Dawson, George, and
Richard Glaubman. Life is So Good.
New York:
Penguin,
2000.
George Dawson was in his nineties when he learned to
read. He was a centenarian when he and coauthor Richard Glaubman wrote his
biography, Life is So Good. I think Dawson’s life was good, and not just because it has been so long.
Even a good life is sometimes hard. Most of Dawson’s life was hard.
Black and poor were not auspicious beginnings for a boy in
Texas at the beginning of the 20th Century. In the opening chapter, Dawson tells of how, as a boy, he witnessed the lynching of a young black man falsely accused of raping a young white woman. Dawson was ready to become bitter and withdraw from all contact with white people, but his father would not allow him to even consider it.
Dawson presents his parents and wise and pragmatic, making things better for themselves bit by bit. He picks it up and does the same thing in his own life, especially once he settled down to start his own family.
He had some wandering to do first. His early life of travel and adventure makes for interesting reading. He road trains all over
North America, sometimes as a ticketholder and sometimes joining the
hobos. He was able to find work wherever he went, mainly because there was no job so hard or unpleasant he was unwilling to try it.
Traveling opened his eyes, especially to
race relations in the
U.S. Growing up in the
South, he thought the
discrimination and
oppression he was accustomed to be the way things were. In
Mexico and
Canada, even in parts of the U.S., he was treated like anyone else, regardless of color. Mexican villagers welcomed him like family and delighted in the novelty of someone so tall. Canadian lumbermen were curious about his home and happily directed him to the snow he had never seen before—it almost killed him. In his early days, he found it strange to be in places where no one cared which train car he was in or the restaurant at which he ate.
Things changed a lot in Dawson’s more than 100 years of life, though
racism hasn’t disappeared. (I grew up in a town that was 99 percent white and I’m barely 40 years old. In the same county were villages that were almost entirely black.) Even in the face of difficulties, Dawson persisted and bit by bit made life better for himself and his
family. When retirement came it wasn’t time to rest from his
labors, it was time to pick up the education he had been denied as a boy because he had to
work.
Dawson’s life story is worth reading simply because he is a witness to
history who tells his story in an interesting and accessible manner. It’s worth reading because, without trying, it has a message too: don’t worry. Dawson recommends that people not worry if they want a good life. I think it’s very good advice. Arguably, though, he was working too hard most of his life to have time for worries, even though he had cause for them.
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