(ed note: We checked in with J. Chester Johnson to find out how he's fared over the course of the last 18 plus months with the publication of his timely Damaged Heritage. Here's his update. sdl)
My latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (publisher: Pegasus; distributed by Simon & Schuster), was released on May 5, 2020 in the midst of a raging covid pandemic that relentlessly and unmercifully brutalized New York City. Those of us who reside in the City and who could do so clung to the interiors of our homes, going outdoors with much fear and trembling.
Into this environment, Damaged Heritage had been published. In turn, a book launch, scheduled for the New York City Harvard Club, was kyboshed, and both my agent and publisher told me to “cool” my expectations on book sales, for Damaged Heritage would be flying into the unpredictable, but clearly adverse headwinds of covid with bookstores everywhere then being shuttered for indefinite periods of time. So, I then chalked up my new book as just one more learning experience to be encased among others that friends and relatives suggest should make me stronger; however, I was getting too old to make much use of such learning experiences. . .I thought.
Nonetheless, there were obviously new paths to be conquered in response to the pandemic. Zoom-type presentations and book plates replaced traveling for in-person gatherings and face-to-face signing of personal inscriptions. On-line interviews then prevailed. At the same time, accommodations were now made possible as a result of new ways of reaching the public. For instance, on Sunday, June 28th, 2020, I conducted a zoom appearance at 8:30AM before a congregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida that lasted an hour; just three hours later, I made another zoom presentation on the book before the Washington National Cathedral in the District of Columbia.
Such a tandem would not have been possible in the absence of zoom or its equivalent. Indeed, I’ve already given nearly 90 presentations, including interviews, on Damaged Heritage. I found that zooms allowed me to reach more people and to participate in more places. Moreover, podcasts represented not an insignificant part of the book marketing effort. Zoom-type appearances will undoubtedly be with us for future “book tours”. One cannot predict an experience like the covid pandemic affecting the way future practices will be conducted; however, speaking as one, I found the results from new approaches of marketing books often quite effective and satisfying.
Damaged Heritage had three, main messages. First, it told of a terribly murderous massacre of African-American sharecroppers and their family members – known as the Elaine Race Massacre – on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta; too few people knew anything about this event, which was conceivably the worst attack against African-Americans in our country’s history. Second, the new book told of my maturation process in discovering that my favored grandfather participated in the Massacre; in addition, notwithstanding my having grown up in a racist family in the very racist region of the Massacre, the process also led this erstwhile white Southerner to the embracement of both Black liberation and a progressive, structural format for racial reconciliation between Blacks and whites.
Third, Damaged Heritage tells the story of racial reconciliation and deep friendship that developed between Sheila Walker and me for seven years and extended to family members on both sides. Sheila was a descendent of victims of the Massacre, granduncles who were shot numerous times by white posses and left for dead, but survived. For several years, Sheila and I talked publicly in numerous forums about our reconciliation. She died in March of this year, and I was requested by her family to give the eulogy.
The torture and murder of George Floyd occurred only three weeks following the release of Damaged Heritage. I simply had no idea how much the racial reconciliation and deep friendship that existed between an African-American woman (Sheila Walker) and a white man who grew up in the South along the Mississippi River (namely, me), as described in this book, would resonate with people following the death of George Floyd that resulted in public outpouring of grief and horror by both Blacks and so many whites, together with consequential confrontations between citizens and law enforcement, including, on occasion, federal troops. Sheila and my racial reconciliation and friendship, combined with the disclosure of this unknown event, the purposefully hidden story of the Elaine Race Massacre, seemed to galvanize readers to Damaged Heritage.
For example, in late July, 2020, two months following release of the book, I was informed by my publisher that Damaged Heritage stood at #3 on a significant Amazon Best Seller list for books sold through Kindle. More recently, I found that the book had been included in Goodreads’ multi-year list of Best Nonfiction Books of Horrifying Events, alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – admittedly, my book is down the list, but nevertheless on the list.
The ole saw that “timing is everything” has its use, but I prefer to believe and adhere to a terse epigram I discovered that had been written cryptically in small, printed letters and incongruously on the gray walls of a New York City latrine located in a writers’ hangout: “Just keep writing”. Part of this book had been written as far back as 2013; filling in the blank spaces between the lip and the cup meant years. One shall never know, and one should never guess. Just keep writing.
Chester Johnson is a poet and nonfiction writer. In addition to Damaged Heritage, he has written three, other books, recently published: St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems, and Auden, the Psalms, and Me. Find out more about Chester Johnson here.
Thank you for posting this timely piece.
Posted by: Henry Wade | October 20, 2021 at 01:50 PM
Wow. How significant events such as the pandemic, Zoom and Gerald Floyd had such a significant effect on the success of your book is amazing! Thanks for sharing this update.
Ross
Posted by: Ross Stuckey | October 20, 2021 at 02:10 PM
Johnson is a gifted writer and poet who shakes the conscience of America with his book Damaged Heritage. I learned so much from his book, including "filiopietism" - a concept that I was unaware of previously. He makes us look in the mirror at our own belief systems, and analyze what it means to honor our forefathers/mothers, particularly in the context of a fraught racial construct that has pervaded American history. To think that the Elaine race massacre occurred fully two years before the more notorious Tulsa massacre, is a painful reminder of how the horrors of our past have become suppressed, and that it takes people of vision, like Chester Johnson and Sheila Walker, to clear the lens we should look through when we rediscover the true history of our country and how we got to where we are today.
Posted by: Steven Itzkowitz | October 20, 2021 at 02:24 PM