Porter Shreve

Today is the 95th birthday of legendary Chicago oral historian, journalist, radio personality and writer Studs Terkel. The New Press has put up a birthday page and is bringing out The Studs Terkel Reader to celebrate the occasion.  Originally published as My American Century, the reader features selections from American Dreams, Coming of Age, Division Street, “The Good War”, The Great Divide, Hard Times, Race, and Working, and includes new commentary by Studs himself, an introduction by Robert Coles and a new foreword by Calvin Trillin.

I've been a Studs fan ever since I read Working in high school, and I keep my dog-eared copy of Division Street close by as I research a Chicago novel-in-stories/ story cycle/ call-it-what-you-will that lies somewhere off in my future. But perhaps the closest connection I felt to this one-of-a-kind writer and human being was when the Chicago Tribune assigned me to review Terkel's Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith just before September 11, 2001, with a due date soon thereafter:

Studs Terkel has made his reputation as one of the great interviewers of the century in part because his subjects have tended to be “heroes of the ‘ordinary.’” Moving with equal ease between assembly plants, family farms, Hollywood back lots, and public housing projects, he has provided in ten oral histories, among them “Working,” “The Good War,” “Hard Times” and “Race,” a chorus as rich and various and affirming of American pluralism as any collection of documents we have. No journalist, with the possible exception of Joseph Mitchell, has displayed such a remarkable gift for connecting with human beings, disappearing into the conversation and allowing his subjects to express or discover the power of their own voices.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner’s latest, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” contains all of the narrative force of his previous oral histories and, given the events of September 11, has an unwitting timeliness as well. Since death and faith are the book’s organizing subjects, we meet doctors and religious leaders, a paramedic, an undertaker, a hospice nurse, an HIV-positive editor for a gay weekly, veterans of Vietnam and World War II, a former South Chicago gangbanger, and a one time death row inmate whose sentence was overturned for lack of evidence.

Among the sixty-three stories the most penetrating come from those who themselves have looked into the face of death: a cancer patient, a prisoner of war, a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. Matta Kelly, a community outreach case manager, tells of her steady descent from an abusive childhood in Iceland to an unhappy marriage in Chicago to heroin addiction, petty theft, drug dealing, and prostitution, all under the watchful eyes of her pre-teenage daughter. “I have actually been pronounced dead once when I was using drugs,” she says. “I woke up on one of them gurneys outside of the morgue. They had already put a tag on my toe.”

Kelly’s story, like many of those collected here, moves from the darkest shadows toward a kind of salvation. She struggles through detox, finds a job working with addicts, buries scores of friends and patients whose families abandoned them when they contracted AIDS. In the end, she accepts the course of her life as part of God’s plan, though her sense of God is not tied to organized religion: “I had to go through everything I went through to sit in front of my clients and be able to relate. How can I tell a woman that has just lost her children, ‘I understand how you feel, I understand your pain.’ How can I relate to somebody that’s shooting drugs unless I’ve done it myself.”

Karen Thompson finds herself in thrall to a different addiction. Alone in the world, she works eighteen hour days for an architecture firm, the stress eventually giving her walking pneumonia. Refusing to cut back on work, she keeps herself going with over-the-counter medicines. Her condition deteriorates, her breathing becomes strained, she goes into respiratory failure and soon slips into a coma, which lasts for two years. Inside the coma, which she remembers as a sensation like flying through intense darkness, she has visions of past lives she has led. She was an Irish woman, an Egyptian boy, an Inuit Eskimo. Years later, after her painful recovery, Thompson goes to a Tibetan monastery in upstate New York and begins her long search for the meaning behind what she saw and the construction of her own set of beliefs.

Not everyone interviewed is a direct survivor or someone who works in close proximity to death. Many have lost spouses, as the 88-year-old Terkel recently did, and others have suffered the particular sadness of outliving their children. Mamie Mobley is the mother of Emmett Till, who was killed at fourteen by white racists in Mississippi, a murder that helped fuel the civil rights movement. She recounts in gruesome detail the day in 1955 when she identified her son, examining up close his brutally beaten skull. Later, turning to the Scriptures for comfort, she discovers that contrary to the popular image Jesus, too, had been badly maimed before descending the cross. “I saw Emmett and his scars. Lord, I saw the stigmata of Jesus,” Mobley recalls. “The spirit spoke to me as plainly as I’m talking to you now. Jesus had come and died that we might have a right to eternal life. Emmett had died that men might have freedom here on Earth.”

The solace that Mobley takes in Christianity is repeated in one form or another — religious and secular, interpretive and introspective — throughout these oral histories. Nearly all of the interviewees believe in something transcendent, though few hold fast to the notion of a God who is purely good. “I don’t believe there’s anything like heaven because if there is a God, in my opinion He’s not worth worshipping,” says civil rights activist Peggy Terry, who also appears in “Hard Times.” “If he was what I was taught, a loving God who sees the fall of the sparrow, why are so many people in the world in such horrible, miserable conditions?”

Reading these stories, it will be difficult not to conflate the grief, suffering and outrage of Matta Kelly, Karen Thompson, Mamie Mobley and Peggy Terry with what we have witnessed over the past weeks in lower Manhattan, the Pentagon and Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The first interviewee in the book is Tom Gates, who spent his working years as a Brooklyn firefighter. The second is Tom’s brother Bob, a retired New York City cop who recounts the most harrowing incident of his career: his rescue of a would-be suicide from the roof of the World Trade Center.

“Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” is an exhausting book to read, all the more so given its connection to current events. These stories have the same effect as the images we’ve watched and the lives we’ve read about since September 11. They are terrifying, moving, painful and redemptive. We can’t turn away from this grief.

A prevailing idea, particularly among the rabbis and ministers in the book is that organized communities play an important role in offering solace to those who need it. As he has done many times before, Studs Terkel provides us with the community, and horrible though it may be to consider that life comes to an end, there is solace in knowing, at least for now, that we are not alone.