My father, Reginald W. Major, died just over three years ago. While his passing has left me, his baby girl, with a tremendous void, l recently discovered a collection of audio tapes that we recorded over period of years. This summer I have found myself able to listen to him once again, getting his wisdom on political struggle, his honesty about his own shortcomings, on how he grew character and understanding, on his long view of history from the 1930’s to 2011. Once again I find myself feeling his indomitable spirit and laughing because of his infectious sense of humor.
While there is a part of me that wished I could say that this came about because I found a way to channel his voice from whatever universe now may hold his spirit, but it is far simpler, I have begun to transcribe the tapes, began in 2001 that we sporadically made when I realized he would never write his own life story. We would come together at arbitrary times cooking, dining, sharing a bottle of wine and yes some cannibis, and without realizing it at the time, we captured a unique history that reflects the complexity of the American experience.
As I listen to the tapes I see the value, indeed the need, to turn them into a book. I am not sure what the book will look like that evolves from these tapes. My father’s life had many parts of the American dreams from the worms to the glory. A child of West Indian immigrants raised in New York from the depressions years, his story includes riots of 1943 New York, military life, an interracial marriage began in the 1940’s, racism, world travels, his growth into a writer and journalist with a clear political ideology, resistance and revolution, and infinite love for his people and his close friends and family.
The tapes are replete with individuals who have in their own ways helped to build, shake up, or change the world. Some are international in scope, James Baldwin, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Alice Walker, Thelonious Monk, and many other. (I’m only two tapes in and have forgotten many, probably most, of the stories.) Others are people who made a mark in the San Francisco Bay Area like Nathaniel Burbridge, once president of the local NAACP who was told by the national office that they would strip his chapter’s charter if it continued to take on such radical actions, or Julian Richardson, the first African-American printer for the daily newspaper and with his wife Raye, founder of Marcus Bookstores, and Carlton Goodlett, the founder of San Francisco’s African American weekly newspaper, The Sun Reporter. Betwixt and between are the family stories, the love stories, the stories of his adventures as a world traveler, his commitment to revolutionary change.
There is no order to these stories because I am simply not that well organized. But I know that in the course of the approximately twenty hours of tapes I have captured much of his life, and what a life it book grows from transcribed tapes as the soil and seed to the chapters of the forest will grow thick and full into a book worthy of his life. I am feeling my way through this work and I invite you on this journey which I hope you will find of value.
I also hope that as I share pieces of these tapes you find or buy your own tape recorders, go to an elder in your family or community and gather their stories. There is no greater gift for yourself, your family, and possibly the greater public. My father is a part of the people’s history which is too often untold or mis-told. Welcome to the journey of the tapes.
Writer’s Prompt
Write a list of questions you would ask, or should have asked, one of the elders in your family. One of the more powerful performance pieces I have seen in the Bay Area was written and performed by poet and memoirist Elmaz Abinader (Her family history/memoir is well worth the read). The question she asked “When did you first cry?” Make the questions fun and provocative and then shape them into a poem. The order of the questions will form the poem.