The Haygoods of Columbus

the long version

Wil Haygood's memoir of his home town of Columbus, Ohio, is an uplifting yet unsparing celebration of the ties that bind all loving American families. The lives of the Haygoods - grandmother a hotel cook, mother a nightlife-loving waitress, father mostly absent, one brother a legendary pimp, the other a star-crossed dreamer, sisters whose fates included very little disposable income - were all intertwined with that of Mount Vernon Avenue, an eclectic, seductive street of shops, juke joints, and speakeasies at the epicenter of Columbus's black community. Wil loved that avenue. Gifted and ambitious, he eventually found his first reporting terrain there, writing for the local paper, the Call & Post, as the first waves of urban renewal began to shake and shift the city of his childhood. Haygood writes of his early passions: his fierce love for his restless mother, his enthusiasm for fishing in the Olentangy River, his adolescent love of basketball, which drove him to ride buses surreptitiously across town to a school whose varsity team would have him, his adult fascination with acting, which landed him, briefly but instructively, in New York City, and his eventual passion for writing, for questioning, for digging for meaning. Most of all, this book is infused with his love for the unforgettable members of his family, whose lives are charted against the rise and fall of a great neighborhood in a tumultuous era. The Haygoods of Columbus is a warmhearted, amusing, and bittersweet book that Americans will find hard to forget.