Authors: Jonathan Odell
But this time, as an adult, I saw something I had not noticed before. Instead of focusing on the marchers, I noticed the white people who lined the streets, throwing rocks, jeering, waving Confederate flags.
My
people. And again I studied the marchers.
For the first time I saw the whole picture. This is not black history, I thought. This is
my
history! And I know nothing about it. These people, white
and
black, and especially the unspoken space between us, made me who I am. Every day as a white man I shape and am shaped by race.
I remembered Joe and his silence and it was clear to me that I owed Joe a tremendous debt. I still can’t begin to fathom what his mandatory silence cost him that day, but I am beginning to understand
how his invisibility was used to underwrite my sense of privilege and entitlement, to embellish my history. His dignity was the price extracted so that an eight-year-old child could feel superior.
I also became certain that I would never understand my own story until I discovered Joe’s. He and I held the missing pieces to each other’s narrative, and for our stories to be complete, one would need to include the other.
• • •
When I decided to write novels focusing on the racial divide, I got some good advice from a black friend. “Don’t you dare write another
To Kill a Mockingbird
,” he cautioned.
I was taken aback. I told him every “evolved” white person I knew loved that book.
“Exactly,” he said. “Self-respecting black folks hate it. Whites get to feel sorry for the poor, ignorant, and powerless black man. And conveniently put the blame on the white southern cracker. I’d rather your book be about a black scoundrel, just as long as he’s a full-blooded and complex human being. We don’t need any more victims for you white folks to feel sorry for. I don’t want my children to have to read one more book about a pitiful black man who needs saving by the white man.”
I went back home to Mississippi. I sought out African Americans who could introduce me anew to myself through their stories. I did countless interviews. I read books, listened to oral histories, pored over slave narratives, spent hours in the cellars of county courthouses. I collected all the broken pieces, all the missing links that I could find.
When
The View from Delphi
, my first novel, was published by a small press,
Kirkus Reviews
wrote, “Odell,
an African American
, is the rare writer on race who allows for a range of responses—and for the possibility of change.” (Italics mine.) I really hated to alert them to their mistake. To assume that I was a black man was the greatest compliment they could have paid me.
In this, my second novel, I wanted to delve even deeper into the shadowy world uneasily inhabited by both the black and white
psyches. I specifically wanted to look at the black midwife. During my research I had interviewed several elderly ladies who had “caught” thousands of children in their communities. I learned that midwifing served spiritual and communal functions as much as a physical one. Midwives could trace their practices back through Jim Crow, through slavery, and all the way to Sierra Leone and Temne tribal practices.
Their occupational demise began in the 1950s when the white medical establishment orchestrated a campaign to discredit midwives in order to make way for government-funded public health services. In other words, when it became once again profitable for white men to touch black flesh, the midwives had to go. They were portrayed in medical journals and state legislatures as dirty, ignorant, and superstitious abortionists. When the medical establishment required that they be licensed, many were forced to “turn in their bags” because they could not read. A category of “nurse midwives” was created to work under the direct supervision of a doctor.
The midwives I spoke with were gracious, proud, and spiritual, saddened to have been barred from their calling and eager to have someone listen to
their
story—not the official white story that vilified them. After I discovered that the live-birth rates among these “uneducated” black women were higher than those of the white doctors who replaced them, I knew I needed to write their story.
Serendipitously, I discovered something about my own family history that fueled my desire to write.
My grandfather lived to be ninety-seven, but just before he died he called his estranged son, my father, to his bedside. “I think it’s time I told you about your mother,” Papa Johnson said. My dad was then in his seventies.
We had all been told that my dad’s mother died of pneumonia in 1927, when my father was only an infant. But that wasn’t the truth.
In the nursing home that morning Papa explained that when my father was six months old, his mother, Bessie, planned to take her child and run away with him. But then she found out she was pregnant again. She had sworn she would never have another child by
my abusive grandfather, whom she had come to despise, and so she went to her stepmother, my great-grandmother, who happened to be a midwife. Big Sal performed an abortion on her daughter, from which Bessie contracted blood poisoning and died. My father was left motherless.
Big Sal went on to help raise my father, whose mother she had had a hand in killing. My father loved her dearly and never learned the truth until seventy years had passed.
I began to wonder, what could it have been like for my great-grandmother to have that child reach out for her, the same woman who was responsible for his mother’s death?
And then there was a third element that intrigued me. Can stories about which we are not consciously aware still serve to shape our lives?
The fear of betrayal by the ones you love most, whether by death or deceit, was never talked about in my family, but it affected at least three generations of men. It is the genesis of our common unwillingness to be truly vulnerable before one another, especially those we love. It explains the high premium my family places on self-sufficiency, on never relying on others for help.
The repression of story can scar the soul.
But knowing our common story can heal. My father, my brothers, and I have learned to connect with an understanding and compassion that was not available to us before. We recognize ourselves in one another.
Through writing
The Healing
and by stitching together my own family history, I have discovered the truth in the old saying “Facts can explain us, but only story will save us.”
If you want to destroy a people, destroy their story. If you want to empower a people, give them a story to share.
Jonathan Odell is the author of the acclaimed novel
The View from Delphi
, which deals with the struggle for equality in pre–civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His short stories and essays have appeared in numerous collections. He spent his business career as a leadership coach to Fortune 500 companies and currently resides in Minnesota.