By: Cynthia Adams | Photos By: Nancy Evenlyn

Kim Waters sends an excited text on the September evening that her friend, Neal Lester, is on the UGA campus for a series of lectures he will give. “If you see him,” she urged, “go introduce yourself!”

Sure enough, there he was, settling his bill in a restaurant. In the very same place Waters had excitedly announced how her childhood friend (Lester) was coming to Georgia for “large scale discussions about race and diversity” only a few weeks earlier. Lester is unmistakable—exactly like the posters announcing his appearances in town and on the UGA campus. Except,
that evening, he is wearing a colorful Batik shirt which, combined with his dreadlocks, lend an island vibe.

Of all the places you might guess the genial man is from, it would not be Jefferson, Ga.

Admittedly, Neal Lester is not yet a household name, but he is almost famous. Academically accomplished and widely published, he no longer lives in Georgia although some of his family do. Lester also has a serenity about him, a Zen-like aura. He hadn’t even finished calculating the tip before being recognized and accosted and it didn’t flap the man. He agreeably confirmed that yes, he was one and the same Neal Lester/Friend of Kim Waters, and that yes, he was also glad that he and Waters had reconnected as old friends.

Lester says he liked that Waters was also an outsider: her father was the mortician. Waters lived above the funeral home. They had something in common, he says wryly. He was a black child in a newly integrated school and given where Waters lived, there weren’t many kids who would join either of them for a sleepover. He chuckles. We were different, he says, in that both were kids out of the mainstream. In the end, those differences made them power vault towards different futures. And they used education as their stave.

Founder of the award-winning Project Humanities initiative at Arizona State University, Lester had a full five days of lectures as a visiting fellow at UGA’s Willson Center for the Humanities. UGA’s Graduate School, Franklin College, the Creative Writing Program, English Department, Linguistics Program, LSUGA, Special Collections Library (SCL), Grady College, Economic Justice Coalition of Athens, Georgia NAACP and Dawg Gone Good BBQ co-sponsored events.

Today, Lester is Foundation Professor of English at ASU and Arizona Humanities Council Distinguished Public Scholar, among myriad other honors. He publishes and teaches on topics in African-American literature and culture: children’s literature, folklore and popular culture, black/white interracial intimacies in American culture, women writers, black masculinities, the N-word, and the gender and race politics of hair.

He has published on such subjects as Disney representations of female characters, black masculinities, and authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sapphire, and Ntozake Shange.

Waters was delighted that her pal was in town—“We met in 5th grade,” Waters explained. “We were fellow thespians, Neal was yearbook editor our senior year and I was the photographer.” And Waters added proudly in a rush of superlatives about her friend, “he was the first black PhD in English from Vanderbilt.”

Now, Lester is an acknowledged voice for social awareness. And Waters, a doctoral student in linguistics with an academic future in her sights, wrote the Willson Center grant and created the series of events as part of her Diversity and Inclusion Graduate (DIG) Fellowship at UGA. The 18-month fellowship requires a final project with a permanent element (Waters interviewed Lester as part of the SCL’s Oral History Project on school integration). The Willson Center grant, which funded Lester’s visit, required both campus and community outreach. Waters says she wanted to build an event around Lester, “a remarkable force in community organization.”

Two kids from small-town Georgia, two outsiders, had made their way through advance degrees and demonstrated ability for great scholarship. Waters marveled at this, saying softly, “And who would have thought!?”

In recent years, Waters found herself sometimes calling Lester for ideas on navigating field work in minority communities and cultures. It seemed fitting that Waters had begun to consult with him about her own journey as a linguist. He is a man who understands the power of language, she says.

Among the lexicon of powerful words with social consequence, Lester explained, there is the loaded N-word. One of his most popular lectures, “Straight Talk about the N-Word,” addressed a difficult topic head-on.

“This is not like the ‘B-word’ or the ‘F-word,’” Lester said in his lecture.

“This is unlike any other word in the English language, and for some reason people think if we change the spelling of it, we change the meaning of it. I’m here to tell you that is not the case.”

“I had a class of 22 students,” Waters told Flagpole last September, “and there were people from all over the world, from South Georgia and North Georgia. I realized that sometimes when people come to this school, Athens is the biggest town they’ve ever been in. I understand what that small-town mentality is, and it can be…insular. I started to see a lack of understanding of other perspectives in that class, and all this time I’m in the DIG fellowship, and I’m thinking about how to help raise awareness, to help others see through someone else’s eyes or think how it is to walk in someone else’s shoes.”

And then, at the end of the events, there was time to reflect upon another “F-word”: Friendship. In the final analysis, two friends who found acceptance in each other in a time when there were reasons for distrust. They had rediscovered the power of connection, and just how much it
mattered when as youngsters they had broken with social restrictions.

“He’s is a wonderfully creative man,” Waters said, “He has become my griot.”