Virtual Conference | March 4, 2021

Episode 165: #AWP21 Day 2, Episode 1

AWP 21 Episode—Jeffrey Colvin (Day 2, Episode 1) We talk to Jeffrey Colvin about his stunning new book, Africaville. Jeffrey Colvin is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, Harvard, and Columbia where he earned an MFA in fiction. He is also a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. His debut novel, Africaville, is an expansive book, a genealogy of sorts that follows several family trees who have intertwined branches in an enclave in Halifax, Nova Scotia, called Woods Bluff and then later named Africaville. Honorable mentions: The 2001 New York Times article about Africville that spurred Colvin’s novel Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Published Date: February 1, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare, recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Martin Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers ...

Kate Martin Williams:

For writers. We are here with Jeffrey Colvin today. Jeffrey Colvin is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy Harvard and Columbia, where he earned an MFA in fiction. He's also a member of the National Book Critic Circle and is assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. We first met up with Jeffrey when the pandemic hit, but a scheduling snafu bungled our getting to talk about his stunning novel Africaville. So we're especially grateful that he made time for us here in the virtual world all these months later. Jeffrey, thank you for coming on the show.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Well, thank you for having me, Kate.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, so Africaville. It's a genealogy of sorts, follows several family trees as they intertwined branches in an enclave in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Woods Bluff, and then later named Africaville as it grew and combined with other settlements. I so enjoy the journey of reading this book. I wonder, it's such an expansive book, and I read that it was 20 years in the making. So I wonder if we could just start out by maybe you covering some of that ground that you covered in the 20 years researching and writing this book.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Well, certainly. One of the questions I often get is you're a man from Alabama. How did you come to write a novel about Canada? And usually I respond that, well, Africaville is about certainly set partly in Canada, but it's certainly about more than that. It's about three generations, as you said, of one family of Sebolts. And it takes readers from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Montreal to Vermont, and then down to the Deep South, principally Alabama and Mississippi. And as it does so it covers the tumultuous events of the early part of the 20th century all the way up to the 1990s. And some of the issues raised are passing this idea of someone who is light enough to a Black person, light enough to, passes for white, those kinds of issues, family, cross racial relationships, and also the meaning of home since the book is called Africaville.

And I began writing the novel really in the 2000s. I was working on a series of short stories set in Alabama along the route taken by the marchers for Civil Rights, voting rights in the 1960s from Selma to Montgomery. Now I have a grandmother who raised a family in rural Alabama so I knew something about these communities, and I was wondering about the people who lived in these communities. We knew about the leaders, Martin Luther King and others, but what about the people who lived along the route? Did they participate in the march and if so, why not? What did they feel about what was happening to them at the time? And so I began writing these short stories. And as I was writing the stories, I went back to visit my grandmother. And after a while, the community that she lived in was no longer there. And so by the time I got to the '80s, the community where she raised her family was no longer there and so that community was gone.

And I began to notice a lot of other communities that had disappeared throughout the south. And then in 2001, I read an article in the New York Times about a town called Africville that was just north of Halifax. And in this community, it was in the news in the 1960s when over the objection of the community residents, the city of Halifax went in, forced everyone out of their homes and tore down all the houses. And so as I was looking at it, the BBC did a huge film about this, and I was listening to some of the interviews, and a lot of the stories that the residents told about their community were very similar to the same stories I had heard being told about the community in Alabama, including my grandmother's community. And so I had an immediate connection I felt to what was happening in Halifax.

And so then I thought, well, that is enough for a novel. So out of that became the genesis of the novel that I call Africaville. And so I began to do research on Africaville, and I can start to talk about the way in which I went about that as well if you'd like to hear that.

Kate Martin Williams:

I sure would, yeah.

Jessica Cole:

Yes.

Jeffrey Colvin:

I started out with this idea of, well, how did the community come to be? That was one of the things I was interested and used it in my novel. For example, principally my community of Africaville came out of three principal sources. One was Blacks coming up to Canada with their whites during the Revolutionary War. As you know, many of the whites who supported the British brought their slaves up to Canada. And some of the slaves settled in parts of middle of Canada, but also some went to the Atlantic coast as well, including Nova Scotia.

So that group of slaves and their descendants became one part of my fictional Africaville. The other parts were people who came up during the Underground Railroad. There are some estimates that about 100,000 people came north with the Underground Railroad. We know about a lot of them settling in the northern part of the United States in the northern cities, but some of them also went north to Canada. Some estimates are that about a third of them went to Canada, and of course some of those ended up in Halifax. So they were the second group, and then the third group, well, the other group that I sort of didn't mention was the War of 1812 in which the British, and a lot did, and some people estimate that the largest manumission of slaves prior to the current time 1960s, was the manumission of slaves during the war of 1812.

But the final group that made up Africaville was a group from Jamaica of the Caribbean. In the 1790s the Jamaicans were really in constant war with the British. And so in 1792, the British rounded up a group of what they called troublemakers, put them on three ships and shipped them off to Halifax with the intention of sending them on to Sierra Leone. And so this group, out of these three groups, Blacks coming up during the two wars, Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, Blacks coming up as part of the Underground Railroad, and then Blacks coming into Canada from the Caribbean made up my group that made up Africaville.

And so the matriarch of the family, the Sebolt family, a woman named Kathy Ella Sebolt, her parents were part of the Caribbean influx to Nova Scotia, and then the next generation there came out of her relationships with a young man whose parents came up from The South. So you had the sort of a mixture of both the Caribbean and the Southern. Those are the roots of the Sebolt family that becomes the three generations that make up the novel.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, I mean it's fascinating. Kath Ella is fascinating. Etienne is fascinating. I loved all the characters. I wonder, at what point did you have to say to yourself, "Jeffrey, I have too many people, like I had to stop adding."

Jessica Cole:

A thousand-page novel.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Well, at one point it was 6 or 700 pages. And there were also a number of subplots in the novel as well. But over the course of working on the book, I would take some subplots out, put them back in, take them out. It went through a whole process of doing that, and also cutting characters in the book as well. And so there was a period of paring down the book that happened over probably in the last say 10 years of working on the book. I did a lot of paring down.

I figured sort of let my creativity flow and see what comes out of it. That was sort of the first part of the generative part of the working on the novel. But at some point, as you correctly stated, I did have to cut back. So I did do a lot of cutting back, both when I worked on the novel and also after it was purchased. I had two editors, actually. The book was purchased by HarperCollins USA, and at the same time also by HarperCollins Canada. They gave me one editorial letter. The book wound up being called Africville in Canada-

Kate Martin Williams:

I saw that.

Jeffrey Colvin:

... because people up there sort of know the community, but I figured since it's a fictional, I called it Africaville in the US.

Kate Martin Williams:

That's exciting and then it got two beautiful covers. You have a variety to choose from.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Yes.

Kate Martin Williams:

Well, could we hear an excerpt? I would love to hear it.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Sure. I'm going to read from the opening of the book because that will give you a sense of how ... You asked about the research that went into the book. I think it gives a sense of how the research about the communities was incorporated into the novel. This is the opening. It's called Dogtrot Fever. Nova Scotia, 1918. Newborns are never afflicted with the malady. The swollen tongue, the reddish throat, the raw cough seemed to afflict only babies older than six months. By the spring in the village situated on the small knuckle-shaped peninsula just north of Halifax, all five of the stricken babies have now developed a high fever. Having no luck with sweet milk and lemon bitter, worried mothers administer castor oil mixed with camphor, then a tea of beer's root steeped with beech ash and clover. When desperate, they even place a few charms under the mattresses of the beds where the stricken babies lie crying. Nothing works. In mid-April With three more babies now suffering from the malady, health department officials visit the village, their faces frozen even before they have examined a single new case.

Why our children? Several mothers standing in the yard of one house want to know. Hadn't Halifax already given enough babies in the fire that leveled ten square blocks of the city months before, when the munitions ship exploded in the harbor? Then again, those had been white babies. No colored babies had died in that explosion. Was it now Woods Bluff's turn to lose infants? And if so, how many, 5, 10, all 22? The following week, after two of the feverish babies die, the mothers turn to the grandmothers, though many are leery of this option. Already several grandmothers have suggested that since the home remedies haven't worked, and since neither nurse nor doctor has useful medicines, the afflicted infants must be saddled with bad luck, must be bad-luck babies. It is an expression the mothers haven't heard since they were children, though the fear of having a bad luck baby has terrorized mothers on the bluff as far back as 1790.

That was a year the first groups of cabins sprang up across the bluff, displacing the fox, hare and moose that ran through the thick Christmas ferns and sheep laurel. Back when no medicine could reinvigorate a baby whose body had begun to show the outline of bones, smothering was sometimes recommended. Take no action and bad luck might infect the entire village. Yet several mothers are unconvinced the deceased infants are bad-luck babies. And even if the now suffering babies are saddled with bad luck, who's to say those old tales of smothering are true? Had anyone actually seen a mother place a blanket or pillow over a child's face? And more importantly for these new cases, by what evidence will the diagnosis be made?

The grandmothers had ready answers. For several descendants of the Virginian who came up to Nova Scotia in 1772 as a messenger in the British army, a feverish baby had to be put to sleep if the father had recently had a limb severed above the knee or elbow. Death was also imminent if the baby's fever came during the same month as the mother's birthday. For the granddaughter of the Congolese woman who, in 1785, dressed as a man, sailed into Halifax Harbor on a ship out of Lisbon, Portugal, a feverish baby had to be smothered if the newborn was smaller than a man's hand.

And for the largest group of grandmothers, those descended from the nearly 200 Jamaicans who landed in Halifax Harbor in 1788 after being expelled by British soldiers from their island villages for fomenting rebellion, a feverish baby's fate was sealed if the child coughed up blood during the same month a traveling man arrived on your stoop selling quill turpentine, goat leather, or gunpowder. Hadn't such a vendor made the rounds in Woods Bluff the month before? Why continue to nurse such a child? Death already had a square toe on the baby's throat. It was only a matter of days, a week maybe, if the baby were a girl.

Kate Martin Williams:

Goodness. Tell us the short sketch of getting from that scene to I wanted to move on to Etienne who was little Omar and then later becomes Etienne, and his son Warner. That relationship was really, really interesting to me. He stuck between two worlds where he can pass, as you said earlier, in many cases for white and yet struggles with his identity. And then he all but disregards his family back home in Woods Bluff, which he doesn't even consider Woods Bluff really his home. What did you hope to accomplish with that relationship in particular with that father and his son?

Jeffrey Colvin:

Well, you said Etienne. One of the things that Africaville was about, was trying to explore this idea of what forces might pull subsequent generations away from their home town of Africaville and what forces might pull generations toward Africaville? And so there were all kinds of social forces acting on both Kath Ella, who wanted to go out and see the wider world. I mean, that was one of the things she wanted to do once she grew up and she moved to Montreal as a matter of fact, but she wanted to grow up. So what was driving her was an idea to see what was happening out in the world. But she still, Kath Ella still had some relationship with Africaville mainly because she knew a lot of people from her childhood. Some of them, many of them were still living.

She didn't go back very often. But she did make one trip back with some complicated results as you see in the book. But she did do that. Etienne on the other hand had other forces acting on him. There was of course the distance. He left Montreal and moved to Vermont and then down to Alabama. But he also had the ability to pass for white. And so the issue becomes this is a Black village, and he grew up in the '60s, a time when the ability to pass for white had certain advantages. He felt that in order to take advantage of some of those advantages, he needed to pull away from any connection to his hometown of Africaville. And of course, I wanted to explore what kinds of effects that this had on him as a character.

I think that's one of the things about Etienne. And then later Warner, who thinks of himself as white, finds out about Africaville and then tries to get reconnected to Africaville. And in essence, Etienne's journey is one of internal, once he makes a decision to pass, what kind of effect is this going to have on him? So I wanted to explore that internal, the stuff that was happening to him internally. And then when Warner grew up, he tries to get back to Africaville. His is more of an external journey. How do I do that? But of course, the people in the community still living want nothing to do with Warner because his father was so estranged from the community that he has to fight that. And so fight for his own place in that community. And then that was really what was happening with Etienne and Warner.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah. It was great. And then the other part of that plot is his, is it his great-grandmother? I'm sorry.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Yes, great-grandmother.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yes. His grandmother who's in prison in Alabama that he tries to then rectify or come back to her and attempt to get to know her. And then she doesn't want for different reasons. It's quite the saga and a beautiful story. I'm so happy it's out in the world. I was thinking about your book a lot, especially because I just finished the book, the craft book called Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses or Salesses. I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. And one of the things he's trying to do is unpack the ways that we have come to teach writing in traditional or old school MFA programs, where often the critique of the group is it's very much colored by the mix of the audience. And typically, I was in a MA program that was very white, and I know lots of MFA programs are taught by predominantly white folks.

Back to Matthew Salesses' book. He's saying we need to reconsider how we teach writing. Who is the audience that if we have a predominantly white audience that will color the way writers of color approach their work. And so I'm curious as to what kinds of things you were considering when you sat down to write with your audience in mind, and if that changes when you go out to sell the book with Amistad or with your publisher in Canada, if those sorts of considerations were part of how you took it on as a writer.

Jessica Cole:

I'm also curious, sorry. I'm curious if you wrote any part of this during your MFA?

Jeffrey Colvin:

Oh, okay. Some of the short stories, I think I wrote during the MFA. I wrote a story called 65, which is actually set during the Selma Montgomery march. So yeah, some of the stories I wrote during the MFA, yes. But most of it, I wrote a post-MFA. It's a very interesting question about audience because one of the things I tried to do in the book was to explore some of the things that I had ... To me writing is living really. And so I wanted to explore some of the things that I lived. I hoped, for example that people sort of get some of the things that you put in the novel. But I did some of the things that I sort of knew about. For example, the name of the college where went to school is called Payne Oglethorpe.

My mother actually went to a junior college called Daniel Payne College, and Daniel Payne is a very famous Black educator and activist. And also Oglethorpe was a very famous Georgia white man who was also had some very interesting and progressive ideas. And so I took things that I knew about it for my own life in my own sort of things that I just knew about. Also, things like for my reading, like Zora Neale Hurston in her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God talks about God as being the man up in the sky with the square toes. And so in opening of the book, when I say things like death had a square toe. And so I'd like to think that my readers are both have, and also the civil rights work, the novel is set during the '60s, and so I sort of think of the reader as being multifaceted.

One is which a reader has some knowledge of Black history and Black culture and also has read widely and so would recognize some of those kinds of things. And also the other group are those that are very curious about some of the things they want to read about. I do get emails from people. I think I get a lot more emails from people who on the curiosity side, who say, "I've read this book and I've learned so much about certain things that I didn't know. I looked up some things I know that Black folks were in that great numbers in Canada, for example." That's a big one that I get. I mean, I didn't know that either.

Jessica Cole:

Especially in Nova Scotia.

Jeffrey Colvin:

I had to do my own research. And I also didn't know what the composition was. I thought that most of the Blacks in Canada would've been Underground Railroad, but turns out that a lot of them are really from the Caribbean. If you're going in the major cities, that's where the majority of a lot of the Blacks are from. And so I learned a lot actually during the process as well. And so I do think that when I think of the readers who would read the book, I would say those are two of the categories. One is people who read widely and have some knowledge of Black history and Black culture in that, but also people who are just curious who read other kinds of writers. So that's sort of how I think about it when I was working on the book.

Kate Martin Williams:

Yeah, it was really interesting to me. I would fall into both categories, I think. It did lead me to do some more research because I ended up going to the Africville Museum site and was reading their postings, and I think they had some videos. And it turns out that your research took you up there to the museum too, right?

Jeffrey Colvin:

Yes. Actually, one of the things I went up about, oh my, so probably 20 years ago or around there. I wanted to walk the land, get a sense of the actual, I walked around sort of, see how wide the community, how much space it took up. There was a park there when I got there, the park had already been built and the museum wasn't there yet. And so the first time I went up, I did that just sort of walking around getting a feel for the land. I also talked to some people who were descendants of residents of Africville, including a young man who worked at the library who gave me lots of information about the community. And then I went up about two or three years ago to one of their community picnics, which is a very interesting experience and I talked to some people there. Along the way, I also talked to the woman on the cover of the book. She was 16 at the time. She actually lived in Africville.

Kate Martin Williams:

Oh, wow.

Jeffrey Colvin:

And she's still alive. And I sort of talked to her, interviewed her, talked to her. So I've been talking to people both during the process of working on the book and also subsequent to that as well. And so it was a very interesting process. One of the things that people find interesting about it is that this whole idea of, there's been a lot of talk in the past years about who is allowed to tell what story. And so it comes up both in terms of culture and also geography. I am not Canadian, and so I always had this tug of war between my own curiosity and wanting to stretch myself as a writer.

And also the pull of, should I be telling the story of ... That's why I called it Africaville when I changed the name of the book. I felt there had been so many stories written about, there's a play, there was a BBC article about Africville. I see my book as a companion to that. And also people from Africville and their descendants are still telling their story so I think that will continue to happen. And so as I said in my book, a companion to those stories. But it does come up. I at one point thought I'd write an article about how people respond to you when you enter a new culture, including one that's geographic. We were all Black, but I wasn't from the community, so that was an interesting part of the process.

Kate Martin Williams:

That would be a great essay.

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:24:33].

Kate Martin Williams:

Well, Jeffrey, I wish we had so many more minutes to talk to you, but thank you so much for your time today and hopefully we can catch up again soon.

Jeffrey Colvin:

Well, thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it.

Jessica Cole:

Thank you so much.

Kate Martin Williams:

[inaudible 00:24:43] the book.

Jessica Cole:

It was wonderful.

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Bloomsday Literary at the 2021 AWP conference & Bookfair. Effing Shakespeare is a production of Bloomsday Literary in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole and produced by me, Phuc Luu. Our trustee and hardworking intern is Sanditi [inaudible 00:25:16]. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever podcasts are found.

 


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