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Ghost Children
An Interview
with author D. Winston Brown
“As a native of Birmingham, I have learned that no matter where I go Birmingham is always with me. It is a character. It’s the particulars of a city, of geographic region, of a street corner or a neighborhood park or a corner store that provide that interest me the most.” D. Winston Brown’s work pulses with a sense of place, and within that, that place’s history. His essay “Ghost Children” resonates with his past, both in the larger-than-life setting of Birmingham and the events that shaped his family’s history. The essay opens in a teenage Brown’s car, then spans to encompass his father’s standoff with gang members and his grandfather’s vigils in a Civil Rights-era black neighborhood.
“The idea for the essay began with the images, of the gun in my father’s car, of the gun handed to me in my car, of my father as a boy watching the men in his neighborhood. All of these swirled in my head and appeared in various other projects for years, but only when juxtaposed against one another did the central theme emerge. So it was the images, and thinking about the factors that created them, which came first.”
Brown’s process did not require the copious notes and structuring of some types of nonfiction—instead, he reached into his memory and let the essay’s shape form naturally. “Once the three central episodes presented themselves, I wrote and revised the individual episodes. I then began the process of how to fit them together, questioning again and again how and why they belonged together in an essay. Finally, the theme emerged, and the pieces began to fit.”
The theme of “Ghost Children,” which Brown calls the “unspoken history” of anger and subsequent action among young African-American men, is as real as any nonfiction. But its connections to a personal history and cultural lore enabled him to shape it into a compelling story. “Personally, it is profound because the writing of such material is a violent act. No matter how many times I heard the stories, or thought about them, to write them was to irretrievably connect to them, and to be changed by them. Doing it is as a nonfiction piece allowed me to address the theme in a much more direct way. If done in fiction, I doubt I would have been as forthright about the issues of anger and violence. It would have been there, but it would have been subtle, imbued in characters and conflict.
“As a nonfiction piece, as an inheritor of these stories, I consider myself a witness of sorts, but it’s complex. I am witnessing events I did not see, events I saw as a child, and events I experienced as a young adult. On top of that, I am reflecting on all of these as a more mature person, who is also distant from all those events. So it is complex, the act of witnessing. I am telling my story. I am telling the story of others, too.”
This difficult obligation, to write a story that belongs as much to others as oneself, is just another of the many challenges to a writer of nonfiction. But Brown advises young writers that “writing is a simple act, done simply. What I do think is that writers must live. Living is where the hard work is rendered.”
—Sarah McAbee |
