I write because I can’t draw. Growing up in South Central back in the day, me and the fellas read and traded Marvel comics. You might sneak in a DC book now and then—say, an issue of Green Lantern rendered in the fluid style of Gil Kane. But certainly not a goofy Batman book. This was before writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams brought back the hardcore Batman, the template for The Dark Knight.
Marvel, however, was different. Beneath Spider-Man’s mask, the teenage angst was plain on Peter Parker’s face. The Hulk’s internal struggle was unending, involving both his horror at reverting to “puny” Bruce Banner and Banner’s own at becoming the man-monster. In the pages of Fantastic Four, meanwhile, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the Black Panther and the scientifically advanced kingdom of Wakanda. Mesmerized by those monthly adventures, made vivid by the art of Kirby and Steve Ditko, my younger self desperately wanted to write and draw my own comic books.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Harrowing real-life occurrences also captivated me. In my neighborhood barber shop, as well as other barber shops and beauty parlors in the hood, various kinds of stories were told by patrons and haircutters. Often, they involved brothers who had run afoul of the cops out of 77th Division, which patrolled our area. The comics and the community: this would be the transmutable clay out of which I’d later mold my novels.
The desire to tell stories led me to reach out as a teenager. Before the internet, like-minded youngsters would get together to produce comics with their own characters. Maybe a hundred copies would be reproduced on a desktop Gestetner duplicator. Or, if enough money was raised, offset printed. Trying to get my work into those fanzines, I stumbled across mystery and crime mass-market paperbacks, as well as science fiction, all of it available on the spinner racks at the Thrifty drugstore. Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Andre Norton, and those Bantam reprints of 1930s Doc Savage pulps with eye-catching covers by James Bama.
A few more years would go by before it finally sank in that drawing comics wasn’t going to be my vocation. Yet even as I picked up a slew of rejections for my art, a few of the letters I got back did note that the writing wasn’t bad. Well, OK, then, let me see about getting the words right. This period dovetailed with my burgeoning community activism, which focused on the matter of questionable policing in my own and other Black and Brown neighborhoods.
Protesting police abuses led me to the anti-apartheid movement, which in turn fueled my participation in direct actions against the contra war, financed by the Reagan administration. From there, I went on, among other endeavors, to become a labor organizer and the outreach director for a community foundation. I found myself reflecting on these undertakings in nonfiction pieces for newsletters. Somewhere along the line, I started writing weekly op-eds for a community newspaper and a progressive media service. This discipline of writing on deadline proved useful to me when it came time to tackle writing a novel.
To write a book at first felt daunting. But looking back, it was an organic development. I was affected not only by pop culture and community organizing but also by the stories about life and loss I had heard from my dad and his friends. They would share these stories over a beer or two while playing dominoes at the kitchen table. These were working-class men who were part of the Black Migration from the South and Southwest to the West. All that time, I kept reading mystery novels, from the old-school classics to the wave of new voices that were then starting to be published: more people of color and women. It became apparent this was the genre in which I could express myself—drawing on a variety of rich source material.
To borrow from John Lee Hooker: It’s in ’em, and it’s got to come out.•
