It's one of those stories that fits together so well, it can't be true. Someone must have made it up.
But that would go against everything Mike D'Orso believes in. He's a nonfiction writer, and he won't twist a story around just to make people read it.
So he didn't. Now the story of civil rights leader and Georgia Congressman John Lewis is a nationally recognized book that remembers a critical time in the past, through the work of the men who wrote it.
Monday night D'Orso learned that "Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement," the book he wrote with Lewis about his life, won the 1999 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The American Library Association also named it the 1998 Nonfiction Book of the Year last month.
D'Orso, 45, a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary and graduate of the school, said the praise belongs to Lewis' story.
"Lewis was like a Forrest Gump character. He was everywhere," D'Orso said. "At every major incident, event and tragedy of the civil rights movement, he was there personally."
Many people have never heard of Lewis, but he was one of the defining figures of his time. He was 18 when the movement spread across the South, one young man among a generation of black men and women wanting a better future. He was quiet, shy, poor, and often in the background at major events.
But he was there, all the same, and he was a doer.
In 1963, he spoke at the March on Washington right before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
In 1965, Lewis was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., when state troopers attacked protesters in what became known as Bloody Sunday. He remembers troopers' boots thumping on the street, horses' hooves clomping on the pavement and a woman yelling, "Get the niggers!" He recalls a trooper hitting him in the head with a club, and feeling no pain at first.
He remembers his legs buckling, his world spinning and feeling like he couldn't get any air. He was choking in a cloud of tear gas and seeing people around him bleeding, crying and screaming.
"If there's one black person in America today who has reason to hate white people, it's John Lewis," said D'Orso. Yet Lewis still believes that the future can be good, D'Orso said.
In 1986, Lewis, who sometimes stammers when he speaks, ran for a congressional seat against an old friend, Julian Bond, and a man with Hollywood good looks who seemed unbeatable.
Lewis won.
"You couldn't make it up. It's too good of a story," D'Orso said. Over the years, Lewis has become a source of nearly every book written about civil rights and the major events of the times, D'Orso said. His memory is encyclopedic, but he needed someone to draw it out.
D'Orso spent a year and a half helping Lewis tell his story, which is written in the first person.
They talked for hours. They traveled to the places of his memories. They saw the school he attended. They stopped at the bus station where he was beaten. Even wearing a baseball cap, not looking at all like the congressman he is today, people recognized Lewis. Old men at the bus station hugged him.
"For a year and a half, I climbed into his world," D'Orso said.
D'Orso has written 11 nonfiction books, including "Walking With the Wind." He's a former staff writer for Commonwealth Magazine and the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, where he won national awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize three times. Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Reader's Digest and People magazine also have published his work. He is also the author of "Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood" that a movie was based on.
People ask D'Orso about the reviews, the awards and the sales. D'Orso answers by talking about the stories. He frames the jacket covers of the books he writes and hangs them in his study. He wants to remember what he has learned.
They're lessons from other people: about a paralyzed football player walking again, a principal trying to make an inner city school work, a woman struggling with being fat.
D'Orso knew Lewis was an important figure when he started writing; but he didn't know what he represented, what he meant. Now he does.
"This isn't just old history. Everything that courses through this book is coursing through America right now," D'Orso said. "We're at a time now, extremely polarized politically, racially. People have turned pretty cynical. A lot of people have given up.
"He still sees hope."
-Deborah Straszheim can be reached at 221-7220 or by e-mail at dstraszheim@dailypress.com