When I called Jerry Ellis a man of letters, he liked that so much he asked me to repeat it. But I really wasn’t kidding. The Fort Payne native and graduate of The University of Alabama has written nine books. His inaugural book, about walking the Trail of Tears, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. I will call this interview the tip of the iceberg because Jerry’s story is so rich that we couldn’t cover it all here. So, I asked for the “Reader’s Digest” version.“I was born in 1947 in Fort Payne,” he says. “My ancestors, who were mixed-blood Indians, settled in Sulphur Springs in 1837. I had a great childhood, but by age 17, wanderlust kicked in and I started feeling strangled by a small town.”Needing to stretch his wings, Jerry took off to New York to stay with his sister, actress Sandra Ellis Lafferty (you may know her from “Walk the Line,” “Hunger Games,” “A Walk in the Woods,” and other films). During the trip, he realized he loved everything about hitchhiking. “I had hitchhiking fever,” Ellis says. “By the age of 26, even going to The University of Alabama and later a year of graduate school in Oklahoma, I’d hitchhiked enough miles to circle the planet Earth five times.” You can imagine the tales that result from miles and miles of hitchhiking and how that fuels the mind of a writer. Ellis was picked up by a wide range of individuals and families, including the Hells Angels, Mr. Universe, and Mr. Teenage America. Fitting, as he’d been a weightlifter who’d set a regional bench press record. Weightlifting and travel had become his fire, as he put it.Over the course of his life, Ellis has traveled to six continents. He lives part-time in Rome. The road called him, steered his life in new directions, and taught him about humankind.“Listening to all the stories … people began to open up to me a lot, and I realized, circumstantially, I was a kind of confessor,” Ellis says. “In a way, I was a very secular priest in the sense of people telling me their deepest, darkest secrets. I’m cheap therapy. They can talk to me. I’m polite, I’m kind, I’m compassionate. I ask the right questions sometimes, and all these stories began to accumulate in me. I realized I was being introduced to the human condition. And I wanted to try and make sense of it.“I realized I had a talent for writing,” he adds. “I had not known that. I knew I had a great imagination; I knew I was very sensitive and all that good stuff that artists have.”His talent was quickly discovered, as he sold short stories in New York, and the first play he wrote was produced in an Oklahoma City theater. Lots of creative folks would have stopped there. But Ellis hadn’t yet found his destiny.“I ultimately wanted to do something more daring, more meaningful, with more substance than just writing short stories,” he says. “In the 80s, the idea of walking the Trail of Tears to honor the Cherokee came to me. It took some failures and confrontations with myself and the world to take the leap of faith and actually walk it, which was my breakthrough spiritually and personally and commercially into New York publishing. I did not walk the Trail of Tears for recognition; I did it to honor the Cherokee and to up awareness about what had happened. You know, Fort Payne was one of the forts or stockades or roundup areas for most of the Cherokee of this area. It always had a strong influence on me.” Ellis actually wrote a fictionalized story about a modern-day walk, only to discover the story was really about him.He gave me a little backstory that led to that linchpin moment in his life. He was waiting tables in New Orleans back in his 30s when he met a director/producer from New York. They made a connection, and the director agreed to option a screenplay Ellis had written.“So, I decided to go for broke and go out to L.A. to sell that screenplay,” Ellis says. “As soon as I got there, I called him because my option money was due. He said, ‘Jerry, I’m going to have to drop the option. I just discovered I have cancer and I’m not going to live much longer.’ I had another script about a man who walked the Trail of Tears in reverse after his Indian grandfather appeared to him at the foot of his bed one night and said, ‘To redeem your soul, you’ve got to go walk the Trail of Tears and offer the spirits of those who died on the trail, the 4,000, to come back home with you.’”Those in the publishing business told Ellis the writing wasn’t bad, and was, in fact, interesting history, “but people aren’t going to buy tickets to anything about Native Americans,” Ellis recalls. “I don’t usually get depressed, but I got very depressed.”Ellis was so broke that at one point he scoured the sidewalks for coins. Ironically, his apartment building overlooked Paramount Pictures, to which he could not gain access. One night, while on the roof of his building ...
