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NOW AVAILABLE

9/2008. 272 pages.
35 B/W photos
978-0-89672-635-2

Before playwright Charles Gordone (1925–1995) became a Texan, he became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for No Place to Be Somebody, in 1970. His search for a home in the West led him in 1987 to Texas A&M University, where he taught playwriting for the last nine years of his life, and to an influential role in the Cowboy Renaissance of the 1990s. Much as Mary Austin saw the West as a place without gender, Gordone regarded Texas as a place without race, where the need for neighborly connections to survive outweighed discriminatory urges.

A Place to Be Someone covers the years prior to this geographical and psychological journey, the childhood and youth that deeply informed Gordone’s pilgrimage. Growing up in Elkhart, Indiana, a “free” northern town, Charles Gordon and his family never fit completely into commonly understood racial categories. Elkhart and the world labeled them “black,” ignoring the rest of their multiracial and multiethnic heritage. Their familial experiences shaped not only their identities but also their perceptions.

For Gordone, childhood was the beginning of a lifelong battle against labels, and this memoir shows many of the reasons why. Written by his younger sister Shirley, who recognized that her brother had spent his whole life coming “home” to Texas, this revealing family memoir will be welcomed by Gordone scholars and those in African American drama and literature, American studies, women’s studies, and history and by any reader young or old who seeks to understand the forces and consequences of discrimination and mental and physical abuse. The sole surviving sibling, Shirley Gordon Jackson tells this story with the intimacy and immediacy it demands.

“A Place to Be Someone delineates the drama that penetrates/permeates not just the lives of blacks who grow up among whites but of countless blacks who find themselves living and working between worlds. Fanon refers to this as ‘certain uncertainty,’ Du Bois calls it ‘double consciousness,’ Bernard Bell refers to it as ‘socialized ambivalence,’ Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall call it ‘living in the interstices.’ Whatever term we use to describe it, this unbelongingness is a painful liminal space—destabilizing terrain. Jackson captures the essence of being stuck in the middle. The schism she reveals in her community resonates in other underrepresented groups. Jackson gives voice to people everywhere who have ever felt invisible and different.” —playwright Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, author of When the Ancestors Call and The Break of Day

“The truth was, Charles and I didn’t think in terms of color, only in terms of people’s abilities. . . . People wanted to categorize, pigeonhole, and stereotype us and force us into the mental slots formed by their own learned prejudices. . . . Even though Mother and Daddy expressed some of those same prejudices in the privacy of their own home, Charles and I truly believed (if we thought about it at all) that we were the same as anyone, regardless of race, creed, or color —most specifically because of our abilities.” —Shirley Gordon Jackson
 

Born in 1929 and raised in Elkhart, Indiana, Shirley Gordon Jackson is the fourth of five siblings. Upon graduation from Elkhart Senior High School, Jackson completed her education at Century College of Medical Technology in Chicago, Illinois, on a scholarship. An accomplished pianist and organist, she is also an artist, poet, and writer. After residing in California for some forty-five years, she now calls North Texas home.

Maceo C. Dailey, Jr., is the director of the African American Studies Program of the University of Texas El Paso and a governor’s appointee to the Texas Council for the Humanities and Juneteenth Commission.