James McGraw: A Life Freed by Storytelling

Miami Herald

05-06-2025

NAPERVILLE, IL / ACCESS Newswire / June 4, 2025 / James McGraw: A Life Freed by Storytelling
There's something disarming about James McGraw's honesty. Maybe it's how casually he reflects on hardship. Maybe it's the way he admits to things most people try to forget-like eating mud as a child, working for two pieces of bubble gum, or wearing the sleeves from a long-sleeve shirt on his feet, held up with rubber bands, just to feel like he fit in.
This isn't a man interested in impressing anyone. He's not chasing a legacy. He's just telling the truth the way he remembers it.
For McGraw, remembering is liberation.
Born Into Struggle, Raised With Grit
James McGraw grew up in Fairfield County, South Carolina, on land that still carried the scars of the past. He was born in a wooden shack near the old quarry, where his dad worked for wages that barely fed them. And yet, this wasn't "history" for McGraw-it was daily life.
In his words: "Although I was not literally a slave, I possessed a mentality akin to that of a person who is not truly free."
That idea of mental enslavement runs deep through his reflections. He speaks of riding in the back seats of white families' cars, eating from their porches, laughing at jokes that weren't funny-just to stay safe. He remembers the quiet weight of being tolerated, not welcomed.
What makes McGraw's story resonate isn't just the hardship. It's the clarity with which he sees it and the humility with which he tells it.
Ask him what got him through, and he'll tell you: prayers. Not loud ones. Silent ones. The kind whispered by parents who were too poor to protect him from everything but still believed in a God who could.
"My parents are long gone," he writes in Slave No More II, "but I believe their prayers for me are still working in my favor today."
This isn't a grand declaration of faith. It's quieter than that. More lived-in. Like so much of his story, it's more about endurance than certainty. Faith wasn't something he put on display-it was what kept him moving.
The Weight of Being Seen
If McGraw's childhood was shaped by survival, his early adulthood was defined by a kind of invisibility. He worked hard, but opportunities came slowly, if at all. He was dismissed, overlooked, and, in some cases, flat-out mistreated.
One memory in particular stands out: a bounced paycheck, written by a white employer to his father for a week's wages. But when the check bounced, it was McGraw-not the employer-whom the police came to arrest.
It was only thanks to the intervention of a local white woman his mother worked for that the arrest was avoided. "I started grinning from ear to ear," he recalls, "because I knew it was all over now. These were rich white folk, and when they spoke, everybody listened."
Moments like that are scattered throughout his life-not just as reminders of injustice, but as markers of just how tightly woven those power dynamics were.
James McGraw didn't set out to become a writer. In fact, he's the first to say he doesn't see himself as one. Slave No More, his first book, was more of a test than anything else. Would anyone care?
But they did. Friends, family, and strangers told him his story mattered. They told him to keep going. So he did.
Slave No More II picks up where the first left off, moving from his early years into adulthood. It's unvarnished, deeply personal, and sometimes jarringly frank. He writes the way people talk when they trust you-with no agenda, just memories that have waited too long to be shared.
What's striking about the book isn't the prose or the polish. It's the feeling that someone is finally saying out loud what many have lived but never put into words.
Life After the Plantation
McGraw never strayed far from where he was born. He built his home on the very land he once called "the plantation." That's not a metaphor. It's the literal place where he once labored-and where he now lives freely.
It's symbolic, sure. But it's also practical. He made a life where he could. And in time, he made that life meaningful.
He worked at plants and factories, took supervisory roles, and lost jobs when the economy turned. Eventually, after a third plant closure, he invested everything-retirement savings included-into a franchise. It nearly bankrupted him. But a contract with a major university saved the business. From there, things changed.
He later launched a janitorial company and became what he once never thought possible: self-employed, self-sufficient, and a mentor to others.
McGraw's sense of success isn't about money or recognition. It's in the fact that his children are both business owners. That they come to him for advice. That he was able to provide something more than what he had.
He writes about becoming a father, buying his first suit, and fixing up his car so it would stand out in town-not because he wanted attention, but because, for the first time, he felt like he had something to show for his struggle.
And even in those moments, he never forgets the people still stuck in cycles he escaped. His concern about generational disconnect is palpable. He talks about how family reunions used to matter. How children once belonged to a village, not just a household.
"It takes a village to raise a child," he says. "But that village starts with the immediate family. And without those values, the risks grow."
Why His Story Matters Now
James McGraw doesn't preach. He doesn't moralize. But read between the lines, and his story is a call to listen-especially to those who don't often speak in public.
He's part of a generation that lived through change but didn't always benefit from it. His reflections carry weight because they're lived, not theorized.
In an age where voices are everywhere, McGraw reminds us of the power of the quiet ones. The ones who observe more than they comment. The ones who survive more than they shine.
His story isn't a lesson. It's a life.
Not Just a Memoir, But a Mirror
There are no perfect resolutions in Slave No More II. No dramatic triumphs. No clean break from the past. Just a man still reckoning with what it meant to grow up poor, Black, and unseen in the American South.
But maybe that's what makes it powerful. McGraw doesn't try to wrap things up. He tells it like it was. And in doing so, he offers something rare: the sense that being heard-really heard-can be its own kind of freedom.
So no, James McGraw isn't trying to sell you anything. But if you take the time to listen, he just might remind you of something you forgot you needed to hear.
https://jamesmcgraw.com/
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SOURCE: James McGraw