‘Miss Oprah called me, and I didn't believe it was her! I thought somebody was playing on my phone! It's been like a dream. Mark finished the interview asking, ‘How has it felt to hear from everybody from the man or woman on the street, to the New York Times, to Oprah Winfrey? They've all had a lot to say about this book.’ I do think that in the United States, people are interested a lot in the book, because it's teaching them certain things. And all of a sudden, I realised, past is prologue. There were white men, carrying torches, and they were chanting anti-Semitic phrases in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the state of Virginia in 2017, there was a white supremacist March. As I kept writing, and the former President was elected, I began to feel very disturbed.
But everybody needs to know about how we got to this place, as a country. So when I was writing, even I thought, well, we've moved past this, we're in a new time, a new era. ‘I actually started this book when President Obama was in office. ‘Looking at the United States, what was it like for you writing this book under the former President?’ Mark then turned his attention to the context Honorée was writing her novel in. After about 12 to 18 months, I realised the stories were supposed to be part of the novel.’ And they would come to me, and I would write them down. Then when I would wake up, there would be these long prose passages that were very lyrical in nature. Chicasetta in the novel is like a fictionalised version of Eatonton. I was in my ancestral home, which is Eatonton, Georgia. When I began to write my beach read, I started having dreams of what I assumed was the past based upon what the people in my dreams were wearing. A very light, happy go lucky, coming of age story with a lot of laughs because all I ever wanted to do was write short stories.
‘People always laugh when I say this, but I was just interested in writing a beach read. ‘I did have some early readers who said that it should be two books, but that was against my vision,’ said Honorée. Why was this the way for you to tell your story?’ It seems to me that you could have done either one, or the other of those stories, but you decided to do both. ‘The book is split, into this contemporary tale of Ailey's life, with then historical sections that chart these extraordinary stories of her ancestors. Mark began the interview, focusing on the structure of the novel. In doing so she must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression and resistance, bondage and independence, cruelty and resilience that is the story - and the song - of America itself. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past, uncovering the shocking tales of generations of ancestors - Indigenous, Black, and white - in the deep South.
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