The Search, page 16
“The day I came back, I sent an email to the entire staff. That softened the shock, I think. I had a couple of people hug me and wish me luck. I have this employee who’s slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, and, of course, he turned out to be amongst the most supportive. One woman complained to HR about the bathroom issue. I’m tall, and she worried that if I wore heels, I could look over the dividers. Our head of HR informed her of my rights under New York law, and she’s been welcoming ever since.”
But Wynne’s real worry was clients.
“I was most nervous about a well-known company on the Eastern Seaboard. The CEO is on TV all the time. He’s a tough, cantankerous man in his seventies. I wrote him a very personal email; he usually answers pretty fast, but it couldn’t have been two minutes later when an email arrived. This changes nothing. Our relationship can only grow stronger. The next day, I’m sitting in my office, when my admin comes in with this box. It’s from the same guy. A bottle of Dom Pérignon.”
What did Wynne discover about herself through this experience?
“I learned that I want to be the kind of person who lives authentically.”
Of all the answers to Who is your who?, learning to be your own who may be the most fulfilling of all.
Chapter 7
What Is Your What?
I Want to Do Work That ____________
In January 1956, a senior at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania submitted a thesis in a seminar on real estate. The seventy-five-page paper wasn’t due until the last day of class, but the student submitted it on the first day of class. “The professor told me that many students over the years had told him that they would do this, but no one ever had,” the student later wrote.
The name of the paper was “Construction of a Low-Cost, Semi-Finished House.” The preface begins with the following statement:
I have chosen this semi-finished house as a topic for my research, because I feel that we have “grown-up” together. As both a summer employee of the Home Loan Company and a year-round spectator of its operations, I have followed the development of this building process throughout my adolescent years. Also, I expect to become an officer of the company upon my graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, so I wanted to acquire greater insight into its functions by making this study.
The author of that paper was Edwin J. Feiler Jr. Eight years later he became my father.
Between those two dates, my dad graduated from college; served two years in the navy; married Jane Abeshouse, an artist and art educator from Baltimore; moved back to Savannah; and went to work alongside his father in the aforementioned Home Loan Company. Over the next sixty years, my father and his father built more than a thousand affordable homes for families that my father identified in his research had been underserved in the building boom of the postwar South.
During his long, sometimes painfully up-and-down work life, my father also constructed multifamily housing, renovated historic homes, and built an assisted living facility. He also nearly went bankrupt, testified before Congress, and lobbied for other homebuilders. Baffled by this mishmash as a child—Why can’t you have one job, like my friends’ dads?—I once asked my dad what he did.
“Shelter,” he said.
Fifty years later, I can still remember the shock of that answer. The beauty of that answer.
Shelter.
One of humanity’s most basic aspirations. One of life’s most basic needs.
Today, I think of my father’s response as probably the best answer I’ve ever heard to the second of the Kipling questions about work: What is your what?
The essence of building a narrative work identity is telling a story about what you do. As we saw in the last chapter, that story has a broad cast of characters; as we’ll see in the next two chapters, it also has a specific time and a specific setting. The heart of that story, though, is the plot. It’s the actions you take, the things you create, the services you perform.
The what.
As we know by now, that what will surely not be a single what. It will be an ever-changing mélange of whats. But whatever those whats are at any given moment, they’re a collective response to an underlying need that you’ve been nursing for years. The purpose of asking What is your what? is to identify both the deep-seated longings that drive your choices and the immediate needs that will guide your next steps. Only when you pinpoint those unspoken motivations will you achieve the meaning you’re looking for.
Beverly Jenkins was the oldest of seven children born into a tight-knit family on Detroit’s east side. Her father was a custodian who earned a teaching degree, then taught in the schools he used to clean; her mother was a full-time mom and even more full-time reader. “Libraries were segregated in Detroit, so she could use the books in the building but not take them home. She read to me in the womb in that library.”
Beverly’s role models were teachers. “My mom once asked my elementary teacher if it was OK that I was devouring the newspaper. ‘Beverly’s going to college. Let her read what she wants!’ ”
The teacher was right, as Beverly went on to enroll at Michigan State. But what the teacher may not have foreseen is that once Beverly got there, she quickly rebelled. “I partied. I protested. I smoked pot. It was the Summer of Love; I was a Negro hippie. It was, Free your mind and your ass will follow. I was raised so strict; I broke my parents’ heart.”
In Beverly’s junior year, a friend told her about an opening at the campus library. “All I ever wanted was to work in a library, so I blew off my exams and started working full time.” She spent the next thirty years as a librarian—first at the university, later at Parke-Davis, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical conglomerate Pfizer. She married a union organizer and had a daughter. “I was content. I was making a good wage. I was driving a sports car.”
But Beverly was also nurturing a hope job that she had learned from all those books.
“When I was working at Michigan State, the library had a full set of The Journal of Negro History, which was founded in 1916 by Carter Woodson, the man who invented Negro History Week, the forerunner of Black History Month. On my lunch hour, I would take armfuls of those journals down to the Red Cedar River that runs through campus and read them. My boss even let me bring home all the historical novels before I cataloged them. ‘As long as you don’t spill Coca-Cola all over ’em,’ he said.”
Inspired by all those stories, Beverly began to write. “Toni Morrison said if there’s a book you want to read and it isn’t in the marketplace, write it yourself. So that’s what I did.”
For her subject, Beverly chose the secret love life of a buffalo soldier.
Buffalo soldiers, Beverly explained, were members of two Black cavalry regiments in the United States Army who roamed the West in the decades after the Civil War. Their main opponents were Native Americans, who gave them their nickname because their dark, curly hair resembled a buffalo’s fur. The regiments were required by law to be led by white officers and were saddled with aging horses, broken-down equipment, and inadequate supplies.
“Those Colored soldiers had saved the Union during the war. The government wanted to thank them, so they let them wreak havoc from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande. They had the lowest level of drunkenness, but the highest level of badass.”
Beverly spent more than a decade writing her manuscript. When she finished, it was “seven hundred pages of heat. You opened the covers and steam came out.”
And not a single person knew what to do with it. Not the editors Beverly solicited, the agents she contacted, the writers she shared her manuscript with. “The market was totally closed to African American novelists. I didn’t know this at the time, but of the fiction published since 1950, only 5 percent were by writers of color. Publishers don’t think we read.”
Then Beverly found her who.
Vivian Stephens was a fact-checker at Time Life when she picked up a Harlequin romance in 1978. Raised in sheltered Houston, she was mesmerized. After being hired by Dell Publishing to start a romance line when no one else wanted the job, Vivian went on to revolutionize the romance industry, dispensing with dusty English handmaidens, insisting writers drop in details from The Joy of Sex, and bringing in Latina, Asian American, and Native American writers. In 1984, Stephens published the genre’s first Black author, Elsie Washington, whose book Entwined Destinies depicts a Black journalist falling in love with a Black oilman.
When Beverly tracked her down a decade later, Stephens was working as an agent. “I sent her this raggedy manuscript. Probably had Coca-Cola all over it! There were no slaves. No white savior. The Blacks saved themselves.”
And Stephens managed to sell it . . . for $2,500, minus the commission, plus a rewrite. “I got the call on my husband’s birthday.” Forty years after devouring those newspapers as a girl, twenty years after inhaling those Journals of Negro History in her lunch hour, Beverly became a published author. Avon released Night Song in 1994, with a shirtless, mustachioed Sergeant Chase Jefferson on the cover, holding a breathless, tight-bodiced, “strong-willed ebony beauty,” Kansas schoolteacher Cara Lee Henson, in his arms.
Critics loved it. People ran a five-page spread. The Smithsonian declared it the first Black historical romance ever published. And readers gobbled it up. “Black women had been waiting for this forever,” Beverly said. “A woman wrote me, ‘I picked up the cover and said, Oh, my God, it’s two Black people! Then I looked at the back and saw it was written by a Black woman! I sat down in the bookstore right there and started reading.’ ”
In the next twenty-five years, Beverly would go on to write forty more books, including contemporary romance, small-town fiction, and young adult. She won the lifetime achievement award of the Romance Writers of America, an organization that had been started by Vivian Stephens.
“When my mother would go to the segregated library when she was pregnant, she would read me classics from the Harlem Renaissance—Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston. When she first gave me cloth books and I would put them in my mouth, she’d say, ‘Eat those words, baby! Eat those words!’ Now I’m the one filling up those shelves with words.
“The best thing about my job,” she continued, “is passing on that love of books. It’s reading to kids in schools; it’s talking to young writers of color who hit me up on Twitter.”
So what is her what?
“It’s community. That’s the thread in my life. Always trying to make the path wider.”
What is your what? What is the animating idea that has undergirded your dreams for years? What is your shelter, your community, your ______________?
Here are three questions to help you find that answer.
Past: Who Were Your Role Models as a Child?
When Beverly shared with me the story of selling her first book, I shared with her one of my all-time favorite stories. It involves Pat Conroy, the larger-than-life novelist of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini. Pat was born in Atlanta to a sadistic father, a marine corps fighter pilot, and a romantic mother, who read him Gone with the Wind at bedtime and begged him to ignore the bruises they both received from her husband. Pat attended eleven schools in twelve years before finding stability—and basketball glory—in Beaufort, South Carolina, just across the Savannah River from where I grew up.
Encouraged by a high school English teacher to pursue his mother’s love of storytelling, Pat went on to self-publish a book of reminiscences about his tough-but-sentimental commanding officer at the Citadel. The indefatigable author then drove across the Southeast handselling copies to booksellers. Turned down by the Peace Corps, Pat went on to teach for a year at a two-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, just south of Charleston, where all the students spoke Gullah. He was fired for his unorthodox pedagogic techniques, a humiliation he turned into the caustic, delightful memoir, The Water Is Wide.
At the urging of friends, Pat didn’t self-publish that manuscript but sent it instead to the agent Julian Bach in New York. When Bach called with the news that Houghton Mifflin had offered $7,500 for the book, Pat replied, “Hell, I can get it printed cheaper in Beaufort.”
“Pat,” Bach replied, “do you understand? That’s what they’re going to pay you.”
I know this story because I grew up idolizing Pat Conroy. He lived where I lived, did what I dreamed of doing, and transformed the isolated corner of the world where we both grew up into a world of color and art. Most of all, he always led with his heart.
Pat was my role model.
In 1957, Robert Merton, the man known as Mr. Sociology, published a landmark study of medical students at Columbia University, in which he showed that younger doctors consciously emulated the older doctors around them, even if they didn’t actually know them. The younger doctors mimicked their elders’ habits, behaviors, and values. Merton was drawn to this subject because he had done something similar in his own life. Born to Russian immigrants, Meyer Schkolnick, as he was named, picked up magic by emulating his sister’s boyfriend. Told he needed a stage name, Meyer selected Merton from his hero Merlin and Robert from another hero, the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who also inspired the stage name of Harry Houdini.
The name stuck, and three decades later, Robert Merton paid homage to the influence of such magical figures by coining the term they still carry: role models.
Role models are among the most valuable building blocks of narrative career construction. The reason: choosing your model is your first choice about work. Mark Savickas told me that if you can ask only one question to someone who’s struggling with what to do, it should be, Who were your role models as a child? He adds these additional questions for clarity: Other than family, whom did you admire growing up? These role models can be people you knew, people you didn’t know, even fictional figures like superheroes or characters from your favorite books or movies.
Role models are deeply instructive because they’re not blueprints we inherit, they’re blueprints we choose. We take in characteristics from our parents; we take on characteristics from our role models. The first is passive; the second is active. And it’s in that act of election—specifically in articulating the traits or values we most admire in our choices—that we reveal what’s most important to us. Our role models’ lives become the road map for the roadblocks we struggle with.
While the question of what you learned from your parents is a who question, the question of what you learned from your role models is a what question because whom you admire is not important; it’s what you admire about them that’s important.
What is their what? becomes the first clue to What is your what?
I asked two questions about role models in my interviews. The first was, Who were your role models as a child? The second was, What qualities did you admire in them?
One observation that Merton makes about role models surprised me: many of the figures the young doctors mirrored weren’t just strangers, they were celebrities. That distance meant that the young doctors had only “partial” or “limited” knowledge of their role models’ lives. A similar dynamic was true with Pat Conroy and me; I didn’t meet him until I was well into my twenties, when I was already a published author. (That meeting and the ones that followed remain a highlight of my professional life.)
Merton’s insight remains true today. Half the role models my subjects mentioned were celebrities—Muhammad Ali, Madame Curie, Carol Burnett, Keith Haring. Thirty percent were professionals—pastors, pilots, politicians. The final 20 percent were teachers or coaches.
The values that people admired in their role models were similarly spread out, including authenticity, creativity, and dignity. The top three categories were character, representation—as in representing a certain group that the mentee belonged to—and charisma.
Among those who said character was Annabelle Manalo, a onetime college basketball star in New Orleans, who left her husband, a Tennessee Titan, because she didn’t want her daughter to believe she was “only an NFL wife,” earned a PhD at Vanderbilt University in cell and developmental biology and became an expert in genetics. Annabelle’s role model was Michael Jordan. “Not because he was always the best, but because he wasn’t always the best. He didn’t have the red carpet laid out for him. What he had was a great work ethic; he demanded to be taken seriously and encouraged me to do the same.”
Ken Tang, a refugee from Vietnam who grew up in Arizona, found inspiration in the writings of John Wooden, the coach who led UCLA to ten national championships in men’s basketball. “I admired the way he mentored people, which inspired me to become a second-grade teacher.” When Wooden was ninety-two, Tang waited in line for his autograph at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “When I told him what he meant to me, he got up, walked around the table, and gave me a piece of advice, ‘Your students are going to know how to read, write, and do arithmetic. Your job is to make sure they grow up to be contributing members of society.’ That advice changed my whole philosophy from being a drill-and-kill teacher to focusing more on how I made these children feel.”
Among those who said representation, Sonali Dev, the novelist, said her role model was Jane Austen. “Every book I read had no female agency. Jane Austen was the first author wherein the heroines had self-worth. The women wanted to be happy and didn’t depend on the men for happiness.”
Courtland Savage grew up in a “down-South, Bible-Belt type of Black family” in Mount Holly, North Carolina. He dreamed of becoming a pilot but had no idea if that was remotely possible. “I literally went to Google and searched Black pilots. I would just print the pages of random air force pilots and tape their pictures on my wall.” Courtland became a fighter pilot in the navy and later started a nonprofit called Fly for the Culture, which supports young people of color in the aviation industry.
