(Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Tayori Jones, and Stephanie Powell Watts) During the Great Migration, many African Americans relocated to the US North. Yet southern culture survives in ancestral memories and in black women's writing in particular. Why do so many black women writers remain fascinated by the South? This panel features five African American women authors who discuss why they set their work in the South and how they confront specific craft issues when writing fiction about this region of profound cultural resonance.

Published Date: May 10, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features on Array fa known Jeff Tari Jones and Stephanie Powell Wise. You'll now hear Honor fan Nun Jeffers provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:31):

Good to see everybody. Okay. Alright, so I am Honoree Fanon Jeffs and I have here with me the great Ari a Jones and the great Stephanie Powell Watts to award-winning nationally known fiction writers who both hail from the south and who write about the south. I'm a fiction writer, but although I'm the oldest person on the panel, I'm the baby in terms of fiction accomplishments. That's why I'm wearing my really cute outfit. Right. Okay. I'm a participant but I'm also the moderator for this panel. I won't read biographies. I assume that they would be in the schedule as they usually are, but they're not. So I just before the ladies begin their remarks and then I'll start with my remarks and then we'll just go alphabetical order. I'd like for you all Stephanie, will you tell us, Lord, this is tacky. Sorry. Will you tell us your books? Okay.

Speaker 3 (00:01:44):

My first book was We are Taking Only What We Need. It was a book of short stories and I have a book coming out in April called No one is Coming to Save Us and it's a novel.

Speaker 2 (00:01:53):

Yes. Ms. Ari, first off, congratulations Stephanie on your new book. Oh, thank you. Thank you. She did not add that it's a selection for the Barnes and Noble Discover program, which is a very big deal and I'm just very excited to see her on this list. I'm Ari Jones. I'm the author of three novels most recently Silver Sparrow. All right, and don't you have a book coming out next year? One year from yesterday? I have a book coming out. I'm very excited about it. I'm really excited too. Alright, so we'll begin with a brief reading. Stephanie is incredibly modest. I forgot about that. So I should have harangued her ahead of time to bring something right, because typically we creative writers just want to have everybody see our sparkle and dash. But Stephanie is going to read remarks to y Ari is going to read from, I'm going to read from my forthcoming piece, your forthcoming book, and I'm going to read from a very brief excerpt from my novel, which is finished and in the hands of my agent and she ordered me to read from it today and to tell the title and so I'm real nervous.

Speaker 2 (00:03:19):

So do you all remember that song Tyrone by Erica Badu and how she started, I'm an artist and I'm sensitive about my insert expletive now and that's me. Okay, so y'all be nice. So my book is a multi-generational saga about an African-American family living in central Georgia in a fictitious town called Chicka, but it's also about one real life figure, a very famous man whose devotion to southern black folk intersects with this family's story. I began this book thinking about a quote from the Souls of Black folk by W e B Du Bois. Ever since I was a child, these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the south unknown to me one by one and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine, and so my novel is entitled The Love Songs of WB Du Bois. This excerpt is from the origin story of this family and it takes place in the very early days of Georgia when the land was occupied by creek and Cherokee people and it takes place a hundred years before Dr. Du Bois was born.

Speaker 2 (00:04:54):

There once was a young man, an African of the Mont tribe from across the big water he had been captured and sold to a ship and on this side of the ocean he was a slave to an Englishman who beat him and who didn't feed him enough. The young man ran away one night plunging into the forest, but he hadn't brought along food and he had no hunting skills before his escape. His owner had told him that red men could catch fish by thrusting their hands into fish's mouths and throwing them up on the bank. The core Monte had tried it but had fallen into the river. The current was perilous carrying him upstream and coughing him out. When he crawled along the bank, he encountered a village of creek people. He was cut with scratches. He was wet skinned to garment and he was hungry.

Speaker 2 (00:05:57):

His hair stood at some length and the villagers saw that instead of soaking it, the river water clung to the Tufts. Africans were not rare sights, but the people had no idea what the core Monte was saying. He was good at gesturing though and he was very handsome. His skin was dark and quite smooth. His muscles well-formed. His teeth were white as sweet corn. When the Kora Monte told the story about trying to seize a catfish by the mouth and falling into the river, there were blass of laughter. He laughed too, but he was terrified. Along with fishing stories, the Englishman had told him that Indians killed men but ate their flesh before they had properly expired. The core Monte didn't want to be a slave though the lowest rank from where he came from, he was willing to take a gamble and if these people ate his flesh, he would die as free As he had been born, the Englishman came looking for his slave.

Speaker 2 (00:07:06):

He was pleasant and seemingly unafraid of being eaten to those in the village who spoke his language. He asked had they seen an African with lots of hair. He wiped his fingers across one shoulder and the other making a hissing noise. There were brands of ownership on the slave's body. The people were concealing the remont from Capcha as they had grown fond of his open armed manna. An elder told the Englishmen that yes, his slave had come through but he had not stayed. He pointed the Englishman to the northeast after some time. The Mont was adopted by a family in the village. They were of the Panther clan from an uncle of the family. He learned his necessary skills. He had been kidnapped across the big water before he went through manhood training. The uncle showed him how to use poison on the water or a net to catch smaller fish and how to catch the bigger ones by grabbing onto their mouths, ignoring their bites.

Speaker 2 (00:08:17):

He was now the core Monte Panther. He proved himself capable of supporting a wife. He had many women ready to marry him and the woman that he chose was of the highest rank. She was from the wind clan. They accepted the match because there were other African men who had married creek women who had birthed strong children, men like Minnie, wa, Geechee and black factor who rode hard without fear. This woman of the wind was lean and had strong ankles and calves. Perhaps she was beautiful though all young women are beautiful in their ways and this is not that kind of story. Her husband moved into her dwelling, which is the way of the people and their children would belong to the clan of their mother. This didn't disturb him for in his own land. His tribe had traced through mothers too. Yet men are men and the re Monte Panther struggled with the woman of the wind.

Speaker 2 (00:09:22):

He shouted and she cried and he was remorseful and the sun rises and the moon collects years. When the husband's anger came upon him, the woman of the wind jutted her chin and poked her finger in his chest. She told him the obscurities of her mind once he struck her and after holding her cheek, she said, I would sleep very lightly if I were you for I am stoking the fire and tonight I shall burn your manhood with coals. He did not rest well for a long time, but he never hit her again. One day by the heart he whispered to her, you have given me a home to live where I can be free. I do not owe you my life, but I owe you my happiness. That is what I have to say. He did not linger at the heart after his speech. He could tell funny stories and killed a bear, but he fumbled when speaking his heart. Tiara Jones,

Speaker 2 (00:10:37):

Thank you so much for that lovely reading honoree. You've been working on this book a long time and we can tell, I don't know if that's an insult or no. It means that you can tell a compliment. No, I mean you can tell the care you put at it. It's not a rush job. Thank you. It's careful work. I appreciate you. I'm going to read from my new novel, it's called an American Marriage and it's about a young couple. They've been married 18 months, they just barely married and the husband is arrested and he is imprisoned for a crime he does not commit and this is their letters. Part of it is epistolary. I always wanted to write an epistolary novel ever since the color purple, I've always wanted to write a novel in letters and so I thought I would share with you a couple of the letters that are couple exchanges when he's first sent away.

Speaker 2 (00:11:32):

His name is Roy. Her name is Celestial. This is from her to him. Dear Roy, I'm writing this letter sitting at the kitchen table. I'm alone in a way that's more than the fact that I'm the only person living within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn't possible. Maybe that's what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It's like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It's the same thing but not the same thing at all. That's the best way I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it's me, but I can't quite recognize myself. Sometimes it's exhausting for me simply to walk into the house. I try and calm myself. Remember that I've lived alone before.

Speaker 2 (00:12:22):

Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and it will not kill me now, but this is what loss has taught me of love. Our house is not simply empty, our house has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life. It makes a place for itself in your bed invisibly. It makes a place in your body rerouting all your blood vessels throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole. Again. Before I met you, I was not lonely, but now I'm so lonely that I talked to the walls and sing to the ceiling. They say that you can't receive mail for at least a month still. I'll write to you every night. Yours celestial. Now this one is from him. Dear Celestial, I don't think I've written a letter to anyone since I was in high school and I was assigned a french pen pal and that whole thing only lasted about 10 minutes.

Speaker 2 (00:13:14):

I know for sure that this is the first time I ever wrote a love letter and that's what this is going to be a love letter. Celeste, I love you. I miss you. I want to come home to you. Look at me telling you the things you already know. I'm trying to write something on this paper that'll make you remember me, the real me, not the man you saw standing in a broke down country courtroom broke down myself like a sandcastle on a rainy afternoon. I was too ashamed to turn towards you, but now I wish I had because right now I would do anything for one more. Look at you. This love letter thing is uphill for me. I've never even seen one unless you count the third grade. Do you like me? Check yes or no. Don't answer that. A love letter is supposed to be like music or Shakespeare, but I don't know anything about Shakespeare, but for real I want to tell you what you mean to me.

Speaker 2 (00:14:04):

But it's like trying to count the seconds of the day on your fingers and toes. Why didn't I write you love letters all the while so I could be in practice? Then I would know what to do. That's how I feel in here every day. I don't know what to do or how to do it, but you've always known how much I care, right? You never had to wonder, I've never been a man for words. My daddy showed me that you do for a woman. Remember that time you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the tree in the front yard was thinking about dying. Where I'm from, we don't believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees, but I couldn't bear to see you like that. So I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind that was a love letter.

Speaker 2 (00:14:45):

The first thing I did is your husband was to sit you down like the old folks say you were wasting your time, your talents doing temp work. You wanted to make your art. So I made it happen. No strings. That was my love letter to say I got this, do what you need to do, whatever that is. But now all I have is this paper and this raggedy ink pen. It's a ball point, but they take away the casing, so you just have the nib in this plastic tube of ink. I'm looking at this thinking this is all I have to be a husband with, but look at me. I'm still here trying and this is another one from him. Dear Celeste, hello from Mars. That's not really a joke. The dorms in here are all named for planets. This is the truth. I could not make this up.

Speaker 2 (00:15:31):

Your letters were delivered to me yesterday, each and every one of them, and I was very happy to receive them overjoyed. I'm not even sure where to start. I haven't even been in here two months and I have already had three cell partners. The one I have now says he's here for good. He says that he has some kind of inside track. His name is Walter. He's been incarcerated for most of his adult life, so he knows what's what around here. I write letters for him but not for free. It's not that I'm not compassionate, but you get no respect when you do things without money. This is something I learned in the workforce, but it's 10 times true in here. Walter doesn't have any money, so I let him give me cigarettes. Don't make that face. I know you girl. I don't smoke them.

Speaker 2 (00:16:12):

I trade them from other things like ramen noodles. I kid you not. The letters I write for Walter are to women. He meets through the personals ads. You'll be surprised how many ladies want to pen pal with convicts. Don't get jealous sometimes I get irritated staying up all night answering his questions. He says he used to live in Louisiana, so he wants me to bring him up to date when I say I haven't lived there since I went to college. He says he's never set foot on a college, so he wants me to tell him all about that too. He's even curious about how I got the name Roy. It's not like my name is Patrice Lumumba, something that needs explaining, but Walter is what my mother would call a character. We call him the ghetto Yoda because he's always getting philosophical. I accidentally called him the country Yoda one time and he got mad.

Speaker 2 (00:16:57):

I swear it was an honest mistake and it's one I won't make again, but it's all good. He looks out for me saying, us bow-legged brothers got to stick together. You should see him. His legs are worse than mine. So that's all I got in terms of atmosphere or all that I want you to know about. Don't ask questions about the details. Just suffice it to say that it's bad in here. Even if you killed somebody you don't deserve more to spend more than a couple years in here. Please tell your uncle to get on it. There's so much in here that makes you want to stop and say like they say. For example, there are about 1500 men in this facility and that's the same number of students at Dear Morehouse. I don't want to seem to be some kind of crazy conspiracy nut, but it's hard not to think about things in that way.

Speaker 2 (00:17:42):

For one prison is full of people who call themselves drop in science and second things in here are so bent that you think somebody must be bending it on purpose. My mother wrote to me too, and her theory is Satan. My dad thinks it's the clan. Well, not the clan specifically with hoods and crosses, but more like America with three Ks. I don't know what I think besides thinking that I miss you. I finally got to make my visitors list last night and on the top of it is you celestial Gloria Davenport. They want your full government name. Meanwhile, please keep the letters coming. How did I forget? You have such a pretty handwriting. If you decide not to be a famous artist, you could go and be a school teacher with that penmanship. You must bear down on the pen because of paper buckles at night when the lights are out.

Speaker 2 (00:18:30):

Not that they're ever really out, they just make it dark enough that you can't read but too light to really sleep. But when they cut the lights off, I run my fingers over your letter and try to read them like braille and thank you for putting money on my books. You have to buy anything you think you might want in here, underwear, socks, anything you need to try to make your life a little better. This isn't a hint, but it would be nice to have a clock radio. And of course the main thing that would make my life a little better would be seeing you love Roy. Beautiful. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:19:08):

Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here with these two amazing writers. Thank you Anna Ray for putting this together. This is really an honor for me. I was in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago. Oh, I should first say that honoree did mention to me bring something to read and I was foolish enough not to listen to me, so I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (00:19:33):

But you can just tell by looking at her, it's going to be great,

Speaker 3 (00:19:36):

Just

Speaker 2 (00:19:37):

The whole atmosphere.

Speaker 3 (00:19:40):

But I do have a few thoughts about Zuora that I wanted to share with you. I was in Atlanta at a conference at the American Library Library Association Conference a couple of weeks ago, and there were two middle-aged black women in the bathroom and they were cleaning up at the convention center. So I was washing my hands at the mirror so I could see behind me, and one of the women had a mop and a white woman about the same age as the woman who was cleaning up came up to her and said, thank you for the work that you do. So I kind of stopped and she was checking out what's happened and the black woman, she looked at the white woman, but her face didn't change, her expression didn't change. She said nothing, and she continued on her way. And so I thought, I wonder what that's about.

Speaker 3 (00:20:32):

And so I saw her talk to the other black woman who was working in the bathroom. So I knew she wasn't deaf. So that was my, maybe she's deaf, maybe she didn't hear her. Maybe she didn't understand her. I was thinking about what could possibly be the explanation. I thought maybe she saw something condescending in the white woman's face or maybe she was just busy. It was a very busy convention and she didn't have time to engage with people in that way. So there are all kinds of explanations, but I felt like it was such a moment and I was trying not to judge the situation at all, and I really don't want to judge either of the women. They probably were both, they probably both had things on their minds that they want to do. I just feel like that those rich and strange moments are what we write about, those kinds of things that we can't quite understand.

Speaker 3 (00:21:34):

We're trying to figure out that this whole big mess of class and race and gender and all of the things that we have on us all the time and governing our behavior all the time were there at that moment. So I thought about that so much of what Zora did and what she was doing, what she was having to negotiate and navigate all the time, how to survive in this kind of crazy world. And probably most of you have read Zora have read, she wrote everything. She wrote non-fiction. She wrote fiction. She was an ethnographer, poetry, poetry. So I mean, there's nothing that she couldn't do. And all the time she's having to navigate that crazy world. So my characters too are small town folks. They're southern, but my writing is set in post-integration of South and about many of the people that I know or that are related in some ways to the people that I know of, that kind of thing. Most of the protagonists are like me. They're first generation of African-Americans in the South after institutionalized Jim Crow. My parents are young-ish, a little bit older than retirement age, but neither of them ever went to school with white people.

Speaker 3 (00:23:05):

In my mother's case, that was a choice. Her very last year of school, she was offered the chance to go to school to go to the integrated school, but nobody in her class actually did that. And I'm sure there are plenty of reasons for that. And I'm from North Carolina where schools were not desegregated really until 1974, not completely desegregated. So Jim Crow has hardly had time to vacate the premises in the world that I write about. And so there are echoes of it all over and it seems like even though it's not officially or institutionally around it is alive and well. So added to that are these significant, heartbreaking economic losses from the places where I grew up and where I'm from. I'm from North Carolina where it used to be that furniture was king and if you couldn't work anywhere else, you could work at one of those at a plant or a factory making a furniture.

Speaker 3 (00:24:11):

But that has disappeared almost completely in where I'm from. So in hard times people suffer. Some of them go to jail and black and brown ones go to jail in greater numbers. Some of them do illegal things, some of them don't. As Atari was just mentioning in her work sometimes that that's the consequence, even though you don't. And when I was a kid, I remember that different kind of feeling in North Carolina, even in a place where people were very poor. There still the kind of people knew that they could eventually make some living, that there could be some money coming into the household, but that idea is leaving. And so that's the backdrop where I want to situate my characters in this place of despair, a little bit of desperation and a desperation that I have felt too, but not quite in the same way.

Speaker 3 (00:25:19):

But one of the things that I'm really conscious of is that I don't want to be naively nostalgic about poverty and despair. Zora never was. Even though her characters are beautiful and humorous and well-rounded and interesting, she wasn't naive about that because it's terrible and it sucks to be poor. It sucks to work in places that make you feel like nothing. It sucks to risk your freedom because you can't imagine that there are other things that you could do. But I wanted to showcase a time and a place and a people and a community of strivers who were trying to get the best out of the situation that they had.

Speaker 2 (00:26:01):

What's interesting is you didn't bring anything to read, but you anticipated the conversation and that was just, I have regional, I'm going to try to move down into a more intimate kind of situation, but I have regional connections to the both of you because I grew up partly in Durham, North Carolina. Then my people are from Eatonton and I grew up, my adolescence was in Atlanta and a little bit less Tony than you to Yari because my parents had separated. So I moved from, I deal a lot with class in my work too, and we're going to talk about that with Zorn Hurston, but I deal a lot with class in my work because my mother comes from very poor working class people. She's the first person in her family to go past seventh grade. Her father was illiterate and she got a scholarship to Spelman College, and she used to talk about, yay, I'm the black sheep in the family.

Speaker 2 (00:27:19):

I'm the one of my sisters that did not go to Spelman. And I'm incredibly embarrassed these days because I went to Talladega and you all can Google. I think most of y'all black folks know what I'm talking about. But yeah, and she used to talk about when she went back to Eatonton, Georgia, she taught Alice Walker and yeah, yeah, yeah. Ms. Alice is a real sweet person. My mama was just in the hospital about three months ago and Ms. Alice came and visited her in the hospital and stuff. And so it's interesting thinking about Ms. Alice and her connection with Zorn ne Hurston, right to Yari, and you don't have to have a connection, but what do you feel about her work? Is her work is Zorn ne Hurston's work important to consider or to reject? And there's no wrong answer here. That's good. I've always felt a connection with Zora nor Hurs, and as I study her when I was in college, the books you read when you're a very young person, they make such an emotional impact on you and their eyes are watching God, just such a touchstone piece.

Speaker 2 (00:28:37):

And I've always liked Janie and I liked the way that Zuno Hurston talked about class mobility. And now that I live in New York, I can also feel a little Zora Ascus this southern person in New York City. So where you're always a little bit of an oddity, you don't realize what an oddity you are until you leave home. And she's from Eatonton, this all black town. I'm from Atlanta, which is not an all black town, but it's a black Townville eatonville. It's a black town though. And so I grew up, as I was educated at Spelman College, I went to all black high schools. I was educated by those colored school teachers in the South who made us memorize all the Langston Hughes. You could wake me up in the middle of the night and I can quote the whole entire Harlem Renaissance because it was drilled into us.

Speaker 2 (00:29:24):

So like Zora, I grew up just with this. I did not know really that black people were a numerical minority in this country. I thought that when people said minority, they were talking about political power. I didn't know it was just counting because when people said that black people were a numerical minority, I felt, or that when people said white people were the majority, I felt the way you do when they tell you the earth is 87% water. And you're like, I guess, but how am I sitting here then? How does that even work? And so I grew up with that kind of understanding about narrative in my mind. I never felt marginalized like Zora. I never felt someone had to tell me I was marginalized. I didn't know. And I think that that is probably the way that I identify with her the most.

Speaker 2 (00:30:10):

Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up the whole thing about the not feeling like a minority, because in Durham or Durham, as we say, we had 25 black millionaires, and I'm a red, black and green diaper baby. And so my parents were cultural activists. My father was a black arts movement poet, and they were very involved in politics. And even though the schools, you're right, like 1974, the schools still were not integrated. We had Dere integration. I see you nodding sister. We had Dere integration, but we did not have defacto integration. And I just remember there was this one, we had one little white girl in all of Fayetteville Street elementary school, Kelly, I still remember Kelly's name. And then we had Bernadette who was Puerto Rican who thought she was white, but she wasn't. And that was interesting because well, she might've thought she was white and maybe it said that on her birth certificate, but none of the teachers treated her.

Speaker 2 (00:31:21):

She was white. So it was a really interesting thing. And so I grew up with this sort of arrogance about being a black person, and probably that comes from Mama having accomplished so much, really going up the class ladder. But she always kept that kind of, I don't know if you got that, but she kept this real lauric thing. So I remember she used to always say, don't nothing go over a mule's back that don't buckle under his belly. And when I first read, their eyes were watching God, and I saw, don't nothing go over the devil's back that don't buckle under his belly. And I recognized every single one of those people I recognized, those gossiping ladies in the very first scene of their eyes were watching God when they're talking about Janie. That was my grandmama. My grandmama knew everybody's business. And she would look in the newspapers to see who black had died, and then she would go to the funeral and then she would talk about the rep past, whether it had been, she's like, they didn't have no fried chicken at the rep past.

Speaker 2 (00:32:50):

They didn't have no chicken at that rep past. So it was like, I really recognize, but this is what I want to ask this, and this might seem a silly question or a strange question. Does shame ever enter into your depictions? Do you ever feel like you're not supposed to reveal, not shame, but that you're telling tales out of school about, I see you nodding too, sister about the work because I know for me, readings Orne Hurston knowing the kind of tension in the Harlem Renaissance about her depiction of these working class people, and ironically, W B Du Bois did not care a lot for her depictions. How do you feel when you're doing class? I feel that sometimes as a southern writer, I'm an urban southern writer and I'm a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and sometimes I feel I'm from Atlanta.

Speaker 2 (00:34:03):

I write about people living in the city, and I often feel like people think almost like that's a marginalized segment of the Southern experience. I was on a panel with somebody and he said that people think the southern literature is about grandmothers and mules. And I grew up in Atlanta and my grandparents lived really far away. I didn't grow up under my grandmother's wing in that way, and I've never seen a mule in my life. I've read about them, I understand them metaphorically, but I've never seen a mule. They stak. I can tell you that right here. And so I write about class, what I write about class in an urban setting, but I don't feel shame. I think it's because, again, I think with this being centered in my own educational experience, I don't have the burden of shared representation. I feel like if I write a black person that's behaving terribly, I don't think it means anything in terms of the collective, I feel it just doesn't bother me.

Speaker 2 (00:35:01):

When I write a book, I feel like your book is your entire universe of people. And in your entire universe of people, you have people who behave in so many different kinds of ways. I don't assign that. I think that's how you can also get can yourself tripped up in your head when you take your own depictions too seriously and decide imbue them with the weight of the whole world. This is one character, this is another character. You have your entire body of work as a time over which to write so many different kinds of characters. I grew up as a writer very quietly. No one was deeply interested in my writing. I see some people here and the crowd who knew me when I was just a little baby writer, and they encouraged me. But in general, I didn't have that feeling of what is the world going to say about what I've written? I never thought the world was going to say anything about what I've written, so I didn't have all that. What does this mean? But sometimes I do feel like as a southern writer, I have a whole different, I have anxiety that's just not one of them. But I feel sometimes that I must've signed up for the wrong set of anxieties. I don't feel like I worry about the things that other people worry about. I worry, but just not about that. Okay. Okay. All right. What about you,

Speaker 3 (00:36:08):

Stephanie? Maybe this has to do a little bit with how I grew up, different from both of you. I went to school in the rural south. I grew up on a dirt road, and so our communities were almost exclusively, but when we went out into the rest of the world, we were most definitely minorities. I mean, I was the only black kid in classes in many, many classes when I was going to school. But in my community, there were no white people. There were no people that, and so then that I saw people switching. I saw their behavior changing. And so it made me feel like that there's a certain way that you have to be in this group, that you don't have to be in the other group. And so I read Zuora and others like her as kind of, she is speaking to me, she's speaking to me in my community. And I know that in her lifetime that she had a lot of people and a lot of really prominent writers say, don't do this. Don't say that. You can't do this. You're just, you're clowning for white people or for majority culture, don't do that. And so I remember hearing that kind of thing. And so maybe that's part of what is a little bit different about my experience. I had this push and pull all the time, depending on the community.

Speaker 2 (00:37:48):

Don't you think that the place of the novel in the culture has changed, which is both a blessing and a curse for writers? I mean, some of us in here, do you all remember when the color purple came out and the entire black race lost its mind? There's people, people are not checking for books on that level anymore. Now it's like if a television comes out, television show has a depiction people don't like, that's when they lose their mind. But it's been a long time since I've heard someone be like, this novel is setting us back. It's just not helping. And so that on the one hand, as novelists, it's a little bit of an ego blow that we're no longer the cultural arbiters. But at the same time, I think it gives us a certain freedom. This novel I've just finished about the man who's wrongfully incarcerated.

Speaker 2 (00:38:34):

His wife doesn't wait for him. She got other things to do. It's not really that deep. She just feels entitled to her own life. But I'm not really worried. What does this mean that I am saying about, because no one's going to read it like that. It's just different. So in the Harlem Renaissance, I'm teaching Harlem Renaissance this term all about it, du Bois and Locke, they really believed that literature was going to be the way that Black America was going to reintroduce itself to society as the new Negro, this new thing. So there was so much pressure as to every novel was like a job interview. How are we going to be presented? What is this going to mean? But I just don't think it's like that anymore. It's true. I don't think it's like that. But I do think that, and then I'm going to go back to a connection that I had with O'Neil Hurston.

Speaker 2 (00:39:25):

I do think that the literature is going to be more important, as I was saying yesterday, now that the seventh Seal is about to be broken. I mean, I hope that's a metaphor and not truth, but I do think that black literature has a role again, that I did not envision for it. For me, one of the things is that because my book is multi-generational, the notion of language and class changes. So I grew up in the eighties in Atlanta, and I hung out with a bunch of boys, scut, black and junior, where my boys, that was my crew, and all three of them, well, two of them went to jail for selling crack and SS, Scott was my man, and Scutt became a crack addict. And so I remember are thinking about how, and I went to college. So in terms of shame, what I mean is this survivor's shame that I have because when my parents separated, we moved into the projects.

Speaker 2 (00:41:05):

And so I was this black bourgeoisie girl in Durham, but then when I moved to Atlanta, I had to learn how to make grilled cheese sandwiches with the government cheese. And my mother would always say, you're a middle class girl. But then I would see roaches crawling up the wall. So there was always this sort of disconnect. And I think for me, I feel that with Janie, like Janie wants to be part of this community, but there's always something sort of holding her back. And at first it made me feel isolated, but now I feel I'm able to access different class realities and to feel a warmth and a love for all those different people. Although I will say that I have more love for my mama's people because that's my mama.

Speaker 2 (00:42:06):

Yeah. And crystal's not here, but I want to throw out something that Crystal talked about, which is, and I wonder, I'm going to start with you Stephanie, but Crystal Wilkinson, who's one of my dearest, dearest friends in the world, talked about when you write about the rural south, for some reason people think it's in the past and they have a, oh, okay, alright. I got some amens up in here. They don't really see the rural south as a contemporary reality, but it is. You go down I 20 and then you turn off on the Monticello exit heading towards edington and Milledgeville and all of a sudden, I mean it looks exactly the same. How do you struggle with that, Stephanie and your work depiction of the rural?

Speaker 3 (00:43:11):

I am really nervous about that, to be honest with you. I mean, one of the things that I was talking to my mother and I said something about being from the rural south, and she said, don't say that. And I don't know, I'm not exactly sure why that hurt her, but it did. She didn't want to be categorized as the dirt.

Speaker 2 (00:43:34):

She thought that meant that you were still using a chamber pot. And I am deeply familiar with a chamber pot. I mean deeply. My grandma's house, we had the little chamber pot up underneath the bed. It was flowered, so that was classy. There you go. You know what I mean? And then my friends, when I would go down there for the summer, they had outhouses. So you had to learn how to negotiate. I got stung by an outhouse in the outhouse at Flat rock primitive Baptist Church. Yeah, I remember that. That's how I learned how to hold it. So she felt insulted by that.

Speaker 3 (00:44:21):

I'm coming to UTR and there is this division. The great migration happened. A lot of our relatives, I'm sure probably a lot of people that you're related to or that went north, and that felt like a hero's journey. And it was. But the people who stayed didn't always feel heroic. They sometimes felt left behind. They sometimes felt like that they didn't do the right thing, that kind of thing. And so I think that's part of it, not feeling like that you made that choice to move. But I mean, obviously staying is also a heroic gesture. Trying to figure out how to make this a little bit better and how to raise your children with dignity. I mean, all of those things are obviously heroic, but didn't always feel that way to people.

Speaker 2 (00:45:14):

I mean, before I go to you two Yari, yeah, my book deals with migrations of different times, but what happens to the land when you have one set of people leaving and then another set of people coming to Yari? We've talked about how, and I'd like you to talk a little deeper if you would like about the ways that people think that southern literature must be in a place with no running water. It must be in the country and how you negotiate the urban south, which I think people assume you're one of, and I assume you're one of the leading writers of the urban south. I feel like, like I said, that when I go to these meetings of the Southern Fellowship of Writers, a lot of people are writing a rural story. And I understand also that because the rural story is so often devalued that there is a need to push back to claim it.

Speaker 2 (00:46:25):

Nothing makes you want to claim something more than someone telling you. You should deny it. And there is this idea that people graduate from rural things, then you go to the big city. So I understand that. And I also understand that African-American writing is thought to be an urban tradition. So when my first book came out, which is called Leaving Atlanta, it's about Atlanta, I was not really invited to any southern things. I think I was black. And because I'm writing about city and I was invited to northern places, to urban settings, I don't really negotiate. I just write what I'm going to write. You know what I mean? And they can market it as they choose. That's just marketing. When I write my books, I don't think about people that don't appreciate the type of work that I write. It's not helpful to me when I write my book.

Speaker 2 (00:47:14):

I just think about an audience. I think about someone. I usually have one or two people in my mind that are interested in what I do. I think that anytime you're in a marginalized group, be it southern, be it black, be a woman, anything. If you think too much about what other people think, about what people like you need to be writing, you're going to end up writing your book about them. So I just write, I mean, I'm interested in migrations too, but my daddy is from a small town, Louisiana. There was running water, but a small town and he moved to Atlanta and because he wanted to migrate to a city, but he didn't want to go north. And so I do think of myself, I think of myself almost like as a child of an immigrant in a certain way because daddy had an entirely different life.

Speaker 2 (00:47:58):

Sometimes I'll be complaining about something and daddy's like, oh, you bourg our children. I just don't know. I just don't know. But at the same time, my daddy's from a small town. My father has a PhD in political science, and he is a diehard Marxist theorist. He's always like, as was Du Bois, but it's all super southern. I never felt, it wasn't until I started publishing that I learned that people like me aren't supposed to be southern. I mean, we just always just felt comfortable being who we were. And I think coming to this place where your identity is interrogated, once you've already grown, you can only care so much. I love that self confidence. No, seriously. Because that's something I had. And then when I got into an M F A program, I lost it. I lost it. I was the only black person in there.

Speaker 2 (00:48:50):

And I remember somebody actually saying to me, because I'm a poet first and saying, you need a glossary on the back of your poems. Oh my God, are they still doing that, baby? I see you nodding your head. Yeah, it was deeply demoralizing. And so then it took me a while. I wanted to get my hustle on. So then it took me a while to reclaim that. So when I see that, that you never lost that, it makes me feel like, okay, okay, if you a woman, and sometimes people want to call you arrogant if you a man, they're like, yeah, well, we going to open this up a little bit. Now let me see how we going to do this. Y'all going to have to be real loud. I know that's going to be hard if you want to ask a question. Does anybody want to ask any questions? Yes, sir. My Morehouse brother here. Oh my God, it's cutie. Hey, I didn't know you went to Morehouse.

Speaker 4 (00:50:09):

That's actually my question.

Speaker 2 (00:50:13):

Speak a little louder. I'm from

Speaker 4 (00:50:15):

Atlanta, and so I've been surrounded by blackness my entire life. And so with that, I know how oftentimes blackness silent, you're surrounded by so much of it, other cultural aspects. My question to you is when did you encounter race as a,

Speaker 2 (00:50:41):

Do you want to repeat that question? When did you encounter race? When I went to graduate school, the first time I went to graduate school, a lot of times it didn't really take until later I went to graduate school. I finished Spelman unaware of the extent to which African-American literature is marginalized. I just did not know that there were people out there who had not, for example, read Zuno hersa. I did not know. There were people out there calling themselves educated that were not familiar with the text that I was trained up on at Spelman College. I thought we had all read Anne Petri, the street. I'm up here, I'm in the class at the University of Iowa, and I'm up here alluding to all manner of texts at I was under impression these canonical. And that's when I realized, I was like, oh. That's when I realized two things.

Speaker 2 (00:51:27):

I realized that that other people didn't know. And then I got mad. I got mad. It didn't give me a complex, but I got mad. And then I did start to feel isolated. I felt almost like I was speaking a language that was close to English, but not quite. Like there were cognates where we could understand each other, but not the nuances of it. And that was brilliant right there. It was traumatic for me, and I wanted to quit the program, and I didn't think I could quit. I felt like I would let down all my teachers, everyone who had written letters for me. But I wrote a letter because when I was a girl, when I was at Spelman, I was very young. I went to Spelman at 16. So I learned how to be the person I am early. And when I was at Spelman, I had a teacher, she was a writer, and I wrote to, her name is Pearl Click.

Speaker 2 (00:52:09):

And I wrote to Pearl and I said, Pearl, I wrote a long letter. I'm really unhappy. I don't know who's on Rehears. It is. And I just feel like people don't understand. I can't get my hair done. I just go, I can't get my hair done. And Pearl, I wrote her this long letter and she wrote me back a postcard. She says, you know, can quit, don't you? And she always signs her letter, love you madly. So it says, you know, can quit. Don't you love you madly Pearl? Well, no, I did know I could quit. But I took that information to heart immediately and by the end of semester I was gone. And I just decided that there was not much to be gained for me to be in such environments. Now, there are other people though, who take energy from that environment. They're like, I'm in this environment. I'm going to change it. And that's their ministry in this important, and it's just not mine. I got to just throw something out here right quick about the term race. I push back against the notion of people saying race, because white folks don't ever view themselves as race. So when someone says, and I don't mean anything cutie, but when someone says, when were you aware of race?

Speaker 2 (00:53:24):

I never was of race. And I'm still not aware of race. I'm aware of culture and blackness. And I think that until white folks start referring to it's women, it's men, and then it's African-American men, and then it's women. And I always, whenever I'm in my class, I will say, well, this white female writer, and I see them jumping and I say, well, you know, have a race too. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Apropos of probably not your question, but I just wanted to throw that out there. Any other questions?

Speaker 4 (00:54:07):

I'm from Georgia too, and I've been writing southern historical fiction. I had that transformational experience when I FirstAmerican fiction class, and you go from Larson to Hurs, and then you speed all the way up to Tony Morrison. It's a big

Speaker 2 (00:54:28):

Gap.

Speaker 4 (00:54:30):

And I just had this hunger to, after you read Zo, where you go back and it's like, I'm wondering, have we not discovered on that legacy from 1945 to 1960, talking about,

Speaker 2 (00:54:46):

Well, that's your job to do a bibliography. But I would say Alice, Childress and Petri. And Petri, of course. Then you got the sixties, Tony Cape and Barra. And one of the things that's really interesting is a lot of people don't know that Tony Morrison had and has a cadre of black women. So she's friends with Science Sanchez, she was friends with Ms. Lucille, God rest her soul. Lucille Clifton. Tony Kra. She nursed her while she was sick. So there's a whole like of course, Shirley Ann Williams, right? Dessa Rose. But Dessa Rose was published a year before Beloved, which is really interesting. But this is, if I can just, I think that's one thing though. What you're pointing out is real, that there are these lulls in the publishing, I feel like for different demographics of people. There'll be a moment when you're in style and there'll be a whole bunch of people and then it'll drop off and then it'll come back.

Speaker 2 (00:55:59):

The amount of work Paul Marshall to discover in this time period you're talking about, because in a generation before, people who, the generation that has really, should they mostly have passed away by now, but the work you have to do to dig them up is evidence of something really significant that it shouldn't be this, right? We shouldn't be here. I mean, we're all have degrees in this, and we're reaching because I do think that in the fifties and sixties, quiet, the street was written the same time as Native Sun and they were considered, but Paul Marshall Brown Girl Brownstone came out in 1959. I mean, that's not my, I'm an 18th century gal, so that's not really my purview. But the library is free for everybody, library cards for everybody.

Speaker 3 (00:56:58):

But don't forget about Octavia Butler. I love her. And with fantasy and science fiction and Gloria Naor, it just hurt me when she passed.

Speaker 2 (00:57:09):

That was such a loss.

Speaker 3 (00:57:10):

It was such a loss. And she was a jehova's witness in an earlier iteration of her life, as was I. And so I was especially connected to her. I didn't know that. But there are a lot of wonderful writers publishing. It's just, as Terry has mentioned, some of them get highlighted and then there's a flurry, and then there're just a few in the interim.

Speaker 2 (00:57:34):

And I also think, I mean to go back to the bibliography, I feel like when I was in graduate school, now this was poetry and there was an absence of, it was like everybody would compare my work to Rita Dubs. I love Ms. Rita. Ms. Rita is a friend, but m