Kevin A. Roberts
You don’t expect a roomful of mostly white, mostly retirement-age folks to be reading Ta-Nehisi Coates. Or Rise of the Warrior Cop. Or How to Be Black.
But this is Ferguson 2019.
For four and a half years, people have been showing up once a month at the Ferguson Public Library to discuss—sometimes tentatively, sometimes with passion—books about race. By now, it’s as cozy as a girlfriends-with-wine book club. Assured of one another’s good intentions, people speak freely, sometimes fumbling a little, always curious.
“It’s been an amazing experience,” says Carolyn Randazzo, a retired elementary-school teacher who took over the convening after co-founder Carla Fletcher died. Here early, she’s pulling chairs around four joined tables. “I now think that when we register to vote, we need to be handed a copy of Dog Whistle Politics. And the first book we read—The New Jim Crow, about our prison system—I had no idea. And I never knew that FHA and VHA loans were not available to African Americans. I hope my parents didn’t know, either. The first house they bought here was with a VHA loan.”
People stream in, carrying copies of tonight’s book, Fire Shut Up in My Bones. A memoir by journalist Charles Blow, it was turned into an opera they plan to see together.
I walk around, scribbling names. Dorothy McGuffin tells me she’s been part of this group for about two—she checks the book list—no, four years. She rattles off a list of her favorites, starting with Olivia’s Story: The Conspiracy of Heroes Behind Shelley v. Kraemer, and Rod Orr chimes in, talking about The Blood of Emmett Till. The group’s discussed memoirs by the Ferguson police chief and Michael Brown’s mother, Hillbilly Elegy, White Rage, The N Word, The Origin of Others...
Abashed by all these titles I haven’t read, I stammer, “I feel so…”
“Behind the times?” she asks, smiling. “That’s why we stay with this group.”
Randazzo kicks off the discussion with a reviewer’s quote: “Charles Blow is the James Baldwin of our age.” Bill Klopfenstein is not convinced. “Baldwin,” he protests, “was so much more global, so much more philosophical.” But Carol Gerdt points out that Blow’s journalism is extensive; this is just a memoir. Ruth Meyer says, “He wrote an op-ed after Trump was elected, saying to the media, ‘You did not hold him to the same standard as the other candidates.’ In that sense he’s like Baldwin—he doesn’t mince words.”
“He’s unflinching,” adds Robyn Browning, “in discussing race, especially the intersection between race and sexuality. He’s not asking white America, he’s saying, ‘You are going to sit with this.’ There’s a fire raging.”
“So maybe he just needs a little more seasoning?” Randazzo says.
“Or we just need to know more about him,” another woman interposes. “Maybe we’re the ones who need the seasoning.”
Randazzo reads a quote about “the idea that, at any moment, we all had the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past.”
“You have to,” murmurs McGuffin. “I picked that same passage. It touched me, too.”
They talk about the transformation in Blow, how he’d clung to his mother as he tried to make sense of who he was and how the world worked. A former teacher brings up the teachers who had no faith in Blow and his admission that he “lived down to their expectations.” Laverne Mitchom recalls Oprah saying that “her third- or fourth-grade teacher, a white teacher, made her realize she was smart and she read well.”
Browning nods. “For black children, it’s extremely important, especially if a white teacher recognizes that. I worked at a middle school for girls, and sometimes I felt that the teachers’ expectations of the girls weren’t high enough. And studies show that without any teacher giving positive reinforcement, a black male child will quickly go the opposite way.”
She adds that she likes this being a contemporary story of a black male in a rural area. “On TV, we think of rural areas as white. I’ve got family still living in the country on gravel roads—and the racism still exists.”
A woman notes with relief that at least Blow had a positive experience with a white family his grandmother worked for. McGuffin says quickly, “I liked his family, from Papa Joe all the way through.”
Gerdt says she’s surprised that Blow “revealed that he is bisexual.” Her glasses slide a little, but she shoves them up. “Sexual fluidity, gender fluidity—I don’t quite understand it, personally, but there are just a lot of different ways people are, and he came out and said that, and that takes a lot of guts.”
“There’s a resiliency in him,” says Meyer. “How do we find that resiliency as a community?”
“Taking trauma and using it to make yourself stronger,” someone says softly.
“Ferguson has trauma,” Meyer says. “How do we come out of it stronger and more unified?”
“I don’t think you can turn something positive if you’re in denial about what’s happened,” says Mitchom, “and as much as I regret to say it, there’s still denial here. Some people feel like Ferguson was made a scapegoat, like it was this perfect little town, and if they’d leave us alone, we’d be just fine.”
Cassandra Butler leans forward. “This group gives me so much hope. Two years ago, an organization of police chiefs met with some citizens in Ferguson, and the level of discourse in that group about race, versus what I have become accustomed to in this group, was night and day. They were saying we were fine until the Department of Justice came, and all we need is for them to leave us alone.”
Browning, who went to the same meeting, nods: “People said, ‘I just want to get it back like it used to be.’ But why let that stop you from enhancing yourself and seeing another perspective?”
