For the Holidays, Mitchell S. Jackson Provides Readers With a Different View of Growing Up Here

Amid a holiday-induced quiet period, it’s worth taking a few extra minutes to read this week’s New York Times magazine cover story, penned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell S. Jackson, who grew up in Portland.

It’s a rumination about a man with whom Jackson shares family ties and whom he revered: “He Was My Role Model. My Mentor. My Supplier,” the headline says. Jackson examines the path not taken and considers why, decades later, the onetime Portland drug kingpin he refers to as “Lonnie” still exerts a powerful hold on Jackson’s imagination.

More than 20 years into a career in academia and after writing three critically acclaimed books and widely published journalism, including a Pulitzer-winning feature story about the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, Jackson admits he feels the pull of the Portland neighborhoods where Lonnie taught him the finer points of the profession that would lead him to prison.

“More than good sense allows, I still wonder whether I’m capable of surviving the streets, whether I own the toughness they demand, if I could live once again by my wiles,” Jackson writes. “Still—I wonder how safe I’d feel in a nightclub, strip club or after-hours full of active gang members.”

Read Jackson’s NYT piece here.