An ‘activism of kindness’

Inspired by authors Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and John Irving, Jeffrey Blount (B.S.’81) always wanted to be a novelist, writing his first book during his freshman year of college.

“It was a first attempt that didn’t deserve to be published,” Blount says. “But I got my feet wet and I knew then that one day writing novels would be a part of my life.”

After 34 years at NBC, where he had stints as the director of “Meet the Press,” “NBC Nightly News” and the “Today” show and won an Emmy, he finally made writing novels his life — and in the image of his three greatest influences.

“They all helped me find my voice as a writer,” Blount says. “They taught me how to be a literary activist for issues I felt strongly about.”

In January, Beaufort Books, an independent publisher with four New York Times bestsellers since 2007, released Blount’s fourth novel, “Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way,” which follows the travails of Black billionaire James Henry Ferguson (Mr. Jimmy), his very public fall from grace and his subsequent slow, often bumpy, path to redemption.

“Every day we are to go out and not just look for random moments of kindness but to see our fellow human beings in need and go about setting it right. Mr. Jimmy is a representation of that” — who reaps his own benefits, Blount says. “When you’re feeling badly about yourself, go out and do something to change someone’s life.”

Blount says he wrote “Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way,” in part, to draw attention to America’s problems with poverty as well as the lack of health care, education and government aid that often define underprivileged U.S. communities.

“I can now take on these missions,” says Blount, who retired from NBC in 2017. “This is the legacy I want to be remembered for.”

Blount, who grew up in Smithfield, Virginia, about 80 miles south of Richmond, says part of the inspiration for “Mr. Jimmy From Around the Way” comes from his wife, Jeanne Meserve, a former anchor and correspondent for CNN and ABC. In the mid-2000s, a news story took her to rural Louisiana.

“She ended up getting lost and came upon some places that just shocked her,” Blount says. “The incident came up again when we were all cooped up during [the onset] of COVID, and it brought back the idea that I wanted to talk about rural poverty. Having grown up in the rural South, I’d seen it: the lack of decent housing, health care, basic services — in communities lost to the rest of us. I’d been carrying around those stories and issues until I came up with a way I wanted to represent them.”

Those depressed Louisiana locales sparked the novel’s setting: the fictional Ham, Mississippi.

Named for an Old Testament character cursed by God, Ham is the backwater where Mr. Jimmy flees after a scandal. He buys a house there, sight unseen, in the most brokedown part of town known only as “around the way,” where he finds his new neighbors — not coincidentally, all Black — living in appalling conditions: no hot water, no gas, houses literally crumbling.

“Ham [in the Bible] was lowered to a lesser level of humanity,” Blount says; thus the name signifies “a town left alone and left below the rest of us.”

And as rural poverty still exists, so does racism with the two often related.

As the white men who run the town initially stymie Mr. Jimmy’s efforts to improve his neighbors’ lives, one character succinctly sums it up: “You are a formidable man, but you are Black and this is Mississippi.”

Blount says that to pretend that racism is a thing of the past is muddle-headed at best, self-serving at worst. Yet it exists side by side with his belief that it can be overcome with clear-eyed hope and a determined, practical approach — what Blount calls an “activism of kindness.”

Every time he learns the book has spurred a reader to action, “‘Mr. Jimmy’ is doing what it was meant to do,” he says.

“I’m happy it’s doing that and hope it continues to do that,” he says, adding, with no small satisfaction, “You love it when a plan comes together.”