Robbie McCauley: Obsessing in Public. An Interview

Abstract

McCAULEY: The store was a magical place for me as a kid, where you go in and buy things, especially sweet things. I have store references in a lot of pieces. I hadn't thought of it as a category, except that I know it's the place where events that had to do with white people happened. It was that other world. The incidents that I talk about are the troublesome ones, but the other side of that store thing was the magic of the things up on the shelves. There's one story I have about Mr. Reddick's store in Columbus, Georgia. He couldn't read and write and my sister and I considered him trash. But he had the store, and we felt connected to that. My grandmother would send us with a note and my sister and I had to read it to him. I even taught his daughter Martha Fay how to read, but when we got to be ten, we didn't play together anymore.