The Haygoods of Columbus: A Love Story

By Wil Haygood

Book Overview

Wil Haygood's memoir of his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, is an uplifting and unsparing celebration of the ties that bind all loving American families. The lives of the Haygood clan-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 intertwined with that of Mount Vernon Avenue, a 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, while the first waves of urban renewal began to shake and shift the city of his childhood. Haygood tells here of his early passions: his fierce love for his restless mother, his enthusiasm for fishing in the Olentangy River, and his adolescent love of basketball, which drove him to ride buses surreptitiously.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814253911
• ISBN13: 9780814253915
• Release Date: November 2016
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

An Unvarnished and Powerful Evocation of a Young Life

I grew up in a small town not far from Columbus, Ohio about the time Wil Haygood was growing up in the big city. The rural high school I attended was a consolidated school, meaning it served farming families who were geographically dispersed and too scattered to justify their own school. Still, even though my graduating class was large because of the demographics, we only had three African American students in the entire school. And yet just a few miles away Wil Haygood was living in an entirely different world, one that he recalls with clarity and grace in this fine book. I'm glad this book found me and that Wil Haygood was willing to share his story of a young man finding his way through the world.

Great reading

A wonderful story about the love one young man has for his family

Haygood memoir -- a solid, entertaining autobiography

I picked up this book because of a jacket blurb by Reynolds Price, who calls it "a grave and beautiful surprise." Price is right. There are no spectacular events in Wil Haygood's story of growing up as a black kid in love with basketball in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1950s and 1960s, but his accumulation of little ones -- living with his dependable grandparents Willie and Emily, going to movies, throwing rocks at a house once lived in by James Thurber (and that Haygood himself would later live in), moving out with his mother and sisters, meeting his half-brother Macaroni (whose end, after a career as pimp and petty thief, will surprise you), transferring from school to school to play basketball, being the first in his family to finish college, trying to make it in New York as an actor. For Haygood himself, this is a success story; he ends as an author. For his family, the success is less obvious, but it is there: they left Alabama in the 1930s and 1940s, got jobs in Ohio, invited brothers and sisters and cousins to live with them while they got on their feet. Not everyone makes it -- there are deaths and jail sentences -- but this is a cheerful book, a hymn to families and grandmothers and sisters who encourage, help, or send money. Best of all, Haygood is a fine writer, able to portray his scatterbrained mother sympathetically and to convey his gratitude to the people who helped him along the way (one is the father of singer Nancy Wilson).