Some Blazers stories don't hit the national news..

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'Everybody Reads,' including Davis

01/15/03

KATY MULDOON

To Trail Blazers center Dale Davis, Ernest J. Gaines' richly simple 1993 novel, "A Lesson Before Dying," felt like home.

Home -- like the deep South, where he grew up, in its earthy descriptions of an impoverished but proud post-plantation-era culture. Home -- like the familiar and often uncomfortable tug of responsibility than he and other successful African American men feel when their past pulls them one direction and their future pulls another way.

Davis talked about those powerful forces with a small group of young men gathered Tuesday at a Northeast Portland bookstore, most of them clutching a paperback copy of "A Lesson Before Dying." He and the teens, members of The Prospective Gents Club for African American high school boys, shared their thoughts as part of the Portland area's first community-wide book discussion, a project called "Everybody Reads." The project is sponsored by the Multnomah County Library and the Library Foundation.

Blazers players often dip their toes into community service projects, and though he is a music and movie buff, Davis has focused his civic energy on literacy work. So it made sense for him to sit down last week and read Gaines' novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is considered a modern classic.

Around Portland, the soft-spoken Blazers center has lots of company. Before it began the "Everybody Reads" project, Multnomah County Library stocked up with 3,600 copies of "A Lesson Before Dying." Tuesday, all of them were checked out; bookstores around Portland reported brisk sales, too.

The story, set in late-1940s rural Louisiana, follows a young man who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and then is sentenced to death. His godmother asks a college-educated schoolteacher, who has returned to his hometown, to visit the young man in jail and to inspire him to stand tall in the face of injustice. With great reluctance, he does. In the end, both men learn lessons that make them and their communities stronger.

And like the simple story that spins eloquently into powerful messages about culture and destiny and what it means to be a man, Tuesday's discussion in the cramped back room at Reflections Coffee and Books on Northeast Killingsworth Street did, too.

Questions about characters elicited answers about integrity. Scenes describing food motivated talk about family. Teenagers and grown men found common ground on the same pages.

And just as the schoolteacher in "A Lesson Before Dying" learns the value of reaching out a hand in his own community, Dale Davis did, too.

"I was fortunate enough to go on to college," Davis said. ". . . Guys I went to school with aren't doing well. Some are in prison. Some are into drugs. Some never made anything out of their lives.

"I try to go back and to give back," he said. "At the end of the day, there's just a feeling of good that comes out of that."

Katy Muldoon, 503-221-8526; katymuldoon@news.oregonian.com