The Official Rodes Fishburne Hub

I wrote this story for my friend Hope Strong, the former editor-in-chief of the Teton Valley News in Driggs, Idaho. He asked me for a letter from the big city.

A letter from San Francisco

The other day in San Francisco, on the Fulton 5 municipal bus line, a young black man got on board and hip-rolled his way down the aisle. He was wearing what a lot of adolescents wear these days: pants so big and billowy they could have been hiding a VW beetle inside each leg and a sports jersey underneath a pullover. He had a blue LA Lakers hat on his head, the bill of which was turned sideways in the style that is the style, know what I’m sayin’?

This young paragon of street-smart sartorial splendor sat down opposite me and I was glad he did, because I learned something.

Seated, across the aisle from him, was a young Latina woman who was studiously reading. I had noticed her when she got onboard because she was holding a single hardback book that was so thick she carried it with both hands. There are a lot of law students on this route and I imagined the thick tome to be devoted to the inner machinations of constitutional law or the bioethics of germline engineering, or some other weighty topic. The ferociousness with which she read the book only furthered my assumptions. She was clearly studying for the bar exam.

The young black man however did not make the same assumptions. After he had checked messages on his cell phone, stroked his immaculately tailored peach fuzz mustache with his index finger and thumb, and scanned the scene, his eyes fixed on the young Latina woman and the book she was reading.

I ride the bus once per day, sometimes more, and I can say without hesitation that very rarely do people who don’t know one another speak to each other, unless it’s to say, “Step down please,” or “next stop driver” or “you’re standing on my foot.”

Yet he did speak to her, and it was a simple, self-consciousless tone of one comrade to another.

They didn’t need an introduction. She was holding the introduction.

Young Black Man: “Is that it?”

Young Latina: (looks up. Smiles) “Yep.”

Young Black Man: “When’d you get it?”

Young Latina: “My brother got it Saturday night. He and my mom went to the bookstore and waited in line at midnight. It was crazy.”

Young Black Man: “For real . . .”

The book was, of course, the latest installment by Mrs. J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

The Young Latina woman said that she was already on “page three hundred and something.”

She’d had the book for a little over a day and a half.

They went on to chat as happily as two Seabees at a Naval reunion. They had been places together, not
physically, but imaginatively. And it transcended age, race, gender, ethnicity, even coolness (the books are labeled
as being for ages 9-12).

Yes, the young black man agreed, Book Three had been better, deeper, with a more intricate plot and more character revelations. They’d both read the first four books and he was going to read the fifth one soon.

Just to put that into perspective, once both of these two readers have read all five of Mrs. Rowling’s books they will
have consumed a sum total of 2,689 pages.

Zounds! As old Bill Shakespeare would have said.

By way of comparision, you could read, “Catcher in the Rye,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Moby Dick,” “Finnegan’s
Wake” and still have enough spare pages of pulp left over to squeeze in America’s favorite freckled face, Huckleberry Finn
without touching 2,689 pages. That, my friends, is quite a feat of magic. And Mrs. Rowling is not even finished writing her
series yet—she’s stated that the entire series will be seven volumes. If the last two books are anywhere the same length as
Book five, she may very well have teased children into a kind of Proustian bargin.

“Rememberance ofThmgs Past” which is considered by beret wearing New Yorkers with a taste for Gauloise
cigarettes and Hermes scarves to be one of the best long story’s ever written is over 3,000 pages. A figure that Harry
and the Hogwarts are within a wand’s distance of equaling.

But wait a second! How can this be? How many times have parents, teachers, Hollywood movie moguls, and just about every other armchair anthropologist insisted that the Internet, Instant messages, comic books, video games and all the other contagion of our culture has conspired to shorten the attention spans of children.

Children, poor things, can no longer concentrate, we are told; they no longer appreciate the value of a long story;

They all have ADD. It’s MTV’s fault!

Batten down the hatches! Double the Ritalin!

The argument, taken to its logical conclusion, states that the material hasn’t let down the children, the children have let down the material. But then came along Harry. And Mr. Potter’s tale turned all these arguments on their heads. Children, regardless of race, age, or background seems to know, intuitively, chat when a story, be it a book, play, or movie, is artful, imaginative, and shot
full of inventive characters and situations, they will give it the time it needs.

All the time it needs.

As the Fulton Five shuddered to another stop, neither I, nor the two Potter-philes, knew that just a few weeks ago, Monday. June 24th, the United States Census bureau had announced that Latinos had surpassed blacks as the largest minority in the United States.

But that fact is of no importance to Ms. Rowling, nor anyone else interested in telling stories. Because a well-told story will interest many readers. It will not discriminate among race, gender, sex or even . . . coolness.

Rodes Fishburne is a writer living in San Francisco.

Tags: Teton Valley News

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