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In the
summer of 1962, I was sitting in Riley's Poolroom on East 105th Street,
in Cleveland, Ohio, listening to the elders talk about their lives
growing up in the south. They discussed how black men and women were
brutalized during their time and how each one of them knew at least one
person--usually a family member--who had to leave the south under the
cover of night to escape the wrath of someone they might have offended.
One elder that day, though, a Mr. Johnson, told a different story.
After everyone had finished, he said softly, "We didn't all lose, and
they didn't all win." Everyone nodded, but no one said anything further.
Mr. Johnson, a quiet and dignified man, was probably in his sixties at
the time. For some reason, what he said that day stuck with me over the
years and occasionally I would hear similarly veiled references to "they
didn't all win," from my elders, including my parents.
The
1960s were fast and turbulent years for me and my friends. The freedom
movement witnessed, among others, the emergence of Malcolm X, Dr.
Martin Luther King,Jr., John F. Kennedy, John H. Glenn,Jr., and John W.
Coltrane. I graduated from Glenville High School during that period,
went on to Ohio University and then Lincoln University in Pennsylvania
where about fourteen of us were almost involved in a shoot out with
Klansmen who were coming from a rally in Rising Sun, Maryland.
I
was drafted into the Army and graduated from Infantry Officer Candidate
School in 1967. I missed the Glenville riots in 1968 because I was in
Viet Nam. But Viet Nam had its own racial conflicts, and as a first
lieutenant, I was made commander of a supply company that had been
involved in an uprising in 1969.
For the young black men who
served in Viet Nam, especially those I met from the south, it was the
first time some had served on equal terms with their white counterparts.
Sometimes the experience was good and sometimes it created friction.
There was usually one outcome from almost all of those encounters,
though. If those young black men thought that whites were in some way
superior to them before the war, they didn't think so afterwards.
After the army, I began to write about my experiences, but I didn't
follow through and put the idea of writing on hold. It stayed on hold
for almost thirty years until I decided to take a creative writing
course at Cleveland State University. I learned a lot in that course and
in subsequent writing workshops that encouraged me to pick up the pen
again.
There were so many stories to tell, but I most wanted to
write about the strong black families, and black men and women I had
known. Somewhere along the way, as I tried writing a number of short
stories and toyed with writing a book, I remembered Mr. Johnson's words
again, "We didn't all lose, and they didn't all win," and I began to
write in earnest.
In 2001, my cousin and I videotaped my aunt,
uncle and my father as they related their history growing up in
Arkansas. Their stories gave me even more impetus and a lot of the
subject matter for my book, thus the story Snake Walkers was
developed. Snake Walkers is fiction, but what happened to the
characters in this book did happen to someone, somewhere. The beauty of
fiction is having the freedom to blend several stories into one.
This book deals with confrontation, but it also deals with growth and
transformation. We are all products of our environment and based on the
sum total of our experiences, we approach situations differently. As
those experiences change, our approaches are subject to change. We look
at circumstances in a new light, and hopefully, we grow.
Snake
Walkers is a story about a young black man who was traumatized in
his youth, and is later faced with a series of situations that at one
point become life threatening. Although he isn't prepared for them, with
the help of those he meets along the way, he adapts and becomes a
different person in the end.
This is a story that has been told
a thousand different times in a thousand different ways, but although I
enjoyed reading a wide variety of books when I was growing up, my
heroes were always people that looked like my mother and father. So from
that perspective, at least, my story is one I rarely read.
They say that you should write about stories you would want to read. I
did, and this is my story. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I
enjoyed writing it. |
About Snake Walkers