As the weather cools, and families gather to celebrate, mourn, and remember, I’m thinking about my mama, my elders, and my ancestors. I want to take this moment to remember, and say “thank you”: To thank them for providing me the tools I need to live this life, no matter how hard it gets sometimes. To thank them for giving me memories to cherish, hands to hold, and words of encouragement through the good times and the bad ones. To thank them for being who they were so I could become the woman who I was yesterday, the woman I am today, and, God willing and the creek don’t rise, tomorrow, and the woman I’ll be on days to come, too.
Last week, I was asked to do a reading, and to give some remarks about the value of exploring American history through historical fiction. It should surprise no one that my remarks were inspired by my elders and ancestors. I’m recording them here today since I didn’t record them in real time. I wanted to share these remarks with you, of course, but now, as with when I gave them, they feel more like a prayer to the elders and ancestors. A prayer that all who lived and died upon this land deserved to be remembered as they lived and as they died. A promise to those who came before us that there are those of us doing the work of continuing to remember their names and stories.
Same rules as usual: if a car or a neighbor rolls by, or a dog barks (or if you hear them snorting), or if I mess up a line or two, we’re just gonna roll with it because that’s what we do here.
The value of exploring American history through historical fiction can be summed up this way—that Alice Young represents someone’s ancestor and deserves to be remembered. The people of New Jessup all represent someone’s ancestors and deserve to be remembered. New Jessup itself represents the more than 1200 Black towns and settlements founded in the United States between the late 18th and early 20th centuries and deserve to be remembered. For true.
The words truth and fiction seem at odds because fiction is, by definition, a product of our imagination. Invention. Make-believe. But stories are powerful tools for conveying information; for wrapping our arms around an entire starry night and distilling it into something our readers can digest. Fiction allows us to newly-obsess over questions we never even knew we had—pick them up and examine them from every angle and still walk away with more questions than answers. It gives us a way to commune with ancestors long passed who we otherwise would never know until we meet in the sweet by and by. It tells us a different story about ourselves and helps us to understand our existence more clearly.
VCCA and Sweet Briar sit on panoramic land. The morning of my speech, I worked in my studio as usual. On my way over in the dark, after my eyes had adjusted to the night sky, I looked over to a large patch of trees and said to myself, “Why are those tree trunks . . . moving?” We’re going to call them a couple of deer, and hope it was a couple of deer, but my point is that, all around us, just like in that mountain, there was life. And until 246 years ago, life on Sweet Briar Plantstion included up to 140 Black people who were held in bondage on the land. As the plantation grew between 1830 and 1865, many unknown ancestors were enslaved here, and died here, before emancipation.
On my first full morning at VCCA, I was walking the grounds and came upon a field. There was a very low mist that felt ethereal, and it brought to mind the unknown number of souls still present in this soil. I am a writer, and I wrote Alice and the people of New Jessup to represent my ancestors. And in that field of ethereal mist, it felt like that untold number of ancestors was lining up, demanding to have each of their individual stories told. It was overwhelming to consider even the hundreds of stories that I couldn’t tell because I couldn’t know, let alone the millions of lives my ancestors lived on American soil. All the iterations of what each individual life looked like during the course of their time here on earth? Even among those at the reading, our stories were not the same that night as they were the night before, nor were they the same that night as they would be the night after. And to think of capturing the entirety of even one life, let alone the millions of lives I don’t have the earthly time to tell, had me in that field thinking:
“If not everbody, then who?”
I started Moonrise Over New Jessup as a short story. It was supposed to be a Black family around a holiday table in 1954, debating the merits of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. But within about ten minutes of writing, Alice’s voice began to get lost in the fray. Of course people would have strong opinions about injustice and what social progress looks like; those narratives are most common and very necessary, as we continue to do the work of documenting Black American experiences.
But what about Alice, who would’ve been my grandmama’s age these days? A woman who made sure everybody was fed, clothed, cared for? A woman who loved her family, her job, her community? What was the entirety of her story? Like our elders, she was young once, after all, and make no mistake about it; love by Alice’s hands, “tethers generations to generations and kin by skin” as she says at the very beginning of the novel. She is smart, fierce, and unapologetic, and she tells her readers up front who they’re about to meet. Her moon rises and sets for family, and she does whatever it takes to care for them. And through her eyes, we experience the gift of her memory—we meet New Jessup, Alabama and all who live there. Telling her story was very much like capturing the night sky and writing it for my readers, and it was one of the greatest honors of my life because Alice Youg deserved to be remembered, too.
Her story is fiction, but it is historical fiction. Maybe history seems like some old dusty textbooks or papers in an attic, but history is alive. It is in archives and museums and textbooks, yes, but it also lives with our elders and their stories. My mama loved Alabama, and made sure she told my siblings and I the entirety of her life growing up. My family are Alabama for at least four generations— we hunted, grew food, fished, owned businesses, built and worshiped in churches, and went to school, all in community with one another. I am blessed because my people still live in, and love, Alabama to this day—it is a place that calls me home often, and because I am nurtured and loved there, it is where I have truly written my best work.
But some folks call Alabama—especially as it relates to Black people—and you can see the impressions and stereotypes running amok behind their eyes about a place they’ve likely never been. I’m not here to deny or defend anti-Blackness occurring on American soil (as the history of anti-Blackness of all varieties is hardly limited to our geography south of the Mason-Dixon). But what I am here to say is what my Auntie J always tells me whenever I leave Montgomery—
“You’d better keep telling these people that there's much more to Alabama than just the civil war and civil rights.”
This is not to defend or deny anti-Blackness one bit. But it is to say that we live, have joy, fall in love, worship, learn, and have petty rivalries with one another that have nothing to do with narratives dominated by injustice and intimidation. Because as Gwendolyn Brooks so beautifully said, "We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other's magnitude and bond."
The stories of my elders are not unique. My family is not the only Black family in America to love Alabama or the south. Information rounding out the fullness of our stories can be found in history books, museums big and small, and archives. I've found ancient film, photographs, and information about Black life on YouTube, Instagram, through Google searches, and on podcasts. There are people, in their own ways, doing work, and it's piecing these resources together, and keeping eyes and ears open to the ways my ancestors lived on American soil, that provided the creative inspiration for Alice and New Jessup. I cannot tell all the stories, nor do I need to, because I am far from the first, or only, one doing this work. But I can tell some stories based on real history. Research, and responsible storytelling, allow me to do my ancestors that small bit of justice.
One of my favorite things about writing historical fiction is the questions it raises in my mind. This goes well beyond craft, style, audience, and into bigger, grander questions about existentialism, religion, physics, chemistry, botany—just to name a few of the concepts I pondered even while at VCCA. The other day, someone shared a favorite quote of mine from bell hooks that reads:
“To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond reality.”
That’s historical fiction! History—the concrete reality of people and events that existed in the United States. Some have had volumes written about them; some are memorialized in oral tradition; and some are all but lost to the stars. Imagining the possibilities beyond reality means building carefully-constructed evidence- and research-based narratives to represent lives we would otherwise never know. It’s allowing mythology and folklore and religion and physics and botany to mingle and enrich the narratives and allow people in the stories, and, by extension, the readers, to explore the far reaches of our past.
How many of you have read, or watched Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad? What about Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or Robert Jones Jr.’s The Prophets or Kiese Laymon’s Long Division or Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing? These books have an actual underground train, letters to God, women who commune with the ancestors, portals to other worlds, and many, many spirits, all while examining true historical events and people. Writers of historical fiction bear important witness to the actual trajectory of our past. While some have used the pen to alter and delegitimize history—and the nefariousness of such aims cannot be overstated—these, and many other Black writers have artfully, and skillfully, continued to use their talents to bring America’s past into sharper focus.
Storytelling is an art that long predates my time on this earth, and will continue into eternity long after I’m gone. It would be impossible to tell every tale about my ancestors, but with instinct and creativity, focusing on soundly researched representation to bring them to life as best I know how, I can tell some stories. And is it ever satisfying to know that someone will be encouraged to speak to an elder or research an ancestor or find out more about the complexity and beauty of Black history because of work that I am doing.
There are a couple of West African proverbs that really speak to me, and I’ll leave you with these. The first is:
“Until the lions have their own historians, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."
I take seriously my responsibility to put Black people on the page for true. We have not always been represented fairly or accurately or as complete human beings in literature, and so I did as Toni Morrison told us to do when we didn’t see the books we wanted to read: I wrote one. I hope everyone picks up my books no matter race, creed, or color. I submitted for, and won, the PEN/Bellwether Prize For Socially Engaged Fiction because there were glaring holes in the way Black history is represented in fiction. But my greatest honor is writing, and inviting, Black people into the pages in ways that we recognize ourselves.
The next West African proverb is:
“Every time an elder dies, a library burns.”
Imagine how catastrophic it would be to lose all the books and volumes you’ve experienced in your life in a fire. All lost in an instant. Such an enormous trove is equal in measure to what one ancestor has inside their head. Because make no mistake about it—our parents, grands, and even great- grands . . . were young once. They’ve lived lives. So as we come upon the fall and winter holidays, and hopefully we’ll be gathering with our folks, I encourage you to be curious about your elders and ancestors, too. Ask your parents, grands, and great-grands their favorite memories of being your age. And if they’re anything like some of my people, try not to blush when you get your answer.
Thanks to all of you who visit with me every week, as well as to my newest readers and viewers. If you like the content you find here, feel free to like, share, and subscribe for first access to my weekly newsletter. Until next week, thank you again for joining me at Lioness Tales.
A Prayer, A Promise