“Young black fiction writers in the U.S. often face a strange obstacle as they try to figure out who they are — it’s called American literature.”
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
I'm a Yankee, born and raised. So why have I set two novels in the South? Nothing obvious about my background explains this anomaly. I entered the world through the Bronx and spent my early years in Yonkers, New York. Before I graduated from high school, I had taken only five trips ever requiring airfare, none further than Kansas. I now live in Brooklyn, that notorious hive of fancy-pants writers.
For a long time, though, the South has had a mysterious grip on me. My mother's family moved from Georgia to Harlem in the 1940s. They never identified themselves as Southerners; in fact, they were eager to shed any traces of Dixie along with their sour memories of Jim Crow discrimination. Yet something down-home persisted. My mother couldn't cook — except for her fantastic bread pudding, mac 'n' cheese, and sweet potato pies, always prepared from memory. She never said "y'all," nor did she have an accent, yet she habitually nicknamed large appliances and family cars "Betsy," supposedly after a cow from her childhood. She didn't go to church except for special occasions, but she claimed to have had a vision of Christ when, hospitalized after giving birth to me, her marriage in free-fall, she experienced a potentially lethal infection on her C-section scar.
As I grew, I became familiar with the stereotype of the South as a hot, poor, religious, racist swamp, the home of Jesus, George Wallace, and BBQ ribs. But closer to home, racism had given shape to my own neighborhood, Runyon Heights: We lived in the last house on a kind of fake dead-end street that ended in an embankment of trees. This same street continued, with a different name, on the other side of the embankment in the adjacent white (technically, Italian-American) neighborhood, Homefield. All of the streets in Runyon Heights that bordered Homefield were like that. And still are. The existence of this mini-DMZ made Homefield a kind of bizarro world for the kids of Runyon Heights. Sometimes, for a thrill, friends of mine and I would sneak over the border and run recklessly through Homefield as fast as we could.
Andrea Hickey / BuzzFeed
Frequently back then, as now, current events would bitch-slap the North into the realization that the South does not have a lockdown on any of the bad qualities for which Northerners make fun of it. The Southern-born yet Northern-college-educated and urbanized black people of my parents' generation had a particularly layered and somewhat cynical view of how self-congratulatory Northern white folks could be about their own supposed lack of racism. My mother became an investigative radio journalist when I was 9, and when, in 1980, the U.S. Department of Justice and the local NAACP sued the Yonkers school system for having segregated schools, she and her friends were privately quick to categorize this event as the kind of thing that happens "up South."
That lawsuit against the city (whose aftermath will soon be the subject of Show Me a Hero, a new TV series by David Simon, of The Wire fame) defined my grade school experience. For years my mother covered the story for radio station WFAS, so what normal people might call "repetitive sound bites from her tape-recorded interviews with city officials," I might call "lullabies." Before the feds called Yonkers out for 40 years of racist housing policy, the city frequently tried to re-draw the school district lines horizontally, perpendicular to the city's racial divides. This meant that I changed schools frequently, and in junior high school, practically everyone in my neighborhood got bussed from our centrally located area to the northeasternmost (read: whitest) corner of the city.
Then, as now, the New York metropolitan area at the time was, in some respects, no less highly charged in terms of racially motivated mayhem than say, Birmingham, Alabama. A white mob, 15 strong, murdered transit worker Willie Turks in Brooklyn in 1982; in 1984 police killed Eleanor Bumpurs in her Bronx apartment; and later that year Bernard Goetz shot four black kids in the subway. Yet another white mob chased Michael Griffith into traffic to his death in 1986. These killers all had vocal supporters. We really did live "up South." Recent events in New York City, like the murders of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, have done nothing to contradict this sentiment.
When bias crimes happen in the North, Americans tend to think of them as isolated events, certainly not indicators of the region's character. It rattles our sense of ourselves as Northerners to think that half a million black folks fled racism in the South only to find different racism in the North. But my parents knew better. That conundrum was the subject of Claude Brown's memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, a book I remember devouring in high school. The distinction must have been even finer for my grandparents; their choice was really between a racist South with no chance for advancement and a racist North where you could get an OK job and your kids could attend slightly better schools — which is what made Yonkers' segregated housing practices and schools so appalling, I suppose. A whiff of Southern fried discrimination in the urban north? Well knock me down and steal my teeth!
