She discusses zine culture, and includes reprints of "Pagan's Head" in her memoir "Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally...Found Myself...I Think". It's a fantastic read - for the "Pagan's Head" reprints alone. But it was her venture into biography that won me over. There is something impressive about jumping mid-sentence the way Kennedy does from underground lit, to beat fiction to narrative non-fiction.
Her multi-genred path led her most recently to document the life of 19th-centure Congo missionary William Sheppard in The Black Livingstone. Sheppard earned the monikor for his adventurous zeal during his trail blazing years in the African Congo region now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a mesmerizing character, but his story was a well-kept secret until Kennedy discovered him in the obscure book Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo by Harvey Blume and Phillips Verner. Sheppard was a minor character in the story, but he intrigued her enough to do some research. What she found was a battered tome titled "Presbyterian Pioneers in Congo" published by the Church in 1917 - likely as a public relations tool for their missionary program. However, Sheppard either savvily or fortuitously, wrote it as a compelling autobiography. It hit Kennedy like a high school crush. Once introduced to Sheppard, she couldn't let him go. She writes "He should have his own book ... and I assumed someone else would write it someday." . . . "I certainly was not equipped to take on the job - and as a white woman I didn't feel I had the "right" to tell a story of a man who, I was sure, would someday be recognized as a major figure in African-American history."
Thankfully, she did. She created a beautiful portrait of a uniquely fascinating man. Sheppard was a larger-than-life character who moved effortlessly between lecture podiums and tribal hunts. A black missionary at the height of the missionary era, he embraced the people and culture of the African Congo in a way nobody else had ever even thought to. He was a celebrity - his exotic stories of Africa drawing as much of a following in America as his jungle exploits did from the Congo natives in Africa.
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