Two summers ago in North Carolina, I met up with my friend Dave Zucchino, the eminent journalist. Over lunch I asked him what he was working on – the rote question people like us ask each other. His answer was anything but rote. He was busy digging into something horrible that had happened in the city of Wilmington, on the state’s east coast, way back in 1898, and it was blowing his mind. He’d known virtually nothing about it.
And that was from a guy who’d grown up and gone to school in North Carolina, where the historic reality of a white supremacist coup – overthrowing a successful biracial government, killing untold numbers of Black people, violently installing a Jim Crow regime – had been virtually whitewashed from public consciousness. Needless to say, everything he told me was news to me.
I mention this because Zucchino has now won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2020 tome on the coup, Wilmington’s Lie. It’s my hope that the award will accelerate book sales – not only because what happened in North Carolina deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with Tulsa, but because that sickening assault on human rights is captured in a you-are-there narrative that’s rich in sensory immediacy.
This is his opening paragraph:
“The killers came by streetcar. Their boots struck the packed clay earth like muffled drumbeats as they bounded from the cars and began to patrol the wide dirt roads. The men scanned the sidewalks and alleyways for targets. They wore red calico shorts or short red jackets over white butterfly collars. They were workingmen, with calloused hands and sunburned faces beneath their wide-brimmed hats. Many of them tucked their trousers into their boot tops and tied cartridge belts around their waists. A few wore neckties. Each one carried a gun.”
Subject matter aside, I had to smile when I first read that opener. It was classic Philadelphia Inquirer, the paper where Zucchino and I first met. I don’t presume to suggest that the Inquirer taught him everything he knows about narrative writing; I’ll simply note that the ’80s-era Inquirer trained us all how to transport the reader inside a scene, how to write with all of one’s senses, how to tease a reader into wanting more. If the “lede” in Wilmington’s Lie doesn’t hook you on learning about that racist insurrection, you’re either willfully oblivious or a Trump fan.
If you want to hear Zucchino in his own words, click here for the event I hosted with him early last year at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House. He makes history come alive, not simply because he’s a gifted story-teller, but because – to quote William Faulkner – the past is not dead, it’s not even past. What happened in Wilmington resonates with us today, and forewarns us about a future we must all work to avoid.