I knew I had to find some place to stretch by my wings and so I asked the editor of the Cleveland Advocate if I could have a job as a reporter so that I would have a leg up when I went to college. My high school did not have a journalism department, and I knew from the age of twelve or so that I wanted to be a writer. You went to work part-time at your hometown newspaper in Cleveland, Texas. In just this way, I became a writer.Īt sixteen you made a decision that maybe shaped the direction of the rest of your life. I took care to listen and absorb the stories of all kinds and I wrote them down. The other positive was that I learned as a small child how to listen to the stories of people in church. It made me aware of injustice at a visceral level. The argument was so heated that I literally feared for my father’s life. One particular night my father, a liberal, argued that not only should schools, bathrooms, and restaurants be integrated but that white churches should welcome black members as well. We rarely did things together as a family as we were always at church - in public and under scrutiny.Īt the time, East Texas was viciously segregated, and as a child in the 1960s I was a witness to countless angry conversations from the church leaders (all white, of course) about the end of segregation. Church definitely came first for my father. He led the music, organized Sunday School classes, ran Vacation Bible School, supervised Wednesday night prayer meetings and tent revivals, and helped direct the spiritual formation of teenaged boys and girls. My father was not a preacher but he was a full-time minister of music and religious education. The fact that it did not occur to my mother to trouble my father for help should come as no surprise to anyone who knows how Baptist churches work: Church comes first.

Mom quietly made her way out of the choir loft and drove herself to the Baptist Hospital in nearby Beaumont, where I was born. My mother was seated in the choir loft of the First Baptist Church in Sour Lake, Texas, an East Texas town of about 1,000 souls, when she felt the grip of birthing pains.

JAN JARBOE RUSSELL: I was born on a Sunday. How did being the “preacher’s kid” inform your early life? You grew up in the small towns of East Texas, and your father was a Baptist minister. LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: In preparing to talk with you, Jan, I was fascinated with the richness of your biography.

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