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Microsoft’s associate general counsel shares a story that is
“as nuanced as it is hopeful” (Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority
Leader) about his rise from childhood poverty in pre-gentrified New
York City to a stellar career at the top of the technology and
music industries in this stirring true story of grit and
perseverance. For fans of Indra Nooyi’s My Life in Full and Viola
Davis’s Finding Me. As an accomplished Microsoft executive, Bruce
Jackson handles billions of dollars of commerce as its associate
general counsel while he plays a crucial role in the company’s
corporate diversity efforts. But few of his colleagues can
understand the weight he carries with him to the office each day.
He kept his past hidden from sight as he ascended the corporate
ladder but shares it in full for the first time here. Born in Crown
Heights, Brooklyn, Jackson moved to Manhattan’s Amsterdam housing
projects as a child, where he had already been falsely accused and
arrested for robbery by the age of ten. At the age of fifteen, he
witnessed the homicide of his close friend. Taken in by the
criminal justice system, seduced by a burgeoning drug trade, and
burdened by a fractured, impoverished home life, Jackson stood on
the edge of failure. But he was saved by an offer. That offer set
him on a better path, off the streets and eventually on the way to
Georgetown Law, but not without hard knocks along the way. From
public housing to working for Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith,
and its founder, Bill Gates, to advising some of the biggest stars
in music, Bruce Jackson’s Never Far from Home is “an important
story, extremely well told, that should serve as a lesson on how we
got here and where we need to go” (Fred D. Gray, activist and
civil rights attorney).
Fieldwork deals with the practical, mechanical, ethical, and
theoretical aspects of collecting data. Jackson discusses how
fieldworkers define their role, how they relate to others in the
field, and how they go about recording for later use what occurred
in their presence. This treatment offers an abundance of useful
information to those who do folklore fieldwork as well as those who
work in any of the other social sciences or humanities. An appendix
relates the author's own experiences while documenting Texas's
death row.
As recently as the 1970s, many inmates in southern prisons lived
and worked on prison farms that were not only modelled after the
American slave plantation, but even occupied lands that literally
were slave plantations before the Civil War, and on which working
and living conditions had not changed much a century after the war.
Bruce Jackson began visiting some of these prison farms in the
1960s to study black convict work-songs and folk culture. He took a
camera along as means of visual note taking, but soon realized that
he had an extraordinary opportunity to document a world whose
harshness was so extreme that at least one prison had been declared
unconstitutional. Allowed unsupervised access to prison farms in
Texas and Arkansas, Jackson created an astonishing photographic
record, most of which has never before been published in book form.
Inside the Wire presents a complete, irreplaceable portrait of the
southern prison farm. With freedom to wander the fields and
facilities and hang out with inmates for extended periods, Jackson
captured everything from the hot, backbreaking work of hand-picking
cotton, to the cacophony and lack of all privacy in the cell
blocks, to the grim solitude of death row. He also includes some
early twentieth-century prisoner identification shots, taken by
anonymous convict photographers for the prison files, that survive
as profoundly evocative human portraits. These images and Jackson's
photographs document, as no previous work has, the humanity of the
people and the inhumanity of the institutions in which they labour
and languish. As Jackson says, sometimes kindness happens with
prison, but prison itself is a cruel world outsiders can scarcely
imagine. I hope nothing in this book suggests otherwise.
Making it in Hell, says Bruce Jackson, is the spirit behind the
sixty-five work songs gathered in this eloquent dispatch from a
brutal era of prison life in the Deep South. Through engagingly
documented song arrangements and profiles of their singers, Jackson
shows how such pieces as "Hammer Ring," "Ration Blues," "Yellow
Gal," and "Jody's Got My Wife and Gone" are like no other folk
music forms: they are distinctly African in heritage, diminished in
power and meaning outside their prison context, and used
exclusively by black convicts.
The songs helped workers through the rigors of cane cutting,
logging, and cotton picking. Perhaps most important, they helped
resolve the men's hopes and longings and allowed them a subtle
outlet for grievances they could never voice when face-to-face with
their jailers.
In the eyes of many white Americans, North and South, the Negro did
not have a culture until the Emancipation Proclamation. With few
exceptions, serious collecting of Negro folklore by whites did not
begin until the Civil War-and it was to be another four decades
before black Americans would begin to appreciate their own cultural
heritage. Few of the earlier writers realized that they had
observed and recorded not simply a manifestation of a particular
way of life but also a product peculiarly American and specifically
Negro, a synthesis of African and American styles and traditions.
The folksongs, speech, beliefs, customs, and tales of the American
Negro are discussed in this anthology, originally published in
1967, of thirty-five articles, letters, and reviews from
nineteenth-century periodicals. Published between 1838 and 1900 and
written by authors who range from ardent abolitionist to dedicated
slaveholder, these articles reflect the authors' knowledge of, and
attitudes toward, the Negro and his folklore. From the vast body of
material that appeared on this subject during the nineteenth
century, editor Bruce Jackson has culled fresh articles that are
basic folklore and represent a wide range of material and
attitudes. In addition to his introduction to the volume, Jackson
has prefaced each article with a commentary. He has also supplied a
supplemental bibliography on Negro folklore. If serious collecting
of Negro folklore had begun by the middle of the nineteenth
century, so had exploitation of its various aspects, particularly
Negro songs. By 1850 minstrelsy was a big business. Although
Jackson has considered minstrelsy outside the scope of this
collection, he has included several discussions of it to suggest
some aspects of its peculiar relation to the traditional. The
articles in the anthology-some by such well-known figures as Joel
Chandler Harris, George Washington Cable, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, John Mason Brown, and Antonin Dvorak-make fascinating
reading for an observer of the American scene. This additional
insight into the habits of thought and behavior of a culture in
transition-folklore recorded in its own context-cannot but afford
the thinking reader further understanding of the turbulent race
problems of later times and today.
Making and experiencing stories, remembering and retelling them
is something we all do. We tell stories over meals, at the water
cooler, and to both friends and strangers. But how do stories work?
What is it about telling and listening to stories that unites us?
And, more importantly, how do we change them-and how do they change
us?
In "The Story Is True," author, filmmaker, and photographer
Bruce Jackson explores the ways we use the stories that become a
central part of our public and private lives. He examines, as no
one before has, how stories narrate and bring meaning to our lives,
by describing and explaining how stories are made and used. The
perspectives shared in this engaging book come from the tellers,
writers, filmmakers, listeners, and watchers who create and consume
stories.
Jackson writes about his family and friends, acquaintances and
experiences, focusing on more than a dozen personal stories. From
oral histories, such as conversations the author had with poet
Steven Spender, to public stories, such as what happened when Bob
Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Jackson also
investigates how words can kill showing how diction can be an
administrator of death, as in Nazi extermination camps. And
finally, he considers the way lies come to resemble truth, showing
how the stories we tell, whether true or not, resemble truth to the
teller.
Ultimately, "The Story Is True" is about the place of
stories-fiction or real-and the impact they have on the lives of
each one of us.
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