A Book in the Trees
As I am editing a book (Heyday, forthcoming) at my favorite picnic table in Redwood Regional—where cellphone signal becomes reliably unreliable, and I mostly hear ravens and redtails and the ting-a-ling of mountain bikers’ bells—I hear the name “Dorsey,” and also the word “book,” from a couple of voices coming up the trail. I know a Dorsey who wrote a book, a Dorsey Nunn, a family friend since before I was born. I edited that book (Heyday, 2024) and thousands of people have read it. Sometimes we get lucky like that, working alongside people we already love.
I get up and say hello: “I’m Marthine Satris, I edited Dorsey’s book!” It turns out I’m saying my name to “Nate Harrington’s son”: Nate! Nate who grew up with Dorsey in Belle Haven on the Peninsula! Nate who taught Dorsey to read (and more importantly, he says, to think) when they were both in prison! Nate who became a lawyer, whose son remembers helping his dad sort through prisoners’ requests for assistance and aid, Nate whose son is raising kids in Oakland today and who is walking with his stepmother who raised him today, Nate whose son and widow are talking about the movements for social change that shaped their lives in Oakland, talking about being a kid riding bikes and taking BART and faking bus passes and watching friends at Oakland Tech get split into separate white kids’ and black kids’ tracks, remembering what crack did to the community of Black men round Bushrod Park who should have been father figures, talking about seeing Dorsey’s book at Oakland Museum now, as part of the display of books that tell the story of Black places in the Bay Area, like Belle Haven, like West Oakland, where Dorsey is trying to establish a safe home for old men coming back after lives spent in prison, coming home to nothing and nobody. Nate! Whose son and widow are taking the dog for a walk in the redwoods on the first hot day of the summer this year and telling stories as they walk. I work in the redwoods so I can edit without interrupting myself, but here I am getting distracted, and glad for it. We are in each other’s stories.
Heyday’s founder, Malcolm Margolin, would tell folks that a book is both a container and a celebration: Without the container, a celebration is just a party, ephemeral; without a celebration, you have an archive, secure but unnoticed. A book, you see, is a gathering, in every way. That’s why we make books out of trees: so they're strong enough to be handed off, resold, borrowed, repaired; they have to circulate, like air, coming in and out of our lives. They come up the trail at Redwood Regional, when you thought you were alone with the trees. They grow inside us like rings, we grow bigger on them.
Today, Dorsey’s book and Nate’s son told me that we leave pieces of ourselves inside one another. We are each other's stories. Here is gathered, in the redwoods, a Bay Area story, one of movement makers and the children of the movement, the people who hold the pieces and are putting them back together to hand on. Every tree catching sun and fog, now, is the child of one that was cut down. We have each other, and we hold each other up to the light streaming through tiny spiky leaves on the highest trees in the world still reaching above Oakland, saying: look at this place we come from and have come to. We’re making it while it makes us. Tell me your story, tell it to me again.
I invite Nate’s son and widow to a gathering we’re having at Heyday in a few, where Dorsey and other California movement builders will be speaking. I call Dorsey when I get back to bars of cell phone service. I tell him who I ran into, and he’s speechless, a rare thing.
