On Writing My Bio

When we decided to tell a little something about ourselves, I was hit with the dread of rendering my life’s small choices and big events into something meaningful on paper. What have I done, really? But then as I begin to try to put a narrative in place, it felt like I was omitting all the key turning points that have brought me to this work with my PRN friends. It wasn’t so much what I had done or accomplished that stood out (or was noticeably absent); it was what I had not done that was so glaringly obvious.

And I struggled, and do so still, to capture those moment and those undertakings and those factors that have brought me to this point.

My father died when I was young, which led my mother to move my sister and me to her hometown of Columbus, Georgia, to be near her mother and sister, who shared in raising us. Columbus is a languid, off-the- road kind of place, despite being home to a major army base. It was founded as an up-river port and railway transportation hub that kind of became obsolete when the highway systems grew and by-passed the town, which led to a kind of insularity. During the Civil War, its foundries turned out munitions and its textile mills clothed the Confederate armies, and while those industries were returned to peacetime output, Columbus has kept an identity keyed to its role in the war. Growing up, I did not always know what that meant.

Before I was of legal age, a family friend created a job for me. My mother thought that working would be good for me. I worked on a peach farm outside of Columbus. I maintained the road-side stand. The workers, all of whom lived in buildings on the farm-family’s land, worked ten-hour days picking peaches and other crops. They got paid by the amount they picked – pennies to the peck. I got paid by the day, tasked mostly with selling peaches to motorists stopping by or to locals who knew the bounties of this farm. I worked in roadside out-building, in constant shade from the broiling Georgia summer sun, under a fan, by the drink cooler. No one else had those luxuries, except at lunch time when the workers were brought back to the shed and other out-buildings for a lunch break.

I came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s, intuitively sensing the differences my privilege afforded me – in terms of education, employment, leisure, and just the everyday walk-around circumstances of public safety and well-being. But I took all of that for granted and was slow to understand how the privilege and opportunity that was afforded me was more than just a matter of fate. Over time I learned that it was a factor of systemic and historical and entrenched racism and that by simply accepting my status without question or objection, I was also substantiating the very architecture of racism and otherness and perennial cultural and economic abrogation - not to mention actual violence – that was exacted from or acted upon people of color in my communities.

I experienced first-hand the unease and anger and violence that accompanied forced busing of the schools in Muscogee County in Georgia in the early ‘70s. I remember hearing the vitriol spewed at the radio as Henry Aaron tallied historic numbers in pursuit of a legacy’s home run records. I remember being taught that The War Between the States was really about states’ rights and that most Southerners enlisted to protect their homes from aggressive Northern armies. I remember being taught that Reconstruction was carpetbaggers and Northern (and the Federal government’s) intervention. I remember my elders talk about slavery as a benign good that helped Christianize a lot of people who were better off for that.

I benefited greatly by splitting my college years between a small, church-affiliated school, Union College, in the Appalachian foothills of Kentucky, and the vibrant energies of a major state university in Chapel Hill, NC. I underestimated the profound impact that living in Appalachia would have on me; I wanted only to move on. But to this day I remember the poverty and resiliency, the seasonal floodwaters and wildfires, and the curious adaption of cultural practices intertwined with the religious services. I found curiosity and rigor and loyalty at the University of North Carolina, and I am grateful to have those impulses nourished there, but I wanted to move on from there, too.

When I moved to New York, I was also thinking I would find a place where equity and fairness, and not the Southern vestiges of The Lost Cause, were the norm. It took me a few years and a few nostalgic trips back to Georgia to realize the roots of Jim Crow were everywhere and I had not outrun much of anything. Nor had I done much of anything to ameliorate what I knew to be wrong, whether in Georgia or Brooklyn, nor even to personally accept any responsibility.

As a kid I wanted nothing more than to be able to hit a curve ball for a living, or write the next great novel, or play guitar in a band tracking the musical roots of one of my rock heroes. It has taken me a long time and a certain kind of suffering, but I’ve learned to give up what I am not capable of or to which I invested no time or training, and to focus instead on changing the few things I can. I gave up softball a few years ago when I began to lose depth perception on fly balls to the outfield. I’ve been a reporter, though a long time ago, and I’ve worked editorially and written a book chapter, but I never put to paper anything that would narrate my story. About four years ago I started taking guitar lessons, though I doubt I’ll ever earn a spot at an open-mike night. But in the short time since I’ve joined my friends old and new in PRN in the summer of 2020, I’ve come to a new passion.

I believe that our efforts are part of a long, complex, messy reckoning. I am not sure we will affect all the changes we hope for. But we will foreground the conversation and we will make a difference in some ways if only because this has become the work of our lives. And I will be changed for it.