Yes, I admit it, I love the historian and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns!

We just watched our tape of the last 3 hours of his spectacular, fascination bio of black boxer Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson while Drew was zonked out. Amazing stuff, and completely, beautifully relevant to my baseball novel, which takes place in the same era, pre-WWI America. Johnson was the heavyweight champion of the world during this time, and our country simply wasn't ready for it.

White people couldn't fathom a black person who thought he was just as good as a white person. I was amazed and ashamed at the racism and violence that abounded in an era that is now called the "Progressive" era. He ignored it all and thumbed his nose at them all, dating and marrying a white woman (two, actually, in all), and knocking out any white man who tried to beat him in the ring until his loss in the 26th round in Havana to Jess Willard when he was 37 years old (the same bout that's referred to in Andy Duncan's fantastic tale, "The Pottawattamie Giant").

And, best of all, the cameo that Jackson plays in my novel still fits perfectly (he's on the run from the feds for "violating" the Mann Act in 1910), and I don't have to take it out! That would've sucked, because it's a great scene.

Now to put some of Burns' "Baseball" documentary in my Netflix queue. Only 10 DVDs in all to watch there... yikes.