10 years later: Remembering a brassy, bawdy bud

Published originally in The News & Reporter, Dec. 2 , 2005

I once boasted I never suffered writer's block.

I was young then, and I know the truth now.

Sometimes the words don't come.

Words define reality and allow it to be shared by others who don't experience it. So if you write down some real thing you lived but tried to block out, you can't hide from it. You think to share it, hoping to ease your pain, but you also know, when it is there, printed in ink, in your own words, you won't be able to hide from it anymore.

It's been almost a month since I heard, and on this topic, the words just wouldn't come.

A few months back, I wrote about my first real boss in this business, Mardy Jackson, as part of a column boasting about how wonderful a profession journalism is.

Mardy Jackson gave me my first reporting job. She took a chance hiring me, because my freelance work at the time meant I was struggling, not having gotten a full-time gig at a "real" paper.

Through me, she showed the people who ran that newspaper company the truth of an aphorism much quoted but not always followed -- "Take care of the news, and the ads will take care of themselves."

She hired me to be a professional writer for her, to take care of the news.

As I got better at doing that for her, the ads started taking care of themselves.

She was always, always, always trying to teach me. She'd teach me with a tale of her hard life, a brutal job evaluation, a lede paragraph so slashed up it looked like Freddy Krueger got to it, or even a dirty joke.

When I first got on board the paper in Cheraw, she was involved in a debate with others in the company. She was publisher of the paper, but she didn't join the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce board. She felt it would be a conflict. If she heard something one of those civic groups didn't want out yet, she would, hypothetically, be torn between her oath to the group and her duty to the readers.

But she was all about her readers, first and always, so she would never really have been torn. Instead of being a hypocrite, instead of pledging to work with a group that might ask her to keep a secret she knew she wouldn't, shouldn't keep, she didn't join.

She'd heard all the "get involved in the community" arguments from the people in such groups. Some, she knew, sincerely believed their groups were the best things for the community, and she respectfully disagreed, for herself.

She also knew others wanted to co-opt her, to join the groups as a way to muzzle her. She was on to them from the get-go.

She told those leaders, told others in our company and told me, privately, that you don't need to get involved in those groups to be involved.

Like me, she was raised a Catholic and knew all about guilt. But she wouldn't let anyone make her feel guilty because she wasn't involved the way they expected her to be involved.

She taught me that working for a paper, one that brings real news, is the ultimate community involvement. It is perhaps the best way to improve your community.

You hold up a mirror to your community, let it see itself for what it is. If there is a blemish here, the community can fix it. If there's a bright spot here, the paper can shine a light on it for others outside to see. The good and the bad, both are in a community newspaper.

Mardy had resigned before I moved from Cheraw to Barnwell. But we stayed in touch and I got to apply her teachings.

In Barnwell, I was challenged by several to "get involved" in civic groups or serve on this or that board. One mean little fellow tried to trip me up as those others had tried to trip up Mardy.

Get involved, he said. What he meant was don't ask critical questions until you get involved the way he defined involvement. Don't fret being asked to keep a secret from your reader if necessary, he said.

My answer was at the ready because of Mardy.

I told him I couldn't serve because I would be asked to keep secrets from my readers. That, I told him, would break the promise I made — I don't keep secrets from my readers.

He didn't get it. I went further, and said if he was a real community leader, he ought to make the same promise. Don't keep secrets from your constituents.

He didn't like that, but Mardy would have roared with laughter, loving it

She taught me another lesson recently, a hard one for me to take.

She quit the Cheraw paper years ago, but she didn't move away. She wrote a novel or two, tried to get them published, freelanced here and there, farmed, did some records checking and private investigations.

She lived a pretty interesting life from a place where those afraid of the truth had called her an outsider just because she had refused to join "those" groups as publisher of the paper.

She was involved in her community in the way she chose. As publisher, she did it by providing information. After journalism, she was as involved as ever.

When the need arose, she took a leading role.

At some point in the last couple of years, some nameless bureaucrat made a decision to move a line on a map. Suddenly, Mardy didn't live in a fire district anymore.

We'd both written about rural fire protection, and she knew the dangers immediately. Even if she never had a fire in her little trailer, she knew her insurance was going to skyrocket.

The problem didn't just affect her. It changed things for a whole bunch of her neighbors, so she helped those neighbors organize and take action. She wrote grants that helped them form a new volunteer fire department, buying land, building a station and most importantly, paying for a new fire truck.

They had a barbecue a few weeks back at the department. They put her name on the truck.

The barbecue was held in her memory. Early in the summer, she was diagnosed with cancer. Before I heard, I noticed she wasn't responding to the infrequent but regular e-mails I sent her.

I later learned she was having such a hard time of it she stopped seeing all but her immediate family.

A few weeks back, I went to Cheraw to do a job for a newspaper group, but didn't take the time to see her. She died a few days after my trip.

I had no idea it was as bad as that.

I am perplexed by many things in her passing. She was a health nut who never smoked, yet somehow got lung cancer that killed her just a few months after her diagnosis. She was just in her 50s. It's unfathomable.

Perplexed by those facts, I am sure of others.

She gave me a chance when no one else would. I thanked her many times for that chance, but never enough.

I am also sure that she has taught me that final lesson, again one about community involvement.

She's now shown me that, if I ever decide to give this profession up, I can still be involved. You don't have to be in the steady group, or even at a newspaper, to make a difference, Mardy's final involvement, helping create a fire department, is going to save people's lives.

I am proud of being a journalist and being involved in a community by informing it. I truly can't imagine not working at a newspaper.

But when I remember that it took me almost a month to write about Mardy Jackson, my mentor, my friend, my bawdy, brassy Madonna of information, I see that maybe, someday, I might have to leave the profession.

Because sometimes, the words don't come.