Memories of Tennessee
… listening to my mother’s stories at the kitchen table
… riding my blue tricycle around the house and the yard like a budding Nascar hero
… watching the headlights of my father’s tractor as he worked into the darkness, tending another man’s fields.
My parents were sharecroppers, caught in a system that allowed only the owners to win. Through Herculean effort they freed themselves from that system and joined the Great Migration north in the early 1950’s. They left the South in search of opportunity for themselves and education for me and my sister, Joyce. My dad found factory work and my mother took a dishwashing job in a restaurant. And I found the local library. Reading became my key to the universe. It remains so to this day.
Reading has provided me with knowledge and inspiration all my life. Study of the Bible was a given in my household. The Bible is a treasure trove of stories about heroes and villains and their interaction with the supernatural. As a child I visited exotic places with Ray Bradbury, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. As an adolescent I discovered the many faces of good and evil through the eyes of Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dean Koontz. My identity as an African American was solidified by the works of Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, to name a few. My classical education included Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and Alighieri. The combination of these influences and my parents’ example led me to a career as a helping professional. When I retired from full time pursuit of that career, I turned to writing like a long-neglected suitor.
I became a father in the 1970’s, twin girls and then a boy. For the first time, I was not the center of the universe. I was a husband, a father, a student, and a bread winner. These roles impacted me deeply, but there wasn’t time to write about them. Instead, their mother and I tried to pass on our love of learning through reading and the arts. It seems to have taken root. My kids turned out to be extraordinary people (no brag, just fact). They have good hearts and strong values and they give me hope. Most important, they love each other, unconditionally. Because of them, I’m a grandfather, twice over. The cycle of love, worry and hope continues.
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I am storyteller by blood, a writer by craft. I practice the magic of telepathy as Stephen King so aptly describes the connection between writer and reader in his book, “On Writing.” Writing is both my palliative and my passion. “Walker’s Way” is the coming out of the child I have nurtured from birth to maturity. I hope Mother and Daddy are proud.
