"It was a surreal moment," Mitchell S. Jackson, already full of honors, could not suppress the surprise and joy of learning that he had won the Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer Prizes have always been a game for media professionals, leaving little opportunity for freelance writers, and even fewer people of color. But jackson was one of the lucky winners at the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Writing a Feature Essay for Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime. He was thrilled, "I think it all shows that the Pulitzer Prize is at least taking our experiences, our language seriously." ”
It's hard to have a more complex and sensitive identity than he does: black, drug dealer, writer, college teacher, and it's hard to talk about his work in isolation from American racism. Jackson always had a keen focus on the social context that shaped his family's life, portraying the unjust times through intimate personal lenses, like his Ahmaud Arbery, why didn't Jackson run in the dark of night?
Mitchell S. Jackson
Twelve minutes of life and death
Even if they are in the same urban public space, the differences in class and race are separating the crowd in the dark, and the air they breathe and the dirt that they step on the soles of their feet are not exactly the same. "Guys, I ask you to ask yourself, what is the world of runners? Ask yourself who should run? Who has the rights? Who are the runners? These are the poignant questions Mitchell S. Jackson asked the audience in Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime.
"Ahmaud Arbery is known to love running, but doesn't call himself a runner. This is a shortcoming of running culture," Jackson wrote. "Abery's jogging made him the target of white hegemony, which was undoubtedly a failure for the United States." On Feb. 23, 2020, Abery, a 25-year-old black man, was chased by three white men while jogging in Green County, Georgia, and was shot dead. The killing of Abery and the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Perry Floyd and other black Americans contributed to a wave of protests last summer in the campaign against systemic racism and police brutality. Jackson noted in the report, "Overall, jogging remains a sport and pastime for privileged whites. ”
In May 2020, Jackson said to himself, "I really want to do some journalism. At this time, he received an invitation from the editor to write a story about Ahmed Abery for Runner's World. He said it was a tricky thing to do to write the story well.
Reporting on the deceased, in addition to explaining the ins and outs of the incident, the more important part is to restore the complete and full characters, rather than just being seen as victims. Jackson said: "Showing Abery's life is really important to me, which is why I named this story 'Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime' because his life was as important as the 12 minutes he was hunted for. ”
At this time, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jackson gathered information from a variety of sources and conducted remote interviews with Abery's family, friends, football coaches and girlfriends, bringing together Abery's multi-layered personal portraits. With the help of a veteran reporter in Georgia, Jackson also studied police and coroner reports. He pored over months of news reports and re-watched The New York Times investigations and videos about the murder on social media to allow him to give an accurate picture of the murder.
Feature Article "Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime"
Every day, Jackson writes for 10 to 14 hours at home, and in less than three weeks, Jackson writes Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime. About four months after Abery's death, the article was published. In these 5,900 words, Jackson tells stories about Abery's short life and lynching, alternating between depicting Abery's life and killing, with the article's gaze leaping between the high school football field, family, hopes and dreams, historical perspectives, and armed white residents, detailing his life, personality, and relationships. For Abery, his only crime was to walk through the house being built and run in the dark.
In this feature, three different voices appear: traditional journalism styles, forensic presentations, and black English. Jackson always emphasized language to let people know that he was trying to shape these sentences in this matter, while trying to reconstruct the young man's real life. For Jackson, Black English was the language of the community he grew up in, representing his own experiences and values. "I introduce specific languages into articles to make sure I write about people I care about and identify with, and from those languages I can hear my uncle speak, hear my friends speak," he said. ”
The work won the 2021 National Magazine Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize jury described Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime as "profoundly influential in the murder of Ahmed Abery, combining vivid text, detailed reporting, and personal experiences to reveal systemic racism in the United States." Jackson noted that the murder trial is still ongoing and that justice "has not yet been done." He said he hoped his Pulitzer Prize would help keep society's attention "where it's needed."
Growing up in the whitest city in the United States
"I thank everyone who pulled out their guns at me but didn't pull the trigger. If they had the wrong biases, or itchy fingers, I wouldn't be here. On March 17, 2015, Jackson, a writer, returned to his hometown of Portland, Oregon, to give a speech in front of thousands of people. Jackson's words, like those of his writings, could never have predicted what the next sentence would be. "I grew up pimping and cheating. But don't grow up to be pimps or liars, please, I don't advocate doing that. Jackson encouraged everyone to revise their lives and reimagine life.
The revision of Jackson's version of his life began after he was imprisoned as a young man.
Jackson grew up in Portland, Oregon in the 1980s and 1990s. Americans usually say, "We didn't know there were black people in Portland." Or, "What does it mean to have poverty out there?" "Speaking of Portland, Americans have coffee, white, hippie, progressive, free, green in their minds. But this face to Jackson may not have existed. Jackson's pen was another kind of Portland that Americans didn't know about, and for him, he had never really seen that free and progressive Portland.
He grew up in a black neighborhood in Portland that was drowning in poverty, neglect, and drugs. Jackson's side, from uncles who were liars, friends who became gang members or drug dealers, and award-winning basketball players, taught him drugs, gang wars, and simple survival philosophies. Around the age of 10, his mom began battling drug addiction, jackson had to do everything he could to fix it, and then — as written in the book "The Broken Year" — eventually sold the drugs and got into trouble.
Mitchell Jackson's mother, Lillie Jackson, and her sons at Easter:
From left, Mitchell, Adrian and Christopher.
Jackson was a junior at Portland State University in 1997, and that same year, at the age of about 19, he was also jailed for drug trafficking. People in prison always say, "I hope someone can write my life story, and it's going to be a bestseller." "There's no entertainment, there's limited activity, Jackson thought, I'm going to start writing my life story, non-fiction or fiction?" Novels, Jackson didn't want to cause trouble for anyone. There was a small bookshelf in the prison dormitory, about 10 to 20 books. This is where he first started writing. By the end of Jackson's 16-month sentence in Oregon prison, he had amassed about sixty or seventy pages of manuscripts.
When Jackson returned home from prison in 1998, he told his partner at the time that he had decided to become a writer. The experience taught him that if he was exposed to any more cocaine, he would most likely return to prison again. Jackson began to work part-time, piling up newspapers, writing manuscripts, writing scripts for television news, and supporting himself in various ways, and freelance work probably began here.
Jackson picked up his love of basketball again. Because of basketball, he got to know one of the few black anchors in Portland, and through his introduction, successfully entered the CBS affiliate internship and participated in news reporting as an assistant. While working odd jobs, Jackson stumbled upon a master's program in creative writing at Portland State University, and he wanted to continue his studies. But when he got there again, Jackson found himself too far behind his peers, and the education he had read seemed to be worthless. During his master's degree, Jackson devoted all his energy to fiction, and he never handed over a story that didn't have a chapter. Gradually, he realized the value of his own life experiences. By the summer, Jackson had completed his master's degree at Portland State University, and in September of that year, he would begin a master's program at New York University.
It was also then that Jackson realized he didn't want to be an anchor. He didn't want to wear a suit every day. And he was afraid of being on camera, and he was afraid of being known to others that he had been in prison. "I'm on TV and my career could be ruined because I'm a former criminal." But saying goodbye to the media does not mean that Jackson and social current affairs and politics have never been separated.
shadow
Can literature and art be linked to socio-politics? In fact, Jackson never gave up the opportunity to express political ideas through literature. He was strict with his writing, always writing in the most beautiful way possible. In addition to pursuing the story, he is also pursuing structural beauty, how to make the various parts fit together to produce resonance, with symmetry. He cared about language and sentences, bringing together literary, poetic, lyrical English and urban slang in a wonderful combination. "I think it's a beauty, and I find myself moving sentences because of length and not just content," he says. ”
Jackson took inspiration from James Arthur Baldwin's article: If black English is not a language, then what is it? Who sets the rules of language, what is language and what is not, what is respected, what is not... This is arbitrary. So Jackson tried to incorporate into his writing language that was contrary to the structure of power, his native language and the weapon he used to resist the culture of white privilege. Another reason to retain the original wording of black English is that Jackson's book was written for the people of the community.
After years in the making, in the summer of 2013, Jackson's debut novel, The Residue Years, was finally published and received numerous accolades, including the Ernest Gaines Literary Excellence Award, the PEN/Hemingway Debut Award, the Helston Wright Legacy Award, and more.
In The Broken Year, a recovering drug addict, Grace, and her son, Champ, struggle in the Portland community in the '90s, a young mother and son who suffer from drugs, heartbreak and the cycle of life, poverty and addiction, a novel about love, redemption and freedom. The selection committee for the 2016 Fiction Awards commented, "Mitchell Jackson wrote in Portland like Edward Jackson. As Edward P. Jones writes in Washington, D.C., his cautious left eye gazes deep inside his characters, and his wary right eye gazes at the wolf at the door. ”
There are many stories in a place, but there is nothing more appropriate than writing about a home. Jackson wanted his writing to stay in Portland. There is no doubt that Jackson drew a lot of inspiration from life, and when he began to write, he found that these characters were very close to his own life, and his words, actions, and manners were also in accordance with reality, and his characters more or less carried the shadows of him and his surroundings, or rather, it was inseparable from the life he experienced or witnessed. These experiences nourish jackson's writing spirit, and the stories he tells about everyone are fascinating. Mom uses drugs, son sells drugs, and in the beginning, Champs and Grace are almost the embodiment of Jackson and Mom.
Later, Jackson realized that the characters in the story should have their own lives. Jackson started getting them to do what worked for them, and the job quickly opened. He tried to string them together, figuring out the characters' motivations and humanity, a process that took many years. He described what he saw as "a mother and a son, redeeming themselves from the harm they had done."
Jackson's ambitions don't stop there, even depicting the history of individual lives, the communities behind them, and the history of the black race is the bigger proposition he's trying to respond to. Today, Jackson lives a life of writing and teaching on the opposite shore, but Jackson has never turned his back on his past and never forgotten that impoverished community.
Mitchell Jackson's The Mathematics of Survival
In his latest work, The Mathematics of Survival, Jackson wrote a book about them that examines the hardships that shaped his life, family, and community, a mixed work of nonfiction—part essay, memoir, and history. In the book, he recounts his family's life in Oregon, a predominantly white state where black residency remained illegal until 1926, and he, his family and friends, grew up in a state of injustice and neglect.
He got writing advice from his mentor, Gordon Lish: Never put yourself above others. Jackson sought to find universal humanity and commonality, rather than something that set the world apart. Jackson's cultural critique of Oregon's racial history, white Americans, mass incarceration, sex work, violence, and broken families presents a microcosm of disenfranchised Americans. Survival Math warns everyone that in places like Oregon, it's not all uniform whites, and that black people are part of its history.
"He presents the black individual with respect, honesty, and love, tracking through detailed research and powerful prose how each person finds a way to survive in a hostile world." Professor John Wilkinson, Chair of the Creative Writing Program and The Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, said.
However, when a writer is faithful to restoring memories and revealing intimate stories, he may face betrayal of family, friends, and communities. Jackson critically writes about some of the people he loves, including his mother and grandfather. While writing about his loved ones, he had to ask himself again and again: Have I betrayed them? Am I writing something to irritate the reader or is it necessary to examine or reveal an important truth? When his novel was published, my father and he stopped communicating. Jackson said: "It's not easy to write about the person you love. Between protecting your loved one and protecting the integrity of what you intend to do, a decision often needs to be made. But most of the time, he chose to reveal, about him, his family, the people around him, through the most intimate lens to observe the social reality of the United States.
Since 2019, Jackson has taught creative writing at the University of Chicago, and according to the University of Chicago's website, his research areas are black studies, poetry, and poetics. He moved to New York and left Portland with a decent job, but the story of black people and the language of black people will be what he will pursue all his life. Speaking of Twelve Minutes and a Lifetime, he lamented, "Abery, why is he dead? And I, by grace, am a writer and professor who is fast moving toward middle age. Jackson, like Abery, loves sports, one loves basketball, one loves jogging, and he was caught in his early 20s, but one life can still have countless expectations, and one has quietly left this world.
Editor: Sun Qijun
About author:Xin Lin, Master student, School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University