About The Festival Director

Because he read a book: A tough guy's transformation
Charlotte bookstore owner says he wants to open others' eyes
Jeri Krentz, The Charlotte Observer

CHARLOTTE - Sometimes we grow into someone even our best friends wouldn't recognize.
Maybe circumstances change us. Or maybe a dream takes hold and won't let go. That's what happened to Darren "Jaz" Vincent, now 34. Vincent's story begins in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where people knew him as a roughneck, a troublemaker. He was a rap singer with muscles and tattoos and a scar from a barroom brawl. But one day, Vincent says, someone convinced him to read a book about facing fear. It was the first book he ever read from front to back -- and it awakened a hunger in him.
"I was a kid from the 'hood, and all of the sudden," he says, "I realized I didn't know anything."He stopped fighting. He left New York. He moved to Charlotte. And he opened a bookstore to open other people's eyes.
He and his business partner called the store RealEyes, a play on "realize." Before it opened, Vincent says he could have counted on one hand the number of times he had been inside a bookstore. His mother was 16 when he was born. Darren was the oldest of four. His younger sister, Yashika Campbell, says they ran to him with their problems; he had to grow up and be a man at the same time. "He might have been angry for that," she says. "We all grew up kind of rough, but Darren had it the hardest. He was the protector of all of us, my mom included. Even if it was something minor, like a boy picking on me on the bus, Darren would fight him."
Vincent says the fights were a way to prove himself. "He was this person who nobody would mess with," says Humphrey Hill, a cousin who now lives in Florida. "If he had stayed stuck in the Falls, he'd be in jail or dead."
'Who am I?'
Vincent started living on his own at 16. At 19, he had a son. At local nightclubs, he got on stage as a rapper -- he was called Jaz because he wore fancy clothes -- but gave it up. "They wanted me to show my arms and show my tattoos and look meaner. I started being what people told me to be. Wear this. Talk like this. Walk like this. And all of a sudden I thought, 'OK, who am I?' "
In his late 20s, he was with his brother in a bar in Hamilton, Ontario, just across the border from Niagara Falls. A fight broke out. When Vincent went to break it up, someone cracked a beer bottle over his head. He remembers his friends screaming, "Come on, Jaz. Let's get those guys." But he says he didn't fight.
"I was standing there, speechless, with blood running down my face. It was like I felt somebody was keeping me still. That was the borderline for me to start over." When a friend called him from Charlotte and asked Vincent to move south, he agreed. It was the start of summer 2001. Vincent, 28, was working as a computer technician. He had never been to Charlotte. He wouldn't have a job. He knew one person in the city.
That first book
The book that changed his life, Vincent says, was "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway," by Susan Jeffers. Published in 1986, it tries to help readers broaden their comfort zone and "let go of the victim mentality." The goal, Jeffers writes, is to learn to face what you're afraid of. Vincent says his biggest fear was leaving home. "Partly, I was worried about being accepted in other places. I'm that stereotypical, perfect example. I got the scars, the bald head, I'm what they portray on TV: the guy who looks like he might flip."
For the first three years after he moved to Charlotte, Vincent worked at a call center answering phones. During breaks, he and co-workers talked about life and their dreams. Vincent told them he had a dream, too. He wanted to open a bookstore. "He told me that he was not a reader," colleague Claude Harding recalls. "But one day, he had read a book. And he thought, this is it. This is the ticket right here."
Vincent's dream wasn't to open a bookstore to get rich. He wanted to open a bookstore to nourish people with information. "I was looking at all my family members, and I saw people who were 26 years old and had six kids, and they had never picked up a book about parenting, never picked up a book about pregnancy." He bought his first books at Goodwill. He asked another shopper for recommendations. Vincent says business at RealEyes has "offs and ons." He has two employees; he works 50 to 60 hours a week.
Last year, he got even more involved in the community by starting the Charlotte Literary Festival. The first event drew poet Nikki Giovanni and local authors. Vincent's longtime friends from New York shake their heads. ''He's the last person on earth that you would think would own a bookstore," says Brian Thomas in Florida.
Humphrey Hill, Vincent's cousin, says, "Everybody who knows Darren Vincent back in the Falls says, 'Oh yeah, I remember him. He beat up my cousin. Now he owns a bookstore?' " Even Vincent realizes the store was a leap. "Trust me," he says. "I look back and it still seems weird."

Courage to Change
by Darren Vincent
Editor: Amy Wong

Positive Thinking

Looking back now, I can see it was fear that was holding me back. Not fear of dying. Fear of trying. I was afraid to succeed. I was afraid to be different. I was afraid to walk away from a fight. Why? Because for most of my life, I didn’t know any other way to be. I’m from Niagara Falls. A beautiful place, you think. And you’d be right, if you were talking about the Canadian side, the part that tourists flock to. But I’m from the other side of the Falls, the New York side, which—there’s no nice way to put it—is a big ghetto. The city used to be booming, with steel, chemical and manufacturing plants. But then came layoffs. The plants closed. Poverty and crime rose.
There aren’t a lot of opportunities for kids from the Falls. I grew up kind of rough. My mom had me when she was 16 and not really ready for the responsibility of motherhood. My dad wasn’t around. Since I was the oldest of us four kids, I ended up being the man of the house. It fell to me to protect my siblings, and even my mom, and I got into a lot of fights, too many to count.
I left my mom’s house by the time I was 16, dropped out of high school, got my own place at 17. I had a son at 19. That was kind of a wake-up call to get my act together. I got my GED. Then my associate’s degree, doing work-study to pay for tuition. I decided to major in communications because the courses—speech, mass communication, psychology, human behavior—gave me a better understanding of how people’s minds worked.
Even though the material was interesting, I didn’t put a lot of effort into my classes. I was too cool for school. Too cool to raise my hand in class. Too cool to read a book. I got away with it because I have a really good memory. I retained a lot of what I heard in class. And I’d ask other students to summarize the readings and get professors to review what was going to be on their tests.
The degree helped me land a job as a computer technician. Not the most exciting work, but it was legit. That didn’t mean I stopped fighting, though. I mean, I had to show the drug dealers I was just as bad as they were.
The fact that I’m six-one, 215, had something to do with it. People took one look at me and expected me to use my size, be a thug. Like a lot of guys in the ‘hood, I wanted to be a rapper. I wrote my own stuff, played some local clubs. Because I dressed nice—I wasn’t into the baggy jeans look—people called me Jaz.
They wanted me to show my tattoos, look meaner. Said I should walk like this, talk like that. I did it too. I let other people tell me how to be, let them define me. And then I started to wonder, Okay, who am I really?
I felt a pull to leave home, but I was afraid. Would I be accepted someplace else, outside the Falls? I had the scars, the tats, the bald head. I fit the stereotype of a guy from the ‘hood, the kind they show on TV. The guy who looks like he’s going to flip at any moment.
One Saturday in the summer of 2001, my brother and I went out. We went to a bar across the border in Hamilton, Ontario, where some friends were hanging out. A fight broke out. I got hit over the head with a beer bottle. I stood there, blood dripping down my face. My friends were yelling, “C’mon, Jaz. Let’s get those guys!”
Then I heard someone else talking to me through all the noise, saying, “Stop.” Someone way bigger than I was. It was like he was holding me back, keeping me still.
I walked away from the fight. That was the first time in my life I became submissive, and surrendered to the will of a higher being. I went home and prayed. I asked, What do you want me to do?
Later that night, a friend I hadn’t heard from in a couple years called. She was living in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Why don’t you come down here?” she said.
No joke. I pray for direction and out of the blue, I get this call. It was pretty obvious what I needed to do. I set a date in October to move. But I was still scared. I kept spending all my money in the Falls, using it as an excuse why I couldn’t leave. October came, and I couldn’t afford a moving truck. My friend in Charlotte said her parents were moving down South and arranged for me to share their truck. No more excuses.
I left home, left the Falls. I should have failed when I got to Charlotte. I only knew one person in the city. I didn’t have a job lined up, and after 9/11, a lot of opportunities dried up.
The one job I found was at a call center run by OnStar. Maybe you’ve seen the commercials. It’s that in-vehicle safety and security system you can get in GM cars, where you press a button and are automatically connected with a person who can tell you the car needs an oil change, for example, or send police and EMTs to you in an emergency.
Well, I was one of those people answering calls. I was grateful to have the job on a practical level. I needed some way to pay the rent. On a deeper level, though, I was confused. I prayed a lot that first year in Charlotte. I’d say, God, I don’t understand why you brought me down here to work at a call center.
Now, in retrospect, I think it was because I needed to be there. Since the call center was staffed 24-7, hundreds of people worked there. People I never would’ve met otherwise. We’d talk during breaks and guess what? Every one of them was interesting. Everybody had a dream.
I learned customer service. At first I thought the callers were all uppity rich people in fancy cars. Then I started listening to them, and I could tell they weren’t all that different from anyone else. They had their problems too, and they wanted help. When they called OnStar to complain about something, I knew it wasn’t me they were mad at. So I learned not to take things personally. Me, the guy who used to beat people up if I thought they were disrespecting me.
But the biggest thing that I learned came out of an argument I had in the cafeteria one day with a coworker. I’d been at OnStar for a year by then. My coworker, a manager, used to be a teacher in Canada, so I liked to call him The Professor. We got into it talking about African American males. I said guys like me just didn’t get the same opportunities others did. The Professor contended that people of any race felt stuck in their circumstances because they were afraid to change.
He gave me a book, a paperback. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. “Promise me you’ll read it from front to back,” he said.
Here was someone who couldn’t have been more different from me—older, white, Canadian, educated, management—and yet he really cared about my well-being. I’d never finished a book in my life, but I felt moved to read this one.
So I did, cover to cover. It really opened my eyes. I saw what I was afraid of and why. I saw that I could face my fears and push through them. I saw that I could go from feeling like a victim of circumstances to being a creator of a meaningful life.
The book totally changed me. I thought I knew everything, but I didn’t know anything. I was hungry to learn. I started seeking ?information, buying books at Goodwill, picking people’s brains.
My imagination was on fire. I would open a bookstore, I decided. I wanted to open other people’s eyes, to feed their minds. I talked to my coworkers about my dream in February 2004. I had five books to my name. By the end of March, I had hundreds. Every night I was carrying boxes of books—from Goodwill or donated by coworkers—up to my apartment.
A friend from work took me to NoDa, an area of Charlotte with a real laid-back vibe, people of different backgrounds all getting along. This was where I wanted my bookstore to be. I saved up money, got two small-business loans with a partner’s help, and leased a retail space.
RealEyes opened its doors that December. I sell new and used books, and two years ago I started the Charlotte Literary Festival to get even more people reading. I put in 50, 60 hours a week. It’s hard work keeping a dream alive, but you know what? I’m not afraid to try.
In his own words:
“During March of 2006, I felt I could do more to promote literacy so I started the Charlotte Literary Festival. Again, considering my past in the ghetto, most banks and businesses refused to support my efforts.

I started the festival with only about $350.00 in my bank account. Not only did seven radio stations, 3 major newspapers and News 14 Carolina cover the event, we had over 5,000 people come out. We also had over 40 vendors, over 30 authors and world renowned author/poet Nikki Giovanni.

During the 2007 Charlotte Literary Festival, I spoke along side some of this industries most recognized authors including Catherine Coulter, Robert Wilcox, Donna Hill, Mary B. Morrison, Francis Ray, Gwynne Forster, Omar Tyree and Zane. I had no idea who these people’s names were beyond four years ago!

After Creative Loafing chose the festival as its cover story and the article by the Charlotte Observer, my journey from a troubled past to a monumental present has touched the hearts of individuals nationwide. I speak at schools throughout the community sharing my story and encouraging kids to read! My commitment to this cause and the empowerment of all people has given birth to a successful festival that will remain for years to come. I said all this to say, anything is possible!”

For Speaking Engagements and booking information call (704) 737-4335