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.