Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Are you open to receive them?

This morning I snapped a photo of a mockingbird perched atop a stop sign. It caught me on my morning walk because it seemed like a message the universe made for me. I’ve been feeling stuck this week in my podcast project, a heavy investigative and writing lift, especially in getting my arms around hundreds of hours of audio, both archival and contemporary. I decided to immerse myself in some of the archival audio, which contains the few police interrogations we have of our main subject, Toforest Johnson, who I (and many others) believe was wrongfully convicted and sent to death row.

My process involves listening to the recordings on a platform that also transcribes them, but dubs of crackly cassette tapes that are almost 30 years old don’t translate well on the platform, not to mention the AI (artificial intelligence) that facilitates the transcription typically doesn’t understand the cadence and vernacular of southern Black folks like Toforest.

So I’ve been painstakingly listening to the interrogations and essentially re-transcribing them, which is achingly slow, but also feels essential, like I’m in the room with Toforest as he’s getting railroaded. The problem is I already have a transcript that was included in the trove of investigative materials I’ve accessed, but the transcripts are PDFs that I can’t copy and paste from in order to pull audio selects as we produce our episodes. UGH.

I am getting too technical here, pulling you into the weeds with me, which I don’t want to do. My point is, I don’t know if I’ve been doing the right thing by spending all this time this week immersed in this audio and I’ve been questioning whether it’s worth it to keep going. Antsy, angsty, anxious.

But I believe that signs are all around us, if we are just willing to see (or hear or feel or dream or even smell, for that matter), we just have to pay attention. Sometimes signs tell us what NOT to do. When I first began reporting on Alabama prisons, I was on my first assignment at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility to cover an educational program, and encountered a bizarre sign on the prison’s exterior fence that stopped me.

Do not stop and talk to inmates? Really? I read the sign to myself, scowled then shook my head. Screw that. I’m talking to the guys inside.

The messenger doesn’t matter. You can believe in a great beyond, or God, or Allah, Buddha, insert name of another higher power, a great consciousness, some force bigger than all of us that is involved in a grand design to things. Or not. You just have to be open, and sometimes these signs smack you in the face every day. At my last TV news job, I passed a street sign on my way to work that simply stated DEAD END. But it took me almost 10 years to finally listen to that sign, and that’s a story for another day.

I happen to believe, partly based on my own Catholic upbringing, but also based on my life, the evidence I’ve collected along the way and what’s simply in my heart. I’m not particularly dogmatic, I’m currently a member of an Episcopal church, but I’m also open to other ways of thinking and seeing and living. And I certainly don’t subscribe to the notion that one religion is better than another. The world is simply too big for that.

But what I DO know after 47 years is there have been signs along the way that have told me what I needed to know at that moment. And for some some reason this morning’s mockingbird on the sign inspired me. She (I decided she was a she) told me to keep going. Don’t stop, keep going. Keep at it. I saw it as clearly as if it was written in the sky. I even stopped to tweet about it. So it was decided, I’d stay immersed in the interrogations, digging deeper into the subject and transcripts. Trust the process. The podcast about Toforest Johnson feels like it deserves that.

And get this—15 minutes after I first saw the mockingbird on the stop sign, she was still there! So on my second trip around the block, I captured her song. Enjoy!

I’m curious, what signs have you received from the universe lately? Did you listen?