It’s my mother’s fault.
Really, it is.
It all started when I was a kid, and she subscribed to three different newspapers, my hometown
Texarkana Gazette,
The Dallas Morning News and
The Wall Street Journal, plus a rotating group of magazines that included
Newsweek,
U.S. News and World Report,
TIME magazine,
Texas Monthly, and
Sports Illustrated.
She read all of them faithfully, and so did I. I was 7.
I grew up reading much of the same fiction that my peers did, starting with
Dr. Seuss and making my way through
The Wizard of Oz and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before diving into the
Hardy Boys and endless science fiction.
But all of that began to change when I turned 12, and I read in the newspaper about this huge heroin bust that was being made into a movie called
The French Connection.
I was intrigued and asked my mother if she could buy the book for me. She did, and I devoured it in days.
While students my age and older were busy pondering the adventures of
Holden Caulfield or discovering the poems of
Sylvia Plath, I was watching the detectives chase “Patsy” Fuca through the streets of New York City.
Then came
Serpico. Then came true crime and whatever book my mom happened to be reading.
I vowed to read nothing but books with prose that soared.
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Other books followed, including
Blood and Money,
Fatal Vision and, of course,
All the President’s Men.
But none of this prepared me for what I would experience when I decided, mid-career, to get my master’s in journalism at Ohio State during the 1996-1997 school year.
One of my first classes was Literary Journalism. The course didn’t disappoint. I read
Brent Staples,
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc,
Tom Wolfe,
Hunter S. Thompson,
Tracy Kidder,
Ted Conover, and
John McPhee.
Then I began reading beyond the assignments...
Mary Karr,
Frank McCourt,
Annie Dillard,
Michael Herr, and the inimitable
Joan Didion, whose 1968 collection of essays,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem, made me realize that nonfiction could soar: “This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book,” she wrote. “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbie and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.”
This was not prose; this was magic, and I was entranced.
From that day forward, I vowed to read nothing but books with prose that soared, and I gave myself permission to toss aside any book that fell flat. Life, after all, is too short for bad books.
More than two decades later, I have resigned myself to the fact that I am no Joan Didion, and that is all right.
But I do hope that those who read
Race Against Time can better understand a place called Mississippi and the families who never gave up on justice, despite decades passing. It is their courage and grace that inspire me.
And so, I write...
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Jerry Mitchell is founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit that exposes corruption, malfeasance and injustices, investigates cold cases, empowers citizens, and raises up the next generation of investigative reporters. His work has helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. He is the winner of more than 30 national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant, and the author of
Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era.