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Chapter 1: What stories about revisiting the past are shared in this episode?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm your host, Jennifer Hickson. In this hour, stories about putting fresh eyes on the past, returning to the scene, and finding new details you may have missed the first time around. Whether you see your past through rose-colored glasses or one of those magnifying mirrors that highlights every blemish, whisker, and scar, the passage of time always sheds new light.
Our first story is by Ivan McClellan. He told this in Jackson Hall, Wyoming, where we partner with Center for the Arts. Here's Ivan.
I was born and raised in Kansas City, Kansas. Go Chiefs. The neighborhood that I grew up in had many sides. It was urban and country at the same time. It was beautiful, and sometimes it could be terrifying.
My sister and I would run around in a five acre field behind our house all summer long and we would play and we would eat blackberries until our fingers were sticky and then we'd run home through the thistle, pick thorns out of our socks on the front porch.
And then at twilight, the lightning bugs would come out and we'd scoop them up in mason jars, throw some leaves in there, screw the lid on tight, poke holes in the top so they could breathe. At night, some nights, gunshots would ring out on the block. and my sister and I would lay on the floor and look up as the police helicopters lit up the street looking for suspects.
There were a lot of gangs in the neighborhood, and they would walk around with pit bulls, and whenever they ran across a rival gang member, they would fight their dogs. I wasn't in a gang. I was a nerd and a church kid, but when I ran across this one guy, he would stick his dog on me, and I would go running, and all the backs of my pants got eaten up, and I got really fast.
My mom worked two or three jobs to keep us fed, and we were latchkey kids. And we determined it was unsafe to go outside, so we quit going out in that field and playing. As I got closer to the end of high school, my prospects were kind of slim. I could go be a delivery truck driver, I could be a pastor at my uncle's church, or I could go work at the assembly line at the Ford plant.
I didn't really want to do any of those things. I wanted to be a photographer. And so I decided I was going to figure out a way out of Kansas. I never felt like I fit in there, and I knew somewhere there was a community where I belonged. So I saved up $500 that summer, and I just upped and moved to New York City. And that money was gone in a week. And I just like worked any job that I could get.
I didn't know anybody. So I like handed out flyers. I blew up balloons. I played guitar in the park. Anything I could do for money. Until some way, through a bunch of luck, I got a job as a photographer and a junior designer at an ad agency.
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Chapter 2: How does Ivan McClellan discover the Black Rodeo?
I didn't know anything that anybody was talking about. They would say ROI, SEO, KPIs, and I would just nod my head and Google what they had said. And I did that long enough that I actually started to get pretty good at my job, and I got promoted. I went from junior designer to designer, and I went from designer to senior designer, and from senior designer to art director.
Every time that I got promoted, I saw fewer and fewer black people around. until I got a job as a creative director, I moved to Portland, Oregon, and I hardly ever saw black people at all. I was in this sea of white men at work, and I was never a culture fit. I understood their culture, but they had no clue who Luther Vandross was.
Or they had never stayed up till 2 AM watching Showtime at the Apollo. They had no idea why I might be afraid of dogs. This led to a case of imposter syndrome. I felt like I didn't belong in the rooms that I was in, that I was going to be found out, thrown out in the street, forced to move back to Kansas. One day I was at a party.
I didn't know anybody there except for the person whose birthday it was. And so I was just drinking by myself and sulking in the corner. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around and there's a tall black man with a salt and pepper afro. And he introduces himself. He says his name is Charles Perry. Says he's a filmmaker. I say, oh, I'm a photographer. What are you working on?
He said, I'm working on a movie about black cowboys. I said, what, like a Western? He said, no, like a documentary. I kind of laughed. I was like, oh, there's not enough black cowboys to make a whole documentary. Like, I knew a thing or two about cowboys. Like, I grew up watching Bonanza and Gunsmoke and Lonesome Dove reruns.
Like, my school choir used to sing the national anthem at the American Royal Rodeo in Kansas. I viewed the cowboy to be the archetype of American independence and grit. But black cowboys, the only black cowboys I knew were Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles and Cowboy Curtis on Pee Wee's Playhouse. So we kept talking and he said, well, you got to see it for yourself, man.
Come with me to a black rodeo in Oklahoma this summer. I said, absolutely. It was exactly the opportunity that I had been looking for. I had never felt more separated from black culture. And going to a rodeo seemed like the furthest thing from working at a computer that I could think of.
And so I went home, and I bought my plane ticket, and I just sat there for the next few months anticipating what this could possibly be like. In my head, it was like Soul Train, but everybody was on a horse. So August came around, and I caught my flight to Oklahoma City. I drove an hour and a half to Okmulgee, parked my car, got out, and got just suffocated by 105 degree heat. It was 105 degrees.
It was 100% humidity. As I was walking through the grass, chiggers were biting my ankles, and there were grasshoppers jumping up on my clothes. There was just a haze of barbecue smoke over the entire lawn. I couldn't breathe. And everywhere I looked, there was a white horse trailer glistening in the sun. And there was R&B music and gospel music and hip hop coming out of the trailers.
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