The Haygoods of Columbus: A Love Story

I grew up in a small town not far from Columbus, Ohio about the time Wil Haygood was growing up in the big city. The rural high school I attended was a consolidated school, meaning it served farming families who were geographically dispersed and too scattered to justify their own school. Still, even though my graduating class was large because of the demographics, we only had three African American students in the entire school. And yet just a few miles away Wil Haygood was living in an entirely different world, one that he recalls with clarity and grace in this fine book. I'm glad this book found me and that Wil Haygood was willing to share his story of a young man finding his way through the world.

A wonderful story about the love one young man has for his family

I picked up this book because of a jacket blurb by Reynolds Price, who calls it "a grave and beautiful surprise." Price is right. There are no spectacular events in Wil Haygood's story of growing up as a black kid in love with basketball in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1950s and 1960s, but his accumulation of little ones -- living with his dependable grandparents Willie and Emily, going to movies, throwing rocks at a house once lived in by James Thurber (and that Haygood himself would later live in), moving out with his mother and sisters, meeting his half-brother Macaroni (whose end, after a career as pimp and petty thief, will surprise you), transferring from school to school to play basketball, being the first in his family to finish college, trying to make it in New York as an actor. For Haygood himself, this is a success story; he ends as an author. For his family, the success is less obvious, but it is there: they left Alabama in the 1930s and 1940s, got jobs in Ohio, invited brothers and sisters and cousins to live with them while they got on their feet. Not everyone makes it -- there are deaths and jail sentences -- but this is a cheerful book, a hymn to families and grandmothers and sisters who encourage, help, or send money. Best of all, Haygood is a fine writer, able to portray his scatterbrained mother sympathetically and to convey his gratitude to the people who helped him along the way (one is the father of singer Nancy Wilson).