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Meeting the Challenge of Perseverance

(ISBN 0816045399)

I finally gave in and told Sandra West that, pending the approval of her agent and the encyclopedia’s publisher, Facts On File, I would accept the challenge of co-authoring the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. My one major regret was that the deadline for completing the encyclopedia was the very next summer. After agreeing verbally to work on the encyclopedia in October 2000 and not signing an actual contract until March 2001, completing the encyclopedia by July 2001 struck me as highly unrealistic. Still, the gesture of a small advance from our agent and the contractual promise of further advances with the completion of each third of the book encouraged me to try my best. I was also encouraged at the thought that Sandra had already started on the book, having plotted out the list of entries and began identifying sources for photographs.

I began by investing the last of my savings into an updated computer, purchased during a Thanksgiving Day sale and programmed for such modern writing essentials as email and Internet capability. Atop the hutch of my obligatory new computer desk, I placed for inspiration a postcard photograph of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, another of Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke (courtesy of my co-author), and a four-inch tall laughing Buddha carved from ebony wood. The laughing Buddha had been presented to me by a writer friend suffering from AIDS, and who, watching me attempt to elevate my career while taking care of my mother, cautioned me that, “Without laughter, we don’t get far at all in this life my friend.” With those parting words, he died a few days later. If that brave soul could die laughing, I told myself, then I could damn sure live trying.

And so I did. I scheduled research trips to the library around Mom’s meals and medication schedule. With my initial token advance and generally below-poverty-level budget, I ordered research books from discount catalogues and unearthed rare jewels out of used bookstores. I was particularly gratified to discover that some of the books I had purchased all over the world--San Francisco, Philadelphia, London--and had been hauling around for decades, contained information on the Harlem Renaissance that was not available elsewhere. Furthermore, neither were the books.

For my mother’s medical appointments when I knew I would be sitting for hours, I began to take with me a tote bag filled with pens and notebooks to work wherever I happened to be. During one such visit to Mom’s diabetes specialist, the brilliant and amicable Dr. Calvin L. Butts, something astonishing occurred. As Dr. Butts examined my mother while I sat beside her, he mentioned off-handedly that he was reading a book about his hometown of Sparta, Georgia, and that it contained some interesting information about the family of Jean Toomer. “You know, one of those writers back there during the Harlem Renaissance.” Indeed. Sitting in my bag was a notebook with an incomplete outline for my article on Jean Toomer and the information I still needed to fill in was that on Toomer’s family in Sparta. Dr. Butts offered to let me look at the book while he completed Mom’s examination. By the time he was done, I had filled in the blanks of my outline and excitedly wrote the article later that evening.

I had expected that we would likely miss the established deadline for the encyclopedia’s completion and we did. Missing a deadline was something I had never done as the editor of a weekly military newsmagazine, at RAF Lakenheath in England, and doing so with the encyclopedia distressed me. Yet I had to acknowledge my circumstances and the impact of having started six months after the project’s official beginning.

In the meantime, the threat of kidney failure nearly forced my mother to go on dialysis, a prospect that terrified me because the only treatment option open to her was one requiring the mechanical circulation of her blood outside her body in order to cleanse it before installing it back inside her body. The process was one she likely would not survive more than half a year. By the grace of cleansing herbal teas, hard prayers, an heroic fraction of a single kidney, and whatever favor Heaven chose to grant us, my mother’s then seventy-nine-year-old body stumped her doctors as her condition stabilized and we escaped that particularly traumatic dilemma. Then came an acid twist of irony: just before Mom’s 80th birthday, her oldest daughter succumbed to the very condition that she herself had somehow eluded. Three months later, a second daughter was lost to cancer. In the face of tragedy, I saw my family turn repeatedly toward my mother for emotional and spiritual strength. She obviously was in no better condition than anyone else to provide such strength but I came to understand that the importance of her remaining among us had to do with even more than honoring her life as I had chosen to do. It involved preserving the symbol of endurance, advancement, and triumph that she had become for the four generations that began with her. Less comprehensible was that so many depended on her as a living symbol to sustain their spirits but so few were willing to contribute to her support.

My position as my mother’s primary caregiver, I realized, was not unique. At the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 22,000,000 Americans were in a similar position that had forced them to adjust daily routines, professional lives, and even individual quirks of personality. For many, more challenging than the time and energy required to provide care, was the fact that they were now responsible for someone who had been utterly abusive towards them when they were children and in need of ongoing care.

In my own case, oscillating back and forth between the often painful demands of family responsibility and the powerful challenge of completing the encyclopedia, I frequently sought and surrounded myself with inspiration of every kind. Sitting on the back porch one day while taking a break, I saw a squirrel fall from a power line into the street directly in front of a car. The drop from the power line had to have been at least thirty feet and I’m certain the hit from the car must have hurt. Yet the squirrel took the fall and the hit with whatever pain was involved, scrambled to the other side of the street, and made its way back up a tree. Well damn, was about the only thing I could say. Who was I to cry about the challenges in my life when a little squirrel could take such a monstrous beating from the world and still keep on keeping on? From where had its strength to carry on come? From Divine will? From the animal instinct that somewhere on the other side of the trauma just experienced was a satisfying treasure of buried nuts or a rendezvous, perhaps, with a mate or offspring? Self pity was obviously something for which the squirrel had no use whatsoever. Witnessing its example, I took three slow deep breaths and went back to my computer.