Charles Johnson - Grand: A Grandparents Wisdom for a Happy Life

National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Charles Johnson shares life lessons for the next generation in this accessible distillation of wisdom, stories and philosophy on being a grandparent

An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has held numerous impressive titles over the course of his incomparable career. Now, for the first time, with his trademark wisdom and philosophical generosity, he turns his attention to his most important role yet: grandparent.

In Grand, Johnson shares stories from his life with his six-year-old grandson, Emery, weaving in advice and life lessons that stand the test of time. Looking at the problems I see in the world around me, Johnson writes, I realize that there are so many things I want to say to him about the goodness and beauty that life offers. What are the perennial truths that I can impart to Emery that might make his journey through life easier or more rewarding? Johnson shares these truths and more, offering profound meditations on family, race, freedom and creativity.

Joyful, lucid and deeply comforting, Grand is Johnson at his most accessible and profound, an indispensable compendium for new grandparents and growing grandchildren alike, from one of Americas most revered thinkers.

Praise for Charles Johnson

One feels honored to be in the presence of Johnsons witty philosophical mind, and, not incidentally, stunned by the graceful virtuosity of his sentences.

The New York Times Book Review

Those of us who put pen to paper for a living have known of Charles Johnson for a very long time. He is one of Americas greatest literary treasures. He is a skilled wordsmith, superb craftsman, master of understatement, philosopher, cartoonist, and deeply talented novelist whose 1991 novel Middle Passage (which won the National Book Award for fiction) predates the current surfeit of Underground Railroad novels by a good two decades. Like the great Ralph Ellison to whom he is often compared, he will forever cast a long shadow over us who follow in his wake.

James McBride

Charles Johnsons deep intelligence, joyful rigor and refreshing iconoclasm are evident in every subject he covers.

Dana Spiotta

Johnsons writing, filled with the sort of long, layered sentences you can get happily lost in, conveys a kindness; a sense that all of us...have our own stories.

Seattle Times

Also by CHARLES JOHNSON

FICTION

Night Hawks: Stories

Dr. Kings Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories

Soulcatcher and Other Stories

Dreamer

Middle Passage

The Sorcerers Apprentice

Oxherding Tale

Faith and the Good Thing

NONFICTION

The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

The Words and Wisdom of Charles Johnson

Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice

Passing the Three Gates: Interviews with Charles Johnson (edited by Jim McWilliams)

Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing

King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. (with Bob Adelman)

I Call Myself an Artist: Writings by and about Charles Johnson (edited by Rudolph P. Byrd)

Africans in America: Americas Journey through Slavery (with Patricia Smith)

Black Men Speaking (with John McCluskey Jr.)

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction: Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing (with Michael Boylan)

Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970

DRAWINGS

Half-Past Nation Time

Black Humor

CHILDRENS FICTION

The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder: The Hard Problem (with Elisheba Johnson)

The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder: Bending Time (with Elisheba Johnson)

The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder: The Tomorrow No One Wanted (with Elisheba Johnson)

Charles Johnson

GRAND

A Grandparents Wisdom
for a Happy Life

A Work from the Johnson Construction Co.

Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, screenwriter and professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. A MacArthur Fellow, his fiction includes Night Hawks, Dr. Kings Refrigerator, Dreamer, Faith and the Good Thing and Middle Passage, for which he won the National Book Award. In 2002 he received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.

For my grandson, Emery Charles Spearman.

Contents

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Proverbs 29:18

O nce upon a time the cluttered study where Ive written books of all kinds for twenty-six years, and drawn all manner of cartoons and illustrations, was all my own. When I remodeled our house in 1992, the room was designed by two architects to be my office, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for literature and philosophy, a drawing table with a glass top, and an L-shaped counter on which to place my PC, office equipment, little Buddhist statues and a Tibetan prayer wheel, figurines of famous writers and thinkers (Twain, Poe, Martin Luther King Jr., Bodhidharma), and grown-up toys to delight an old sci-fi and comic book fanboy like methe spaceship from When Worlds Collide and a miniature Stargate. This was my workspace, a room that externalized my own mind and creative spirit. Just sitting there in the comfortable leather chair at my scarred and worn schoolhouse desk, or on my meditation cushion (zafu) was all I needed each day to be inspired.

But eight years ago, my grandson Emery was born. And apparently this room inspires him, too, because he now calls it his office.

I watch in wonder as he, a beautiful and brilliant boy who feels at home in a room of books and artistic tools, takes over my workspace for his projects. He raids my ream of paper on a bookshelf for his own drawings and books. He creates origami objectshouses, airplanes, pouchesbecause his imagination seems inexhaustible. An only child, as I was, he listens intensely to the ways adults talk, and tries out our grown-up language just to see how it rolls off his tongue. But he knows more than English since hes in his second year at the French American School of Puget Sound and speaks French better than I ever will. (The ninth-century king Charlemagne would love this schools curriculum, having once concluded that to know another language is to have a second soul.) There, at that school, his weekly schedule is heavy on classes for science and coding, a skill that when he grows up will be as necessary as typing was for my generation. Added to which, hes been able to read since he was in preschool, so Im forever asking him not to read over my shoulder as I type personal emails to friends. I know his grandmother deserves the credit for his early reading ability because she was once an elementary school teacher and taught him as well as our son and daughter to read. And his mother, Elisheba, a conceptual artist and poet, should be credited for stimulating his imagination by reading him a story every night since the day he was born. Furthermore, he knows that the main character in the middle grade series of books I coauthor with his mother, The Adventures of Emery Jones, Boy Science Wonder