The whole way, favoring winds

It was one of those oppressively humid New York City evenings in late summer when sodium-orange street lamp glow reflected on my sweaty skin. From our spot outside a building on 100th Street and Central Park West, sophomore reporter Lydia Wileden and I spotted Win Armstrong, the silver-haired, bespectacled, former tenant association president we were to meet.

Her slow and careful steps led us from the steamy street into Central Park. We sat down at a bench, and as we absorbed the cool darkness, she poured us Dixie cups of Chardonnay from a salad dressing bottle.

As we nursed our mini cups, Win and I caught up about the last six months. A source of mine while I was writing a story about her apartment complex for the Spectator, we kept in touch after my article was published, and we’d occasionally meet up. Over tea, we’d talk about papers I was writing, our travels, and her years of experience working on climate change issues, urban environmentalism, and politics.

This kind of deep interaction was not characteristic of my three and a half years as a writer for the Spectator, a place that, like many newspapers, gets caught up in the demands of nightly production even as it attempts to foster long-term relationships with sources.

But by peppering sources with questions on rushed phone calls, at rallies, on the street, or in the corner of the auditorium after community meetings, being a reporter in this neighborhood and in this city, during an important four years of my life, I did learn how people cast their actions, identities, and affiliations within different histories.

There was Jimmy McMillan, the 2006 candidate for governor on the Rent is Too Damn High ticket (Google it, and turn your speakers way up). McMillan sponsored his own third party candidates’ debate at a club downtown when he, the Green Party, the Socialists, and the Libertarians were shut out from the Spitzer-Faso televised one. Three people came—five if you count the bartender and McMillan’s son. As part of our coverage, we asked all of the gubernatorial candidates to fill out a questionnaire. He answered our bonus question at the end—if you were a superhero which would you be and why. He responded as follows: “MYSELF, I am a Vietnam Veteran with 3 Bronze Stats [sic] who spent 2 1⁄2 years in combat. Myself.”

There were the people from around the block and around the world that snaked down the street from the Apollo Theater to catch a glimpse of James Brown’s almost plastic-looking corpse before his memorial service. Esther Holiday remembered seeing him at 18 years-old in 1956: “I wondered how he could move his feet so fast. He would just glide.”

I followed the state Senate campaigns of the earnest Columbia graduate, Jimmy Dahroug, who bartended at the West End to pay his way through the School of General Studies. He came quite close to beating a 30-year incumbent, and said he knocked on 4,000 doors across Long Island.

I poured over old photographs of Columbus Avenue with a man who organizes an annual reunion for people who lived on 98th and 99th Streets before urban renewal razed the entire neighborhood in the late 1950s. I met a woman who remembered playing on those streets.

I took the stories of people like these down in my notebook, and then tried to make sense of the scrawl back at the office. As a reporter, I was empowered to test the validity of people’s claims by juxtaposing their ideas with contrary ones—rubbing them together to spark a fire.

But making those decisions meant that representation was far from an objective practice. My perception of journalism was becoming influenced by too many anthropology classes: reporters cannot be distanced observers. They actively create the subjects they present. I had to tease out subtle differences in perspectives without slotting sources into stereotypical, oversimplified roles, but could not lose the pithiness, narrative tension, and characters that would prompt the average student to read—or at the very least, scan—my articles before flipping to the Sudoku page.

The weight of those responsibilities, coupled with the tangible ways that the Spectator was getting torn to shreds by student groups for failing to consider the politics of representation during some of the most tense years Columbia has seen in awhile, were enough to inspire in me a good deal of angst that was typical of many college sophomores I knew back then.

This year, the birds of identity politics have made smaller nests in my hair and made journalism less of an existential conflict. Still, I realized that while I enjoyed and respected the critical eye journalism afforded, I liked being a reporter because interviewing led to truly meaningful conversations and relationships. The pursuit of that kind of productive exchange intrigues me today, and so I will let the practice of journalism itself fade out of my life. It will return again some day.

Before I set off for my semester abroad, Win sent me a Chinese proverb in an e-mail. It puzzles me, but I think it can end my column in a way that this sentimental medium calls for. She said: “The whole way, favoring winds.”

The author a Columbia College senior majoring in urban studies and concentrating in anthropology. She is the former deputy city editor for the 131st Managing Board and news training/staff development editor for the 132nd Managing Board.

Tags: Opinion, Sara Vogel, columbia spectator, Senior Column