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George Dawson spent his youth working on farms, only learning to read when he was 98. Now 102, heÍs written a memoir. Its title: Life Is So Good.
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Over the years, George Dawson picked cotton, cut cane, and plowed fields in Texas; helped build a levee along the Mississippi River in Tennessee; unloaded cargoes of coconuts in New Orleans and, during Prohibition, barges of illicit booze in St. Louis; worked on a coffee plantation in the jungles of Mexico; and broke horses all over the Midwest. He lived in hobo camps, in boxcars, and under boardwalks and laid rails and rode them from Cincinnati to Canada to California, all the while turning the other cheek when he was insulted or humiliated by white folks who “just didn’t know any better.” Always a good Christian, he resisted the temptations of crap games, women, and booze—with the notable exception of his sojourn in New Orleans. He had signed aboard a ship bound for India, where a great-great-grandmother had lived, but got so busy partying that the boat sailed without him. “I found New Orleans just like the preacher warned against,” he says in the book. “It was great.”
Richard Glaubman, the co-author of Life Is So Good, first learned of George Dawson in a newspaper article reprinted from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. An elementary school teacher on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Glaubman was intrigued by the story and thought it might make a good children’s book. “I went down to visit him, thinking this was a story about overcoming hardship and suffering,” Glaubman says. “After a few hours everything changed. I was struck by how much he remembered and, more than that, by his attitude toward life.” Dawson wasn’t all that sure he wanted to deal with a white man. Nevertheless, he permitted Glaubman to move into his home. Between trips back to Washington, Glaubman shared the cooking and household duties and taught Dawson about the world he’d missed; Dawson taught Glaubman about chitlins, fishing, patience, and humility. When Glaubman finally sat down to write, he automatically typed Dawson’s favorite expression across the top of the first page: “Life is so good.”
To fill in the gaps, Glaubman showed Dawson old newspapers and magazines documenting periods that he had lived through but couldn’t read about until now, then solicited the old man’s reaction. This device teaches us more about ourselves than it does about Dawson, and some of the revelations hit like an ice pick in the heart. Did Dawson remember the Scopes trial, labeled the “Trial of the Century” in 1925? It was in all the papers, but of course he couldn’t read the papers. And even if he could, the Scopes trial was “white news... it wasn’t part of the America I knew... the only [trials] that colored folks noticed were when a colored man went on trial for raping a white woman.” How about the Great Depression? Dawson didn’t know much about any depression, only that white people believed that times were tough. “For the colored folks,” he told Glaubman, “times was already tough and it wasn’t so different than before.” And Jackie Robinson, surely he had heard of the great black athlete who integrated major league baseball? Dawson shook his head at the naiveté of the question: “I guess [Glaubman] doesn’t know that there ain’t no black man in America that was alive then would ever forget Jackie Robinson.” Dawson was a pretty good ballplayer himself in the twenties, as was his brother Johnny. He has often wondered if they could have made it to the majors.
Dawson didn’t march with Martin Luther King, Jr., but he remembers his own personal protest. It happened one hot summer day in the late sixties, not long after he had retired from 25 years as a handyman for Oak Farm Dairies. Retirement didn’t mean Dawson could rest. He did yard work and gardening for rich housewives who competed for the best rose garden in Dallas. Most of them seemed decent enough, furnishing him with pitchers of ice water and inviting him into their kitchen for lunch. But one particular matron seemed to regard him as another tool to be used and stored in the garage. He had to drink out of the hose, and when the noon hour arrived, she was nowhere in sight. Eventually she appeared—to feed her dogs. A few minutes later she brought Dawson a bowl of stew and a biscuit, setting them on a porch shelf out of the dogs’ reach. “She expected I would eat out on the porch with her dogs,” Dawson tells us. “But something told me, ‘George, don’t go up on that porch. You must keep your pride.’” He worked all afternoon on an empty stomach, getting hungrier and weaker but dead set against surrender. When she discovered the uneaten stew at the end of the day, the woman angrily scolded him for wasting “perfectly good food.” Dawson replied that he didn’t eat with dogs. “I eat with people,” he told her. “I am a human being.” Her face tightened, he recalls, and changed to meanness and anger. “From her mother and father and back through her grandparents, I could sense a hundred years of anger and fear coming out toward me.” The woman told Dawson not to come back again.
One of the most touching scenes in the book is when Glaubman takes Dawson back to Marshall to visit the local newspaper. Growing up, Dawson had learned the news by listening. “In those days,” he says, “it seems like everything had two stories, the white story and the colored story.” In the reference room of the Marshall newspaper, they searched without success for a mention of the lynching of Dawson’s boyhood friend Pete Spillman. Dawson and his father had come to town to sell some cane syrup the day the mob turned on the seventeen-year-old black kid, falsely accused of impregnating a white girl. When they dragged Spillman onto a buckboard and looped the noose around his neck, Dawson buried his head against his father’s chest. Only when he heard the snap of the whip and the lurch of the buckboard did he look back. “Pete’s neck broke instantly; his head rested at an awkward angle,” Dawson tells us. “His eyes were open and he looked out at everyone.”
At the time of his visit to the newspaper, Dawson still wondered why he had lived so long—and why, against his father’s warning, he had trusted a white man to write his story. Suddenly he knew. “I guess I am the only man alive that knows the truth about Pete Spillman,” he told Glaubman. “I am a witness to the truth.”
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