Icarus’ Daughter: Reckoning with a Father’s Notorious Past https://ift.tt/WbugG90
No Ordinary Bird is Artis Henderson’s second book after her debut memoir, Unremarried Widow, about losing her husband in a helicopter crash. In this book, she weaves memoir and journalism to reconstruct her father’s life as a drug smuggler and his ultimate demise in a plane crash, which she herself survived at five years old.
Henderson’s father, Lamar Chester, ran a drug smuggling operation in the era of the War on Drugs and Reagan’s Iran-Contras operation. A preliminary Google search of his name reveals the extent of his notoriety in the 1970s and 80s including harrowing drug runs, concealed airstrips on remote compounds, high-stakes indictments, and rumored involvement in a series of government conspiracies both local and international.
While thrilling, this is more than the sensational tale of a drug smuggler in the 80s – this is the story of a daughter making meaning out of what she once considered a senseless accident which left her fatherless and changed her and her family’s lives. Through vivid scenes recreated from first-hand accounts, news articles, and government reports, Henderson alchemizes the shame and confusion she’s carried since her father’s death while introducing him to us.
It is here that I must disclose a personal connection to this story – not only is Chester’s former compound and site of the plane crash located four miles north of my childhood home, but I, like the author, also had parents who lived in Florida during the 70s, and a father with his own run-ins with the law.
My father undoubtedly smoked weed smuggled by Henderson’s father. Ironically, these encounters with law enforcement led my family to relocate in North Georgia in 1985, the year of Chester’s crash. When I asked, my older brother said he knew the stories about an infamous drug smuggler down the road, as well as a brothel on the county line and a GBI agent gone missing around the same time.
All this to say that my own family’s experiences reinforce Henderson’s account of North Georgia in the 1980s: wary of government, more inclined to be on the side of the moonshiners and even drug runners from out of state.
The majority of the book’s 226 pages are spent with Chester throughout his early life and as he built his smuggling operation. We see him in his heyday making payouts in Miami; flying blind through the mountains of Jamaica; and taking on his accusers in the press and courtrooms to the point of openly defying the U.S. government. In these descriptions, Henderson shows her father as inimitable and dashing, though not without flaws.
Throughout the book, the author grapples with her father’s imperfections – his hubris, which as a young pilot led to a crash landing in the Everglades, and ultimately kept him going in the drug trade long after he should have walked away. There’s a thread of shame which the author speculates may have driven her father to constantly strive for more as a poor kid from Georgia who grew up with acute acne and one pair of shoes. This shame carries over to Henderson, who, though enamored of her father when she was little, inherits a sense of shame around her father after his death – a feeling she faces and even defies in the book.
Some of the most surprising moments are those in which Henderson not only expresses that she cannot despise her father for his choices, but that she has come to feel a sense of pride in him. After one scene in which her father doles out stacks of cash to members of his operation in a Miami club she says, “This is my dad, I want to say. Look at him. He’s not a nobody. He’s a big fucking deal.”
The fact that Henderson manages to entertain us while excavating difficult family dynamics and political nuances without cheapening her father’s story or the seriousness of his actions is the sign of a mature and skillful writer. While unique, her experience is presented in a way that can be deeply relatable for anyone with a flawed character who looms large in their life. This moving and exhilarating story shines a clear light on not only a fascinating man and his misadventures, but the people whose lives were impacted – for better or worse – and who carry his legacy today.
NONFICTION No Ordinary Bird
By Artis Henderson
Harper, an Imprint of HarperCollins Press
Published September 2, 2025
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