So thank you, so beautiful.
Oh, no.
Thanks.
Thanks for listening.
I appreciate it.
Can I lean on you a little bit to talk
about why it's complicated?
Yeah.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, this is going to sound kind of esoteric.
But the great joy in this book for me
and seeing the positive response it's gotten,
is because it's not me.
And it's not my story.
And it's hard to carry a story of that gravity sometimes.
And so, sometimes it's easier than others.
And I was sitting there, I was like, my God.
This is hard today.
It's a really--
I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I mean, they're going to be like, they were like,
oh, you know, oh, I think I'm going to go take a nap.
It's just-- but sometimes, I mean,
I think there are times when I can be in the poems
and carry them.
And then, there are other times where the poems really like,
they pull me down in some ways.
And so, when I was reading some of them tonight,
I could feel them holding me in that way.
Maybe it's because we talked about them quite a bit today.
And so, I've been thinking a lot about what legacy
means and what history means.
And for me, the whole exercise of this project
and the graphic novel, were to try to reclaim this story.
Because it had been stilted and distorted
in so many different ways.
And I feel really lucky that I was trusted with it.
I don't want to get tin foil hat about it,
but I feel very fortunate that I was trusted with it.
How many of you have seen The Great White Hope?
I mean, it's a different generation, right?
Yes.
So that is like the worst most bastardized version
of his story, right?
James Earl Jones is great in it, Jane Alexander
is amazing in it.
But it pretends to be a biography
of Jack Johnson that is--
just takes the most salacious, the moment
of biggest spectacle, really, in his biography
and turns that into the story.
It's like this cut-- for those of you who haven't seen it,
it's this country fried fighter who's
got this thing for this white woman.
And he just, I don't know-- it's nothing like what happened,
minus the very basic details that this man was
a heavyweight champion.
And he was involved in an interracial relationship.
You take that part of it out, and The Great White Hope
is completely erroneous.
And there are so many people who think
that's the story of Jack Johnson.
The crazy thing is, Howard Sackler,
the guy that wrote The Great White Hope as a play won
the Pulitzer Prize for it.
And so, I sit around, I'm like, OK.
So he won the Pulitzer for a broke down version
of Jack Johnson's story, right?
A bastardized version of it.
I almost won with my thing.
I think it's safe to say it's his story, right?
It's nothing that Sackler did has done that I did,
it's Jack Johnson's story.
It's the life that he lived and how it emotes still.
I mean, I guess, in 1970, it would
have been really salacious, this interracial relationship.
And now, it's like, eh.
Unless you're in Indiana, it doesn't really--
[LAUGHTER]
--doesn't make that much difference.
So yeah, that's why it just is-- it's a big thing.
I can't imagine what it had been like to live that way.
Yeah.
It's fun to imagine but not to exist there.
Yeah.
Did what your mother said--
did what your mother said to you "don't
make a spectacle of yourself" ever keep you
from going full head on into writing this story?
Because he is larger than life.
Yeah.
You know, it didn't.
Because I didn't-- that's a great question.
I didn't think about it.
I mean, I really-- until I was doing this,
I had forgotten that my mom said that.
I think I ingrained it as a pattern of behavior.
Like, we're lucky to be here, right?
So pretending that it's anything else but luck
seems presumptuous.
And that's my mom's idea.
And she'd say that, "Boy, you're lucky to be here.
You're lucky I kept you," this kind of thing.
Not that she was going to give me up, but there's this--
there was always this thing that was like, look, you know,
you're here by the grace of me.
And I'm here by the grace of somebody else.
So don't pretend that you're bigger than those things.
And it always made sense to me.
Particularly, in the face of my biological father
who was a dancer on Soul Train and was very ostentatious.
So that thing was--
so that didn't keep me from going into it.
I think, if anything, the challenges
for me, when I was working on the book,
were how to write about something
that was so complicated and confusing to me, right?
To write about this man who put his wife in a coma,
and supposedly brought one of his girlfriends
there to see her and was like, look, if you don't act right,
this is what happens to you.
So I mean, I found these things once I got into the story.
So what do you do with that?
And I chose to push through it.
But it was really hard to write those poems.
And I have a wonderful wife and a wonderful daughter.
And I can't imagine ever wanting to do,
like, we don't even get the wooden spoon out
for my daughter when she does something like there's no--
it's all hands off, right?
And so, I can't imagine what would--
but it wasn't a motivation that was based in these women.
It's a systemic behavior that was so messed up.
And then when people start to think about that,
it's really complicated things that your grandfather,
your great grandfather might have
treated your great great grandmother that way.
Then it becomes much more personal, right?
And so, I mean, you mentioned that interview-- was
that the thing in Nashville?
Yeah.
So one of the things that made me think about
is that he's a part of a bigger conversation.
And so it's like a way into that conversation.
And then the book came out and that horrible video of Ray Rice
dragging his unconscious wife out of the elevator.
Then Greg Hardy throws his girlfriend on a bed of guns
and then signs a $9 million contract
with the Dallas Cowboys.
It just happened that those things happen right
after the book came out.
And so, it was really strange timing.
I mean, I think it being fortuitous in a horrible way,
right?
I would never want those things to happen to someone.
But if they're going to happen, it's almost better
that they happened all at once.
Because then, it was an inescapable discussion.
And it's been really easy to just ignore it for a long time.
And so the thing was when I was trying to write those poems,
I couldn't do that.
I couldn't write the poems.
I figured out early I couldn't write the poems if my wife
or daughter were in the house.
It just was so stressful to me to think about those spaces
and know that my kid's downstairs playing with her--
in her kitchen, she had one of those,
when she was really little, she had
one of those little kitchens where she'd pretend to cook
or whatever.
And my wife's down there doing stuff.
And I'm upstairs, trying to figure out
how to write a poem about domestic violence.
So I waited for them to go to the park or something,
or go to school, and I'd work.
And that wasn't good enough either,
because I knew they might come back at any time.
And I was always looking over my shoulder.
Because I didn't want them coming into the house
with that kind of action.
Even if it's up in my office, I don't want that energy
around them, right?
So I had to write all of them when they were out of town.
So they would leave town to go visit my mother-in-law
or something for three or four days.
And I would spend that whole four
days working on the poems about domestic violence.
And they'd come back, and I'd just
be like, just leave me alone for a little bit, you know?
And I need to reenter for a while before we talk.
But that's how I got them done.
And it was really uncomfortable.
And it doesn't get any easier to read the poems
or talk about that stuff either.
So, yeah.
So it was maybe just emotion more than my mom.
Yeah, you guys say that is really bright, isn't it?
I just realized there were people behind it.
[LAUGHTER]
Can I?
I was wondering when you were writing your shadow poem,
was there an aspect that primarily influenced
these poems in the sense that you say yourself
from reading this article from the New York Times,
I really have a sense of this is what he's saying to a shadow,
or for reading this dialogue he had with an interviewer,
this is what you might be thinking--
Yeah.
--or saying through a shadow?
What were the primary influences there?
Yeah.
That's a hard thing to do.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
That's really good.
We were talking about this earlier about every event
in the book is accurate, right?
So if he's in Chicago in a poem, he
was in Chicago for real in the poem.
If he was racing in Crown Point Indiana, then that happened.
It's exactly as it-- and the one space
where it's not like that was the shadow poems,
and when he's talking back and forth.
And the thing about it, and it brings it back
to this idea of a spectacle in my mind
as being out of a sharing of some moment
in some ostentatious way, is that he would have never
been honest about those things.
So it's twofold, right?
It's the idea of what a man was and how a man behaves
at the turn of the century, which is I'd go get the deer,
and then I cut the deer.
And then you make the meal, right?
It's like this weird hunter-gatherer shit.
And so he's straight up and down like that, right?
But he's also a Black man who's still fighting with the idea.
He's fighting people's beliefs that he's not a human being.
He's the first generation after--
his parents were owned.
Like, his parents were somebody else's property.
So he's fighting against that, too.
So to show weakness, or to show confusion,
or any of those things, would be wholly unacceptable.
So in all of the work I did, all of the source text,
and I had 22, 23 source text for this book,
it used to have a bibliography.
Because I was very proud of them.
Yes, I did research, right?
And my editor was like, no, dude.
Books of poems don't get bibliographies.
[LAUGHTER] It's like, my mind does, come on, man.
Yeah, so in all of this, I never found a place
where he talked about being afraid or admitted to losing.
Even when he lost heavyweight title,
he said he threw the fight, so he could come back
to the United States.
So every time, he always won.
There was never a place in which he showed weakness or fear.
And I thought, and so the book reflected that at first.
Before those shadow poems, the book
reflected the fact that he was always
the winner, always the most gregarious, always the most
elegant and eloquent, right?
And so, the shadow poems I hoped at least
would lend a little nuance where we would see the things
that maybe he would not say.
They're totally fabricated, right?
But I tried to find places or events
he could respond to in the poems that might tie them in,
in some way.
His shadow calls him out about abusing one of his girlfriends
and things like that.
I try to weave it in a way where we could address
some of the things that the persona of Jack
Johnson or the human being Jack Johnson
would never address publicly.
Thank you for that question.
We can do one more.
So why or how did you choose him as a subject?
What took you there?
Yeah.
You know, so I apologize to the class that heard this earlier.
But my mom, here we go, right?
It was my mother every time.
So I was joking with Tyler, and I
said that every book I've ever tried to write
is just about having daddy issues.
But every book I've tried to write somehow my mom
got it started for me or helped me to come to terms with it.
And so, when I was a kid, I used to watch boxing with my mother.
I mean, it wasn't my dad.
She was the one that taught me about prize fighting.
And so, we would sit there on this awful couch
that we had in Frankfurt, Germany
and watch the fights on Wide World of Sports.
And what I didn't understand at the time
was that she was betting on all these fights.
And so she's-- so we're watching these fights.
And she's really into them.
Like, well, I know, my mom, she loves boxing.
I guess, I love boxing, too.
And I found out later that she was sometimes
losing a lot of money.
And when the guy that-- the fighter she was betting on
didn't win, her dismissal of the other fighter
would always be like, forget that dude,
he's no Jack Johnson.
But she never told me who Jack Johnson was.
She would just use this blanket dismissal of the guy that
lost her money, right?
And so to this day, I don't-- she won't tell me.
She just gives me this like Yoda look
where she's like, we know things that you don't know.
But I asked her why it is--
how did she know Jack?
I mean, the ages are wrong.
Jack Johnson died before she was born.
So I still have no idea how she found out about this guy.
But she used to invoke his name all the time when I was a kid.
So I thought I was going to write an essay about watching
boxing with my mother.
I thought it might be an interesting gender reversal
thing, and also speak to what it means
to be a single parent, a single mother with boys
and how that dynamic works.
But I needed to learn about Jack Johnson.
And the more I learned about him, the less important
my story seemed, and the more important
it seemed to really pursue this other conversation about him,
about history, and masculinity, and domestic violence,
and spectacle, and sports, and turn of the century.
You know, when Jack Johnson was heavyweight champion and nobody
could beat him, President Roosevelt
was so bent out of shape by it that he almost
tried to ban boxing in the United States.
Even though he was a huge fight fan.
But nobody could beat Jack Johnson.
So they're like, look, we'll just get rid of this sport,
then, if nobody can beat this dude.
And so, finding out these things about our presidents
and people, the people who were prominent in his time
is really incredible.
I shouldn't be surprised, I suppose.
I mean, I think the more we open up history,
the more we find just really how complex and awful a lot
of the things that went into making this amazing country
were, right?
And I think if we can ever get that part right, the part where
we can acknowledge like, hey, we were built on some messed up
things, I think we might be able to figure out
a little more clearly how to navigate what's going on now.
I mean, it feels like this to me like there's
a really important event happening around us.
And so, anyway, yeah, and that was the thing.
It was my mom.
And she never lets me forget that.
[LAUGHTER]
Any time I talk to her, she's like, you know
I gave you that book, right?
[LAUGHTER]
You know the one that almost won?
I gave you that book.
[LAUGHTER]
But that's probably a good place to stop.