Many journalists harbor the dream of writing a book some day. And many of us speak regularly to high school and college students. The two are not unconnected: we can do a better job of writing that book if we listen to what we tell young people about how to practice the journalist's craft. While I was researching and writing This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi civil rights activist, I often had to remind myself of my own rules. Each time I did, I discovered another piece of the rich mosaic of the life of this poor, black, Delta sharecropper who confronted the political and economic injustices around her at considerable cost to her own well-being. History isn't that different from journalism; the deadlines are just longer.

Take the first rule: always make one more phone call. We preach and prach to students that, if they stifle that yawn, block the urge to go home, and make that last call on the list, they will hear one more side to a multifaceted story, glean one more insight into whomever they are profiling, and perhaps even come up with the idea or anecdote that provides the perfect end to their article.

So there I was in Greenville, Mississippi, weary after days on the road and frustrated because a much-desired interview and evaporated. All I wanted to do was to go back to my motel and the book I was reading. But all those lectures of time past commanded me: make one more phone call; you did not come all this way to sit in your room and read.

I thumbed through my notes and found the phone number for Charles Victor McTeer, an attorney recommended by a source in New Yori. I hate "cold calls," but I received a warm greeting. The first case McTeer handled when he went to Mississippi in the early 1970s, he told me, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and Fannie Lou Hamer was an expert witness for him. "I still have the transcript."

Bingo! The case involved a smalltown school superintendent who fired two women, allegedly for having illegitimate children but in actuality s retribution for black pressure to desegregate schools. Not only was it a case I might never have discovered even with an extensive search of Hamer's paper trail, but McTeer's transcript provided glimpses of Hamer's lifelong commitment to work in her own community. Despite her traveling and advocacy of such national political concerns as voter registration, she said, "I was always at home when I was needed in Sunflower County. All they had to do was tell me when I was needed and I was right there. Because that's home."

Next rule: every student journalist needs to be reminded that secretaries and clerks are people who deserve polite treatment, not disdain, as one waits to see the Great Man or Woman for whom they work. In the first place, it's the right thing to do. In the second place, journalists who have been pleasant and explained their deadline situation may find that their phone calls are returned more promptly. Secretaries who know what material can be distributed and what can't also provide needed documents quickly, without case-by-case clearance from their bosses.

So there I was in Mississippi again -- this time schmoozing with the clerks at the federal courthouse in Oxford during a break from reading the transcript of the 1963 trial of law officers accused of violating the civil rights of Hamer and several of her colleagues who had been beaten in the Winona, Mississippi, jail. As informative as the transcript was about what had occurred in the courtroom, I had little sense of how.

Was the judge perceived as fair? What were the atmospherics? And was there any possibility that the civil rights workers hadn't been beaten but were indeed bruised when they had to be dragged into their cells, as the law officers insisted?

"Who was the U.S. attorney who prosecuted that case?" one of the clerks asked. I told her. "I was here then," she said, adding that the U.S. attorney I had named was now practicing law in Jackson. "I'll bet he's in the phone book," she said. He was. And I had another invaluable source on a trial that had occurred more than twenty-five years earlier.

Next rule: talk to people on airplanes. I routinely violate this one because airspace can be private space, providing time for major chunks of reading. But I remembered that my friend Cheryl Arvidson, who was the Washington bureau chief of the late Dallas Times Herald, had once broken a major story on a tip she got from talking to someone in an airport lounge. And, from a woman I spoke with on a flight, I got a lead on civil rights photographs collected by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Two of the photos are in the book.

Another rule: ask each source who else you should interview, or who holds diametrically opposite views. This technique, which again should be common sense, is particularly useful when practicing "parachute journalism" -- that is, when you are dropped into a breaking story that you haven't covered before or when you drop in on a culture with which you are not familiar -- say, when you are a white woman from California writing about a black Mississippi sharecropper. One way you'll know you're about to exhaust a particular topic is when you start getting the same names from everyone and you've already talked to them.

And another: throw nothing away that might be remotely useful. This rule is the bane of mothers who want to clean out their attics and say all your old treasures must go.

As I was researching my book on Fannie Lou Hamer, I kept coming across second-hand references to her having been sterilized. She had talked frequently about sterilization, I was told, but the predominantly male group of young civil rights workers never focused on the issue. Nor was the press especially interested until a major case in Alabama in the 1970s brought to light widespread sterilization among poor black women and girls. I remembered reading an article in which Hamer discussed having been given a hysterectomy without her knowledge. The references I had were not enough to use without some harder fact. I searched every article I could find. Nothing.

Finally, when I had finished my first draft, I went through all my boxes and folders of photocopied papers, reports, interview notes, everything, to see if I had left out anything. In the back of an old folder that I had kept from an attempt to write the book in the 1970s, I found a Washington Post clipping headed a SURFEIT OF SURGERY. The lead was a description by Fannie Lou Hamer of her reaction when she found she had been given a hysterectomy in 1961. "If he was going to give that sort of operation," she told the reporter, "then he should have told me. I would have loved to have had children. I went to the doctor who did that to me and I asked him, Why?"

Then comes the writing advice: assume nothing. Write for those who say "Who?" or "What?" as well as those who say "Wow!" Explain what's involved in picking cotton -- the back-breaking labor, the hot sun, the cuts on the hands. Or tell readers why it was so dangerous when Hamer and her fellow Mississippians dared do something we take for granted today -- trying to register to vote. Don't assume that readers, especially young people, know that black Mississippians then could lose their jobs, their homes, even their lives, for bucking the system.

Finally, there's the advice of author Annie Dillard. I keep her words about writing taped over my word processor: "Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe