Unsung Heroes

From August 18th, 2008

I’ve been given the word that Walk-On will hit the stores on September 9^th. Am I excited? Hell yeah! Excited for any number of reasons.

One, the moment I left Auburn University I knew I would write this book. Actually I knew it in my junior year. We were living through an historical time and I was fortunate enough to be aware of the journey I was on. We were traveling through the hills, valleys and mountainsides of desegregation, integration, and the dying breaths of racism. It was a trip of isolation, and loneliness, filled with the occasional high of a good time.

As excited as I am for myself, I’m equally excited to have honored the people who were there doing those times. Those brave souls who marched headlong into the new south and believed in the dawning of a new day. My Mom and Dad are two such people. I dedicate Walk-On to them.

Hard working, blue-collar parents, they bent their backs to make possible my dreams, my hopes, and my opportunities. More and more I’ve come to realize how fortunate my sisters and I were to live in a loving, encouraging, and psychologically nourishing household. My dreams and goals weren’t selected for me rather my Mom and Dad fertilized the hopes and dreams simmering in my head as a new world opened up in my home state of Alabama. A world they had been denied access to.

A search through old photos leads me to a cracked black and white photo of my Mom and me, as a fat baby boy. It’s my favorite picture of the two of us. My Mom is all-smiles through the cracks in the paper. The world lies ahead for her son and knowing her as I do now, she had already decided by then that she would give me the gifts of imagination, freedom to dream, a love for reading and unrequited hope for a better life.

Another photo of my, then thirty-two year old, Mom is a church portrait of our family. My Mom’s smile radiates through the freckles in her face. We’re all wearing our Sunday best, the five of us, Dad, Mom, sisters Donna and Kim, and me. “Hope and promise,” is what I call the photo. It’s evident in our faces. Yes, we were blue collar in regards to our financial resources, but we owned our own home, had plenty to eat, wore nice clothes and went to private schools. More importantly, we’d been taught to dream about a world our parents could only imagine. Daddy, the captain, was the vessel by which money came into our home. Mama, the first mate, was the conduit in terms of how our money was dispensed and what happened on a day in and day out basis.

There’s one final snapshot of my Mom. It’s in my head. It’s a snapshot of Mom’s last days with us as she struggled with that bastard, Cancer. It’s not a pretty picture. Mom left us in 2000. Need I say more?

The other half of that dynamic duo is the man I physically resemble more than anyone else in the world. I’m his spitting image. Sometimes at night, sitting before a droning television, I catch myself sitting exactly like him, my hands folded across my lap, nodding. Yep, just like him. My dad, now eighty-three years of age, taught me to be a good man and to work hard. He set his lessons in examples. He never came home drunk, never missed a day of work, never missed a night coming home, and never beat on my Mom. When we needed something he went out and worked for it, whether at his regular job, his night job, or doing plumbing on the weekend.

The photo of my Dad I’m most proud of is a solo shot of him picketing outside the federal courthouse in Birmingham in the 1970s. He was involved in a class action suit against his employer. He’d weighed doing what he thought was right against the possibilities that, in those times, he could lose everything at the whim of an angry white man. He chose to stand up, that lesson is still with me today. In 2000, my Dad lost his partner of 49 years and life will never be as good.

He is excited about Walk-On. The very first copy I get, I will put in his hands. He’s already told me, “I’ll get in my room, under my extra light, so I can take my time and read a little bit every day.” I hope he enjoys it.