Author Interview: What did you have in...
What did you have in mind with the title, the first line of Invictus?
It was a well-known poem in the fifties, one that school children were required to read and often memorize. Its theme speaks to the struggle of my main character, John. He must take control of his life in order to survive in a world completely alien to anything he has ever known, brought about by circumstances over which he has absolutely no control. In the same way the poem might apply to the African Americans living in the Alabama Black Belt at the time, as they were on the verge of realizing that they must take control of their destiny. In a way, perhaps it speaks to the condition of the entire south in the 1950's as it approaches a crossroads carrying a very heavy history it must take in hand and mold into new beginnings.
Is the character of John based on a real person?
When I was a child growing up in a little town on the edge of the Tennessee River in north Alabama, I had a playmate that lived a few houses from me He was the only child of a mother who had adopted him late in life and he became the center of her world. In what passed for love, she coddled and cloistered and contained his every move. If it rained, he had the biggest umbrella, if it snowed--a huge event in our Alabama childhood--he was bundled up like some tiny abominable snowman' walking around more encumbered than protected by his galoshes, coat, scarf, and mittens. And in those summers that brought polio to our small town, his mother would put him in the basement-- filling it with toys and books--keeping him from the polio germs, she said, and then by necessity from the rest of us.
He became the character of John in my first book, a very self-satisfied, bright, little boy who lived in a world all his own surrounded and completely dominated by his mother until, toward the end of that story, his mother suddenly dies leaving him completely alone in the world except for one living relative, his mother's sister, who takes him to live with her in the Alabama Black Belt.
In real life my boyhood friend's mother didn't die and he eventually grew into a rather prickly, sometimes sickly young man going off to college and immediately coming back to live with his mother--sometimes teaching school and sometimes not because he never really had to make a living
When, in her early-eighties his mother did die, he waited for what I suppose he felt was a decent interval and then he too died two years later at the age of forty-three. His life, it seemed to me, was like some unused canvas stretched and ready but gone unmarked. I often wondered what might have happened to that bright, handsome little boy had his life taken a different turn when he was a child. And of course in the wonder of fiction, you can find out about those things. You can create worlds and you can alter destinies. This second book, Out of the Night that Covers Me, is my story of that altered destiny.
You seem to like writing about the 1950s, why?
Yes, the first novel was set in the early-fifties and this one a few years later. Of course having a character carry over from one book to the next defines your parameters somewhat, but mainly it's that period of history that interests me. I think it's as fascinating and certainly as edifying to look back to the circumstances that precipitate events, as it is to study the events themselves. The 1950s was a time in our history and particularly in the history of the South, when we were approaching a crossroads and didn't know it, as we usually don t seem to know it when we are coming to a historically momentous turning point. This was a time when events were on the edge of catapulting us into the great era of social and political upheaval that would become the civil rights movement.
Will your next novel also be set in the 1950s?
I'd like to write one more story, perhaps early- to mid-sixties, that would, in my mind, complete a three-book thought about that period in time.
Your story is set in the Alabama Black Belt. What is the Black Belt and did you think the setting was important?
The Black Belt is generally defined as a land area 20 to 25 miles wide running across south-central Alabama. The dark soil for which the Black Belt was named was once famous for its richness and its abundant cotton production. In the early 1800S over 70 percent of the slave population in the state of Alabama was located in the Black Belt. Nowhere else in the South in the mid-fifties, or in the nation for that matter, with the possible exception of the Mississippi Delta, did black and white living conditions offer such a stark contrast. There was a huge black population that was completely disenfranchised and a white population so long ensconced in power that they could not imagine any other way of life--and certainly couldn't fathom the changes that were about to come. This was the area of the country that gave rise to the first strikes of the civil rights movement; the Montgomery bus Boycott, the Selma voting rights drive, and the Selma to Montgomery march. It was not happenstance in that black leaders realized the marked inequities in the Black Belt would make their efforts to gain equality all the more dramatic.
How did you research the background for this story?
The most enjoyable part of writing this book was the research I literally stepped back in time to find the other characters that would people John's world as he came to live in the Black Belt. My sister lived for a time in that part of the state and still has in-laws down there. They are known in the family as Aunt Robina and Aunt Tommie. As I began to gather material for this story, I would tag along with my sister when she visited them. They were in their mid-eighties when I first began visiting, they are in their mid-nineties now.
If you take the famous highway 80 from Montgomery to Selma, go over the Edmond Pettus Bridge and keep going west on 80 you come to a small town called Uniontown, Alabama and about two blocks off the main street of Uniontown is the same old two-story Georgian house that Aunt Robina and Aunt Tommie have lived in for over fifty years.
The fascinating thing about visiting the sisters was that they were, and are, walking, talking histories of the area. In fact they are incessant talking histories of that part of the country, so that when we hit the door for a weekend visit, we would be obliged to listen for the next forty-eight hours straight. Of course my sister had heard the stories hundreds of times, but for me it was a wellspring of information and I began to make regular trips down there, especially after I started working on the book.
On a typical visit we would all get up in the morning, be made to eat a huge breakfast, and then get in the car, the sisters sitting in the back giving directions, and we would drive around the area, the sisters pointing out everything we passed--train depots, churches, falling down cotton gins--and telling me a story about each one of them. At the end of each story, knowing that I liked to take pictures, they would insist, "Now honey, why don't you just get on out and take a picture?" The pictures became my notes; stacks upon stacks of pictures and each one had a story attached.
"See that house over there, honey? Scott and Zelda used to visit there and everybody would get drunk as Cooter Brown and stay that way all weekend."
"See that old wall over there, honey? Used to be the okra factory. I would come in the afternoons and sit outside in my car and listen to the Negro women singing spirituals as they worked. Most beautiful music I ever heard. --pause--And I know music, honey, I was the organist at the Uniontown Baptist church for over twenty-five years."
"Yes, I took Milton" (her husband who was blind and president of the local bank) "and we went on over to see what was goin' on at the Edmond Pettus Bridge. Went both times, the first time and the second time. It was just horrible what they were doin' over there."
The other great source of information was the scrapbooks--The night of our first visit, we, my sister and I and Aunt Robina and Aunt Tommy, were sitting on the old screen porch in ages-old wicker rockers eating homemade peach ice cream among the Boston ferns, when my sister said, "Have you had a chance to show Pat the scrapbooks?" Thinking there would be a few scrapbooks of family pictures, I followed the sisters back into the parlor and lo and behold--when the sisters opened the scrapbook cabinet, there was a gold mine of the history of the area. The sisters had kept, not one, but two, sometimes three scrapbooks for every year they had lived in the Black Belt and before. The first scrapbook dates back to 1926, the year Aunt Robina entered Judson, a small women's college in south Alabama.
As I sat there late into that night, and on many other occasions, poring over these old scrapbooks, the characters and the time they lived in began to come to life. This, coupled with research at the Alabama Department of Archives in Montgomery and a wonderful source of information on Gee's Bend at the Birmingham Public Library along with books about that time, gave me more than enough information to find the world of Lower Peachtree and the people of Kay's Bend.
What about Kay's Bend? Is that a real place?
The mythical Kay's Bend is much like the real Gee's Bend, Alabama, an isolated African American community in the south-central end of the state. It was first settled in the early 1800s when its owner walked his slaves from North Carolina across South Carolina and Georgia into the Bend to clear the land and establish a large plantation. Over the years, be cause of its isolation, the slaves who later became tenant farmers in Gee's Bend kept many of their old customs and ways of life. In the mid-1 950s, when this story takes place, there were still no paved roads, no telephones, and very little indoor plumbing. The main contact with the outside world was by a ferry that crossed the Alabama River close to the town of Camden. During the civil rights era, the ferry was stopped, some say in order to keep the people of Gee's Bend from participating in civil right marches in nearby Camden, Selma, and Montgomery. There are plans today to reopen the ferry.
Gee's Bend is unique in that it was part of the WPA writers' project in the 1930s. For that reason there is a wealth of documented information about the history of Gee's Bend.
Although large numbers of blacks have left the area, there are still many descendents of the original slave settlers living today in Gee's Bend. A wonderful Internet source of information on Gee's Bend is the Birmingham Public Library at www.bplonline.org.
What about Tuway? What is his character supposed to represent?
Everyone asks about Tuway. I think any character in a story is defined by the reader as he views that character through the lens of his own experience. It's not what I wrote about Tuway but what you read. Having said that, I can give you possibilities to contemplate as far as Tuway is concerned:
Perhaps Tuway is first and foremost his mother's child--or the product of his mother's invention--in much the same way that John was becoming the end product of his mother before she died and left him to fend for himself. However, Tuway is bent in an entirely different direction.
You might look at Tuway as the universal misfit--plain and simple--as we all cope first with what we are before we see or take advantage of our larger implications or impacts. Before he is a symbol of anything else, he is a misfit in a world that does not look like he does. To him perhaps this takes precedence over his blackness, his role as son, employee, lover, etc. He lives day to day in his own skin and copes with it.
Tuway might be the physical manifestation of the complete impossibility of accommodation-in that place and in that time. Try as he might to be all things to all people it is impossible for him to accomplish. Even as he literally walks on water, his struggle to accommodate what is an unworkable social and economic order is the very reason we in the South, and in the nation, were approaching an impasse. B1ack people had been assigned an unmanageable task---that of being subservient and accommodating while at the same time being told they were free and independent and must fend for them selves, while being denied the tools--legal, economic, and educational--to accomplish this. Like the African tale of Little Black Sambo and the tiger, running round and round in circles until everything melts down. It was, arguably, an existence worse than slavery in that it gave no accommodation to the inevitable falling short.