Books: "Yet Here I Am" By Jonathan Capehart

 

Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home

By Jonathan Capehart

Grand Central Publishing; hardcover, 272 pages; $30.00; available today, Tuesday, May 20th

Jonathan Capehart is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and a co-host of the morning edition of The Weekend on MSNBC. Capehart is an Associate Editor at the Washington Post, where he also writes an opinion column, and he is an analyst for The PBS News Hour. His career began here in New York with the Daily News, where he was the deputy editorial page editor from 2002-04, and served on the editorial board from 1993-2000. He earned the board a Pulitzer for his editorial campaign in 1999 to save the Apollo Theater.

Yet Here I Am: Lessons from a Black Man's Search for Home is Capehart's new memoir, in which he tells his life story centered around his quest to embrace his identity, pick battles, seize the opportunity, and find his voice.

Capehart's tale begins with the fact that he only knew his father from a photograph, and could not glean much information about him from his mother, who made it clear she did not want to talk about him. He spent his childhood being shuttled back and forth from New Jersey to rural Severn, North Carolina, where he spent summer vacations with his maternal grandparents.

North Carolina was where he also got to learn a lot from his father's father, Granddaddy Willie, and younger brother, Uncle Johnnie, who made sure to remain a part of his life after his father passed away. While there was always a Christmas card or a phone call, what mattered most was when they took Jonathan to visit the Capehart side of the family in Colerain, North Carolina.

"On sweltering front porches, inside fan-humming living rooms, and in the Gospel-rocking church where my father is buried, I was granted audiences with strangers who marveled at how much I'd grown, how much I looked like my father, how much I looked like my mother (if they'd met her), and how 'book smart' I sounded as I answered their questions about school, like 'Up North,' and what I wanted to be when I grew up.

"This was the 1970s, and Granddaddy Willie, who worked in the shipyards in Newport News, Virginia, and Uncle Johnnie, who was in law enforcement, were definitely men of that time, when gentlemen dressed up for such visits and topped off their suits with hats they removed before stepping onto a porch or entering a home. Form them, I learned the theater of the social visit, the words employed upon arrival, and the language that signaled our farewell."

Capehart, while contemplating the complexities of race identity as they shifted around him, had to bridge two worlds, while constantly being told he was too smart or not smart enough, or too Black or not enough, making it hard for him to find his place.

After he and his mother left Newark by the time he was ten years old, they spent two years in North Plainfield, which was not much of an upgrade over Newark, before moving into a new residential development in Hazlet, New Jersey. 

This was where Capehart experienced his favorite childhood memories, and it was where his mother finally had what she wanted, a living room that was purely meant for company. This also would be where he would see clearly what his future could be.

"Mine was a childhood filled with more television viewing than was recommended," Capehart writes. "I consumed countless hours of local news, national news, and those one-minute network news breaks that hit just before the top of the hour. The locations of stories taking place all over the world would send my eyes to the maps that covered my walls. They ranged from National Geographic glossy to the simple paper design sent by foreign embassies upon my request, first for a book report and then to feed my newfound obsession with geography. I wanted to see where the action was happening."

It was at Carleton College when Capehart was able to embrace his identity as a gay Black man surrounded by a community of like-minded people. His journey continued when he came out to his family, at the risk of rejection, and ultimately, when he moved to New York City, where he stumbled and picked himself up.

Capehart's first big break came when he landed an internship at NBC's Today show, which was his first step on the goal of being on television news, and blazing a path to be the pioneer we see today.