Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to My American Hero. This program is a POS podcast production. Here is Henry Doyle honoring his brother's life work.
Speaker: My grandma, Ruth, liked to show her breasts to the mailman. That's not your typical opening sentence to a novel, but my brother Liam was an incredible writer.
Speaker: He had a way of hooking readers from the first line. I used to ask him, how do you come up with lines like that? He'd always say, I start with the end in mind.
Speaker: Now that Liam has passed, I've been rereading his books. I think I understand more about what he was trying to accomplish as a writer. At the end of his novel, Jim Crow Ho, we learn Grandma Ruth miraculously escapes the devastating separate but equal policies of Mississippi and eventually settles in Detroit with her daughter and grandkids.
Speaker: I've come to believe Grandma Ruth's habit of showing her breasts to the mailman represents her deep desire for equal rights. I think she targeted the mailman in particular because letter carriers of that era were symbols of transformation and national identity.
Speaker: So from the very first line of Jim Crow Ho, my brother Liam was hinting that one black woman's sacrifice to bare her breasts was the quiet catalyst for an entire nation of black people to claim the freedom they rightfully deserved.
Speaker: God, I miss my brother. To my brilliant brother Liam, he was a writer and my American hero. Music
