Margaret Wilkerson Sexton Reading
I sat in on a book reading at the Mechanics’ Institute in San Francisco. Market Wilkerson Sexton has just released a book “On the Rooftop” that tells the tale of three daughters in the 1950’s San Francisco Fillmore district when it was still the height of the African American jazz scene. It’s wonderful seeing an artist talk in person about her process, discuss the history of a neighborhood that vanished due to methodological racist gentrification, and we even had music too.
I sketched some things out, inspired by visual journalism, but these are just sketches, not a fully wrought article. Visual journalism is hard! It was cool drawing as people spoke, you feel more connected to what they’re saying somehow.
Here’s some of the process:
We started the evening off with some live music from Bryan Dyer, it’s really cool when the musicians can be in an intimate setting and go over their lives, why they are playing what they are doing, and the long road they took to get to where they are.
Margaret read a passage about one of the characters, the mother, immigrating from the South to 1950’s San Francisco, walking through the crowds in her nursing uniform and passing by a vibrant African American community in the SF Fillmore. Some professors were there and we discussed how this world had been deliberately eviscerated by property developers and was long gone. As a New Orleans native Margaret has been dismayed by the same gentrification and eradication of black culture happening in the 4th (sic) ward in New Orleans, and she doesn’t know what to think other than anger that the an entire neighborhood is quietly being erased.
She also discussed her journey to become a full time author, sort of scary since she was a professional lawyer and had gone to a big name law school UC Berkeley. The creative life is not an easy one! What she thought would take one year to publish her first book was actually five, and the first book wasn’t even the one she had been thinking of, it was something she came up with in six months. Despite this she’s become successful and become quite successful, winning many awards.
During the research she said that she met people who told her that this time in Fillmore was the “best time of their entire lives”.
She said that her mother raised her very strictly, so she could only watch certain types of plays and movies growing up. One film they watched repeatedly was “Fiddler on the Roof” which they saw together a million times. After the success of her novels, her mother said, “Why don’t you write a Fiddler on the Roof, but with an African American mother and three daughters who marry guys she doesn’t like? Put it in New Orleans?” She laughed at first, but considered the idea, then decided to set it in San Francisco.
Those are the quick notes I caught, but I’m sure I missed all others. Doing visual journalism is hard, I wonder how the pros like Oliver Kugler do it. I’d like to get to a point so that my sketches for the night can be formed into coherent stories that help tell what I saw in another way! I guess the only way to get better is to practice :)
