Yet in the midst of the hardest moments helping my mother write this book—those moments when I faced unexpected tears, spiritual fatigue, or stubborn memory blocks—I began to consider the possibility that my fascination with horror stories sprang from a very different source. What if it was my knowledge of real-life horror that drove me to the sanctuary of horrific fiction? What if it started when I read Roots at the age of eleven with the keen realization that my ancestors had faced the same fate as Kunta Kinte? Or when I put pen to paper that same year to imagine what it really would have felt like to be a confused African girl chained in the bowels of a ship as it rocked its way across an unknown sea to an unknown land? Or during those Martin Luther King Day commemorations with my family at Miami’s Torch of Friendship, when I visualized Dr. King—a man who’d nearly been bitten by my parents’ dog—suddenly felled by an assassin’s bullet during a casual moment on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel? Or knowing that black men could be beaten to death by police officers in a way no sane person would beat a dog, and no one would go to jail for it?
Or, to bring it closer to home, did I begin to embrace imaginary monsters when I thought of my own mother, her eyes burning with teargas as a girl not much older than I? Maybe that’s why my mother loves horror movies, too. Maybe they’re infinitely preferable to dwelling on the real-life horrors people inflict upon one another. I realized without being directly told that there was hostility for my family outside of the solid walls of those suburban homes where we lived in racial isolation. And I knew very well, even if the knowledge wasn’t conscious, that both of my parents carried war wounds I might one day carry myself. I wouldn’t realize the larger cost imposed by their activism until I was an adult, but I have always known what happened to my mother’s eyes.
In December 2001, my family had a Christmas and Kwanzaa gathering at my parents’ new home in a rural development called The Farms at Quincy, in Gretna, our first Christmas together since Mother’s death the previous year. The house has a parklike yard dotted with more than sixty pine trees and moss-hanging oaks, nestled in a community of very nice homes where the occasional dilapidated shack or immense tobacco barn had been left standing as a testament to the area’s past. For several days, all of us lived together in our own rooms in the same house for the first time since we were in college, bringing spouses, children, and my stepdaughter with us. As we have since we were children, we celebrated Christmas and then Kwanzaa, reviewing the seven principles and reflecting on which one has meant the most to us in the past year. (My favorites are Kuumba, or creativity, and Imani, which means faith.) Mom brought old Cosby videotapes to recreate the times when we’d all huddle around the television to watch that program religiously, seeing our own family reflected back at us through a more humorous, stress-free looking glass. We also watched videotapes of Christmases past, family celebrations, and a party we recorded when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, enjoying the images of Mother and the rest of us at different ages and with different hairstyles. In one video, I played South African township music on my keyboard while Mom danced and shimmied, laughing about the United Nations parties she’d attended the year she lived in New York in the 1960s, and I could see a peek at the carefree young woman I wish I’d had a chance to know.
After Christmas dinner, our family made a pilgrimage to the grave site at St. Hebron AME Church, where Lydia Johnita is buried. Aunt Priscilla, who had arrived on Christmas Eve to stay at the house with us, joined us as Mom, Dad, and I took Johnita and Lydia, and their husbands, to see the grave of the sister who shares their names.
“Why do you think none of us has followed in Mom and Dad’s footsteps as activists?” I asked my sisters during a moment of solitude during that Christmas gathering. I told them about a woman I’d interviewed weeks before, a Miami resident named Mrs. Johnnie Parris, who told me that none of her children had followed her activist path either. Why not? Why weren’t any of us more like Jesse Jackson Jr., who is a United States congressman, or Florida Senator Kendrick Meek, whose mother, U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek, sponsored me as a high school messenger when she served in the Florida Senate before going to Congress? Why weren’t we like the children of legendary SNCC activist Bob Moses, helping their father with his newest campaign, the Algebra Project, which is teaching black children the skills they need to succeed in math and in life?
Or are we like our parents in ways we don’t even know?
Johnita and Lydia are both lawyers like our father, but neither of them practices civil rights law. Johnita’s first job was on Wall Street. Now, originally based on her desire to help me navigate through confusing book and film contracts, she has specialized in media law at the McGraw-Hill Companies. She recently taught the subject for a semester at Cornell Law School, where she received her law degree. Still, our parents’ imprint is evidenced by Johnita’s interests: When she first went to law school, she wanted to do public-interest work. Like me, she went to England as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar, and she wrote her master’s dissertation at the University of Sussex on the leadership, structure, and strategies of Afro-Caribbean organizations that emerged in Britain’s racial climate. During law school, she interned with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the United Nations Center for Human Rights. After law school, she spent a year working pro bono at a nonprofit anti-racism organization in Rome, Italy. Today, she is still committed to public-interest work. She has tutored prisoners to improve literacy and advised incarcerated mothers in their desire to fulfill their responsibilities toward their children. At McGraw-Hill, she has become a mentor for disadvantaged youth and has been involved with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“We need to be everywhere,” Johnita says. “We need to be in the corporations, the boardrooms, and the universities, in addition to the civil rights organizations, helping the civil rights cause and making a path for those who come after us.”
And Lydia, who had initially proclaimed that she would depart from family tradition by practicing corporate law and getting paid, has found a job she loves, working for the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of the General Counsel in Dallas as a lawyer who helps monitor the quality of care provided in nursing homes. After watching Mother’s decline late in life, including her brief stay in a nursing home while she recovered from surgery, work on behalf of the elderly is more important than ever in Lydia’s mind. “I have an overall sense of pride in what I do because I feel that ultimately my job does ensure that the elderly receive better care,” says Lydia, who is the only one of us who has the full responsibilities of motherhood, at least for now. “It’s important because in this society we tend to take our elders for granted.”
As for me, I’m a writer. I write about history and race sporadically, but I am not a Randall Robinson, bell hooks, Derrick Bell, Jill Nelson, or Michael Eric Dyson. Most of the characters in my books are black, which is important to me because I’ve read too many books where I did not feel represented, but with the exception of The Black Rose, my characters’ stories are not focused on questions of race and discrimination. I like to think I’m having an impact in my own way, but if I have an agenda, it’s unclear even to me. I have no master plan. I only know how to write the stories that ask me to tell them.
When I was awarded a Rotary Foundation Scholarship, I had the pleasure of hearing Nobel prize–winning author Toni Morrison read from her work in 1988. I was a graduate student in English literature at the University of Leeds in England at the time, and I gathered enough nerve to stand up to ask Ms. Morrison a question. “When you write, do you ever write from anger?” I asked her. She thought for a moment, then she said she had never found anger to be a productive place from which to write. Listening, I felt the young writer in me loosening with relief. No, anger is not a productive creative place for me either, I thought. Maybe I’d believed I had to write from anger to be effective as a black writer, but I didn’t think I would know how to do that. The larger u
nasked question that lingered in my mind: What is a black writer? What does a black writer do?
I think I was looking for permission to be myself, free of constraints imposed either from without or within. I’d always included black characters in my writing, but I’d also spent much of my adolescence writing about white characters because they were “generic,” and in college, when I began depicting more black characters, I picked inner-city subjects whose experiences were very different from my own. Writing streetwise dialogue I had never mastered myself, I felt like a fraud. For whom was I writing? What should I be writing about?
Buried deep inside of me, I had a love for horror I’d never given myself permission to explore as a writer. When I interviewed vampire maven Anne Rice as a reporter for the Miami Herald, I got another vital blessing to be myself when I asked Ms. Rice how she responded to criticism that she was “wasting her talents” writing about vampires. She nearly laughed. “That used to bother me,” she told me, “but my books are taught in universities. Writers don’t have to choose between being ‘literary’ or ‘commercial.’ They can be both.” Hearing those words, I shed my last vestiges of doubt. I’d always wanted to be respected as a writer more than anything, especially given that I grew up feeling a responsibility to achieve because I sensed the eyes of white society studying me, waiting for me to reinforce every negative stereotype. But without ever knowing why I’d asked her the question, Anne Rice gave me hope that perhaps I could write exactly what I pleased and still be respected, even if I didn’t write what might be expected of me.
Within weeks of that interview, I started writing my first published novel, The Between. In that book, my protagonist, Hilton James, is caught between life and death after a childhood near-drowning incident, so death is chasing him in his dreams. Hilton also happens to be a black community activist who is often away from home, trying to save the world. His wife is a highly regarded judge. His family lives in a mostly white neighborhood and faces hostile neighbors. I specifically chose to write from a black male viewpoint because I did not believe there were enough strong, sympathetic black males in black commercial fiction. Some of the decisions I made in writing The Between were purely political, but it is not a political book. Neither is my second novel, My Soul to Keep, although I took great pleasure in writing a novel about an immortal African because it gave me opportunities to create a living eyewitness to important moments in black history. At one point, my immortal, Dawit, laments his experience as a slave in the American South: I remember these events as well as I do eating breakfast this morning. It was a very short time ago. Yet, I have lived to see it buried. And Adele, and all of us, treated as though our pain was imaginary. It was not imaginary. It is with me every day.
In other words, history is real, and its effects still live and breathe among us.
Then, there is my only historical novel, The Black Rose, about pioneering entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker and her dogged quest for human dignity and success at the beginning of the twentieth century, but I would not have thought to write The Black Rose on my own. The Alex Haley estate approached me and asked me to write the novel Haley had been researching for years but died before he could write. Given my childhood fascination with Roots, I eagerly agreed. I often joke that I feel sorry for the traditional, history-conscious readers who discovered my writing through The Black Rose, then were confronted with the terrifying creature on the cover of The Living Blood, the novel that followed. My unpredictability as a writer is due to a kind of split personality, I suppose. I want to teach, and yet I want the freedom to explore my heart’s whims.
So at that recent Christmas gathering, as my sisters and I found a quiet moment together in a house bustling with relatives, we pondered why we are not the modern-day equivalent of the radicals Mom and Dad were considered in the 1960s. We are our own people, living our lives with integrity the best we can, but with neither Mom’s unswerving courage in the face of opposition nor Dad’s single-minded quest for social change.
It was Lydia who first spoke what was uppermost in our minds. “I think it’s because we were there, and we saw the cost. We don’t want to have to live through what they lived through,” Lydia said as she fed her seven-month-old baby, Jordan, trying to keep him clear of the reach of three-year-old Justin, his older brother.
Johnita and I nodded our agreement. If we learned the nobility of struggle from our parents, we had also learned that there is nobility in sacrificing to raise one’s family. As Mom always said, charity begins at home.
There was something else, of course—the part that’s harder for us to admit: The times are different now. Nowadays, affronts are usually more subtle, and sometimes even careful social observers overlook the full breadth of the challenges still facing the black community. I can only imagine that a lifetime of activism today must feel like boxing a shadow. Here one second. There the next. And it would be so easy for many of us—particularly those of us in the middle class who do not live in black neighborhoods—to close our eyes, pretending the challenges aren’t there. But the seeds our parents planted in us will not allow any of us to overlook the work that remains to be done. My sisters and I are not naive. Just because today’s world shakers and social pioneers aren’t all carrying picket signs doesn’t mean the struggle is over, and we know this. We know that there are horrible discrepancies in school resources and test scores between black and white children. And in arrests and jail time. And in the imposition of the death penalty. And income. And AIDS statistics. We know that police in New York shot Amadou Diallo forty-one times, fueled by a raving fear of black men. There’s plenty left to do. But there is no single most obvious place to begin, and the avenues for bringing about change are infinite.
So what is our part, and how do we know if we’re doing enough?
It’s hard to believe we’re ever doing enough. As much as my parents have done, I know they both wish they had been able to do more. There is no “Movement” in the early twenty-first century, so all of us have to pick our battles and hope we’re making a difference. We have to reach out to each other across neighborhoods and income levels. We can’t dismiss segments of black youth because we feel we no longer speak the same language. We have to teach each other and learn from each other. We have to take responsibility for raising our families.
We can’t give up.
In 1996, I was able to donate $10,000 to Florida A&M University to inaugurate what I called the John D. Due Jr. and Patricia Stephens Due Freedom Scholarship, intended for students who need extra help to attend college. Mom and Dad were both with me when I presented the check to Florida A&M President Frederick S. Humphries on the Tallahassee campus where I was born. The money came from an unlikely source; I’d taken part in a book called Naked Came the Manatee, where thirteen writers with South Florida ties wrote a chapter apiece. Dave Barry, Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, and Edna Buchanan all took part, among others. In the coming years, I plan to continue to donate money to that fund and help administer the scholarship in my parents’ names.
Aside from that, in many ways I am most proud of the seven years I spent as a volunteer with Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Greater Miami, an organization that attracted me because of my burning need to do something that felt concrete. I learned long ago that I’m not cut out for endless meetings or direct confrontations, but I could spend a few hours each Saturday with an inner-city girl, Penny Darien, whose mother had died of an asthma attack when she was five. Penny was seven when I met her, very shy and reserved. She needed me, so over the next years of her childhood, I was big sister. I took her to museums, to movies, to bookstores, to the beach. I took her trick-or-treating and to the park for pony rides. I brought her to my office at the Miami Herald and let her sit at my desk, typing on my computer. I tried not to overindulge her with gifts, but I bought her books readily because I wanted her to love reading. To my delight, she once told me that reading helped her escape the noise in her home. “Sometimes when I’m reading,” she said, he
r soft little voice filled with awe, “it feels like I’m in the book!”
Today, Penny is a teenager who is taller than I am. I left Miami in 1998 after I got married and had to move to a small town in Washington State because my husband’s daughter lives there with her mother, but Penny and I still call and write to each other, and I visit her when I can. She is in high school now. She wants to go to college. I have no doubt she will live out her childhood without having any children of her own, the fate that befalls so many other ill-prepared girls in her neighborhood. She told me not long ago that she doesn’t have too many friends because, in her words, “Friends get you in trouble.” Penny isn’t looking for trouble. Instead, she spent a recent summer working in a shelter for battered women. I’m so proud of her. She is a lovely, self-directed young woman. I don’t know who she will become in future years, but I pray my role in her life will help give her at least a fraction of the chance my parents gave me and my sisters.
Penny has also helped inspire me. Because of the historical component and the unusual situation of working from another writer’s notes and research, The Black Rose was a very difficult book to write. But during my most frustrating moments, when I wrestled with the question of how best to convey the story of a nearly illiterate black woman who was born poor but whose tireless self-determination built a hair-care fortune and helped uplift thousands of other black women, I told myself that I was writing that book for Penny.
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