Talk of the Town - Good-bye, Hosea November 25 2000

It's odd how deeply we can become psychologically involved with public figures we've never met. When I heard the news that Hosea Williams had died last week, I felt that kick in the gut with which grief always seems to announce itself.
Williams was a firebrand of the civil rights movement who led the Selma march in 1965. In more recent years, his great heart devoted itself to the feeding of Atlanta's poor. But — let's be honest — he also became well known for his problems with alcohol and it's probably not stretching a point to say that many young people know him most for his stays in jail as a habitual traffic offender, as a fallen hero who tried to board a plane with a handgun in his briefcase. I seem to even remember his operating — gasp! — a shady bingo parlor on Piedmont near Lindbergh a couple of decades ago.
He was a flawed character, a maddening blend of show-stopping narcissism, charity and bountiful love. But how could one so flawed accomplish so much, gain the respect of so many?
Because he was true to his character. Because he was "authentic," to use the word that has come to worry so many critics these days. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the meaning of "authentic" derives from a couple of Greek words that mean both "original" and "authoritative." In other words, the authentic has power, authority because it is unique, original. Power, by this principle, is inherently given with whatever is original.
And from that you can extrapolate a conclusion about that other word, "empowerment," so frequently use by pop psychologists. If power derives from originality, our task is to become true to our characters, no matter how flawed.
Of course, on principle, most of us agree with this. But we like to think that those shady aspects of our character, like Hosea's taste for liquor, are symptoms that will be dissolved in some magical process of enlightened self-empowerment — through religion or psychotherapy or self-help or scoring a million in the market.
True, just to maintain survival, we have to find a way of coping with our flaws (and Hosea did do battle with his addiction). But the reality is that it is these conspicuous flaws that mark our humanity and are often long remembered in stories told about us. Which is more interesting — an unblemished angel of the civil rights struggle or such an angel who now and then showed his ass on the street? Your answer will depend on whether you value stories themselves, their complexity, or their abstract morals more.
I often ask clients if they want to be remembered as interesting people or as balanced, "well-integrated" people. I don't have much help to give the latter, since I think it's a boring fiction that compels people to hide from their character rather than to live fully in the natural eccentricity and uniqueness given with what we call soul — that "thing" that makes us who we are individually and usually puts us in opposition to everything comfortable.
It's a bit ironic to me that Williams and the civil rights movement actually represented an escape from the fiction of perfection in which I grew up. As a kid in Sandy Springs, then called the "golden ghetto," I palpably suffered from the suffocating sameness of that perfect world (so well represented in the movie American Beauty).
Just following the wonderful stories of the civil rights and antiwar movements on television and in the newspapers gave me a real sense of drama in life and taught me the virtue of struggle on behalf of uniqueness, no matter how peculiar. I fled the suburbs every Saturday by getting on a bus and heading downtown. I told my parents I was going to the library, but mainly I walked every inch of downtown Atlanta, soaking up as much that was strange to my eyes as I could. I often got into trouble — like the day I wandered into SNCC headquarters — but always seemed to talk my way out of it.
Clients, who are almost always refusing to honor their actual character, often ask what is necessary to honor the soul's desire, the destiny of character. I think Hosea's life provides the answer: He faced death early in life. His mother died giving birth to his sister. Then, not yet 20, he joined the Army. A Nazi bomb exploded in a foxhole he inhabited and killed everyone but him. Then, the vehicle transporting him to a hospital was ambushed, again killing everyone but him. After leaving the Army with a Purple Heart, he was beaten and left for dead when he drank from a water fountain in a segregated bus station.
Heroic figures like Williams instruct us with the stories of their own lives. We can't all have this literal showdown with death, but we can take their stories to heart. We can go out of our way to confront this reality, to die willingly to the idea that we can live as perfected beings of our parents' imagination — in an earthly paradise (of enlightenment and money), bound for glory in heaven and memory. The soul, historically, has great fascination with actual death. Our souls pull us into the future by representing our "calling" — and we are all called eventually to death. Men like Hosea Williams remind us that the journey, the potentially interesting story we live, matters far more in its particular details than its summary meaning.
Cliff Bostock, MA, is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology. Contact him at 404-525-4774 or care of his web site, www.soulworks.net.