The Truth, So Help Me God
Like all writers of serious literature, I’ve always anticipated that moment when I’d encounter
some perplexing attempt at defining some aesthetic term - beauty, love, truth... In the end
perhaps, what we discover is to be comfortable with the ambiguity of it all, that state of mind
where complexity becomes a synonym for being human.
However, some instances make us aware of how devious we can become in the name of
such an abstraction - in this case I discovered something about the term truth, as in the term
“do you swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God?"
I was driving home on a weekday in mid-afternoon in Rochester, NY, listening to the radio. I
was coming back from my office in City Hall, near the Mayor’s office. What was a poet and
writer doing with an office at City Hall? I was the country’s only full-time, city-government
Writer-In-Residence - ever! - and my duties included creating narratives from the oral histories
(stories) of people in the city, from the elderly, to youth, to city councilmen, local celebrities,
and even the Chief-of-Police, who had been a boyhood friend of mine. The narratives were
part of a larger program of writing and reading to enrich communities throughout the city of
Rochester, New York - but the narratives, which I transcribed and wrote after several
interviews with people, proved very popular, especially with the column I did with Gannett
newspapers once or twice a month. They also came out in a book, Hearts and Times: The
Literature o f Memory, and that book was adapted for the stage and had a successful run in
Chicago.
About six months prior to my afternoon drive (which I’ll get to here), I put on a concert for
the city of Rochester which included music, poetry, rappers, storytellers, and a unique
combination of an ex-con, terrific poet named Etheridge Knight, and my friend, Gordie
Urlacher, the Chief of Police, who read the narrative I wrote after getting his oral history.
Gordie’s story, humorous and told with a good heart, described a time in his youth when he fell
off the back of a bus on his way home from a Catholic grammar school. He ended up breaking
both arms, leaving him unable to attend school. He described his attempt to avoid trouble by
saying he fell off his bike, and how the nuns showed up at his house and felt sorry for him and
hinted at the right answers on tests with inflections in their voices as they administered school
tests. Besides Gordie reading it at the concert, it was published in Gannett for a couple of
hundred thousand people to read.
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