And then, seven years later, I was invited on his show, and this was the first time I met Studs in person, and I was invited to talk about my first book, There Are No Children Here. And to be interviewed by Studs is nothing short of exhilarating, and I walked in there, and there was my book, the pages were dog-eared, there was tabs sticking out of the book, there were notes written along the margins of almost every page. And I should tell you that, as an author, I am usually simply pleased if someone knows the title of my book. He had not only read it, he had devoured it; he had digested every moment, thought about its implications. But here is the astonishing part, for me at least—Studs began the interview by having me read a short section from the book, and it’s a part where we’re at a funeral of a sixteen-year-old boy who was killed in a gang war. A young friend of the deceased in a eulogy says, “Sometimes we take tomorrow for granted—oh, I’ll do this tomorrow, or tomorrow this will happen, and we forget that tomorrow is not promised to us.” And Studs repeats that last line, “Tomorrow is not promised to us,” and then tells me and his audience that some fifteen years earlier, he had been interviewing teenagers in Chicago’s West Side ghetto, and that he’d heard that exact same fatalistic thought spoken. And lo and behold, Studs had gone back into the archives and had the tape there, which he’d then proceeded to play. I was in absolute awe. One, that he’d remembered this moment from over a decade earlier, and second, that this disheveled looking man could actually find the tape. But what I’ve since learned is that while Studs—with his hat looking as if it’s about to fall off his head, with his hair uncombed, with his pants so short you can see his red socks—he has a mind which holds everything, and I mean everything. The man does not forget a moment, a person, an idea. You can’t get anything by Studs, not even John Ashcroft. As Rick Kogan said, “Studs knows everything.”
As a writer, I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t tell you that we steal a little bit here and a little bit there from other writers; it’s kind of our little trade secret. It’s not subject matter that we borrow, or substance, but rather style and method and a way of looking at the world. And occasionally it’s done consciously, with some deliberation. With my second book, for instance, The Other Side of the River, which is about two towns in Michigan, one black and the other white, and the mysterious death of a 16-year-old African boy whose body is found in the river that separates these two towns, I went back to re-read two works: one was Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and one was Tim O’Brien’s A Lake in the Woods. Winesberg, Ohio was helpful to me because I had this rather large cast of characters in these rather small towns, and so I employed the structure that Anderson used, writing short portraits of individuals in the town and having characters reappear in each others’ stories. And O’Brien was a guide because he had written a story in which there was no clear resolution in his book, A Lake in the Woods, and I had a story in which there was no clear resolution, and so I was able to learn from O’Brien’s work.
But usually the influence of others is considerably more subtle and much less conscious. Moreover, you usually don’t realize that influence until well after the fact. I should tell you, I’m a voracious reader and I see the influences in my work of John Steinbeck and William Faulkner, of Harriette Arnow and Norman Maclean, of Tony Lucas and my dad. I’ve learned from them all.
And then, there’s Studs, the man I now realize has left his mark on me and in a rather big way. I didn’t set out to mimic him; I couldn’t, I wouldn’t even begin to try. In fact, what we do on some level is quite different. I’m a writer, Studs an oral historian. I’m committed to the notion of story, of narratives, which have a clear beginning, middle, and end; Studs is more free-form. I suppose if we were musicians, I’d be the balladeer to Studs’s bebop jazz. I tend towards rather conventional colors; Studs, as you can tell, favors red.
Much of my writing though, like Studs’s interviews, is about the fissures in the American landscape. My first book, There Are No Children Here, chronicled the lives of two boys in a public housing project in Chicago, a tale of those most marginalized. My second book, The Other Side of the River, as I mentioned, is about America’s dilemma about race. My newspaper and magazine articles over the years have dealt with the moral quandary of the death penalty, about the ineffectiveness and sometimes cruelty of the juvenile justice system, about the questions raised by our ambiguous immigration policy, about the debate over how best to educate our children.
Certainly, as I look back on my 25 years’ body of work, I see Studs’s imprint quite clearly. Spending time with people whom we otherwise might not have reason to meet, visiting places where we might not otherwise spend time, telling stories which have never been told publicly before—I can’t tell you how exhilarating it is to hear a story for the first time knowing that the person hasn’t told this to anyone before. Knowing that by your questioning and probing, you’ve gotten someone to think about the world and their life just a little bit differently, and with the hope that it will also push readers to do the same.
I remember when I was working on my first book, There Are No Children Here, one of the things that took me off guard was this overwhelming silence in the lives of the boys I wrote about. One of the kind of obvious silences was the institutional silence in their lives, but there was also a silence that for me was less obvious and more subtle and nuanced. That was a kind of self-imposed silence on the part of the people living in these communities. I came to realize that this reluctance to share the stories had everything to do with this feeling that if they did they wouldn’t be believed, and I can tell you that I’ve been confronted with this time and time again.
I can remember shortly after There Are No Children Here came out, Oprah had decided to make the book into a movie and the screenwriter had come to visit and I was to be his tour guide to introduce him to the neighborhood and to the people I had written about. We had four days together, and he was a very quiet, soft-spoken gentleman, and as we began to spend time together I got the uneasy feeling that he didn’t believe all that I had written. And so I took him to the worst of the high-rises, I pointed out the meanest of the gang members and the worst of the drug dealers, and on the fourth and last day, he and I and two friends of mine who live and work in a neighboring housing complex went out to lunch at a restaurant on the West Side, Edna’s. As we were sitting in our booths, eating our meal, a young boy, maybe thirteen, fourteen years of age, ran into the restaurant and ducked behind a heating grill. And as he ducked, a group of boys walked by and one of them pulled a pistol out of a brown paper bag and started shooting. Needless to say, we were scared for our lives. And I remember as we lay there under the table, literally one on top of the other, I thought, “Now he’s going to believe me!” I mention this because what it says to me is something very, very simple—that we stop listening, that we stop believing. And that, of course, is what Studs has taught us. He’s listened, and he’s listened some more. He’s had the smarts to push and prod his subjects, and then get out of the way and let them tell their stories.