What obstacles did you encounter while writing the book?
When I would submit for critiques and things everyone always assumed my doctors were White, and I’m like, no, they’re Black. They thought that this story wouldn’t sell. They were like, “change the love interest to White men” and it sold with the Black man.
As a historical writer, what makes good content for a novel?
While I was writing the book, all of these instances showed up where White people were calling the police on Black people for doing normal things. Well, guess what, that happened back then, too. So, that shows up in the book where you have Black women officers in uniform and somebody took offense to it. That was something I knew had to go in there. There were Black female, military personnel who were beaten for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What do you want readers to glean from this book?
I want them to get a sense of what it was like for our grandparents and our great grandparents. I want them to get a sense of the things that might have shaped who they are, when we knew them later in life. I also want to put a record scratch in the narrative that everything back then was so horrible. That we were all down trod in Europe, dirt poor, depressed, and always complaining about the White man. We live life with regular everyday problems that had nothing to do with that. They may not talk about it, but I wanted to show the creative ways they were able to persevere and carry on. They built that foundation for what would later become the Civil Rights Movement.
