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Michael Steinberg on Creative Nonfiction

by William Meiners

For a first-time teacher like myself, about as calm and erudite as a young, professorial Jerry Lewis, it never hurts to bring a real expert into the classroom. When Michael Steinberg showed up to my creative writing class at the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal College in February I learned very quickly, alongside my students, what a great teacher Mike has been for about three decades. And a deep source of knowledge about the field of creative nonfiction.

Mike and Bob Root wrote the book on creative nonfiction. Well one very good one called Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction that’s now in its sixth edition and used in college classrooms all over the country. We caught up at a bookstore in East Lansing last month to talk more on the subject. Then we kicked the following back and forth through emails.

William Meiners: You mentioned that your anthology, Fourth Genre, which you wrote and put together with Robert Root, and the same-titled journal that came out more or less at the same time. Could you talk about both the timing of the two, as well as your initial ideas for putting such a collection together?
Michael Steinberg: Both publications were, in some ways, coincidences. The anthology, which came out in 1998, grew out of a course pack of readings that Bob and I put together for our graduate classes. At the time, there were no anthologies that covered the genre’s spectrum — personal essay, memoir, literary/personal journalism, and personal/cultural criticism. Since it was a teaching text, we organized the course pack as a writer’s conversation on/about the genre. Part one contained a series of selected pieces that represented the four subgenres I just mentioned. In Part two, we chose essays on/about matters of genre and craft. In addition to craft essays that Bob and I, and a few other teacher/writers wrote, we found a handful of pieces written by some of the writers whose work appeared in Part one. That gave us the idea to add Part three. We chose four essays that our best students had written; and we asked them to write an accompanying commentary on/about how they wrote their pieces.
We taught and revised the course packs for two semesters before deciding to expand the first two parts by adding about a half dozen essays, memoirs, literary/personal journalism and pieces of personal/cultural criticism — by a variety or writers. We kept Part 3 intact. At a point, we found that we’d collected enough work to constitute a teaching anthology. We sent out a proposal to 22 publishers. A few trade houses liked the idea but couldn’t provide the permissions/acquisitions budget we needed. Allyn and Bacon, then a small textbook house that published books on/about teaching writing and literature, offered to publish it. And today, the anthology is in a sixth edition.

WM: And the journal?
MJS: The first issue of the journal, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, came out in 1999. It grew out of a conversation I had with an adult student in one of my graduate course in literary/creative nonfiction. She was an aspiring writer who’d never written personal essays or memoirs before. The readings and writing assignments, it seems, led her to believe that she could write with more ease and fluidity in this genre than she could in either fiction or poetry. Coincidentally, she happened to be the journals editor for the Michigan State University Press.
To make a long story short, she did some research and found that, at the time (1997), the only journal of literary/creative nonfiction was Lee Gutkind’s Creative Nonfiction (first published in 1995). As it turned out, The Michigan State University Press took on Fourth Genre. That was 17 years ago and today Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre (I‘m no longer the editor), and River Teeth (which first appeared in 1999, two months after we did) are still the three most prominent journals of literary/creative nonfiction in the field.

WM: I’ve read various articles about the genre. From Lee Gutkind getting the “Godfather of Creative Nonfiction” label to another on the thoughts about the “non” label, essentially calling something “not fiction.” It all reminded me about having read and been curious to learn more about In Cold Blood about 10 years back. And of course, I think two different movies about Capote were coming out around that time. But I read somewhere that he claimed to be writing a nonfiction novel, an oxymoron since a novel is defined as a work of fiction. Or maybe it’s getting into double or triple negatives. Nevertheless, does In Cold Blood come up much in the discussion of the genre? Or is it more linked to the writers/journalists who may have defined it a decade or so later?
MJS: There are a few different theories about this. Lee Gutkind (among others), for example, believes that the genre we’re now calling creative nonfiction, grew out of the New Journalism movement of the 60s; books of investigative reporting by writers such as Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Gay Talese, among others. Critics called these books “nonfiction novels.” Which really means that the writers of these narratives were journalists who were using a novelist’s tools — plot, character, scene, dialogue, setting, etc. —nin order to make their “true stories” read more like plotted narratives. In time, the term “nonfiction novel” got replaced by works of what we’re today calling “literary/investigative journalism.” Some journalists and critics will argue that literary journalism is the earliest and purest form of creative nonfiction.

WM: I suppose all writing is some sort of “truth-telling,” if only to attempt to write a story, poem, or play that smacks of the truth. What drew you specifically to telling true stories?
MJS: Although in my personal essays and memoirs I do use research and reportage, I don’t write “true stories.” Let me explain that. I’m one of many personal essayist/memoirists that use our experiences, our lives, as raw material for finding out what fiction writers call discovering “what we didn’t know we knew.” I think this process of exploration and discovery, in other words, writing out of a sense of “not-knowing,” is closer to the ways in which writers of literary fiction and lyric poems create their works than it is to the ways in which investigative journalists approach their craft. Many of the debates/controversies on/about truth in nonfiction — especially those on literary memoir — generate from these two differing approaches. Yet, along with many others, I consider both to be works of literary/creative nonfiction. In fact, some of the best work I’m reading right now combines the personal with reportage and research.

WM: You told my creative writing class that creative nonfiction might feel a little more natural to you. I think all writing is probably difficult. What’s the most difficult thing about writing in the “fourth genre”? What are the links to fiction and poetry?
MJS: Yes, all writing is difficult, especially when it’s required, like a class assignment or a job related project. But, in my case, I write because I feel compelled to do it. For years, I tried to express my deepest feelings and confusions in fiction or poetry. But, over time, I found that I could be my best self as writer when I wrote personal essays and memoirs. In those forms, I feel less inadequacy and doubt — less hesitant and self-conscious. More spontaneous, I’d say. There are a couple of quotes to that effect that I’ve taped up above my writing desk — one from the novelist/essayist David Shields, and the other from novelist/journalist Pete Hamill. Shields says, “Find the form that releases your best intelligence. Find what you do exquisitely well and play it to the hilt.”
In describing the shift from writing news stories to feature columns, Hamill writes, “From the beginning, the form felt natural to me. I was like a musician who had found at last the instrument that was right for him.”
Hamill adds, “It freed me from an impossible objectivity…”
That freedom, that feeling of being in sync as a writer, parallels my own discovery, when, after decades of struggling to write fiction and poetry, I realized that writing personal essays and memoirs came more naturally to me than either of those forms did. It was the writing breakthrough I’d been struggling toward for much of my adult life.
As for links between literary nonfiction and fiction and poetry, I think there’s an important relationship, at least in my experience, between good literary nonfiction and good fiction and poetry — and I’ll also include drama in that mix as well. That’s because what’s most important, most necessary, in all forms of writing — literary, critical, and popular — is how skillfully the writer shapes/structures the work. And that always comes down to matters of genre and craft.
Whether the work is narrative or lyric, all literary writers possess similar tool kits. For myself, a personal essayist/memoirist, I’ve learned from good fiction writers how to use narrative and plot; and how to create three-dimensional, fully rounded characters, (in my case, mostly first person narrators), as well as how to craft dramatic scenes.
The heart of the playwright’s craft is dramatizing conflict through the use of dialogue and scene. Poets, especially those who write lyric poems, bring a freedom of imagination, an ear for rhythm and language, an eye for imagery, and a comfort and ease with metaphor. And, literary journalists and cultural critics, we’ve increasingly found, are often combining research and reportage with more personal presence, and in some cases, more intimate, voices.

WM: Your memoir, Still Pitching, has baseball as a central theme, though of course it’s about much more. Why did you decide to frame, or at least build it, around these memories of being a young pitcher? I love the title, which resonates in many ways. On the mound, ball in hand and every part of the game depends on what this player does. In what ways has that been a metaphor for living your life?
MJS: All memoir, I believe, is, in one way or another, about identity (and loss). In my case, the catalyst for writing Still Pitching was an impulse/urge to try to go back into the past in order to better understand how being a kid baseball pitcher led me to being a midlife writer and writing teacher. It’s all speculation, of course; but that question sent me back to my New York childhood and adolescence to see if I could discover who and what might have been the most influential forces that helped shape my adult self. Baseball turned out to be one of those influences. That inquiry and curiosity also allowed me to focus the memoir on those early, formative years.
I don’t think, that, in the writing I fully answered such a complex question. But, through a long, long process of drafting, revising, and rewriting, I was finally able to execute and to understand what Annie Dillard calls the process of “fashioning a text.” Which, in the end, is what all of us who write literary work are trying to do.
What you say about the title Still Pitching being a metaphor for living my life is something I never really thought about. But, since I do believe that persistence, tenacity, and determination are so important to becoming a writer — or, for that matter, to accomplishing anything else you’re proud of — the Still Pitching metaphor does have some truth to it.

WM: Having started a literary magazine about sports 21 years ago, I knew I wanted the focus to be on creative nonfiction. And in my mind, I thought maybe this is literature with a small “l.” After all, it’s about sports. But then an essay you shared with us, “Elegy for Ebbets,” was our first to get a nod in Best American Essays, in 2002. Some affirmation, for both of us, I suppose, that it’s not just about sports. What make writing about sports, beyond the daily coverage or “hot topic” sense, important as fodder for literature?
MJS: We both agree that there is a difference between sports writing and writing about sports. For the most part, sports are an arena I seem to be able to understand from the inside-out. In conversation, a colleague who, himself is an athlete, referred to this kind of sensibility as a “sports intelligence.” And so, in my writing, I often use sports as a lens; by which I mean, a way of seeing, a way of better understanding and utilizing the strategies, the tactics we need to know, in order to get ourselves through, or even to master ongoing personal problems and confusions. And these internal struggles are what all human beings have in common. Whatever I’m writing about sports, challenging relationships, family difficulties, serious health problems, personal losses — or anything else, really — I’m always hoping that readers (in my case, readers of memoir), can identify with the narrator’s (the “I’s”) internal struggles; that is, his fears and self-doubts — as well as his/her need to belong to something larger and/or to comprehend and overcome whatever human obstacles he/she might be facing.

WM: I hate whenever someone asks me who my favorite writer is. Probably because I think they’re going to judge me and then ask about 10 writers I’ve never heard of. No one really wants to interview me, but I’ve got this fear that someone might give me the Sarah Palin treatment and I’ll be shaking my head saying “I love all of it and read everything,” which I don’t. That said, who are your favorite writers? And why?
MJS: It’s a bit like writing; you don’t know what works or doesn’t work until after you see it on the page. And even then, recognizing whether it’s good or bad can take years, sometime even decades. Something that might have been a good choice years earlier, might today look like a poor fit. This kind of evolution and change also relates to the shifts in my reading preferences over the years.
Different authors have captivated my imagination at different times in my life. When I was growing up, for example, I loved reading Salinger and Twain, as well as Clair Bee’s popular novels about teenage sports heroes. Those writers created characters and situations, that, as a kid, I could identify with and understand. When I was a young adult, I admired and identified with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters — people, who like myself, came from a lower middle-class background and who entertained dreams of greatness and who aspired to a life of stature and privilege. When later on, when I became enamored of literary nonfiction, I cultivated an appreciation for writers like Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, E.B. White, Vivian Gornick, and Scott Russell Sanders. The list goes on and on. And, like most readers, I love the writer(s) and books I’m reading right now; that is, until I read the next author and next book.

WM: Fourth Genre is a staple textbook in creative nonfiction classrooms, and you’re up to six editions. Can you talk about the various additions to the book and where you see the genre heading in the next five to 10 years?
MJS: In the mid to late 90s, when the genre first began to get some recognition as a legitimate literary form, the majority of work that appeared in the first few editions and issues of the anthology and the journal, were largely internal, linear narratives; and by that I mean, “Montaignian” personal essays. In addition, I saw a sprinkling of memoirs and some works of literary/investigative journalism and personal/cultural criticism.
The works I’m seeing in journals today, as well as the best writing that my MFA students are producing, often are experiments in form, voice, narrative persona, structure, and language. For example: short pieces of prose that use language and form in most unexpected ways; increasing numbers of essays and memoirs that combine personal narrative with analysis, research, and reportage; as well as works of literary journalism and personal/critical essays, where the narrator’s persona (by which I mean, the “I”) is sometimes at the center of the piece and sometimes not.
I’m also seeing more segmented and disjunctive essays, as well as an increase in lyric and lyrical essays, some of which take the kinds of imaginative and linguistic leaps that the best poetry does. In addition, there’s graphic nonfiction, as well as blogs, visual and video essays, and forms that combine different elements of media.

In short, this genre, like the contemporary visual arts, is, I believe, pushing at the boundaries that once separated the more traditional and experimental literary forms. And as a result, we’re seeing more existing hybrid, forms.

WM: You shared your story with me, and my class, about being a 20-plus year professor of English and writing courses, and then making a decision that you wanted to become a serious writer (in your 40s, I believe). And of course you’ve been successful as a writer over another 20-plus years. Was it as easy (and I know it’s not easy) as just making up your mind to do this? As a teacher of writing, what’s your best advice for anyone who wants to write stories about his or her life?
MJS: My decision to write grew out of an urgent midlife need to try to do something I’ve always dreamed of; that is, for decades, I’d yearned deeply to become a literary writer. When I was coming up, fiction, poetry, and in some circles, drama, were considered to be the only legitimate literary forms. I’m being kind to myself when I say that I was a less-than-skilled-writer in all of those genres. For as long as I can remember, my best, most compelling works were my personal essays and memoirs. I taught and wrote personal essays with my composition students for decades. Yet at the time, personal essays were considered to be the province of freshman composition. A deliberate slight, to be sure. And so, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to become known as even a workaday literary writer.
But life can be full of surprises. About five years before literary/creative nonfiction began to get some national attention, I had my first of what would be two cornea transplants. The surgery was a wake-up call — a first brush with mortality, if you will. My greatest fear was the possibility of losing my sight. At that point in time, I told myself that, even if I didn’t succeed, it was urgent for me to put as much focus, energy, and commitment into my writing as I could. Failure would have been devastating; but knowing my nature as I do, I don’t think I could have lived with myself had at least not tried. Plus, I knew, that time was running out.
Five years later, literary/creative nonfiction began to slowly enter the literary conversation. And today, it’s considered by many to be “the fourth genre.” Not fourth in terms of its stature; but fourth in that it’s inclusive of the other three.
So the very short answer to the first part of your question is that I became a writer through a combination of luck, circumstance, will, desperation, and readiness. As I’m fond of telling my MFA students, talent and a buck fifty (it used to be a quarter) will get you a phone call.
As for the advice I’d give to those who want to write stories about their lives, in addition to the David Shields and Pete Hamill quotes [above], I’ll offer two others, the first by Donald Hall, the next by William Stafford — both of whom, are, by the way, among our finest poets. Since I’ve talked a good deal about baseball and determination, I’ll cite Donald Hall’s advice first. *When Hall refers to “poems” or “poetry,” I’ve extended it to all four literary forms (see italics below).
I watch the old ones, the athletes without the talented young bodies. I watch the intense, concentrated pushing of the self past the self’s limits. It is like writing poems *{stories, essays, memoirs}, or it is what writing poems ought to be if you’re going to last as a poet; you have to bring everything to the poem that you have ever learned as to the painting if you are a painter, or to the swing of the bat if you are a hitter, and everything you ever do. You have to push up to the limit and past the limit.
Hall indicates here that what’s most important is that we bring, not just an “I”, but our fullest, wisest, most experienced (three dimensional) selves to the writing desk. And I also agree with William Stafford’s belief that, for many, many different reasons, we all too frequently talk ourselves out of writing.
Here’s what he has to say about that.

I believe that the so-called “writing block” is the product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance… One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.

And…

I can imagine a person beginning to feel that he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now….You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today; the assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.

And to that I’ll add something that my colleague Mimi Schwartz often tells her nonfiction students, “You’re the only one,” Mimi says,  who can write your story.”

Michael Steinberg founded Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction in 1998. He’s written and co-authored five books and a stage play. Still Pitching won the 2003 ForeWord Magazine/Independent Press Memoir of the Year. An anthology, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers Of/On Creative Nonfiction, with Robert Root, is now in a sixth edition. Currently, Steinberg is the nonfiction writer-in-residence in the Solstice/Pine Manor low residency College MFA program.

SL Essay

Christmas City, U.S.A.

by Michael McColly

In 1966 my family moved from the little farm town where I was born to Marion, Indiana where my father took a job as a high school teacher and basketball and baseball coach. Marion was a factory town that manufactured TV tubes, automobile frames, glass jars, and plastic Christmas decorations. In fact, Marion churned out more plastic Santas and reindeer than any other town in the world. Christmas City, U.S.A., a sign boasted outside of town, dwarfed the other two markers that announced its other two claims of notoriety: the birthplace of James Dean and home to the State Basketball Champs of 1926. Unwritten on the water towers and welcome signs on the highways, however, was any mention of the August night in 1930 when a mob stormed Marion’s jail, dragged two black teenagers accused of murdering a white man out to the courthouse square, strung them up in a tree, and tried to burn their bodies, giving Marion the infamous distinction of being the site of the last known lynching above the Mason-Dixon line.

We lived in an old farmhouse on the south side of town in a working class neighborhood populated by both blacks and whites who’d moved up from the South for factory work. There wasn’t much on our side of town except the VA Hospital, the town dump, 38th Street Park, and the Christian College, where Methodist missionaries taught Christian mathematics and Christian biology to their converts from poor countries I’d never heard of — like Ghana and Honduras. Walking home from school I passed by the campus and gawked at these foreign students, innocent smiles locked onto their faces, dressed in ill-fitting second-hand clothes. To me they looked like someone’s prized doll collection come to life. But when they looked back at me, and the broken, queer sounding words came out from their lips, I felt like mountains or giant trees from a jungle had popped up out of the monotonous middle-American landscape.

Summer evenings, coming back from the grocery store, my father would drive slowly by the park to keep tabs on his black players at 38th Street Park, which was where they all hung out. He pulled up to the curb, leaned his head out the window and studied their play. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he might holler out something to one of his guys, more for his sake than theirs, forcing my sister and me in the back seat to duck for fear of being seen: “Hey Pettiford! You got any feet? Use ‘em!” Thank God he never got out. I watched him watching them, his face softening from its usual hardened stare, as these black young men ran the court like they were some part of his youth that he could never have back. For my father, too, had played basketball in college and baseball in the minor leagues until he had to quit when age caught up with him.

The year Bobby Kennedy campaigned in Marion for president I made the fifth grade basketball team. We had uniforms, an electric scoreboard, referees with striped shirts, cheerleaders, and everything. Our team was half black and half white. I played forward, two other white kids played at guard, and two black guys who were cousins played center and forward, James and Clayton Stanton. Often my mom took some of my teammates home from the away games, and since James and Clayton lived down the street, they came with us. I don’t remember getting a ride with their parents, not that they didn’t come; they did. Sometimes I could see James’ mother sitting in a big old coat off by herself in the corner of the gym with his little sister. James lived across the street from the RCA plant where his mother worked. I often wondered, since she worked there, if they had TVs in every room of their house. If he had a lot of TVs, I never found out because he never invited me inside. But I did discover that in James’ house, as it was in my dad’s, there was no father.

My friendship with James began after that first season, and when winter turned to spring, he and his friends started coming to shoot hoops. My house became the place to play outside of 38th Street Park because my father had paved our driveway, found an old goal at the high school, and made an official backboard with a black square above the rim to guide our bank shots. From here, it wasn’t too long until I was allowed to follow James and his friends to the park. It was different at the park, however. I was usually the only white kid playing. So I got kneed or pushed around more than most, sometimes because I was white and sometimes because I played like a coach’s son — calling fouls or traveling until I learned to keep my mouth shut. But if things got too rough, James, and then some of his friends, came to my defense: “Just play ball and leaved that boy alone.” This was a risk for James. Even though he was respected, his respect came from his athletic abilities and not from bravado. He held a quiet presence among his peers. And they often made fun of him for being a momma’s boy, going to church, and baby-sitting too much for his little sister.

My relationship with James was a risk, too. But not as far as my parents were concerned; they were “good” liberals and relished their progressive tendencies in our small town made up mostly of republicans and redneck democrats. No, it was my relatives and neighbor men who often went out of their way to offer their so-called wisdom: “I seen some white boys down at the park. I don’t know if I would go there if I was them? Niggers you can’t trust with tour breath, you know? They’ll steal ya blind or knife ya, they will.” I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I didn’t hear them. But I heard everything they said, and the words echoed in my head every time James and his friends took me down to the park.

That March, Marion lost in the state finals to an all-black team from Indianapolis. Then Martin Luther King got shot in April and Bobby Kennedy in June, and suddenly people seemed to say and do things I’d never seen before. Fights broke out at school. Fires were set for no reason. Streetlights got shot out and yahoos raced around in pickups stirring up old black people who were afraid to leave their houses. Night after night my parents sat in silence and watched the sad faces of Huntley and Brinkley as they described a world that seemed to be falling apart. But I was obsessed with basketball and didn’t care or know any better.

I would hang out at the park by the hour, playing, or more often watching from the sidelines the older guys running, waiting for that rare chance to get in. Fights, shouting matches, and dramatic debates broke out over who fouled whom with endless reenactments of rule interpretations. In fact, their whole way of playing began to fascinate me as it seemed not at all like the rational and orderly form taught by my father. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there, but somehow I felt drawn to the distance they created between themselves and the white world just off court. It was like I had traveled to some distant country, when all I did was walk three blocks from home. Watching these black men and boys, I realized they were completely different here than they were around white people. They spoke in a language that was both English and yet not English. I could never figure it out. Sometimes it seemed like when they talked they were playing a game, turning words and sentences inside out, making jokes and coining new phrases, more like singing than speaking. Their cryptic jokes, especially those of the older guys, depended on secret meaning and signals I knew nothing about. Even their laughter seemed to originate from some unknown organ in their bodies. I’d never seen any white guy laugh like they did. Grown men, too, doubling over and falling on the ground, like people in seizures who needed wallets or spoons stuck in their mouths to keep them from swallowing their tongues. Sometimes it was funny to watch them and other times I found myself becoming nervous. Life was supposed to be more serious, I thought. What could they be seeing that I couldn’t that made everything so funny?

The big games were played on Saturday afternoon and almost every night during the summer. Men drove over from nearby Muncie or Kokomo. A crowd would form and guys would have to wait sometimes for hours to have the chance to knock off the team holding court. They came in long, low-riding, dark Oldsmobiles and Pontiacs, never station wagons or trucks or convertibles like white men drove. When someone new arrived, the men hanging around for the next game turned to see who had arrived. Slowly the car door opened and two or three pairs of long legs came out as they sat changing their shoes. Stepping out dramatically, the music of Curtis Mayfield and James Brown floated them onto the court. These weren’t the happy, snappy songs my sister and her friends listened to, jumping around in our yard; these were moody songs of love, with emotions that sank down the spine, into the groin, and then out through the shoes, inspiring images in my mind never before dreamed of.

Then they took off their shirts, revealing upper bodies that projected masculinity and majesty that magnified their true size. And by the time they’d run up and down the court, their skin took on a sheen that made them look the color of oiled guns.

If there was a game going on, newcomers stayed in their cars and drank tall bottles of Pepsi. But if all the men were shooting around between games, they ambled up the court, their bodies lanky like spiders, going sideways and circling around, casing the competition, nodding, slapping hands, allowing everyone to notice their presence. A player with a reputation commanded respect and got the ball as soon as he came on court. I remember one of my father’s best players, Avis Stewart, who’d returned from college, showed up. He wore a dark head band to keep back his afro, a ragged, sleeveless sweat shirt, trunks with his college emblem on them, and suede Converse tennis shoes the color of his gold skin. He towered over everyone, proud but cool, like a magnificent hawk that flew down from atop his perch. He took the ball, spun it in the air, and then dribbled around in and out through his legs to get a feel for it, as if it were a religious object that required ritual preparation. Then with a flip of a wrist, he put a little ‘English’ on the ball and made it bounce back to him so he could take a jumper. After he made the first shot, the ball came swiftly back to his waiting hands. Hitting the first shot was a good sign, hitting a third or fourth in a row cut the chatter and the court cleared. All eyes turned to Avis. He held out his hands and waited for the ball, his long gold fingers stiffened as if in some kind of trance, almost like they were separate from his body. From baseline to baseline, ‘round the world,’ we followed each of his shots as they sank with a sweet ring, hitting the bottom of the chain net and plopping out. Each shot propelled him faster and faster, making him even a little impatient for the ball to be back in his hands. Finally he missed. The spell he’d created broke and the court flooded with players again.

After more warming up, a game emerges suddenly out of the chaos. With white players a game came slowly; someone had to always organize it, line players up, five here and a group of five over there, pointing out who was guarding whom, setting up a defense, figuring out who should bring up the ball. But not so with black players; their game just began. Its logic came from within the game itself.

Once play started the game was all that mattered. No one was supposed to leave or concern himself with matters off-court. And the best players seemed oblivious to friends, dogs, kids, and even women. The world outside was forgotten. To be within that rectangular space, inside that timeless dynamic, a part of a rhythm and movement that they had created called them every weekend and every spare summer night. When I think about it now, the basketball court was perhaps the only place black men could be together in public without suspicion outside of their church.

Sometimes a ball would careen wildly off the rim, destroying the rhythm momentarily. But this was my moment — a chance to enter the game and thus their world. I ran to retrieve the ball as it rolled all the way to the swing sets or into the street. As fast as I could, I ran back to within heaving distance, and with all my might flung the ball with as much speed and accuracy as I could to the guy waiting for me off court, who gave me what I wanted most: a nod, a quick jerk of his head, his chin pointing to me in approval, acknowledging my presence.

My father had two lives: basketball season and the rest of the year. He coached baseball too, but there wasn’t as much passion for this in Indiana. But then nothing in our town could match the magic people felt for high school basketball. Nothing.

Not religion, not politics, not music, not the county fair in August, not even the trial of a woman and her lover who supposedly sawed up her husband and threw him in the Mississinewa River. When November rolled around, people talked of nothing else. In the barbershops and beauty salons, in the bars and bowling alleys, at church and even in funeral homes, everyone elsewhere talked basketball.

In Marion, everyone know the names of the 12 players on the high school team, the Sutters, the Prices, the Pettifords; everyone knew their families, the coach’s record, the schedule, the chances for a state championship. A spell came over our town when daylight waned and the darkness of December pulled people indoors. The stores brought out the purple sweaters and sweatshirts, the gold shirts and neck ties, the purple pumps and pant suits — all to match our school colors. The booster club sold stickers and pins and people stuck them onto bumpers and winter jackets. The signs on the stores no longer advertised sales and specials, but changes weekly to cheer on the team. Even the dentist, who my mom always suspected of being a John Bircher, took a break from his battle to get “the U.S. OUT OF THE U.N.” to lend his billboard to the cause. Week by week through the winter, basketball crept into our consciousness, taking over our lives, shutting out the world except for what was known of our rivals in the other factory towns of central Indiana. The War in Vietnam and the civil unrest in cities and on campuses were far away.

Basketball somehow kept our town together. It removed barriers and eclipsed the mundane circumstances of our lives, allowing us to celebrate the energy of youth — the beauty and innocence of young men who didn’t have much future off court, but who had promise and passion and a jump shot. Ironically, in these winter rituals the most feared and mistrusted members of our community, the black male teenager, often took center court. And they became my secret icons — heroes who couldn’t be heroes for white boys growing up in Indiana in the sixties. I idolized the players on my father’s team, black and white. I sat with them on the team bus, shot with them after practice, ate with them at restaurants before the game. I was privy to a world that boys and even adults in my town envied. I witnessed the pre-game pep talks, the half-time strategy sessions, the post-game celebrations. In awe I watched them shower, their long, lean, Herculean bodies, ageless and true. I watched my father whispering in their ears, his arms around their backs, yelling at them from courtside, talking quietly to them in the dressing room after they lost a game. I lived every moment of every game with them. With each shot, each defensive move, each pass, I followed the ball from player to player as if I were out there with them. I knew their nicknames and moves, and practiced with them in my driveway, muttering to myself the play-by-play, switching roles as I became each player. And as it was in my fantasies, it was the black players in real life who secretly captured the imaginations of the throngs of white people jammed into gymnasiums all over Indiana.

At that time there were maybe four or five black players on Marion’s team. Industrial cities like Fort Wayne, Anderson and Muncie also had black players, (and of course there were all black teams in Indianapolis and Gary), but by and large there was a clear taboo against blacks dominating any team of influencing the style of good old Hoosier high school basketball. Even for those teams which had several black players, five blacks were never allowed on court together. No one ever said exactly why. But everyone knew. They wouldn’t be able to do the set plays, chaos would break out. They needed a little smart white point guard to direct traffic. Once when several of the white players had fouled out, I remember that four black players and a Chinese American guy were sent to the floor to finish the game. Of course we won. But if we had lost the blacks would have been blamed, not the whites for fouling out. Yet everyone could see the dynamic of the game change with each black player added to the court. The pace of the game quickened and the fans got more excited as the style changed from the white game of defense and passing inside to the big man, to the black game of finesse, speed, shooting, and blocking shots.

From the bleachers I watched as did all the people in town lucky enough to have a ticket. Seven thousand people clung to their prized season tickets which people won in a lottery at the beginning of the seasons, while others procured them through clout or via family inheritance. The ticketless and the night shift huddled around radios. And the streets emptied from seven to nine o’clock. Everyone kept the players in the center of their mind, whispering prayers for each free throw. But when these heroes of Friday and Saturday night slipped out of their uniforms and walked out of the gym, those who had the wrong skin color became “colored boys” again who live on the wrong side of town.

I could never understand the hypocrisy that warped the people on my hometown, who otherwise seemed to see life so clearly and simply. When you’re 13, you don’t know how things get twisted like this, and it bothers you because in school and in life you’re trying hard to fit all the pieces together. It didn’t make sense why people distrusted one another because of the color of their skin. The riots and burning down of the cities, the KKK marches, the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seemed like scenes from folktales or stories in the Bible. Surely the good would win out in the end over evil. Yet distance always creates the illusion of righteousness: racism wasn’t our problem; what we saw on the nightly news had nothing to do with us, the good people in Marion, Indiana. Besides history told us that slavery and all the terrible things white peoples did to black people happened a long time ago. All that was fixed and forgotten. Yet, now that I look back, it never occurred to me to question why there were no black people at my church or at the Elk’s Club swimming pool or teaching at the high school or working anywhere but in the factories.

Then one day I was looking at an old scrapbook at my grandmother’s house. My cousins were showing me the obituaries of my grandfather, proving to me what I refused to believe when they showed me the rafter in the garage. I kept staring at my grandfather’s picture and rereading the newspaper clippings, wondering why what my cousin’s had told me had been omitted: that my grandfather had not simply died in the early morning hours, but had been found hanging from a rafter by my 10-year-old father when he went to the garage to look for his basketball. I flipped through the pages looking for him, but my grandmother had apparently unconsciously left him out and instead I could find only page after page of my ancestors, the poor Celtic-American farmers with stern faces and stiff bodies, who stared back at me as if judging me for my grandfather’s unforgivable act. And then, more horrible still: in a fold of a page I came across a yellowed newspaper article, unfolded it, and read the headline: “Mob Storms Jail in Marion,” Below the headline was a photograph of those two young black men hanging from trees on Marion’s courthouse lawn. With the image of my grandfather still trying to find its place in my mind, I stared at their heads drooping like puppets, their feet hanging off the ground, their bodies thin and long-stretched out of proportion, tongues hanging out of the corner of their gaping mouths. Below, looking up at them, glassy-eyed and giddy, some with remnants in their hands of the boys clothing as souvenirs, were the citizens of my home town — men and women, teenagers, relatives, uncles and aunts, perhaps even my grandfather there somewhere in the crowd.

After seeing that picture in my grandmother’s photo album, I would stare at those terrible trees on the courthouse lawn that I recognized from the photograph. And at Christmas when the town square was bedecked in holiday lights to proclaim our town’s status as “Christmas City, U.S.A.” I couldn’t help seeing the shadows of those teenagers hanging from the same trees gaily strewn with wreaths and reindeer.

When James and I reached 14, he looked almost like a man. He’d grown tall and the muscles in his arms and legs had grown thick and pressed out his skin. He became the star athlete in junior high. He was the team — the halfback, the pitcher, the 100-yard-dash-man. He hit all the home runs, blocked the shots, ran for the touchdowns, and captured the ribbons for the longest jumps. And when he pitched all you remembered seeing was not the white of the ball but the white of his clenched teeth as he struck you out. One Saturday, playing football in our yard, James ran so hard for a touchdown that he bulldozed an evergreen bush and it snapped off at the base. Confessing to my parents, he cried, promising my mother he would give her the money to buy a new one. But it didn’t matter. My mother worked at the urban League and slipped political pamphlets into people’s doors of McGovern. She liked that I had black friends playing in our side yard and spending the night. James could have burned our garage down, and she wouldn’t have cared. My father liked him too and would stand and watch us playing in the driveway, coaching James on how to flip his wrist for his jump shot: “Son, you’re gonna hit a lot more of those shots now if you follow through like I showed ya.”

James spent hours at our house, coming over when I wasn’t even there to practice and shoot around. When we went on vacations, he came over and mowed our yard and checked around to make sure the papers weren’t piling up on our porch. Sometimes, too, he spent the night. Lying there next to him in the dark, I thought about what would happen if some of my relatives would come over and see him next to me in my bed. Feeling him there breathing next to me, his eyes staring wide open into the dark, it felt like the Earth might crack open and swallow us down into that molten ball of fire at its core. Or, I thought, lightning might strike our house, like in a Frankenstein movie, and transform us. Him into me and me into him. When he went home after breakfast, I felt a sense of relief. My two worlds collapsed back into one. And I would go back into my room and quickly brush off his hairs left on the bed sheets, the little o’s that looked like they had spilled from out of a book.

It seemed like sometimes he never wanted to go home, and would stay past dinner, refusing my parents’ invitations to eat with us because he felt like he was imposing. So as we ate, we could hear the ball bouncing on the driveway and the goal shake when he missed a shot. At the time, I never understood why he didn’t want to go home, but now that I think about it, who ever wanted to be home at 14? My house was a refuge for James. His black friends made him uncomfortable, and at times teased him for being square and a mama’s boy. One day after losing yet another game to him at 21 and a little annoyed that he had been at my house nearly all day and showed no sign of wanting to go, I made up my mind to ask him a question that I knew he didn’t want to talk about — his father. I figured maybe he would just leave rather than talk to me about it. I knew the subject upset him because once he and his cousin Clayton fought over something about his father. James and I were resting between games, sitting against the giant ash tree that shadowed the court and hung over our garage. When I mentioned his father, he didn’t say anything, which was what I expected. James spoke only when spoken to, and then not always. So I asked him again, “How come you don’t have a dad, James?” He fidgeted, began itching his back, pulled up on his socks, then tried to spin the ball on his index finger but couldn’t. I pressed for an answer, ignoring his discomfort. “Everybody has a dad. How come you don’t?”

“No, I don’t have no dad,” he finally shot back with unusual emotion.

“Wol’ why not? What happened to him?”

For once I felt like I had ruffled his poise and made him sweat. He looked sick, and his mouth opened but no words came out. Then incredibly I saw tears like steel ball bearings sliding down his cheeks. He tilted his head up toward the branches overhead and blinked and blinked, trying to keep them wide open, hoping to keep gravity from letting them spill out. I was sorry I’d ever asked and wanted to take the ball from his hands and run for a layup, hoping he’d follow and all would be forgotten. Embarrassed for him, I tried to look away, but his Adam’s apple kept lifting and falling down his throat as he tried to swallow down his pride. He clinched his teeth and then burst out his explanation, choking between breaths, his eyes still staring up into the branches, as if I were looking down on him: “My daddy killed himself, put a gun in his mouth behind our house in the alley and blew out…”

I never heard the rest of it. I sat in silence, looking at the grass, afraid to see his face. Then he got up and stumbled around like a newborn colt, took a couple of shots and went home.

As James and I got older, we became absorbed into our separate racial spheres except during basketball season and in the summer when he would drop by my housed for a game. Our games became so intense sometimes I lost my temper and stomped into the house or threw the ball well into the neighbor’s yard. My temper had become a serious problem and often I had to be set down for getting so mad at myself in the middle of our games. It was like some kind of spell came over me and I lost all sense of reality. James, of all my friends and family, never judged me for it. He simply waited until I returned to myself. And then beat my ass one more time. Sometime we nearly fought, pushing and shoving for a rebound, or slamming each other against the telephone polls that held up the backboard. His jaw tightened and his eyes became small. Sweat poured off his forehead even in December. I loved playing this way, pushing out the world, maintaining my focus on his eyes and daring him to come in and try to get around me. We knew each other’s moves so well, we could close our eyes and play.

No longer a kid, James at 15 and about to enter high school had a reputation at the park that got him picked quickly for the big games. I could only play in the games with younger or white guys or when they weren’t enough players to make five on each side. In the big games, I remained a spectator. I could tell James felt uncomfortable when he would be allowed in game after game and I would be ignored or overlooked. He lobbied for me, pointing me out in that awful moment when the team had four players and a guy scanned the court looking for his fifth, taking his time to feel the power he had to make grown men feel their worth. “He’s the best shooter on our team, pick him. You know who his dad is, don’t ya?” James urged an older teammate. But the older black guys usually chose their friends.

Sometimes as I watched him play, I found myself envying James, envying his blackness and the world he lived in. I spent hours surrounded by black guys either at the park or playing sports in school. Unbeknownst to them, and perhaps even myself, I tried to imitate them on and off the court. I longed for a black leather jacket and shiny, exotic-colored three-inch heels, but my parents never allowed them. All I got was a bandana and colored shoestrings for my ugly white high-top Converses. I listened to the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, and the Motown sounds. I slipped their expressions subtly into my speech. I fantasized about the black girls they talked about. Alone in my room, I practiced that bounce and drag to their gait before the mirror.
One day, standing around on the sidelines waiting to get into a game, James pulled a muscle and waved me in to take his place. At first, I thought he just wanted my help, but hobbling off he pointed out a guy and said, “You got the guy in the blue sweatshirt.”

None of the older guys said anything as I took his place. I played like it was life or death, running as fast as I could up and down the court, thrilled to be jostled and pushed around for the ball by men twice my age. When I waved James back in, he shook his head. Our team won and won again, and I played three times that day thanks to James’ injury. Later, when we finally lost the court, James and I walked to the drugstore for a Coke. He had stopped limping, making me wonder if he had really been injured at all.

Breaking into the games I learned didn’t necessarily mean I was allowed into the game. I was still white and an outsider. Sometimes it felt like three teams playing at once — the opposing team, my team, and me.

I played whole games without once getting passed the ball. I got the ball only through my own rebounding efforts or by stealing a pass. When the ball did come my way, my sole option was to pass it back. But I didn’t care. I concentrated on defense, setting picks, and rebounding. Only toward the end of games, with our team well ahead or if I was wide open, did someone pass me the ball. But then, out of fear, I’d often pass it back, which drove them crazy. “Man, shoot the damn ball!” But if I made it, it was like I had grown six inches and my hair turned from thin blond spikes to a thick Afro. Then I was in rhythm of their world and I didn’t want out.

Most Sundays my family got together after church for dinner with my relatives — either they came for a visit or we drove over to my grandmother’s. One day, I wasn’t sure if they were coming or not, and so when James stopped by to play a few games, I grabbed my ball and slammed the kitchen door behind me, tossing it ahead to James for a lay in.

My relatives lived in a small farm town 20 miles away where no blacks ever lived, or even thought to stop and get gas. My uncles and grandmother weren’t exactly generous in their opinions about the “coloreds.” My grandmother, years ago, had attended Klan rallies with my grandfather. She was bred into a world that feared African-Americans, Jews, Catholics, and foreigners of all kinds. A dyed-in-the-wool Republican, she talked like FDR was the antichrist until the day she died.

As James and I fell into our usual competitive games of one-on-one, I lost all sense of time and concern about my relatives’ visit. But when James pulled up short on a drive to the basket and turned to look up the driveway, I knew instantly that they had arrived. I turned to see my grandmother getting out, followed by my aunt, uncle and two cousins. They waved, expecting me to run up to the car and help them unpack. But seeing James beside me on the court, the older adults walked toward the house without turning back. My cousins lingered longer, pulling picnic baskets from the trunk, looking at me for some sort of reaction. James, paying them little if any attention, continued shooting. Suddenly I felt small and getting smaller. My older cousins, who I revered, seemed to get taller and taller as I feared introducing them to James. Then James seem to become unnaturally prodigious, reaching his hand above the rim to tip in a shot, his body getting wide and thick, his shoes and elbows crowding me. I didn’t know what to do, but had to do something quickly. “Got to go,” I said, turning to James and seeing all of his blackness, his dark face and arms, his pink skin under his fingernails.

As my cousins edged closer, both curious but with little interest in playing, I pleaded to James out of panic. “Maybe you ought to go on home now.”

“I just want to shoot around some,” James said, draining his favorite shot from the corner. “That’s okay with you isn’t it?”
Of course it was. He could have come in and ate with my relatives and no one would have said anything. My uncles might have been nervous and might grandmother might say something stupid like, “I’ll bet you don’t get no pie like this at your house do you?” But I choked. I told him he had to go home and asked if he didn’t mind going the back way — behind our garage, over the back fence and through the field.

“Why through the back yard?” he asked.

“It’s closer,” I whispered. Not true. It was out of his way.

“Closer?” James looked embarrassed, his mouth opened looking for something to say. Then he looked over to my cousins and tossed me the ball. Without looking back at me he walked past our garage to the back fence. He climbed over it and into the empty field that separated our house from the black neighborhood behind it.

“No you can keep the ball until tomorrow,” I said running after him. “Maybe there’s a game at the park?” I was sure I could say the right thing to get him to understand. But as I reached the fence and called out his name his fast walk broke into a run.

The next time he saw me at the park, he acted as if nothing had happened. But the die had been cast. And as we grew older and went to high school, we came together only when we were playing at the park or during basketball season when the world around us, for a brief time, reduced to a colorless blur in the corner of our eyes.

Michael McColly, in 2000, won a creative nonfiction award from the Illinois Arts Council for “Christmas City, U.S.A.” In 2007, his book The After Death Room, a work of journalism and spiritual exploration centered on the AIDS epidemic, won the LAMDA Award. He teaches creative nonfiction, journalism and literature at Columbia College Chicago and Northwestern University.