Under a Dark Summer Sky

by Vanessa Lafaye

  9. Selma believes that she has summoned the hurricane with her voodoo spell. Other characters place their faith in a higher power who will heed their prayers. Does the universe care about us? Do things happen for a reason?

  10. There are clashes between tribes, of townspeople and veterans, between black and white people, between the wealthy and the poor—all groups who mistrust and dislike the other. Jimmy’s outlook changes when he is on the run with Henry. Have you ever experienced a radical change of view after getting to know someone very different?

  11. There are several parallels between the veterans’ experiences of the hurricane and the battlefield. How are they similar and different?

  12. What is your first impression of Dwayne? And how do you feel about him at the end of the book?

  13. If you were Missy, would you have gone on the run with Henry?

  14. Huge events can be triggered by the smallest incident. One example is when Mabel starts the rumor that Henry is Roy’s father, simply because she is piqued. Things then quickly spiral out of control. Has something similar ever happened in your life?

  15. Missy believes that people’s fundamental natures don’t really change, regardless of outward appearances. Do you agree?

  16. Missy risks everything to save Nathan; Henry returns to the storm zone rather than save himself; the veterans have lost limbs and sanity in the service of their country. In contrast, Nelson won’t even save his dog. Do you know where the boundary of your self-interest lies? What would you do to help a stranger if it meant personal risk for you?

  17. Both Selma and Hilda have very emotional relationships with food. Discuss the very different reasons for this.

  18. How much has changed between the races in America since 1935? And how much remains the same?

  A Conversation

  with the Author

  What do you love most about writing?

  Those (very) rare moments when you hit on the perfect combination of words, and it resonates through your whole being, almost like poetry. I also love it when the characters surprise me. And I love it when readers talk about the characters like they really exist, because they do for me!

  Which book has had the greatest impact on your life and writing?

  Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks. I read it when I had been living in England for several years. Being American, I knew nothing of World War I and its effects on a whole generation of Europeans. I saw the veterans parading every year on Armistice Day but had no understanding of what they had been through. Birdsong opened my eyes and my mind to an incredibly important historical period that is almost completely overlooked in American education. I then went on to read Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, which deepened my interest in the period. So, in a way, it was destiny that I ended up writing about veterans of that war—and having it published during the centenary commemorations. I feel very privileged to be even a small part of it.

  What attracts you to historical fiction?

  I absolutely love having a framework of real events that I can populate with characters. I love feeding in the little period details carefully, to avoid the kind of heavy-handed exposition that you get with some historical fiction, e.g., “She picked up the Regency faceted crystal goblet and remarked on its typical pattern of grapevines.” It adds an extra layer of complexity to what is already a very complex task, but I much prefer it to writing contemporary fiction. I’m completely in awe of writers who wrote these kinds of books without the help of the Internet for research. I can’t imagine how much longer it would have taken to check every fact and answer every historical question, such as “When was the tetanus vaccine invented?” The Internet is the historical writer’s best friend.

  What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started your writing career?

  I used to think that I could only write if I could carve out large chunks of dedicated time. You hear a lot of writers say that it’s essential to write every day, even just a little. My life isn’t like that. I realized that I would have to snatch any small opportunity, rather than waiting for long stretches to become available, if I wanted to finish writing a book.

  Do you write to a plan?

  Only in the broadest sense. I have in mind a series of important scenes to include and a spreadsheet where I list each chapter and what it will cover. But when I actually start writing, unexpected things happen. The characters say and do things that I hadn’t planned, so I need to stay flexible the whole time. For example, I may have a general idea of where the book ends but no precise idea of how until I reach that point and it reveals itself to me.

  What research or preparation did you engage in before writing this book?

  Because I didn’t set out to write this book, the research took a circuitous route. I intended to write about the lynching of Claude Neal in Greenwood, Florida, in 1935, which I read about in the St. Petersburg Times, because I thought it was so outrageous that no one has ever been prosecuted. Then the magic of Google led me to the Keys History website, www.keyshistory.org, where I found the story of the hurricane and the veterans. I found myself moved so profoundly and ashamed that I knew nothing about it, although I was a Florida native. I felt compelled to write about it, almost like I didn’t have a choice.

  Which character do you feel most closely connected to?

  Henry is my favorite. Although it’s traditional for female writers to have more connection with their female characters, I felt Henry’s story more intensely than some of the others. I could picture every step of his journey and how it made him feel—the initial euphoria when the war ended and then the terrible, crushing disappointment that destroyed his hopes. Also, I enjoy writing action scenes more than emotions, and male characters lend themselves more to that. Of the female characters, Selma was my favorite. I’m really fascinated by her. She’s had a tough life, and I loved introducing a hint of magical realism.

  Did you create your cast of characters at the beginning, or did they evolve with the writing?

  That’s another interesting thing about historical fiction. Some characters are entirely imaginary, but others are needed to play real roles, even if their personalities are entirely fictional. From the outset, I had Missy, Henry, and the Kincaid family in my mind. Dwayne and Doc were also fairly well-formed. The real events required a camp superintendent and the relief train crew. Interestingly, I didn’t intend to develop Selma into a main character until I got some really useful feedback from a writers’ website where I posted the first two chapters. The reviewers all wanted to know much more about Selma, so I developed her further to include her voodoo skills. It was a very constructive and positive experience, and I highly recommend it to other authors.

  Why don’t you reveal the father of baby Roy?

  Throughout the book, I want the reader to feel the same emotions as the characters, in real time. Dwayne undergoes a huge transformation during the story, and the pivotal realization is that the identity of Roy’s father doesn’t matter. All that matters is his love for the child. I want the reader to feel, along with Dwayne, the frustration of not knowing the father’s identity and then understand that, actually, it isn’t the point.

  The hurricane seems almost like a character itself. Is this intentional?

  Yes. I invested the storm with a personality, partly to tie in with Selma’s voodoo beliefs and partly to explore how the characters see themselves in relation in the universe. Are there higher powers, which punish and reward us? Can we influence them with prayers or spells? Or are we alone, with nothing out there but indifferent, empty space? And although the storm was real, I use it to reveal what happens to people when they are pushed to the limits of their endurance and find out what really matters to them. The storm is an agent of change for all the characters, which is often both good and bad.

  Where do you get the names of the characters?

  This is hard to answer
in a way that doesn’t sound very affected, because the names come to me on their own. I picture the character, and their name appears. If it doesn’t sound quite right, for the period or the setting, then I tweak it, but generally the first name that pops into my head is the one that sticks.

  Author’s Note

  Although I was born and raised in Florida, I was unaware of the events on which this book is based until I stumbled on them accidentally in 2010 while researching the idea for another book. The story then completely took over my imagination. As my research progressed, I began to realize that it was one of the most scandalous episodes of the period—not just for Florida, but for the United States as a whole.

  It was a desperate time for many in 1935. The nation was still on its knees from the effects of the Great Depression. The economic hardship and competition for jobs did nothing to ease the racial tensions going back as far as the Civil War. These were exacerbated by the return of thousands of black soldiers from the battlefields of World War I, who brought with them new ideas about equality of opportunity that terrified white Americans. Every aspect of daily life was segregated by the Jim Crow laws enacted in the 1880s. It was illegal for blacks and whites to marry or cohabit; all facilities, from hospitals to restaurants to prisons to libraries, were supposed to be “separate but equal”—but of course only managed the former. It was illegal to promote equality of the races in written form. Even in death the doctrine reigned, as whites and blacks could not share the same burial grounds. These laws not only legalized discrimination for whole generations, but also legitimized violence against those who transgressed the laws. I was shocked to learn of Florida’s status as “lynching capital of the South” in 1935, having always associated this with the “real” deep Southern states like Alabama and Mississippi. Lynchings were carried out for a variety of supposed crimes, including infringement of labor laws, but there was nothing more heinous than a crime of violence by a black man against a white woman, such as the one for which Henry is accused. At this time, white men ruled supreme, especially those with money. At the other extreme were poor black women like Missy, Selma, and Mama, with virtually no civil rights as we understand them today.

  For the veterans, both white and black, life was extremely hard. Many had left jobs to fight for their country but came back to destitution. In 1922, Congress had approved a bonus for their service, due to be paid out in 1945. As the teeth of the Depression bit deeper, these veterans began to pressure Herbert Hoover’s government to make an early payment. In 1932, up to 40,000 veterans and their families made camp outside the U.S. Capitol building while Congress debated the question of an early payment of the bonus. (One of the most interesting yet overlooked features of this camp was the complete integration of black and white veterans—for the first time ever. It was not remarked upon by the press at the time and would not be repeated for many years.) The House of Representatives approved the motion, but it was overwhelmingly defeated in the Senate. Many of the veterans left the scene at this time, even further dejected and dispirited. Those 3,500 or so who stayed behind were perceived as both a threat and an embarrassment to the Hoover administration. Fearing that the police would lack the resources to deal with the veterans, Hoover authorized the army to disperse the crowds. George Patton, charged with commanding the cavalry, said later that it was “the most distasteful form of service.” The violence erupted into a national scandal that was a key factor in ensuring Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory in the next presidential election. The penniless, desperate veterans had helped bring down a government—but had to wait until 1936 to get their bonus.

  Roosevelt did not have long to enjoy his election victory. With the economy still in critical condition, and the specter of further unrest from the veterans, he was quick to set up public works projects—both to provide employment for the disgruntled soldiers and to rebuild areas devastated by the Depression.

  It is not hard to see why this group of hopeless men, scarred by their experiences of war and defeated by their government, would have been attracted to a works project in the Keys. Many had been living rough for years. As I learned more of their story, I began to feel it was important to make more people aware of what happened to these men: that they were housed in appalling conditions and left to die, through a combination of apathy and incompetence, when a major hurricane struck.

  Equally, the residents of Islamorada, the town on which the fictional Heron Key is based, were unprepared, either for the veterans’ arrival or for the hurricane’s powers of destruction. It is easy to imagine the disruption caused by the hundreds of bedraggled, disturbed soldiers on a small, isolated community, which itself was struggling with economic hardship. The tragedy that befell the Conchs was no less shocking in its loss of life. With their long experience of hurricanes, they thought they were ready, but none of their preparations could withstand winds and waves of such magnitude. When the storm finally receded, the area of devastation resembled the photos taken at the epicenter of an atomic bomb: no buildings, no houses, no trees. Nothing left standing. Even the soil was stripped from the coral bedrock. A large stone angel, a grave marker from the seaside cemetery, was lifted and whisked 150 feet away by the wind. She still resides in the same cemetery, her broken arms never repaired, as a reminder of that night.

  Although meteorological science was primitive by our standards, with none of the hurricane tracking systems we rely on today, the risks of storm season were well understood by all. Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West at the time, was one of the first on the scene after the storm and helped with the cleanup operation. His conclusion, published in the article “Who Murdered the Vets?” (New Masses, September 17, 1935), was clear:

  Who sent nearly a thousand war veterans, many of them husky, hard-working, and simply out of luck, but many of them close to the border of pathological cases, to live in frame shacks on the Florida Keys in hurricane months? You could find them face up and face down in the mangroves. They hung on there, in shelter, until the rising water and wind carried them away. They didn’t let go all at once, but only when they could hold on no longer… You found them high in the trees where the water had swept them…and in the sun all of them were beginning to be too big for their blue jeans and jackets that they could never fill when they were on the bum and hungry… You’re dead now, brother, but who left you there in the hurricane months in the Keys where a thousand men died before you in the hurricane months when they were building the road that’s now washed out? Who left you there? And what’s the punishment for manslaughter now?

  In the investigation that followed, no one was ever prosecuted for what happened to the veterans, despite compelling evidence of official culpability. One of the great ironies is that the same scandal that brought Roosevelt to power almost cost him the presidency, such was the nation’s outrage at the veterans’ deaths. On September 12, 1935, the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote that putting the veterans in the Keys during hurricane season was:

  …a piece of criminal folly committed by someone in Washington. The camps on the Florida Keys were established to avert another bonus march on Washington, with all the political embarrassments involved in such a demonstration of discontent… Naturally a site was selected as far from Washington as it conveniently could be while still providing free labor for a southern constituency which wanted public improvements at somebody else’s expense.

  People will say that such a thing could not happen today, but the residents of New Orleans might disagree. We have thousands of damaged soldiers making an uneasy reentry into civilian life, with a shockingly high suicide rate that is an indictment of their treatment by the military establishment and society as a whole.

  None of these characters are based on real people. The real hurricane struck Islamorada and the other Keys on Labor Day, not the Fourth of July. There would have been a separate “colored” area of the beach a fair distance away, not right next to the beach reserved for the whites. Such
is the license of fiction. Many of the events depicted did not happen, but some of them did, as told by the survivors. General Douglas MacArthur, given the job of breaking up the Bonus Army protest march in Washington, was worshipped as a hero by the very men he drove out with bayonets and gas. Some of the black residents were turned away from a storm shelter in town, which was then destroyed, forcing the white residents to join the blacks in empty boxcars for safety. The tragically late relief train was blown off the tracks by the storm before it could evacuate the veterans. Almost all of the veterans died, and so did many, many of the locals. People were found high up in the lime trees and as far as forty miles away, dropped there by the wind. Unlike Missy and Nathan, they did not survive for long.

  Some who did survive have recorded their memories in a fascinating video to be found on the Keys History site at www.keyshistory.org/shelf1935hurrpage15.html, which also has photos of the memorial erected by the American Legion. The decapitated remains of Flagler’s magnificent East Coast Railway, never rebuilt to this day, can still be seen in the turquoise waters off the Keys. They mark the place where, on Labor Day 1935, Nature demonstrated her prodigious power over us.

  Further Reading

  Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002) by Willie Drye is a meticulously researched description of the storm and the investigation that followed. The author concludes that the veterans were failed by every level of government with responsibility for their well-being. Even if you do not agree with the author’s conclusion, his book is a factual account that reads like a thriller.