LY #118 The Joe Louis Chapter

Back in the early 90s I spent a year working with an organization that is now known as Oregon Humanities  as what was then called an Oregon Chautauqua speaker.   During that time I went on five or six jaunts to various colleges around the state talking about the second boxing match between Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, and the German Heavyweight Champion, Max Schmeling.   Of course I did most of my traveling in February, Black History Month.  I remember the biggest paycheck I got for this activity was around $800 (paid by the Humanities Association) for a trip to Rogue Community College where I wound up giving a formal speech to a very small audience (fewer than 10 people, as I remember).

I was not a very good speaker in those days.  I read too much and didn't make enough eye contact.  But it was a good experience and helpful in my development as a teacher of public speaking because I learned a lot more about what not to do.  At the time I also had a very poor copy of film images of Louis on videotape.  The vast storage house I'm typing onto would make a presentation given today so much more lively!

 My presentation was based on the largest chapter in my doctoral dissertation, the one that focused on "The Fight of the Century."    It's not my intention here to review the history of the fight.  If you want to know more about it, follow the links.   I just wanted to say a little bit here about the chapter, the challenges of writing it, and the good it did me.

As I mentioned, a major part of the good was that I was able to turn the chapter into a public presentation which, though usually ill attended, brought in some extra money and built my own public speaking skills.  (Didn't hurt my Report of Service, either!)

Though the speech was a relatively simple historical presentation, the chapter on which it was based was a very difficult one to write.  It finally wound up coming in at 80 out of a dissertation total of 388 pages -- indeed a heavyweight chunk of a chapter.   It was one of the three chapters I wrote that focused on "social dramas" or public events that engaged the focus both the national and the African-American press.  For each of these events (the Fight, the Detroit Riots of '43, and the Texas Primary Decision of '46) I reviewed stories written for both white and black audiences and compared them, focusing most closely on the voice of Life magazine.  I called these the "horizontal" or "longitudinal" analyses.  The "vertical" or "latitudinal" analysis was the chronological page by page coding of every African or African-American face in every issue Life magazine printed between 1938 and 1946.  I wound up looking at over 40 thousand pages and coding every image in a variety of ways. 

Oh, yes, if I had to do it all again I would have chosen some single photographer who wasn't very well known and focused in on his or her images.  But I didn't, Blanche.

But back to the Joe Louis chapter.  Not only did I have the history itself and my analysis of a few dozen articles to review.  I also gave myself a thorough grounding in the ideological analysis of sports and read everything I could find on the meaning of boxing.  I had stacks of quotes from Joyce Carol Oates!  I had so much stuff and I couldn't figure out how it all went together.   For three hours one morning I kept trying to figure out what the weather had been like on the day of the match!  I wanted to start with that.  Or perhaps I was avoiding actually trying to write anything substantial because I was just stuck.

Then I was saved by a dream.  One night, after a few days of struggling with the material, I dreamt that I saw myself sitting down and writing an outline for the chapter.  In the dream I looked over my own shoulder and realized, "Hey, that will work!"  When I woke up in the morning, I immediately sat down and recreated the structure I'd "seen" in my sleep.  After gift from my unconscious, it just took me a few weeks actual conscious labor to write the chapter out.

Thinking back to that experience is a good reminder to me that a Muse (in this case Clio, the muse of History) is always waiting in the wings of the unconscious for that particularly desperate moment when her help will be most appreciated.