Structure and Chronology in You Didn’t See Nothin’s First Episode
Author: Jill Barshay
In storytelling, chronology is your friend. The late New Yorker editor John Bennet used to say, only half jokingly, that his work mostly involved putting a writer’s draft back into chronological order.
The story might start near the end or at a moment of high drama, but then rewind from the beginning and tell it in order. “Try to sneak in historical background and analysis in between events told sequentially,” Bennet explained to me when I was one of his students at Columbia Journalism School.
I’ve been facilitating podcast listening groups through TPA’s mentorship program over the past year, and I’ve been thinking a lot about when audio stories follow and detour from a timeline. I thought it would be interesting to analyze You Didn’t See Nothin’, the brilliant podcast that won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Peabody earlier this year, and how it uses chronology to structure its first episode, “Young Black Male.”
The story is about how a horrendous racial hate crime in Chicago influenced the life of a Black man named Yohance Lacour, who is also the podcast’s narrator.
Instead of beginning with the 1997 crime, Lacour opens with an anecdote of where he was when Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election.
The moment has nothing to do with a Black teenager being beaten to a pulp by a gang of white thugs, but it was a key moment in the personal history of the narrator, Lacour. He is both ecstatic to see the first Black man become president in his lifetime and incredulous that he is witnessing this history from jail, getting drunk on contraband hooch. Lacour, now older and wiser, questions how his life ended up like this. Lacour wants to consciously reflect on his life, and he will take us on that psychological journey. The starting point in the chronology is one of psychological contradiction, an incongruity, and it introduces the internal struggles and tensions that will become a leitmotif throughout the seven-episode series.
Toward the end of the introduction, Lacour rewinds to 1997, when he was a college student, living with his dad and dealing weed. Lacour gives us the briefest summary of the 1997 beating of Leonard Clark. This is Lacour’s story, not Clark’s.
The first section of the podcast takes a break from the exposition and gives us a long portrait of our main character, Lacour, as an unfocused college student in the 1990s. Through interviews with two friends and Lacour’s own memories, we learn that Lacour was a brilliant, well-read young man from an educated, professional family of Chicago’s Black middle class. He wrote plays and rapped. He was also a restless hothead who showed little interest in his studies and eventually dropped out of college. This character development is critical in order for the listener to care about this unusually bright but flawed man.
After establishing Lacour’s character, the heart of the episode is a day in the life of Lacour immediately after the 1997 beating of Leonard Clark. Now the story adheres to strict chronology, almost minute by minute, from how Lacour hears about the beating, his reaction to it, and the actions he takes.
(Spoiler alert: if you haven’t listened to this episode, now is the time to stop reading this blog post and enjoy a laugh-out-loud sequence of events.)
The narrative marches from Lacour’s rallying of the troops, to a road trip through Chicago, and then to a battlefront. But this quest for justice ultimately fails in comedic fashion and ends with a pointless food fight at a taco joint. As Lacour tells his story, he deftly weaves in context. Sandwiched within the first anecdote of the day is a brief political history of Chicago and an explanation of its residential segregation. In the middle of Lacour’s failed mission, there is a long excerpt from an NPR story, where we hear the voice of a white racist diner. That gives us a glimpse of the white working-class neighborhood Lacour and his buddies are heading to before we get there. After the retreat, Lacour pauses to share his thoughts and feelings about the failure. Again after the food fight, Lacour pauses to reflect aloud.
The episode briefly leaves Lacour’s story to update us on the news events that are happening along this same timeline in the days after the beating. Leonard Clark is in the hospital fighting for his life with his mom at his bedside. Three white guys have been arrested for the crime.
The episode closes on a philosophical note. Lacour explains the big tension between the peaceful approach of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the militant activism of Malcolm X, and how he struggles internally with these two opposite approaches to seeking justice.
Here’s a recap of how I think of this episode’s structure:
Intro: A moment of reckoning 11 years after the event that propels the story
Section I: Character profile of the protagonist around the time that the event took place
Section II: Chronological narrative of what the protagonist does immediately after the event. Woven into the narrative are breaks for historical context and pauses for the protagonist to reflect on events.
Conclusion: Philosophical reflections on a theme, in this case, the struggle between peaceful change and militant activism.
Figuring out the structural bones of an episode is a somewhat subjective exercise. Reasonable people can see the structure differently, and I’d be curious to hear how the producers and editors of this podcast outlined it. For me, these exercises are useful because as I simplify the structure in my mind, it becomes a template that I can borrow from in the future. This one is a good model for when a common man’s life intersects with world events, and the lesson here is to keep the story—and the chronology—focused on the common man’s life
___________________________
Jill Barshay -