LIFE
Working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as I did in southwest Georgia for two years in the 1960s changed my understanding of everything and as I look back on it, set my life on a certain trajectory. After a couple of years at Harvard University I traded an academic outlook for involvement in a noble human quest. I stopped studying history and participated in making it. I stopped understanding America and began to live what it has always been and continues to be. There is the idea that the white (and black) kids from the North (and South) who dropped everything and joined the civil rights struggle in the South in those days made a sacrifice and contributed something, which to a small degree is true, but really it was the other way around. They received a thorough education in the realities of life in the US and got to participate in a sublime adventure, a noble fight, an experience not every generation is blessed to have. I hadn't intended to drop out of college necessarily but I never got back. One thing led to another. I got my degree in what my Harvard friend John Perdew, who worked in Americus, GA, and nearly got killed there, called "Southerology." I did time in four Georgia jails for doing civil rights work, in one of them (in Lee County) undergoing a hunger strike of three weeks. At this time I did some work as a free-lance journalist. Two of my Nation magazine articles are collected in the Library of America's Reporting Civil Rights. While in Africa also in the 1960s I worked as a reporter for the Salisbury Evening Standard in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and joined the youth wing of ZANU, the revolutionary party in those days. My novel The Angels of Zimbabwe comes out of my time living in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) before the war of liberation there. Rhodesia, like present-day USA, was run by an estimable elite of whites who in many ways were admirable, inventive, charming, and brave, but who lacked all self-knowledge as well as the generosity and imagination necessary to get along with people unlike themselves, let alone the inclination to share power with them, even when such a leap or sacrifice would have been all that could save them. My first novel, Feelgood, confronted the possibility that the civil rights movement in the US might fail and the white supremacists win. In 1963 and 1964 while I was in south Georgia, before the big civil rights laws were passed, this seemed like a definite possibility. Today, sadly, with the resurgence of a white supremacist mentality in the country, to contemplate the likelihood of a civil rights movement failure again seems realistic. The novel is about a white kid who has been in the Movement living on the black side of a small Georgia town during a post-civil rights movement defeat and recounts his adventures along more traditonal lines of African American resistance to and coping with American cultural realities. My novel Invisible Car Dealer explores the limits of freedom and the possibility that Americans have maybe always had too much of it. I've traveled in the tropics and all my life wanted to wind up living in a tropical country but instead have always moved northward. As a kid I spent summers in the northern Wisconsin/Michigan upper peninsula area, and I now live in the northern tip of New Hampshire near the Canadian border in the North Country. I've lived in Chicago (I'm from Evanston), New York City, Berkeley, Oakland, CA, Los Angeles, and other US cities, but have always escaped to rural parts of the US. I'm a liberal who has mostly lived in redneck country. I've lived on the black side of town and the white side of town, always with one foot in the other. That's what I mean by living American culture down to your aching bones. What we think of as the current crisis in America seems to me to be mostly what America has always been, nothing new. You live through it but not unscarred. Life seems to me a perennial mix of noble dreams and stark tragedy, and I think my writing partakes of both, that is, realism with a strong shot of the quixotic. The point is always to let your dreams rise to ascendancy, and be true to them, no matter what, for they lead to wholeness. My novel Melusina is entirely based on dreams. Everything in it and the entire progress of the story come out of a dream journal I kept for ten years. It is a dream narrative. For the SNCC 50th reunion in 2010 I edited and produced a nonfiction book of recollections of mine and several friends from the 1960s civil rights movement in Southwest Georgia. This book, The Great Pool Jump, was printed as a limited edition of 500 copies for the reunion and is sold out, with only a handful remaining. I am contemplating a new edition, as apparently little has changed over the course of my lifetime in America.