How I Came to Cowrite Richard Brown's Memoir

 Brian Benson is the co-author of This Is Not For You: An Activist’s Journey of Resistance and Resilience, which is Richard Brown's Memoir. Brown is an eighty-year-old Black Portlander who has worked to bridge the divide between police and the Black community. His memoir brings readers with him into the streets with fellow activists, into squad cars with the rank-and-file, and to regular meetings with mayors and police chiefs. There are very few people doing the kind of work Richard Brown has done. And that, as he sees it, is a big problem. 
           
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One day in late 2016, after Trump’s election but before his inauguration, I went for a long walk with my sister. I want to say it was foggy, the gray sky backlit by a rising sun, but if the day did gift us that metaphor, I don’t remember it. All I remember is, as we walked, we talked, about what so many shell-shocked white people were talking about in those days: about how the world felt, and why, and what we might do to help make it feel a bit better. At some point, my sister asked if I’d ever considered using my writing to help tell stories other than my own; more specifically, she asked if I’d thought of using it to help turn up the volume on voices that often got ignored. What I said was, “Well, yeah, I’ve thought about it.” I said this because I knew it was the right thing to say, and I wanted it to be true. What was true, though, was that I was forehead-deep in a floundering novel, reeling from a breakup, teetering on the edge of depression. I was thinking mostly of myself.

A week or two after that walk, I got a call from a friend I hadn’t seen in some time. My friend told me he’d just met someone, an eighty-year-old Black man, who was looking for help writing something. Richard Brown was the man’s name. He was a photographer and had spent decades doing work in and for Portland’s Black community and, as my friend put it, “He’s a unique guy, he’s got a lot to say.” My friend then asked if I’d be up for talking with Mr. Brown about a story he wanted to tell.

I wish I could say this was one of those light-bulb moments. But I was still way too submerged in myself to really hear what I was being asked. I took down Mr. Brown’s number, and I told my friend I’d get in touch, to see what he was looking for and maybe point him in the right direction.

* * *

A few weeks later, after a long game of phone tag, I talked with Mr. Brown, and we made plans to have lunch at a Jordanian restaurant I’d never heard of. While on the phone, we talked about what Mr. Brown wanted to talk about: he wanted to be heard. He’d been engaged in activism around police for decades, he said, and lately, he’d begun to want to write something, just a pamphlet he could hand to policing “experts,” so many of whom would write him off before hearing him out.

I showed up to that lunch with a list of questions I thought I’d ask and suggestions I thought I’d give. I never looked at it. What happened was, Mr. Brown talked, and I listened. I listened as he told me about how frustrating it was to spend three decades working on police issues and still get ignored because, as he put it, he didn’t have any abba dabbas after his name. I listened as he talked about his many decades of police activism, and also about his Nicaraguan solidarity work, and his support of gang-affected youth, and his crusade against environmental racism in Portland, and all the other activism he’d done for years and years and years. I listened as he talked about his photography, about how back in the eighties he’d been known as the “Picture Man” and had probably photographed every Black Portlander, probably a few times. I listened as he told me about growing up in post-Renaissance Harlem, about serving in the Air Force in the Jim Crow South and in the Philippines and Germany, about somewhere in there becoming a race-car driver. As I listened, I began to feel things I hadn’t felt in a while. It was like someone was walking around inside me, slowly flipping all the lights on.

Finally, after about three hours, I asked Mr. Brown if he’d maybe want to write a book.

“My friends,” he said, “are always asking me that.”

As Mr. Brown saw it, his life was just his life, and he didn’t know why anyone would care to read about that. All he wanted was a document he could hand to people he met, something that said enough about who he was and what he’d done that they’d maybe listen to him. Maybe, he said, that document would be a book. He wasn’t sure yet. But would I like to help him write it?

My impulse was to tell Mr. Brown, right then and there, that I wanted to work with him and I wanted to start right away. What I did instead was take a few breaths. I said I was inspired by his story, and I was honored he’d asked me to help him write it, but I wanted to take some time to think. And so I thought, as I stepped out of the restaurant into the cold and as I biked home. I thought about what Mr. Brown had said to me, and about what my sister and I had talked about on our November walk, and about how long it’d been since I’d last felt what I was feeling.

I called him that night.

* * *

We met the next Friday, and the next one, and every Friday after that. For the first half-hour, we’d talk about what had happened over the previous week—Mr. Brown was (and still is) regularly visiting Oregon’s police academy, sitting in on trainings and offering feedback, and he always had things to say about that—and then we’d jump into his life story, which we were working through, start to finish, week by week. It took us a month to get out of Harlem. And a couple more to retire from the Air Force. And several more after that to make it up to the present day. He told me so many stories, and whenever I thought I’d finally gotten all the best ones, he’d show up the next week and tell me nine more. In the transcripts of our conversations, you can almost hear my jaw hanging open.

I’d never really done transcriptions before. I didn’t have the budget to hire anyone—Mr. Brown had done his work without compensation, and I’d decided to follow suit—and so every Saturday, I’d play back our conversation and type it out. Transcribing took awhile (at least twice as long as the conversations themselves), but I’m glad I ended up doing it myself. Mr. Brown had so much to say, and I’d often miss some of it in the moment, so as I transcribed, I’d bold any quotes that seemed particularly useful to the book. Often enough, I’d end up bolding a whole page.

Mr. Brown would also use our meetings for show-and-tell. He brought in the fuchsia jacket he wore while racing cars in Germany, and some stop-the-violence posters he helped design in the nineties, and the letters he wrote to and got from his parents when he was in the Air Force—and, of course, he brought in pictures. We went through boxes upon boxes of his pictures, many of which came with a story, many of which ended up in the book.

As the weeks and months went by, we became, as Mr. Brown would put it, “good friends.” Along with our weekly meetings, we saw some plays and literary readings together, and we went to the movies (we saw Get Out, then spent the next few months picking it apart), and he let me tag along on a half-dozen visits to the police academy so I could watch him do this thing. On those drives (an hour-and-a-half each way), we’d listen to music and he’d tell more stories and I’d tell some of mine.

Which isn’t to say ours was always an easy friendship. Mr. Brown is an octogenarian Black man from Harlem, and I’m a thirty-something white guy from Nowhere, Wisconsin. Sometimes, the gulf between us felt pretty wide, and we’d have to strain to be heard across it. We didn’t—and still don’t—always see eye-to-eye, politically. I found my views often fell a bit to the left of his, and it would take sustained effort to recognize that my role was not to argue my points, but rather, to express his, whether or not I agreed with them. Also, in our conversations, and in my early framing of his story, I tended to talk about white supremacy and whiteness a lot more than he did; and though I still believe this is an asset to me as a white person, doing work on myself, I came to understand that it was problematic to the writing of a book about a Black man, and Black people, and Black culture.

I wondered, during those initial months, when I was still just taking down his stories and had not yet begun writing his book, if I was the person to be doing this. I wondered if I was capable of getting Mr. Brown’s story on the page. I felt good enough about my motives, but I wondered how people would react to a white guy writing a book about a Black guy. I wondered if he should find a different writer, maybe a Black writer. I wondered this aloud, sometimes, to Mr. Brown. And whenever I did, he’d shake his head, and he’d remind me that, in worrying about all of this, I was again centering myself and losing sight of him. “I’m choosing to work with you,” he’d say.

Through all of this, I hadn’t yet written a single word. I hadn’t wanted to start the book until I knew—or, at least, thought I knew—what it was we were writing. And finally, in August, after seven months’ worth of conversations, I thought I knew. We’d gotten through all of Mr. Brown’s life story. We’d recognized our differences well enough to move through them. We’d had dozens of conversations about the tone and form and focus of the book. Now, we just had to write it.

* * *

Once I got into the writing, Mr. Brown and I kept up our weekly meetings, which was a good thing, because I quickly learned that no matter how well you think you’ve prepared to write someone else’s story, once you actually get into it, you’re going to have questions. Thousands of them.

I’d realize, as I wrote, that we hadn’t talked about Mr. Brown’s maternal grandparents, or about the layout of the church where he slept when he ran away from home, or about the color of his commanding officer’s poodle, or the things he thought while in jail, the words he wished he’d said while his dad was still alive. And so I’d ask him during our lunches. And if I couldn’t wait that long, I’d call him, and he’d answer my questions, along with a few I wouldn’t have thought to ask.

For a long while, we kept up like that. I kept asking Mr. Brown if he wanted to read what I was writing, and he’d say he did, eventually, but for now, he just wanted me to get into a rhythm and not worry about what he thought of it yet. What we did talk about, a lot, was the book’s structure. And what we came to, and kept coming back to, was a narrative braid. We both felt like readers needed to know what he thought, now, and how he’d come to know it, then. So we decided the book would be a sort of back-and-forth between his present-day self, looking back, and his younger self, growing up.
 
I began to understand, as I pushed on, that the curse and the gift of cowriting is that somebody’s watching. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself. Whenever I got fatigued, or began to believe that I couldn’t write the book, or didn’t want to, or didn’t want to even get out of bed and do anything, I’d remind myself that I’d made a promise to Mr. Brown. I’d promised I’d write his book. Maybe that’s why I ended up drafting the whole thing much faster than I usually would, in just over a year.

When it was finally ready for Mr. Brown to read, he took his time. And when we sat down for coffee to talk about it, the conversation was awkward, in a way it hadn’t been since our first lunches together, when we were still feeling each other out. Eventually, he found a way to say what was on his mind: he had some issues with the writing. He had lots of issues. First off, there were the profanities, which he rarely used (“Seems like you’ve been watching too much Shaft,” he told me), and then there were the many factual inaccuracies (I’d flubbed some of my secondary research), and also it seemed I’d maybe missed the whole point of this anecdote, and also that one, and that one.

I’d been prepared for this, or at least I’d told myself I was prepared. And I told Mr. Brown, at that lunch, that I wanted this feedback, because I wanted this to be his book, to reflect who he was and how he spoke and what he spoke about. But I’ll admit that I was surprised to learn how often, and by how much I’d missed the mark. And what really struck me was how much my whiteness had crept into the writing. Despite my many conversations with Mr. Brown about this very topic, I’d still brought up white people a bunch, more than was necessary in a book about the life of a Black man. And my privilege had seeped in in all sorts of surprising ways, too. For example, when describing Mr. Brown’s involvement in a campaign pushing for divestment from South Africa, and about the governor’s last-minute quashing of the bill activists had worked hard to get on his desk, I wrote, in Mr. Brown’s voice, about how totally crushing that defeat was, because I, a white guy who grew up mostly getting what he wanted, was crushed by that story when Mr. Brown told it. At one of our lunches, though, Mr. Brown pointed at that section, and he told me that this wasn’t how it went at all. “When you’re Black in Portland, Oregon,” he said, “you expect to lose. And when you do, you just move on to the next fight.”
 
I’m not going to pretend we fully solved that problem. Though this is very much Mr. Brown’s book, I’m the one who wrote the sentences. I’m sure I’m still in there, somewhere. I’m sure that my speech and my sensibilities show up in those pages, just like I’m sure that Mr. Brown is showing up in what I’m writing right now. That, Mr. Brown and I both believe, is the nature of collaboration. You learn from and influence each other, whether or not you’re trying to. This is why we decided—and Mr. Brown, especially, felt strongly about this—that this book wasn’t going to be “ghostwritten.” If I was a part of it, he said, people ought to know. He felt this way because he, as an artist, wanted me to get credit for my art, and also because he wanted people to know how this book came to be. He wanted readers to know, from word one, that an older Black man and a younger white man wrote this together. He wanted them to know this because of how it affected the writing, and just as importantly, because he’s spent his whole life entering into cross-cultural, cross-generational partnerships like ours. This book, he felt, could be more than a document. It could be an example of the sort of partnership we’ll need to see more and more of if we’re ever going to change anything in this country.

We worked hard, though, to revise the book. We did all we could to turn my volume down and turn Mr. Brown’s up. We spent months sending pages back and forth, tweaking lines, adding and deleting paragraphs, getting it right, or as right as we were able to on our own. And finally, in the summer of 2019, over two-and-a-half years after we’d begun, we began sending the book to publishers. The following spring, not long after 2020 became what it became, we signed a deal with OSU Press.

* * *

It’s been nearly nine months since Mr. Brown and I last met in person. We talk on the phone often, and he updates me on his life, and I tell him about mine, and we talk about whatever book details we need to talk about: about the cover (done by a Black designer he recommended to OSU Press), or the audiobook (he’s been considering whether he himself will do the narration), or the launch, which, we both came to accept, probably wouldn’t happen in an actual room full of people.

I’ll be honest: I’m anxious about publication day. It’s easy for me to imagine the criticisms that could be made of this book and how we wrote it. Criticisms about co-optation, and representation, and inauthenticity. It feels scary, taking this step into one of our most painful national conversations. But that, for me, is the point. Every day, if I want to, I can choose to live the easy way. I’m trying to make a different choice here.

I hope people read this book. I hope it impacts readers in ways that Mr. Brown and I can and cannot foresee. I hope it starts some conversations, and deepens others, and inspires more than a few people to step into activist work, however that looks. Most of all, I hope I’m able to stay open to what people do and don’t say about this book, and that I learn from all of it. Because I have learned so much already. I have learned about how and why to be an engaged citizen, about what resiliency really looks like, about the full history of my adopted city and the lived experience of a remarkable Black man and, most of all, about friendship. I never could have imagined, back in the winter of 2016, that I’d meet a man like Richard Brown, that I’d come to call him a good friend. Our friendship has changed me in so many ways. And if I were to call him up and ask him, I imagine he’d say that’s the point of friendship, of everything. You let yourself change and be changed, again and again and again.

Brian Benson is the author of Going Somewhere. Originally from Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches at the Attic Institute. 

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