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Redding Educator, Poet Larry Harris Takes on ‘Blue Train’ Project
Recently retired from teaching at-risk youth in Redding, poet Larry Greco Harris was looking for a new adventure. “I wanted to step outside of the usual, do something that would make my brain grow new brain cells,” he says.
Then he got a call from Artistic Director Deborah Tobola. Would he travel 400 miles to the Central Coast to hang out with the Blue Train cast and crew and write about them with his intrepid poet’s eye?
So for several weeks Harris has been profiling the members of Blue Train, a prison play produced through the Poetic Justice Project. The play debuted Dec. 22 at San Luis Obispo Little Theatre.
Harris and his wife, Tish, love traveling—especially to California’s Central Coast.
And he says, “So many people these days don’t feel like they matter anymore. I want to do things that are worthwhile. It just makes sense to make the world better.”
Rejecting the stereotype of hardened ex-cons, Larry found people he greatly admires in Blue Train’s cast and crew. “There’s something magical happening here,” he says.
Faces on the Blue Train
Raymond Jerome Walker
Part I: Ray-Ray
by Larry Greco Harris
A four-year-old boy stands alone on a front porch under a rare rain dropping over Los Angeles. It’s 1961.
He is not crying. He is not smiling. He is holding tightly to the top of a crisp brown paper bag which, filled with a few clothes, scrapes the ground next to his shoes. He faces the door, then swivels his head without moving his feet to catch the last glimpse of his uncle’s car disappearing around the corner.
His crystal green eyes—unusual eyes for an African American child—turret left and right trying to take in everything that moves and everything that doesn’t move as far down the sidewalks as he can see.
“There’s your grandma’s house, Raymond,” his uncle had said as he reached across the boy’s lap to push the door open. “Go on now, Raymond, you’ll be staying here from now on.”
The boy, doing as he was told, had stepped out of the car, had hefted his bag to his chest trying to keep it off the ground, had carried it at his side leaning up the path to the house, and without a single word, had hoisted it directly up the steps, stopped, and faced the door.
Standing there now, with no explanation for any of this, no direction other than that curt order from his uncle to get out of the car, the little boy must now decide for himself what to do next. His decision: he knocks.
And before the sound of that knock has time to fade, Raymond’s grandmother swings open that door and does something that will be done again and again during his lifetime—she renames him.
Ray-Ray!”
On the road ahead of him, this little boy will be painted with many more names—some names so close to fame, some names so deep in drugs. But he won’t be Raymond anymore—at least not until many years later as he sits in a cell, his name a number.
. . . this true story to be continued . . .
Raymond Jerome Walker, 52 years old now, will appear in Blue Train beginning Dec. 22 at the San Luis Obispo Little Theatre. But don’t call him Raymond or Ray-Ray that night, because he’ll be answering to yet another name—R&B—one of the lead characters in the play.
Reprinted with permission.
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Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.
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Boy, talk about leaving us wanting more! I look forward to reading the entire story.
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Hey Larry,
I’d been wondering what you were up to. Good to know.
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