m not afraid that Cork will harm me.  Deep, deep down I feel a certainty that when I sit across from him I will be assaulted, not by him, but by a suffocating sadness. 

Cork started getting arrested when he was 14.  The first time was because he’d stolen pots from a department store and was caught trying to sell them.  He was extremely poor.  I often wonder what he was going to buy with that money.  Drugs weren’t prevalent in Greenwood back then.  I keep thinking that maybe he was just hungry.  Maybe he needed money for food.  Maybe he needed help instead of punishment.

By the time he was 22 he’d been arrested 18 times, and then he killed Booker Wright.  He went to jail, then prison, and has been incarcerated for the last 39 years.  What kind of a life is that?  What bothers me about our visit is that I don’t really care about him, and I don’t think that anyone else does either.  I'm meeting with because I want to take something from him, his memories. 

I will walk in there with my Nordstrom jeans on, and sit across for him for as long as it pleases me to do so, then I will leave and never look back.  I will step into this life of loss and tragedy for my own gain.  What will it be like to sit across from someone who hasn’t been able to spend their time how they want to, or hop in a car and go for a drive on a whim?  It’s like realizing all of a sudden that I am coated with a putrid, nose-burning, un-concealable stench of privilege.  I wonder if this is what white guilt feels like. 

A Killing at the Grill

There's a restaurant in Greenwood (NOT Lusco's) that, for many blacks, was the primary symbol of segregation during the movement.  It's still open today and is one of only a handful of sit down restaurants that even offers lunch in Greenwood. Nevertheless, most Greenwood blacks have never eaten there.

During the making of Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, Raymond De Felitta and I interviewed a woman named Marie Tribitt, a childhood friend of Booker's.  Marie told us the story of a man who was most likely mentally disabled.  He had a job cleaning floors at this whites' only establishment in Greenwood decades ago. According to Marie, one day the man was mopping the floor and he accidentally touched a white woman's foot with his mop.  The woman became very angry. Later that day, the man was shot dead.

Many of my white friends from Greenwood have been angered by this story and the fact that it was included in the film at all.  They've never heard it and don't believe that something like that could ever have happened in their town.  I was on the fence about it until Thursday night.

I just got back from Greenwood where I screened Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, at MVSU, the local state university there.  A black man stood up and recalled the challenges he'd faced while living in Greenwood when segregation was upheld by the police.  He told a story of something that happened when he was nine years old.  A black man was in this same restaurant and he was mopping the floor.  He spilled a little water on the foot of a white woman, who then became irate. Someone tried to calm her down, tell her that it was an accident, that he meant no harm, and that it was just a little water.  She could not be soothed.  Later that night the man with the mop was murdered.

Sometimes I think there are two Mississippis.  Otherwise, half the people talking to me must be liars.  I'm not a god, I have no magic, I cannot discern a lie from the truth when the story is older than I am.  Sometimes people argue that if there is no record, then there was no crime.  However, the Greenwood library is filled with white history and almost completely void of black history.  Finding public photos of Greenwood blacks from the 1950s and earlier doing anything other than hanging from a tree is almost impossible.  If there is no record of them, then were there no blacks in Greenwood at all?

Sadly, the police rarely investigated the murders of poor black men in Greenwood unless pressured to do so by outside forces.  The idea that this man lost his life in such a way, for such a simple mistake seems absurd to many whites in Greenwood and completely plausible to many blacks.

What does that tell us?  Beyond this story, what does that say?  Blacks remember, with a clarity that cannot be compromised, that there was a time when their lives were worthless to the white people in their community.  Whites remember their parents feeling trapped and not knowing how to navigate in the segregated society that a strong few wanted to keep in place.  Whose version of Mississippi shall prevail?  Whose truth is the Truth?

I tend to think that both are true, depending on which side of the river you grew up on.  If I say this murder didn't happen because I cannot prove it, then that means that countless black murders that were never investigated also didn't happen.  If I say I believe it because two sources recall it, then I am following fanatics who want to exacerbate the problems of the past to justify the troubles of today.

I am not a judge.  I am a woman in search of the stories that shaped the world my grandfather lived in.  If blacks believed that stories like this were true, whether or not they were true, can we use that to help us understand how and why they lived in constant fear?  Can we move the ball forward by admitting that even if it's hard to believe this one story, that surely, somewhere in Mississippi there are true stories like this that never made it out of the grave?

I am caught between whites and blacks in the town of my ancestors.  Both hold me up as a spokesperson for their side.  I am not a referee who will determine whose story is true.  I'm more interested in why people believe in and want to tell their stories at all.  I am a collector of memories.

Adichie says that "Stories matter. Many stories matter.  Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.  Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."

My only hope is that people will keep talking, keep remembering, keep listening, and that they will keep moving the ball forward.  

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.

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.

My Boy

I come from a broken family.  Usually when people use the phrase "broken family" they are referring to a family where the parents are divorced.  My parents separated when I was 15 however, when I say that I come from a broken family I mean that I come from broken people.

It's always hard for me, incredibly hard, to write about the failings of my parents. Like I talked about in this post, now that I am a mother myself I have to constantly reconcile the mother I dreamed I'd be with the mother I really am.  It's humbling. Parenting is humbling.

My parents' problems always seemed obvious to me.  There were three kids in my family and none of us was planned.  My parents kind of raised us that way - unplanned, shooting from the hip.  They abused substances, forgot about us, and got lost in their own problems.  I've spent countless hours on the couches of psychologists trying to work through the quagmire of who I am because of the pain that my parents gifted me with.  At least, that's what I used to believe.  The simple truth is that I blamed them for what I didn't like about myself.

One of the ideas I've explored a lot here in this blog space, is the idea that the members of my family wear a "mark" because we're from Greenwood.  There is a heritage of slavery that haunts us.  Greenwood was slave country, and we are her descendants.

Years ago, before that idea had occurred to me, I thought I had all the answers.  In my arrogance, I believed that I could construct the perfect family in the same way that I could mix together and bake the perfect cake.  I met a man who didn't drink, had a stable job, and seemed to be the perfect puzzle piece to build my ideal family on.  He was the cornerstone, and we were both the builders.  We had two sons.  I read to them, I home schooled them, took them to the park, and was convinced that my love would be all that they'd need to be perfectly, adorably happy.  I was wrong.

I always thought that I was sad as a girl because I had absent, selfish parents. Then, I met my son.  He is sad.  He cries a lot and talks often about how much he hates himself.  He is seven years-old.  I play with him, read books to him, take him to all types of doctors, and sometimes, in the quiet of the night, I resent it all.  He reminds me so much of myself at that age.  I was 11 the first time I contemplated committing suicide.  I always thought that particular detail was a reflection of the terrible, oh, so awful home life I came from.

In the life I have today, I easily spend 20 hours a week trying to save my son.  I take him to specialists, read books on kids that are "different", and talk to other moms. Every day it feels like the two of us are on a course marked for certain destruction. It's a game.  People are hiding where I cannot see them.  They watch us and laugh at us as we try to get off, because there is no "off."  There is only a mother trying desperately to find the right pill, the right program, the right diagnosis, the right anything.

Sometimes, he smiles at me.  He truly is the most beautiful boy in the world (although he may be tied with his brother).  He has caramel-colored skin that he hates because it's not white.  He is tall and most people think he's three years older than he actually is.  I know that one day when he's a man he will love being tall. For now, though, it's like a cross to bear.  People look at him and wonder why he can't do more.  Why is he crying?  Why is he screaming?

As I deal with him, trying to nurture and love without getting tapped out, his father lingers in the background, already talking about military school.   I picked him because I thought he'd be the perfect father.  But, I also thought that I would be the perfect mother.

Some days, I am painfully aware of the fact that I'm the only one who "gets" my son. Others hear rage, I hear a panic attack coming on.  I perceive the tears behind the behavior. Sometimes, I wish I could permanently tie him to me to help him navigate every situation or at a minimum, I want to construct a world in which he would experience no pain, a world in which everyone would "get" him.

Along with all of this, I have to wonder two things: 1) Is he like this because I am like my parents? Or 2) were my parents normal and all of my crap was my own fault because I was messed up biochemically or something?

Either answer kind of sucks.  If answer 1 is the truth, then does that make me a terrible mother?  If 2 is true, then I've spent all of these years blaming innocents for my own loneliness.

I've made some of the most critical choices in my life because I wanted to build the perfect family.  I don't have the perfect family.  I have a broken family and I don't know what to do about it.  

Branded

When I was a girl, I dreamed of being a writer.  In middle school, I started reading Sweet Valley High books and other teen romance novels.  In my early teens, I read E.L. Doctorow, Pat Conroy, John Irving, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  In my late teens, I painfully made my way through Shakespeare and Faulkner, all the while imagining that one day I'd be sitting at a desk writing deep, complicated tales that would both reveal and inform the American way of life.

I didn't write those tales.  Actually, I didn't finish those tales  Every laptop and every computer I've ever owned contains dusty hard drives imprinted with half-written stories that are trapped in an eternal, peaceful sleep.  When it comes to fiction, I'm just not a finisher.  During those blurry days when I started and restarted my computerized masterpieces, I was using napkins, scratch paper, and the backs of grocery lists to jot down my feelings. Unbeknownst to me, where I was failing at fiction, I was succeeding at non-fiction.  

Around this time I discovered the story of Booker Wright, and I made a choice that would change my life.  I decided to record, here on this blog, the steps I took to uncover his story and my efforts to grasp his soul.  Some of my earlier posts are lame.  I'll be the first to say that.  You can see me struggling to find my way.  At first, I thought that no one would ever read my blog, so I wrote hurtful things about my family, revealing with reckless detail, all of their earthly failures.  

In the summer of 2011, I made a documentary about my grandfather, called Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story.  After our first shoot, the filmmakers went back to their work spaces and started trying to pull together a movie.  I went into a corner and started blogging about everything.  Every feeling, every emotion, every moment of bliss and pain, I recorded here.   

My computers tend to die sudden deaths, and I can't keep up with printed copies. I've lost every story I wrote as a young girl.  That's why I posted here.  I was afraid that if I collected my random thoughts anyplace else that, one day, they'd be gone, accidentally thrown away or trapped in a computer that'd been murdered by the latest virus.  So, I blogged.  Blogging helped me to process, and it simply made me feel better. 

At the time, the only "visitors" to my blog were poor souls from the Ukraine who'd typed in the wrong URL. Then, one day the producer called and said, "Everybody in NY loves you."  He meant everyone at his agency who was working on the film.  I said, "Why?"  He said, "They've read your blog."

I felt like someone had just said, "Hey, yesterday, when you were showering, the window was open and everybody on 46th St. and 11th Avenue was watching."  It was weird.  I went back and read some of my earlier posts, the ones where I talked about which members of my family couldn't hold down jobs and which ones would go on shopping sprees and then not have enough money to pay their bills.  I did some quick deleting.  

Since then, I've tried really, really, really hard to keep writing with the same mission I had at first.  I write to escape, to work out my feelings, to make sense of what stalks my soul, and to record, so that in 30 years I can go back and accurately remember.  

But something has been lost.  Sometimes, I feel like I'm changing my clothes with eyes on me.  I wear my best undergarments, turn my body in a way to highlight my toned parts, but hide the flabby ones.  I have about 60 blog drafts here that I chose not to post because I didn't want to throw anyone under the bus or make anyone angry.  In some ways, I'm a brand now.  When I start to write I catch myself wondering if the writing will enhance or hurt my brand.  I wonder if it will make the people who've invested in me happy or angry.  Will it help the movie?  Will it hurt my book?

My soul lives here.  I stamp myself onto this blog space.  Just now, I started to type, "I stamp myself onto this blog space, because..."  but nothing came after "because."  I don't know why I leave myself here, I just do.  

There are things about this project that I need to work out.  I've seen my counselor about them, talked to girlfriends about them, and even started several pen to paper writings about them.  But for some reason, at least for now, I only seem to be able to get to "the end" of my conflicted emotional ropes when I am here, sitting in a coffee shop, shutting out the conversations around me, and staring at this empty white space, the one that invites me to pour it all out - the goopey, confusing stuff that sloshes around inside me.  

I've learned a lot about myself through this process, most of it hasn't been too beautiful.  I'm working on a book about this journey and I've had to dive deep into my past.  Some shameful truths have come to the surface and I want to run from them.  Lately, I've been spending a lot of time in my bed staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning, and trying to shut out who I am.  It's not working, so I'm switching gears.

I'm really hopeful that if I can write through some of this, that I can get to the other side of the murkiness and once again feel the sun shining on my face.  Some people will think I'm using this platform to harm.  What I've learned about those people is that nothing I say makes any difference, they'll assume the worst about me, anyway.  Blogs are free, go get your own.  

I'm starting a "hard truths" series.  Hopefully, I can use this space to face myself.

Behind the Talk

I've gone back and forth about whether or not to delete some of the uglier comments that were left on my post about Lusco's Restaurant.  The simple truth is that talking about race is anything but simple.  It's complicated, messy, humiliating, dangerous, and sometimes it doesn't seem worth it.  But it is.  If we can keep our wits about us, we can move forward, one conversation at a time.

I'm no expert, but I sincerely think that one of the critical aspects of successfully talking about race is actually the stuff behind the talk.  This is one of the things I learned from my grandfather.  Booker was well regarded in both the black and white communities.  Blacks saw him as a successful business owner who ran a restaurant that celebrities frequented when they were in the Delta, he owned several rental houses, and had what appeared to be friendship with influential whites.  Dentists, doctors, and lawyers shared laughs with him.  On the white side of Greenwood he was the most dearly loved waiter in the town's most popular restaurant for the upper class.

He had it made, and he threw it all away in a moment to do what we all need to do when we talk about race.  He showed us his humanity.

He did not say mean things.  He did not make fun of anyone.  Instead, he shed his image of success, layer by layer removing his guise of strength and joviality, and told the nation that he lay awake in bed each night worrying about the future.  He told us that the way he was sometimes treated at work made him want to cry.

Our country is in a mess.  It seems almost impossible to talk about race without lowering ourselves to schoolyard communication techniques.  I think sometimes we forget that we're talking to actual people and we begin to feel as though we're talking to the issue itself, as if it has taken on the flesh of the one we're arguing with.

There are some basic truths that we may want to hold on to when we engage in these complicated conversations.  We all have the capacity to love, to hurt, and to ache.  We all love our children and would do whatever we think needs to be done to protect them.  (Yes, I know there are some crazies out there who do not love their children, but we're not talking about them).  We want to protect our homes from the unknown.  We want safety and a hope for a bright future.

Let's start there.  Let's start with what makes us the same, because what makes us different is often times found in the slight nuances of how we respond to these same intrinsic yearnings and desires.  At the core of who I am, beneath my shade of skin, underneath my life choices, there is a warm core that is probably similar to the core of a racist.

One of the most difficult things I've had to do in the last 18 months is sit down with people who knew my grandfather but failed to see his humanity.  I was tempted to do the same to them.  I wanted to humiliate them, cut them down, and expose their lack of understanding.  But that is not the response of the rational and it denies the beautiful gift that my grandfather gave to me and to all of us.

Instead of inciting more hate, I push forward, determined to find a common ground of shared human experiences with everyone, even those who might cringe if they saw my son in an alley with a hoodie atop his head.  I make a conscious choice to be a peacemaker, because it's what Booker Wright would do.

Masters and Man

Check out this video on Dateline.  It's a clip that didn't appear in Dateline's Finding Booker's Place broadcast.  In it, Raymond De Felitta talks about about the place where we stayed while making Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story and, what it was like to visit the South.

The Tallahatchie Flats, where we stayed during filming, is an interesting place.  It's a collection of reclaimed sharecropper shacks that sits on the Tallahatchie River, the same river where Emmitt Till's body was discarded after he'd been beaten and tortured all night long for making a sound in the direction of a white woman.

The Flats have been restored enough to make them livable.  They have working toilets, the spaces between the floorboards have been sealed, and each flat has at least one room with a window air conditioning unit.  It's strange to me that people think its quaint to live in sharecropper shacks.  It reminds me of people who tour Alcatraz and want to be temporarily locked up.

Raymond makes a point in this video that I really want the world to know: sharecropping continued well into the 1970s.  Many blacks continued to live at or below the poverty level while they worked their fingers to the bone in hot fields only to be told at the end of the year that they hadn't earned enough money to get paid. Many young black boys, my father included, were expected to miss school when the harvest came in.

I have to say though, the Flats truly are in God's country.  They overlook breathtakingly beautiful fields that stretch on and on.  Nights at the Flats are blanketed by an eerie silence.  I have to wonder how many slaves were whipped in those fields, and how many mothers had their young sons dragged from their arms because someone decided it was time for their sons to be sold.

Many times in the last five years I've thought about tracing my roots back as far as I can.  I envision myself uncovering the stories of my ancestors who lived as slaves. I went back two generations and found Booker Wright.  His presence in my family line has been an amazing gift, but it hasn't come without a cost.  His story pains me, and I wonder how I will bear the weight of all the other stories which will most likely grow more and more painful as I look back deeper and deeper in time.  Maybe I'll save this job for my sons.  Maybe I'll be brave enough to do it tomorrow, or next year, or in the next decade.

Lusco's Restaurant

Wow, the pot has been stirred.  Apparently, since Dateline aired Finding Booker's Place this past Sunday, Lusco's Restaurant has received threats via phone and email.  People have threatened to burn down their restaurant and the owners of Lusco's have been harassed at gas stations and at other public places.  Lusco's is the restaurant where Booker was working when he experienced the racially charged treatment that hurt him so deeply.  That was in 1965.

I am deeply saddened to hear the news that today, in 2012, the family that owns Lusco's is being harassed.  The heart of Booker Wright's message was to let people know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of racism.  His message was not meant to incite hate or violence.  Anyone who responds to my grandfather's story with more hate has clearly missed the point.  I have personally eaten at Lusco's Restaurant many, many times.  They have the best steaks in the Delta and they have always welcomed me with open arms.

I want everyone to know that when we were looking into my grandfather's life, the filmmakers and I were eager to find photos and footage of him.  The folks at Lusco's had a box full of old and precious 8 mm film that spanned decades.  They suspected that some of that film might contain a few minutes of footage of Booker Wright.  They trusted us enough to send several boxes of film to New York, where we processed it and found, out of hours and hours of footage, a few precious Booker Wright moments.  Having that additional footage, seeing my grandfather as a young man, was a gift beyond words.  That was a gift from Lusco's.

The family that owns Lusco's has supported my research with openness and kindness.

As a nation and as a people, we should revisit the hurts of the past to learn from them, not to imitate them.  Anyone who has harassed the family that owns Lusco's Restaurant today, should be ashamed.

I am Booker Wright's granddaughter and I embrace Lusco's Restaurant and so should you.

Dateline

I am overwhelmed with joy by the responses I've received so far from people who watched Dateline over the weekend.  I've been fielding phone calls and emails, but later today I'll make some time to post about my thoughts on the piece.

More than anything, I am delighted that my grandfather's story is getting out to the masses.  GO BOOKER WRIGHT!!!!

Are We Losing Our Humanity?

This is a question that a good friend of mine is probing through a series of community activities sponsored by ASU.  This idea, that as a people we can lose sight of what really makes us human makes me think of Booker Wright.

He was surrounded by people who enjoyed him.  He was fun-loving, humorous, kind, thoughtful, and humiliated almost every day.  The very people who believed they had friendship with him failed to actually take in his humanity.  They were living in a societal structure that let them believe that he was probably content with his station in life.  Why would an illiterate black man in the mid-1960s want anything more than to wait on tables and deliver a steak and a song night after night?

What I've learned, from sharing meals and memories with these very people, is that they did truly love him.  That cannot be denied.  Yes, they failed to see him, but they didn't know it at the time.  This has been one of the biggest lessons for me in all of this.  I don't want to be so busy in my daily life that I fail to see those in need or in heartache around me.  There will always be politics, but each individual that I come across in my daily life is unique and temporary.  I have to choose to celebrate people even if we're not on the same side of the aisle.  Booker Wright taught me that.

Wanting the World to Know

Five years ago when I first learned about my grandfather's heroic statements to the national news crew I felt like something was happening that was bigger than me.  I felt as though I was being handed a precious gift and also, that I was being tasked with the responsibility of sharing that gift with the world.

So much has transpired during those years.  I type these words with tears of joy and a heart that is filled to the brim with excitement.  People are hearing his story.  Once again, Booker Wright's name and his words are making their way across the nation.  His tender, yet triumphant story of humiliation mixed with hope is a beautiful song that, if we listen, can inform and influence the way in which we interact with one another and lead our daily lives.

With tears of joy and hands held high I proclaim "GO BOOKER WRIGHT!"

I've recorded lots of thoughts and memories throughout the course of the journey.  I've put them together in a collection called Searching for Booker Wright, which can be picked up on Amazon for just $2.99.  Like me on Facebook and get a free, 36 page preview of this book.    

Same Story, Different Lens

The reviews are coming in.  Not the critics’ reviews, but the resident reviews.  I’ve gotten two lengthy emails from Greenwood residents about the film; neither of them was very good.

Both of the people who wrote to me felt as though Greenwood was not well represented.  It struck them that people would get the impression that Greenwood was stuck in the past.  I’m torn about how to respond to these individuals.

One of the initial thoughts Raymond had about the movie was to make a “Greenwood Now and Greenwood Then” film, one that would examine just how far Greenwood has come.  In the end, that’s not what happened.  The film we made dives deep into the story of Booker Wright, it examines questions surrounding his murder, and paints a picture of what Greenwood was like in the ‘60’s in order to create a proper context for what Booker Wright said and did.  I think we accomplished this.

One of the things I know for sure is that being the subject in a documentary is nerve wracking.  There is a complete loss of control.  Many times during this process I have felt angst, even anger over the direction I thought the film might go in.  Some of the people we interviewed, people who were kind enough to let us into their homes, spend an afternoon with us, get back to us quickly when we had urgent research questions now feel as though they participated in something that disparaged their community.  They feel powerless, I know the feeling.

There are two lanes of thought going through my mind, running simultaneously side-by-side.  The first is that Greenwood has changed.  They’ve had a black mayor.  Today the majority of the police force there is made of blacks.  It’s a radically different place than it was when Booker Wright walked her streets.  Longtime Greenwood residents love their town like people love their favorite football teams.  They spoke with us because they hoped to see a different story of the South told.  They wanted to see a film that would highlight how far they’ve come.  I get that. 

The second lane of thought and, I hate to say this, but Greenwood still feels very broken to me.  People who’ve lived there their whole lives see the change, but they don’t always see how far they still have to go.  I think that’s why our film angers them so.  One person said to me that he didn’t think there was still a market for speaking poorly about the South or telling the story of lynchings, etc. 

I know that Raymond did not construct this film based on what he thought would sell.  There is no money to be made in documentary filmmaking.  If he was trying to make a buck, this wasn’t how he was going to do it.  When I went to Greenwood last year and I think Raymond and David had the same experience, I was taken aback by certain things that I observed.

Maybe for Southerners the story feels old.  Maybe it’s hard for them to believe that everyone hasn’t heard it time and time again, but the truth is just that – many people still don’t understand the deep humiliation that blacks experienced day in and day out in the South. 

A few months ago I was talking to a good friend who’s from Arkansas.  I was explaining to her that I wanted to include certain details in my book to help people better understand what it meant to be black in the South.  When I told her which details I was thinking of she expressed that most people knew those things and that she personally wouldn’t want to read a chapter like that.

I pondered this for a long time.  Maybe this story and others like it have been told so often in the South that some white Southerners feel like they have done their penance and more.  They have apologized, instituted holidays, hold meetings like the Bridge – they have committed themselves to change.  But just because a story is old doesn’t mean that it’s no longer relevant. 

Not everyone knows, but everyone needs to know.

To the kind and thoughtful men and women who helped make this film, lending their voices and their memories, I am endlessly thankful.  I am deeply saddened that this story, or the way in which we chose to tell it, was so off-putting to them.  I understand why it was.  But I must stand behind the telling of this story.  Because so many people simply do not know.