Doing well by doing good

For most people, the older you get, the less likely you are to be surprised.

Until you hit 70 or 80 or thereabouts.

After that, you’d be foolish not to be surprised every single day you can sit up and take nourishment. The New York Times ran a recent story about super-centenarians — people who not only crack 100 but last to 110 or longer — and in that story, they claimed there are a lot more of them than there used to be. So we shouldn’t be surprised by longevity.

But I am, especially when I read, regularly it seems nowadays, about better people than I am kicking off before I do.

What else besides longevity can surprise you when you reach the country of fewer and fewer surprises?

Children, without question, and in my case, the surprises are both pleasant and humbling.

I have three sons, all of them more capable than I am in some fundamental way — thinking rationally, for example. Behaving in a mature fashion. Climbing mountains, doing a multitude of push-ups, understanding which end of the hammer drives nails, avoiding road rage, understanding what an author means when he, or she, writes something like this: “Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle’s compass come…”

FLOYD

Say, what?

So imagine my surprise when it happened again late in the week — I got completely surprised, on this occasion by a phone call with the president of Inkwell Publishers in Atlanta, Beverly Floyd.

Ms. Floyd hasn’t hit 60 yet so she’s probably surprised regularly, but — except for my children — I’m not in the same boat.

That changed by the time I finished a conversation with her about a book Inkwell will publish next year. The author, Sabrina Sanford, lives on the southwest coast. She grew up in Germany, moved here years ago with her husband for better opportunities as a nurse, and finally wrote a novel set in the time of King Arthur. But unlike so many others in the last 1,000 years or so, Ms. Sanford cast a woman this time as a triple-threat: a survivor, a hero and a healer, one who uses knowledge of the natural order, not magic or sorcery.

I learned from Ms. Floyd (again, and to my surprise because I never expect it), that some people combine an ethical or moral core with a pragmatic business acumen to do beautiful work in the world, if I can put it like that.

Experience can shape such a combination sometimes —not always happy experience — and that happened at least in part to Ms. Floyd.

Here’s what I know about her based on a single hour-long conversation. Born into an Army family, her father was stationed at Fort Campbell, Ken., home of the 101st Airborne Division, when she hit 17 and enlisted in the Navy, having to get her mother’s permission.

She was billeted to the Philippines, where she met her husband, Marcus, also a sailor. That was in the latter half of the 1980s. She left the Navy after six years when they started a family, and Marcus retired from a 20-year career. They’ve been married for 35 years.

She’s an articulate, driven do-gooder and a passionate, lifelong reader and writer who launched Inkwell with her husband. They realized eventually they’d have to make the company a nonprofit — a 501c3 — to publish the kinds of books she wanted to publish.

She describes her company mission like this: “to reimagine, redefine and recreate the publishing experience for talented storytellers, (empowering) writers to use their gift of storytelling as a platform to spark dialogue, inspire empathy, provoke curiosity and challenge perspectives…”

That doesn’t sound like a publisher fishing for a million-dollar bestseller or 10. “No,” she told me, “we’re not trying to get rich. We want to make a profit, sure. But we’re trying to do some good.”

Ms. Floyd comes from a tight-knit, very close family. She has siblings, and with her husband, two daughters.

In 2019, her beloved nephew Cedric Hutchison, then 27 and a graduate of George State University who had spent several years traveling the world, was killed in an automobile accident when his car caught fire in Atlanta.

He’d come home to celebrate family events on Friday and Saturday, which he did, and Mother’s Day with his mom, on Sunday. He never got there.

One of the places Cedric loved and visited three times was Bali, a province of Indonesia. The third book Inkwell published is about Bali, where his mother — Beverly Floyd’s sister — traveled after her son’s death: a children’s book by Patti Hutchison called “Flower Baskets & Giant Kites: A Bali Tradition.”

The family also established a scholarship fund for young students in Cedric’s honor, and another fund, called Sunrise in Heaven, sponsoring trips for mothers who have lost children, Ms. Floyd told me.

Together with Holder Construction in Atlanta, Inkwell has also established a literacy program to provide books and more for children in disadvantaged circumstances and school.

To see those funds, either for scholarships or mothers’ trips, or to view a list of books out on the Inkwell label, go to the links included with this column.

Who knows, you could be mightily surprised. ¦

In the KNOW

· InkWell’s website: inkwellpublishers.org

· CedintheCity Scholars: cedinthecityforever.com/scholars

· Sunrise in Heaven: sunriseinheaven.com/#hero

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