“Yeah, hey bro,” Ramsey told the dispatcher. “I’m at 2207 Seymour. West 25th. Check this out—I just came from McDonald’s, right? So I’m on my porch eating my little food, right? This broad is trying to break out the fucking house next door to me, so there’s a bunch of people on the street right now and shit. So we’re like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’ She’s like, ‘This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter…’ She say her name is Linda Berry or some shit. I don’t know who the fuck that is, I just moved over here, bro.”

“Sir, sir,” said the male dispatcher. “…You have to calm down and slow down. Is she still in the street?”

“Seymour Avenue,” Ramsey said.

“Is she still in the street or where did she go?”

“Yeah I’m looking at her right now. She’s calling y’all! She’s on the other phone.”

They went on for a bit, with Ramsey getting frustrated and the dramatic tension (hello, narrative) rising. A short while later the TV news crews arrived, and Ramsey’s story got longer and more detailed, with discrepancies:

I went to McDonald’s and I’m at home and I hear this, ‘Help, let me out!’ This girl screaming. Now we don’t have that on our street because everybody on this street knows each other, so when you hear something like that you come running to see what’s going on. I thought it was a kid got attacked by a pit bull. And I looked at that girl and I said, ‘You look familiar!’ And I’m prying the door open and she’s trying to get out, and she climbed through the bottom of it and soon as she got out she said, ‘My name is Amanda Berry, call the police.’

You heard screaming? the reporter asked.

I heard screaming. I’m eating my McDonald’s. I come outside and I see this girl going nuts, trying to get out of her house, so I go on the porch and she says, ‘Help me get out, I’ve been in here a long time,’ so I figured it was a domestic violence dispute so I opened the door and we can’t get in that way because…a body can’t fit through, only your hand. So we kicked the bottom and she comes out with a little girl and she says, ‘Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry.’ When she told me, it didn’t register until I got to calling 911… I thought this girl was dead, you know what I mean? And she got on the phone and she said, ‘Yes, this is me…’

And when did you see Gina?

About five minutes after the police got here. See, that girl Amanda told the police, ‘I ain’t just the only one, it’s some more girls up in that house.’ So they went up there 30, 40 deep, and when they came out it was just astonishing because I thought they were gonna come up with nothing.

How long you lived here?

I been here a year! I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot, and listen to salsa music.

And you had no indication?

Not a clue that that girl was in that house, or that anybody else was in there against their will. Because how he is, he just comes out to his back yard, plays with the dogs, tinkering with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house. He’s somebody that you look at and look away because he’s not doing nothing but the average stuff. There’s nothing exciting about him. Well, until today.

What was the reaction on the girls’ faces? I can’t imagine…

Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she’s homeless or she got problems. That’s the only reason she’s running to a black man.

[The interview over, Ramsey flashed the thumbs-up.]

Why this is great and people love it: First, true originals mesmerize. Unfiltered, unmanaged, Ramsey was authentically who he is. Second, he told a story. His account of the escape is straight up narrative. The elements are there: a compelling character with an original voice (“Yeah, hey, bro…check this out;” “so they went up there 30, 40 deep;” “We eat ribs and whatnot”); there’s a clear structure (chronological), dialogue (which is key), and the aforementioned dramatic tension; it’s got what Tom Wolfe calls status details—food from McDonald’s, assumptions about a pit bull attack and a domestic violence dispute. And then the underdog hero utters a Hemingway’s-iceberg line of dialogue:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”

So the story becomes transcendent.

If you’re writing the long-ball narrative you wouldn’t want to omit what happened next, which was that Ramsey, inevitably, went viral. Why? Did the public love him for his storytelling skills? His authenticity? His gutsy instincts? Yep. And was that okay? Absolutely. There was nothing, on Day 1, not to love. This was “a wonderfully vibrant interview with a man who helped kick down a door and rescue three women and a child,” said Neely Tucker, a veteran Washington Post reporter and author of Love in the Driest Season, when we informally polled a few journalists on the topic. “It was precise, exciting, emotional, visually telling, and told with great pacing and narrative detail. All in two minutes, live, on camera. Anybody who’s bothered that the narrator is black and probably not rich is saying more about themselves than him.”

*Things got tricky when the inevitable autotune opportunists and meme-weavers bundled Ramsey with the viral videos of other crime-scene witnesses, all of whom happened to be black. The personal you-go-dude! feelings for Ramsey, conflated with images of expressive stylists like Antoine Dodson, morphed into something else. Not ugly, exactly, but ugly adjacent, if you took the view that the meme-drivers were laughing at, not with. Ramsey moved “from bystander and guy on the scene into ‘Internet object of affection,’” as Justin Ellis, an assistant editor of Nieman Journalism Lab, one of Storyboard’s sister publications, puts it. “I don’t know if that’s just the Internet chugging along or if there’s something else to blame. People want to celebrate him, which is great, but it’s hard to ignore the familiar trappings/scenario of ‘black person achieves Internet fame through local TV,’ which can feel exploitive at times and condescending or even casually racist at others.”

A narrative that already contained those trace elements of race/class (“pretty white girl;” “black man’s arms”) now had an overlay of social media influence, triggering confusion (was it not okay to like this guy’s interview?) and raising coverage questions: How will—or should—this aspect of the story be presented in the long view, or even in the short one? We asked other colleagues and here’s what they said:

Greg Moore

I have not watched a lot of the Internet stuff having fun with Charles Ramsey’s manner and I don’t plan to. I am from Cleveland and I know lots of people like Ramsey. On the street, he is likely being lauded for “keeping it real.” And part of the fascination with him is his originality and lack of self-consciousness. That’s partly why he could do what he did in saving those three women. He was on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning talking about the case, grappling for the right word here and there and sometimes clearly not understanding the question. But there was no mistaking his meaning and his grit when he did. Lamenting that he had shared ribs with the alleged perpetrator and even tried to salsa dance to some of his music, he ruefully noted something like this: If I had known what was going on in that house, don’t you think we’d be having a different interview right now? With Ramsey, you darn tootin’. Sometime people have to laugh to keep from crying. That’s a little bit of what is going on. This stuff is so bad and we are so relieved. But we all need to be listening to what this brave man is saying and not how he says it. I don’t think the reaction is so much racist as it reflects the lack of real familiarity with the strata of America. There are lots of people who talk like Ramsey and are damn funny, too. And there are many I grew up with who don’t play; who do the right thing and are fearless. Simple applause for Ramsey should be enough. He is a genuine hero, quirks and all. McDonald’s needs to put him in a commercial and one of those public-minded dental clinics should give him some new choppers for free. That’s the best way to show gratitude for such courage and community mindedness. And it is okay to chuckle at the unvarnished way he puts things? (Because it is really nervous laughter about how little we know about real people living real lives in communities across America). If we really understood his world, we’d know he is just keeping it real. And we are damn lucky he is. — Greg Moore, editor of the Denver Post, and Pulitzer Prize board member

Callie Crossley

First, of course, so glad he did what he did. Having said that, I wondered why a lot of the response to him has been all about the “funny” delivery. Have to say I’ve seen it before in portrayals of black men who happen into the middle of a breaking story—Antoine Dodson a prime example. For a while he was all the rage in pop culture, even garnering a record contract. But in his case and in Charles’ the serious substance of what they were saying got subsumed by their mannerisms and affect. I’m fascinated—not in a good way—by the fact that Charles’ commentary about race in Cleveland has stopped being reported as part of the story. “I knew something was wrong when a little pretty ran into a black man’s arms”—that’s pretty deep, and I think should have inspired journalists to ask him to explain what he meant. I’ve only heard one report focusing on this piece of the story, and I can’t remember if it was a TV or radio story. The piece picked up on his statement and went on to talk about the deep racial divide in Cleveland. But, that is the ONLY report I’ve seen dealing with it. As I see it, this is another example of journalists who are reluctant to pursue a legitimate racial angle to a story, even if it is a part of the main character’s story. And of course there is a class angle here. Reporters are also not so comfortable dealing with that issue. By the way, in the black blogosphere, a lot of folks are referencing In Living Color‘s satirical sketch: Reporters arrive on the scene of a breaking story and there are two witnesses, one a black professional in a suit and tie and another a black woman in what we used to call a housecoat, with curlers in her hair, and not in great command of the King’s English. Of course all of the reporters rushed past the guy and went to her for a “colorful” recitation of the events that had transpired. This is not exactly the same scenario in Charles Ramsey’s case—he was the only witness—but you get my drift. — Callie Crossley, host of the WGBH Radio show “Under the Radar.” Friday night at 7:30, Crossley will lead a Basic Black discussion called “What Can We Learn from Charles Ramsey?” It airs on WGBH-TV, Channel 2 in the Boston area.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland narrative unfolded. When Anderson Cooper spoke to Ramsey about all this, Ramsey said, “It’s about cojones. It’s about cojones, on this planet.” Cooper then asked whether he hoped to receive the FBI reward for helping free the women. “I tell you what you do,” Ramsey said instantly. “Give it to them.”

But, most of all on Friday, there was the simple and uncomplicated language of an elementary school, where, at 9:35 a.m., an unfamiliar voice could be heard shouting over the loudspeaker:

“Put your hands up!”

The Post‘s Gene Weingarten, meanwhile, lauded this Post lede as a Hall of Famer:

A big part of successful narrative, deadline and otherwise, is being prepared for it. Cultivating a narrative state of mind helps journalists across the spectrum − writers, editors, visual journalists, radio storytellers − tell our most devastating stories as meaningfully as possible. As we’ve seen in tragedies past, solid breaking narratives often come from newsrooms that nurture the discipline. We asked Greg Moore, Pulitzer board co-chair and editor of the Denver Post, a staff that’s covered not one but two mass shootings (Columbine and Aurora), for best practices for Newtown and, God forbid, beyond. Here’s what he said:

Moore

>This narrative rises or falls with the details. Throw staffers at it. The more staffers you have on it the more patient you can be, and the reward is huge.

>I do concentric circles: Go for the people who were in the room or who know the people who were in the room; then the people just outside ground zero; then the first responders and so on. You can see it takes bodies to attack like that.

>Be sensitive. If people don’t want to talk, don’t press. We learned that from Columbine and cascading tragedies. Emotions are raw in the immediate aftermath, and the last thing some people are thinking is media. Sensitivity often pays off with a great interview down the road and gratitude from your community.

>This is where I take reporting over writing. Lay off the flourishes. The drama of the event is enough. Rely on the details. If you don’t have the details, you really don’t have a narrative. Keep reporting.

>Let everyone who is working any aspect of the story know that the narrative is a communal project. Everyone needs to contribute. You run across something, share it.

>If you have time, use the web to find people who can help flesh out the narrative. There’s lots of help out there. It should be among the first things you do.

>The narrative done right is the first public balm on the community wound. In most every case the narrative reveals the best of human nature. There are heroes if you try to find them, and incredible personal sacrifice. It is a very important story and approaching it with that in mind helps the end result.

]]> http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2012/12/17/the-newtown-narratives/feed/ 0 http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2011/06/02/bio-2011-conference-jane-leavy-john-aloysius-farrell-anne-heller/ http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2011/06/02/bio-2011-conference-jane-leavy-john-aloysius-farrell-anne-heller/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:59:12 +0000 Andrea Pitzer http://niemanstoryboard.us/?p=9909 A bevy of biographers gathered in May in Washington, D.C., at the second annual Compleat Biographer Conference to discuss how to chase down subjects and make their lives into great stories. Last week we covered Robert Caro’s speech on the importance of setting. Today, we have highlights from the panel on “Turning Research into Narrative.” Speakers included Anne Heller, John Aloysius Farrell, Jane Leavy and moderator Amy Schapiro. The following are excerpts from their presentations that we thought might be useful for Storyboard readers.

Anne Heller, formerly a fiction editor at Esquire and Redbook, talked about her first book, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.” Heller described becoming intrigued by Rand after reading one of her books on vacation as an adult, even though she never became a fan. Here she describes how her own curiosity propelled and winnowed her research:

“I began my biography of Ayn Rand with a number of questions that drove me and drove the narrative. The research in my case was driven by the questions that I had about her as a writer and a human being and a political figure. One of those questions was that I learned that she was born in  Tsarist Russia in 1905 in the last decade of the Tsars, that she’d lived through the Russian Revolution at age 12, and that she was 21 when she came to the United States, having idealized the United States first from afar, from a vast afar.

“She had no way of knowing anything about these places except what she read and what she saw in the few movies she had seen in St. Petersburg, where she lived. She was Jewish in the most anti-Semitic place on the European continent at that time, and never mentioned being Jewish. Most of her readers don’t know that she was Russian. Those who had heard her or seen her in her lifetime did know that. She spoke with a very heavy Russian accent. But her name, which she changed from Alissa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand, had not only no nationality that could be identified but no gender. So then people didn’t know that she was a woman.

“I wanted to know what being a Russian, being Jewish in Tsarist Russia, being a woman who left that place that was so difficult to leave to come to the United States all by herself with the intention of becoming a writer in a language she didn’t yet know – what drove her and what influence these life experiences had on the Ayn Rand that we know: the pro-Capitalist, anti-altruistic, free market, self-styled philosophical Ayn Rand. So I set out to find out, and the research that I did was, for the most part, in the service of these questions that I had.

“I wanted to know something about her inner life, with which I could not identify at all to start with. My biggest fear was that I would come to dislike her thoroughly in the course of living with her. Wil Haygood spoke in the last session about unlocking the front door at the end of the day, opening your door, and finding your subject on the couch waiting for you. My fear was that I would have to move.

“But that didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen largely because the things I was able to find out about Ayn Rand continued to intrigue me. As I folded them into what I knew about her version of the narrative of her life, she became more interesting rather than less interesting.

“All I can say is that I tried to include nothing that didn’t answer the questions that were drawing me to write the book in the first place. Since this is the only book that I’ve had the experience of writing, I do know that each project presents its own peculiar challenges. But this one for me was to uncover the inner and outer influences that created I think a very unusual, a very powerful woman who continues to influence our leaders’ thinking today.”

John Aloysius Farrell is with the Center for Public Integrity and has previously written for The Boston Globe and The Denver Post. In addition to stressing the value of assembling a complete chronology for the central character in a story (his run as long as 1,000 pages), he discussed his latest book, a biography of celebrated trial attorney Clarence Darrow, to be published this month.

“The theme of my talk is what you should leave out. I wanted to give you an exclusive look at the last anecdote that got chopped from my manuscript. It takes place in about 1926 or ’27, after the Monkey Trial, after Darrow was at the peak of his fame. And it takes place in New York, where a young cub reporter was called up to the city desk by his editor, who said, ‘Clarence Darrow’s in town, kid. I want you go to go out there, and I want you interview him before he goes to this black tie dinner, and I want you to write it up for tomorrow’s edition.’

[He tells a tale of a cub reporter trapped into helping a partially naked Clarence Darrow get dressed for a formal event.]

“Now you see my regret that I didn’t include that. Why didn’t I? Well, any of you who are newspaper people know the phrase “never let the facts get in the way of a great story.”  Or as a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer once told me “Jack, that’s what footnotes are for.” If an anecdote is too good to be true, put it in the book and then go back to the footnotes. Aside from the fact that it was sort of demeaning to [Darrow’s wife] Ruby and coarse, I left it out because I just wasn’t sure of the provenance. New York newspaper people of that time were not known for their, um… [audience laughs]

“It could have happened, and it might have happened, but in the end I chose to leave it out, because what you leave out is as important as what you put in. You have to be very careful. More importantly, when you leave it out is important. This was the last thing I cut.

“I have a couple former colleagues in this room. Those who know me know I tend to write very long. The original manuscript for “Tip” was 1,000 pages, and it was published at like 760 pages. You think that I would have learned when it was time for the second book, but I didn’t. I wrote another thousand pages, and this one – in this day of e-books and brevity and it being very important to appeal to the reader – came in at about 550. But in each of these cases, as I came along to something in the writing, and I had all this research, I said to myself, ‘Do I need a quote here? Do I want to put this in? I’ll just put it in now, because I really like this quote, and I’ll cut it out later.’

“No, no. You have to do your triage right from the start. Otherwise you end up, as I did in both cases, with months of rewriting and condensing and putting in new numbers for your footnotes. And you also end up with choppy prose. If there’s anything drives me nuts as I read both manuscripts is that I can tell where the cuts are. I just hope you can’t.”

Jane Leavy, who spent many years as a sports reporter and feature writer for The Washington Post, has written two sports biographies – “The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood” and “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy.” For the BIO audience, she discussed her personal connection to Mickey Mantle and shared a story from her time at the Post:

“I think the most instructive thing I can say about turning reporting into narrative starts with my first trip as a reporter for The Washington Post, when I was sent to Houston, Texas, to interview a guy who was a great running back for the Houston Oilers, Earl Campbell. Earl Campbell was told I was coming, and the PR mechanism went into effect. Well, Earl Campbell did not want to talk to this Washington Post reporter, or any reporter.

So he bolted from the practice facility with me running after him, which is hilarious in and of itself. Remember this guy was the best in the world at the time, and here’s this little white girl running after this large black man, and chasing him down. And he runs into a men’s room, a cinder block thing at this practice field. And he goes into the men’s room, and I stand outside the men’s room. Every once in a while, he would stick his head out, and I’d still be there. And I’d wave, and he’d go back into the men’s room. This went on – I kid you not – for five hours. I wasn’t leaving, and he wasn’t coming out.

“Lesson No. 1 about being a biographer: You chase their asses down, and you don’t leave once you’ve found them.

“No. 2, when he did finally make a run for it, I stuck my whole body in front of him. He didn’t run over me, which he clearly could have done. He just looked at me, scared to death, and said, ‘No comma.’ I did two things at that point. I wrote it down, because we all take notes, and nobody was going to believe it anyway. And I went into the men’s room. It had been a long five hours.

“The story there, the material, is nothing. My editor said, ‘What did he say?’ I said, ‘He said, No comma.’  ‘He said No comment?’ ‘No. No comma.’ Well, they weren’t going to let me write that. So I wrote some story, some nonsense, and it didn’t have any quotes from Earl Campbell.

“And years later when I sat down to write ‘Squeeze Play’ – which is really my life as a female sportswriter, except that I never did sleep with a catcher, honest – I realized that little moment taught me more about how to organize and how to impose structure on material than anything before or since. Because the words themselves, the notes, were nothing, but the narrative was that he was scared of me. I had a kind of power that he was terrified of. We all do, when we write about people.

“That power, for me, can be paralyzing. I don’t know about you guys, maybe if you’re only writing about dead people it doesn’t matter. But the dynamic there, which was that he was not necessarily – unlike a writer or a pol or a great lawyer  – he was not able to tell his own story, and he might not have been inclined to do so had he had that ability. But he didn’t. So it was my job to impose on the story that I was able to glean from other sources, from history and teammates and other interviews, what the narrative was.”

In “Modern-Day Slavery: A Necessary Beat – with Different Challenges,” E. Benjamin Skinner offers a well-written account of reporting on the sex trafficking beat, weighing storytelling with ethics, action, and the needs of his subjects. Melanie Hamman’s “Visual Stories of Human Trafficking’s Victims,” a partner piece to Skinner’s, discusses visual documentary of criminal, exploitative activity, and wounded subjects. “Merely by retelling her story,” Hamman writes, “a victim can be retraumatized, severely complicating her recovery.”

Storyboard contributor (and longtime narrative journalist) Beth Macy offers a sample of the kinds of stories she balances on the family beat at The Roanoke Times and how that beat has changed in her many years there. Looking to the future, Macy says that when it comes to stories, “If we tell them well, it won’t matter what medium we use. They can be our saving grace.”

Very different opinions emerge about new media’s effect on the sports beat, including storytelling in sports. Former Wall Street Journal tech columnist Jason Fry discusses sportswriting as a blogger and ponders what’s most important in reporting. Lindsay Jones, who covers the Broncos for The Denver Post, explains how Twitter works for her. But in excerpts from the 2010 Red Smith Lecture on Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, sportswriter Frank Deford (a senior contributing writer with Sports Illustrated and commentator for NPR) worries about what the digital revolution has done to sportswriting:

“The Internet – or to be kind, the influence of the Internet – is reducing the amount of storytelling in sports journalism … the story – which was always the best of sportswriting, what sports gave so sweetly to us writers – the sports story is the victim. Sportswriting remains so popular – one word. Sports stories – two words, are disappearing.”

Gay Talese might well agree. In an excerpt from an October talk in Boston celebrating the release of “The Silent Season of a Hero: the Sports Writing of Gay Talese,” he answered a question from the audience by saying that reporters are behind their laptops too much. Arguing for being present with subjects and occasionally unplugging, Talese said, “Sometimes I think reporters should waste some time. Good journalism is wasting time.”

The winter issue includes many other stories, from reviews of books about the status of women journalists and the work of legendary writers to a look at whether news organizations have some obligation to tell stories whose audience size may not sustain the resources required to report them. See the full roster here.