By Martha Southgate

Joe Wood, courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1999.

Ten years ago today, my friend Joe Wood, Jr. went birding on Mt Rainier in Washington state. He never came home. He was 34 years old.

Many people reading this will think, “That’s sad, but people die every day. What was so special about your friend? Why does the anniversary of his death merit mention here?” But when Joe Wood, Jr. disappeared, the potential that was lost—particularly when it comes to thoughtfully considering matters of race, civil rights and culture—is incalculable.

Rather than try to describe his work myself, I’ll let the words of one of Joe’s many friends, Robin D.G. Kelley do it for me—this is from a piece he wrote for the Albion Monitor in 1999, shortly after Joe’s disappearance: “Besides being one of the most dynamic editors at the New Press and a former senior editor at The Village Voice, Wood is regarded as one of the most talented writers of our generation. His essays are generally autobiographical, exploring issues such as race, color consciousness, sex, masculinity, and the problems of coming of age in a post-Civil Rights generation. His prose is pure poetry, metaphors rising from the page, a thousand pictures of meaning packed into short staccato phrases. His book reviews, like his brilliant meditation on critic Albert Murray’s most recent works published in the Village Voice a couple years back, are always incisive and thoughtful. And his edited book Malcolm X: In Our Own Image (1992) has few peers in the burgeoning field of Malcolm studies. If there was a single theme in all of Joe’s writings it is that black people are extremely complicated and diverse, and while our burdens are often collective and shared, what goes on in our families and communities is beautiful, four-dimensional, multicolored chaos.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The manner of Joe’s death was complicated and sorrowful. He had gone to Seattle for the Unity ‘99 conference, an event that brought together 8,000 minority journalists. A devoted birder, despite having been born and raised in the Bronx and living in Brooklyn, Joe seized the chance to take time away from the stuffy conference halls to pursue his hobby. He drove to Mt. Rainier, parked his car in the visitor’s lot, took off into the woods—and vanished. Later, during the search, one man came forward to say that he recalled speaking to a man who fit Joe’s description and warning him of an unstable snow bridge up ahead. But that was the last person who ever saw Joe.

Particularly painful for those of us who knew and loved Joe in the days after his disappearance was the possibility that he was the victim of a racially motivated attack (though there has never been any evidence to support this suspicion). Equally heartbreaking was the fact that, pressured by Joe’s family and friends, although the National Park Service spent $50,000 and searched longer than they normally would have, they never found a trace of him. The same weekend that the search for Joe went on, closely watched by a few hundred, the very ocean was being nearly drained in the search for John F Kennedy, Jr’s downed plane. That hurt too. Why couldn’t they turn the mountain over looking for Joe? Why couldn’t they find him?

But they couldn’t. They never have. Now that so much time has passed, my anger has faded. Mt. Rainier is a wilderness and Joe was out there, relatively inexperienced and alone. The wilderness is a dangerous place. I realize that.

But I still miss my friend, my son’s godfather. I miss his sweet smile and his soft voice. I miss being able to talk over the world with him—oh, what he would have had to say about Obama’s election, Michael’s death, the state of hip-hop—so many things. I miss the relationship he might have had with my son and my daughter, who never knew him at all.

We should all miss what we didn’t get—the work he would have written himself and the work he would have guided to fruition as an editor. This spring, The New Press, where he worked at the time of his death, published Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement by Patricia Sullivan, a book that began with an idea of Joe’s, as Sullivan notes in her acknowledgements. There are the people he worked with prior to his death—among them Robin D.G. Kelley, Cornel West, Adolph Reed, Jr., John Edgar Wideman and Patricia J. Williams, all important minds and voices that he helped guide in ways small and large. When it comes to his own work, yes, there’s all the fine writing he’d already done (in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice and elsewhere), but we never got to see the longer works he would produce. At the time of his death, he was working on a long, meticulously researched family history entitled Blood in the Water. Who knows what else he might have produced? But I know it would have been good–incisive, thoughtful, brilliant on the matter of race and its discontents. That’s the kind of writer he was.

Even 10 years later, his voice can still be heard. As his friend, as his admirer, as a writer, as a black woman, I wanted to take a moment today to remember him publicly. So that he won’t be forgotten. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you lost something the day he died. It’s important that you know that.

Martha Southgate is the author of three novels, most recently Third Girl From The Left. She is working on a new novel to be published by Algonquin Books.