On the Rails and On the Ropes in Oklahoma

This spring sees the publication of On the Ropes, a long-awaited sequel to James Vance’s earlier graphic novel, Kings in Disguise, which followed the hard journey of teenage Freddie Bloch. When Freddie’s father loses his job in the Great Depression, Freddie goes from being a nice Jewish kid to the life of a hard-luck hobo, one of nearly a quarter million other homeless youth, riding the rails. He meets Sam, who claims to be the “King of Spain” and together they find themselves in some of the landmark moments of the Great Depression – including the 1932 Ford Hunger Strike of unemployed workers at the River Rouge plant in Michigan.
    By the end of Kings in Disguise, Freddie has helped an ailing Sam return to his hometown, and embarked on another journey solo, now sure that his mission in life is the cause of organizing the poor and giving voice to the common man.
   On the Ropes finds Freddie in 1937, a few years after leaving Sam. He’s still on the road, but now working in a circus funded by the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. The action takes place in a few months’ time but, as Vance said in a recent interview with Oklahoma magazine, historically “this two-month period… was incredibly full of events.”
    Another Oklahoman published a real-life thriller with a hobo protagonist in 1935. Jim Thompson, later famous for pulp novels like The Grifters and silver-screen collaborations with Stanley Kubrick, wrote "The Strange Death of Eugene Kling," a detective story for True Detective magazine. Thompson, son of a deputy sheriff who hit hard times, grew up in the shadow world of Oklahoma and for a while in the mid-1930s eked out a living as a true-crime writer.
    In "Eugene Kling," Thompson records the true story of Robert Norwood, a young hobo in Oklahoma. When his friend is found murdered, Norwood sets out to solve the mystery and bring the killer to justice. That (as recapped in Soul of a People) involves gathering evidence in homeless shelters and tracking down suspects by hopping a freight. Thompson used all the storytelling devices at his disposal – what he called his "little bag of tricks" – and made the hobo detective’s tale not only a gripping read but a window into the lives of the homeless. "The Strange Death of Eugene Kling" was both unsparing in its view of human nature and sensitive in its portrayal of young Norwood's trials: the loneliness, hard landings, privations, and hopes for a stable life.
    When writing crime stories failed to pay the bills, Thompson joined the Works Progress Administration, just like Freddie Bloch. Except Thompson joined the Federal Writers’ Project, and went on the road to document Oklahoma life for the American Guide series, known as the WPA guides. It was hard work for low pay but like Bloch, Thompson came to see it as a sort of mission, working his way up to editor before leaving in frustration.
    To honor him and Vance’s characters, here’s the full story of "The Strange Death of Eugene Kling," with pictures, as it appeared in November 1935.

Young Readers Engage

A few weeks ago, courtesy of the PEN/Faulkner Writers in Schools program, I was honored to join a group of high-school seniors in a public school here in DC for a discussion of Soul of a People and the WPA writers’ experiences.
    The English class of the Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering High School in Northeast DC had read up on the 1930s and American literature of the time. They could compare our current recession with the Great Depression, noting that segregation compounded the bad economy’s pain for African American families and others. They could compare the experiences of people who had made their careers as writers in very different fields.
    The students had smart observations and insightful questions, ranging from what I learned about other backgrounds while researching the story of Soul of a People, to the role of music in writing, and advice for young writers (Read, Write). They also proved capable of flattery (one called the book "captivating"). I thanked them then and I thank them here for the attention and respect paid. And I thank PEN/Faulkner for making the visit possible.
    For the rest of the day I rode a swell of optimism for the future of reading and creative expression.

5 Steps for Creativity

Starting a new workshop at The Writer’s Center (and speaking at a book festival next weekend) has me rethinking the writing process. It's been a while since my piece for the Center about ways to nurture creativity amid daily life, so this is an update. It starts with the adage from Samuel “Sunshine” Beckett, quoted by Amy Bloom: “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.”
    For me, creativity boils down to a handful of practices:
1. Make the time. Hoard your best hours for your own project. Are you most creative when you wake? Mark off an hour then. Late at night? Stay up. The rest of the day, use time wisely.
2. Find creative people and listen to them. Your peers (I started with a group from The Writer’s Center) are priceless for feedback and for self-imposed deadlines that help to motivate. I don’t always like other people's feedback at first but I suspend judgment until the next day.
3. Know when you’re drafting and when you’re revising. When you start a work, let it come out so you can see on the page the material that you can work with. When it has cooled, go back and allow yourself to tear it apart - that is, to edit and revise. I think of it like a train: To get started, unhook the drafting engine from the editing brakes. The brakes work best later when it’s underway.
4. Follow the links from small to large. Short stories can lead to a collection. An article can lead to book, maybe to film. Post this motto somewhere where you see it: “By the yard, it’s hard. By the inch, it’s a cinch.” Allow yourself to take small bites. Writing an article may not capture the entire epic that you see in your mind, but getting an article published can help focus it.
5. Do the paperwork. Submitting stories to journals and contests doesn’t sound creative, it sounds tedious. And full of rejection. But pick a few, put the deadlines on the calendar, give it time, and send them off. (Don’t calculate the odds. They’re never good.) Then forget them. When one comes back, send it out again; when one succeeds, your creativity gets the world's stamp of approval.

Documentaries Need Characters Too

Thanks to Sunil Freeman at The Writer's Center blog, First Person Plural, for posting my piece on how crisis shapes character, and can make a compelling documentary. Case in point: Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records. Have a look here.

Uncovering History, Black and White

Black history is detective work, uncovering clues and putting together narratives that survived underground for generations, or sometimes in plain view but unrecognized by historians. Dr. Ann Robinson has documented African American life and history in New Haven this way for over 40 years. Along the way she has found and championed new connections between the past and present and sometimes, like last summer, opening a new door between them.
    A North Carolina-born psychology professor and community historian in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood, she grew up seeing African-American Masons in her community as remote, notwithstanding that her father was one. She and her husband Charles moved in August 1967 to New Haven, where he taught at Yale’s medical school and she taught first at Trinity College and then Gateway Community College.
    She wrote a column for the New Haven Register, “As I See It,” to give voices inside the black community. Her daughter Angela Robinson became a superior court judge, the youngest ever appointed.
    During that whole time the city saw riots, assassinations and New Haven’s Black Panther trial. Freemasons seemed even more irrelevant. So she was startled when, in the 1990s, the local Prince Hall Masons contacted her to help prepare their lodge to join the Connecticut Freedom Trail.
    From her father, she knew African-American Freemasonry went back to Prince Hall, the freedman who founded a chapter in Boston. When white American Masons refused to admit Hall and 14 other black applicants, they started their own lodge with authority from the Masons of Great Britain. Yet for over 200 years, American Freemasonry, with a core tenet of universal brotherhood, was segregated by race.
    It was also segregated by gender. “It was a secret society,” she said, “closed to women.”
    Soon after she was invited, however, she took a tour inside the Widow’s Son Lodge, an old brick building on Goffe Street that she had never felt welcome enough to enter. She walked into the foyer and encountered a life-size bust over six feet tall, with a forbidding expression. She continued on to the main room – there was the same man again, this time in a large oil portrait on the wall. She couldn’t tell if he were white or black. She could only see that he was stiff and formal. Who was this? Robinson wondered.
    Robinson told me this two years ago when our detective work intersected. In the course of other research I had come across the papers of African-American lawyer George Crawford, a co-founder with W.E.B. Du Bois of the NAACP and a core member of its predecessor, the Niagara Movement. Through a series of phone calls I had found a protégé of Crawford’s in the Prince Hall Masons, who suggested I talk with Dr. Robinson.
    I phoned her standing on York Street as snow came down. She politely put me through a vetting. Who was I? Was I African-American? I replied that I was a white male writer (exactly the kind who had stolen stories before). I explained my background and my work. After ten minutes, she invited me over to talk.
    The woman who came to the door was youthful-looking, in a terra-cotta colored dress and short grey dreadlocks. She was formidably articulate. Her husband Charles took my coat, and when his wife mistakenly introduced me as a Mason he tried to shake my hand with the Masonic handshake until I explained that no, I’m not a Mason.
    We sat in their living room and talked about the man whose bust had so commanded the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge: George Crawford. She was surprised to learn that he had been born in Alabama, had started life as a Southerner like her, had actually had a hand in anything like civil rights activism.
    “I thought until yesterday he was indigenous to New Haven,” she said.
    Then she considered. “How did he change New Haven?” Maybe through his legal opinions. Certainly the Masons seemed to be “his constituency.”
    She listened as I explained what I had found in the Yale library collection: his correspondence with Du Bois, the clippings of his "firsts" – first African-American to head Connecticut’s draft board in World War II (when he instituted advances for black soldiers), first African-American to take a prominent position in a city government anywhere in the state. One scrapbook held a cable from President Kennedy dated June 1963 inviting him to the White House for a discussion of civil rights. Yet his scrapbooks also held painful mementos. With what emotion had he pasted in a cartoon from his hometown, the Birmingham Herald, with a caricature of him as an ape, its only recognition of his triumph as one of the first black law graduates from Yale?
    Crawford’s friendships stretched from his headmaster at Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington, to Du Bois and the NAACP, and on to Thurgood Marshall, his protégé in Prince Hall Masonry and the younger lawyer who delivered the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education 50 years after Crawford had stood with Du Bois for a more assertive brand of leadership for equality.

    Later Ann Robinson brought our talk full circle: She and Charles opened the doors of the Prince Hall lodge to the public for a walking tour in the city’s International Arts & Ideas Festival. So that one Sunday afternoon I walked up steps to a door that had been locked before, and it opened. Above us in the foyer stood the bust of George Crawford, chin up, Masonic cap in place, a rather defiant welcome to visitors.

Dr. Ann Robinson (second from left) with other hosts of the event at the Prince Hall Masonic lodge.

    Watch the short video to see more of the connections, and dig deeper into history.

Young People, Passions, and a WGA Screenplay Reading

In the 1930s young people with little experience, like Margaret Walker, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, got on their feet with jobs as WPA writers. Working for the government on the American Guides, they got a firsthand sense of what creatives can contribute to society.
    Walker was just out of college when she applied to the Writers’ Project. She had grown up in segregated Alabama, a minister’s daughter, and after college she prepared to follow her mother’s path and marry a young minister. But her mother urged her to chart a new course. So Margaret lied about her age and got a spot as a WPA writer, meeting up with other young writers Richard Wright and Nelson Algren.
    Wright, too, came from the South, moving with his mother from Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago where he  found work with the post office despite having just seven years of school. In time he would become the poet of the Great Migration, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns (the title comes from Wright).
    What struck me in their letters and writings as I researched Soul of a People was how that moment in Chicago allowed them to connect with other writers across conventional divides of race, gender, age and education.
    The Chicago office, Walker wrote later in Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, fostered “what nobody believed was possible at that time -- a renaissance of the arts and American culture… and some of the most valued friendships in the literary history of the period.” She said in that moment she saw an end to the “long isolation of the Negro artist.”
    Wright mapped his move from Chicago to New York in 1937 as his road to a literary career. “When I go tonight, I will have forty dollars in my pocket,” he told Walker as they rode the El his last night in Chicago, after leaving the WPA office. Wright planned to get a transfer to the agency’s office in Manhattan, but there were no guarantees. “I hope I’m not making a mistake, going this way,” he told Walker.
    It wasn't a mistake. And after he burst on the scene with Uncle Tom’s Children and followed it with the bestseller Native Son (which benefitted from Walker’s research on a murder trial in Chicago), Wright remembered his friends in Chicago. He kept up a lively dialogue with Nelson Algren for years (see this piece in the American Scholar), and mentored other young writers. But Wright was a complex and conflicted personality, and no relationship was easy.
    Their story unfolds against a backdrop of suspicion and controversy that swirled around the Writers’ Project, as Texas congressman Martin Dies led a congressional investigation by the House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities. In 1939 he brought his investigation to Chicago, interrogating witnesses and raiding offices across the city. When Dies brandished what he claimed was a list of suspected un-Americans in Chicago, it included 514 milkmen, 144 newspaper reporters, 112 lawyers, and 161 radio workers – people just as likely to be on a list of interviews by the WPA writers for publication in the American Guides.
    These creative, political and personal tensions and vitality lie at the heart of My People, which gets a stage reading in the WGA Screenplay Reading series on January 9, 2013 at the Players Club in New York. I’m thrilled that the screenplay, co-written with veteran screenwriter Jim McGrath, will bring the little-known story of these taut relationships involving Walker, Algren and Wright to a new audience.

Woody Guthrie Goes to Germany

In one of the last hurrahs of the Woody Guthrie centennial, a festival in Germany honored him today. The festival description points up his influence and his mythic stature internationally, and draws links from his Dust Bowl ballads to the Occupy Movement, and from Alan Lomax to Bob Dylan.

    For me it was fascinating to study Guthrie as a key figure in Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways, and to see how the Folkways label was a key player in his own rise and influence. (You can watch the whole film on iTunes.) I still find parts of Woody Guthrie: A Life haunting. Happy Hundred, Woody. Or rather, Glückliche Hundert.