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U.S. Civil War - Black Soldiers in the Union Army - David Wright Faladé
85 Plays2 years ago
Ep 006 - Fiction. My first fiction author on the War Books Podcast! The incredibly talented author David Wright Faladé joined me to discuss his new book, “Black Cloud Rising.”
Black Cloud Rising takes place in 1863, at a time when former slaves joined the newly formed African Brigade to hunt down rebel guerillas & fight against their former owners. I found the novel to be both exciting & complex, and David was a phenomenal guest. Topics included Civil War leadership, the true-life story of his main character Richard Etheridge, and how a scene from the movie “Glory” inspired his vision for this book.
Support independent bookstores & buy David’s book here: https://bookshop.org/a/92235/9780802159199
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Transcript
Introduction to War Books Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Hi everyone, I'm AJ Woodhams, the host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war related topics. Uh, today I am super excited to have David Wright Folliday, uh, on the show for his new novel, Black Cloud Rising.
00:00:21
Speaker
David Wright Falladay is a professor of English at the University of Illinois and the Mary Ellen Vonder Hayden Fellow at the New York Public Library's Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston Richard Wright Award, and he has written for publications like The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Southern Review, Newsday, and others.
Meet David Wright Falladay
00:00:42
Speaker
And I'm so excited to talk about his new book, Black Cloud
00:00:46
Speaker
rising. David, how are you? I'm doing well. Thanks, AJ. I appreciate it. Yeah. And we were just chatting a little bit before the show. So this is a very cool interview for me because David is the first fiction writer that I've had on the show and I'm a fiction writer. So this is this is very cool. But you're actually you've written nonfiction pieces in the past, correct?
Connecting Fiction and Nonfiction
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I started as a, uh, when I first started writing in my, in my twenties, I was a journalist for a short period of time, never a good one, but I was a journalist for a short period of time when I started my MFA program in Virginia at VCU as a fiction.
00:01:32
Speaker
a friend and I, who was a first year poet, stumbled on the story that became Fire on the Beach, my first book, which was nonfiction. And Black Cloud Rising comes out of a story that I stumbled upon while researching Fire on the Beach. So yeah, I've written a fair amount of nonfiction at this point.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah. And the, so the, and this is a question I've got for later, but the main character of your book is the same, uh, the same man that you wrote your nonfiction book about, correct? Exactly. That's exactly right. Very cool. Well, let's just, let's dive right into the book. Actually, let's not dive right into the book. Let's get some context for the book and then we'll dive into it. All right. So your novel, it's, it takes place during the U S civil war. Um, so let's just situate the audience a bit.
00:02:18
Speaker
It's 1863 is when this story takes place. So we're a couple years into the war. What's
Black Regiments in the Civil War
00:02:26
Speaker
going on? Who's winning right now? Who is losing? What's the situation in the Civil War when your novel takes place? The novel takes place in Tidewater, Virginia, Northeast North Carolina. And at that point in the Civil War,
00:02:45
Speaker
The Union Army has a toehold in the south, which is to say there are Union troops further south in Louisiana and New Orleans. But then in the outer banks, the Union has taken control of the outer banks and also has a strong presence in Tidewater, Virginia, Norfolk, Portsmouth, that area.
00:03:06
Speaker
So as concerns of fighting, they're going back and forth. But that Union toehold in Tidewater, Virginia is what allows the events of the novel to take place, which is to say slaves from all the surrounding regions are fleeing into Union lines. And the Union army at that point is realizing, well, initially they're using the slave labor to build encampments, to help build fortifications, whatever.
00:03:34
Speaker
But they realize, certain generals realize, that to form Black regiments would not only have the effect of removing slave labor from Southern forces, but also would have a psychological effect.
00:03:52
Speaker
to have these armies. It's contested in the North. There are some folks who are opposed to it out of, just completely. There are other folks who are like, yes, let's use the slave labor as labor, but let's don't arm them. They think that blacks might not be capable of being soldiers. This sort of heady, not heady, this sort of active debate. And that's the sort of general context. And these soldiers are in, it's the African brigade.
00:04:19
Speaker
is this brigade, this unit that's been created. Talk a little bit more about that brigade, about this fear that whites had with black soldiers being in uniform. Yeah, about the fear first. If you think about it,
00:04:40
Speaker
I mean, it makes a certain sense. There are several things going on, but a couple just sort of broader things going on. At the heart of Americanness,
00:04:53
Speaker
American identity is this fight around slavery, right? I mean, before the Civil War, even in the writing of the Constitution, the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution whereby slaves are considered to be three-fifths of a man. That is less a philosophical point than a pragmatic point. It's not that three-fifths of a slave is walking to the voting box. It's that the person who owned the slave had that many more votes.
00:05:23
Speaker
And that was to try to keep this balance of power between the slaveholding states and the non-slaveholding states. So there's this just pragmatic question around slavery. Are we gonna be a slave nation or are we gonna be a free nation? That thing is out there. At the same time that in the South, as we move from the colonial era, as we move from indentured servitude towards slavery, slavery was not inevitable.
00:05:51
Speaker
But as the move goes from in vitro servitude to slavery, particularly in certain regions of the South, the slave population just gets big and booms. At certain points, in South Carolina at a certain point, there's a bigger slave population than there is a white population, particularly in certain parts of South Carolina. And so it lends itself then to rebellion, right?
00:06:16
Speaker
So the Stono rebellion, and I forget the date, but in the early 1600s is one of the very famous one, first famous ones where the Southern white population recognizes itself at risk significantly in the 19th century and not so far, in fact, in Tidewater, Virginia, Southampton is in that same area, Nat Turner's rebellion, 1831. At that point in 1831, even in Virginia, you know, sort of tobacco has depleted the land,
00:06:45
Speaker
They're having internal debates in Virginia leading up to that moment in 1831, where they're thinking about abolition themselves, right? Nat Turner happens, the Nat Turner Rebellion. I think the number is 59 white folks, men, women, and children are killed. The threat of rebellion is a constant fear. So the fact of, or the possibility of armed black people, armed black men in particular, but armed black people broadly,
00:07:15
Speaker
is just an undercurrent of southern American identity in particular. With the African brigade, it's really a few individuals who spearheaded. Benjamin Butler, who's in command in Tidewater, Virginia, but then also Edward Wilde.
00:07:35
Speaker
from Massachusetts, an abolitionist sort of through and through, and also sort of the most appropriately named general ever, even before the Civil War.
Inspiration and Historical Context
00:07:47
Speaker
Now he's got one arm, right? That happens to him eventually, before the Civil War, when he's fully, you know, before he's had these
00:07:55
Speaker
these wounds, he's from a family of doctors, he's trained as a medical doctor, but he gets involved in the Crimean War. He goes abroad and he gets involved in the Crimean War on the Turkish side. Later, he's involved with Garibaldi's forces in the 1850s. I think he's got passionate intellectual beliefs that he's willing to fight for.
00:08:20
Speaker
and then the Civil War arrives. So he raises a regiment of troops in Massachusetts, white troops.
00:08:27
Speaker
They fight at the Battle of South Mountain. He's wounded in one arm. His arm is more or less incapacitated. He's back home. He recovers, goes back, rejoins his regiment. They fight at Bull Run. He loses the other arm. So he effectively has partial use of one arm. He's back recovering. And it's in that time that he helps, if y'all remember the movie Glory, he's one of the people who helped the Matthew Broderick character raise that regiment.
00:08:56
Speaker
of troops, the 54th and the 55th. And I don't know if that's what gives him the idea of this is something that he had brewing, but he then goes south. And this is slightly digressive, but it was actually part of the reason that I ended up writing the novel. I mean, it goes back before fire on the beach, speaking of glory. There's a scene in glory, and I loved the movie when it came out. I was living abroad being a movie. I wonder what the intersections between your story and that movie might be.
00:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, it was 1988. I was a bad journalist in France and trying to start to write fiction. And I went to see the movie Glory. And it was striking to me. I thought it was just a wonderful movie. I hadn't seen that story before. I didn't know the story. And I thought that, you know, what it was trying to say about, you know, just sort of revealing the active role of blacks in the Civil War was wonderful. But there were two things that struck me. One,
00:09:50
Speaker
it's Matthew Broderick's story, you know? So even though it's the story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, it's really not Andre Brower or Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington's story, it's really Matthew Broderick's story.
00:10:03
Speaker
I'm like, okay, but within that though, if y'all remember the movie, later in the movie when they're finally dispatched to the South, the 54th, they go out on a foray into Darien, Georgia. And it's based on a foray that the 54th did, and they do it with another regiment. But the other regiment of Blacks are recently freed slaves. They're men who have fled from the plantation or were liberated by the Union Army and formed into a regiment.
00:10:30
Speaker
And the way that the film juxtaposes those two regiments was striking to me. On the one hand, you see Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington there in these blue shell coats and these blue pants. The other regiment, and it may be historically accurate, but visually it had this effect. They were in blue shell jackets and red pants.
00:10:51
Speaker
and they show them marching down the road in this regiment of recently freed slaves. So like yesterday, these men were on plantations, working gang labor, sun up to sun down. Once they're in the Union Army, they can't seem to manage to, you know, manage to march together. They're sort of bumbling around as they march. They seem really undisciplined. Again, recently freed slaves. At one point, one of them who has a musket runs up to his commander and he says in this really heavy dialect, he says,
00:11:20
Speaker
Massa, Mephi, or Musket, and it was so striking to me visually and otherwise, it was kind of out of mistracy the way that they were portrayed. And at that moment, I remember thinking, I love this movie, and if I can ever tell those guys' story, I'm gonna tell it. And that's a little bit what's happening here. These men were on, they were slaves, they were on farms and plantations, and suddenly they're part of a unit.
00:11:42
Speaker
And I just wanted to show their complexity of character and that they were in fact effective good soldiers, which was the case with the African regiment, the African brigade. No, you're absolutely right. There's only a particular story that gets told about the civil war. I mean, really all wars in American history up until recently have been told through the same lens. But I want to come back to that.
00:12:12
Speaker
Let's talk about, so you have the African brigade. How many people are in the African brigade and what is their mission? Why are they formed and what are they supposed to be doing? So there's the historical record and then for the purposes of my novel, I'm gonna manipulate it a little bit. What was effectively the African brigade in history was a few different regiments.
00:12:41
Speaker
of United States color troops.
00:12:45
Speaker
What would become the 35th and the 36th, the first North Carolina colored volunteers and the second North Carolina colored volunteers? The first North Carolina eventually ends up going to South Carolina. So it's fundamentally the second North Carolina colored volunteers. I'm saying this, I know it's a general audience, but this is a war podcast. So for any civil war buffs, I want to be on the historical side, let you know that I deformed the record. So it's the second North Carolina colored volunteers that becomes the 36th United States Colored Troop.
00:13:12
Speaker
I think it's the fifth USCT from Ohio. And then part of a different unit forms the African Brigade. I make mention of the other two in the novel, but for the purpose of the novel, it was just cleaner and easier to just make it what was the second North Carolina color volunteers. So effectively, there were about 1000 strong in the novel. In history, there were a little bit more. And so, yeah, about 1000. I think there were roughly
00:13:43
Speaker
10 companies and they were all commanded by white officers. So they had a black non-commissioned staff and some of the criteria for being a non-commissioned officer, one of them was just sort of literacy, you know, because of the reports in this map, whatever, you know, men who distinguish themselves or seem to be able to distinguish themselves as leaders, but they needed to be able to
00:14:06
Speaker
read and write, which obviously wasn't very common from that slave population. The white officers, some of them had followed Edward Wilde from his previous unit. So Wilde is the commander broadly of those men.
00:14:26
Speaker
Colonel Draper, Alonzo Draper, was underneath him and was effectively in charge. And he had been in command of another white Massachusetts regiment. Some of his former men came to be officers. The way that the Union Army incentivized these men to be officers in black regiments, because it wasn't clear that people would want to, was you could be a non-com in a white regiment and become an officer in a black regiment. So that's the case for some of those men. That led to some problems. But they also found some men who were
00:14:55
Speaker
you know, capable officers
Themes of Identity and Race
00:14:57
Speaker
and all that. Now, did many of the officers, did many of them command for practical reasons of career advancement or were they largely ideologically? No, it was mostly practical. Yeah, I mentioned it sort of in passing in one of the chapters of the novel where Richard Etheridge, the main character is reflecting on some of the leaders they had. And I'm taking that straight from the history.
00:15:23
Speaker
You know, they they the first commander of his company, company F was a man named Ives, I-V-E-S. And and he was a drunk, you know, he ends up Draper, Alonso Draper ends up running him off because he's a drunk. There's another man who was a commander of a different company, I believe, and I don't remember his name. But he I make the comment in the novel, I took it straight from the history. At one point, he there's a dog in the regiment and he
00:15:51
Speaker
He calls him Sergeant Blackie or something, the black dog, and talks about how the dog was more capable than any of the black troopers could be. There were some men who had racist tendencies and they just went for the opportunity, the opportunity for advancements or whatever. Draper himself, Alonzo Draper, the Colonel in charge underneath Wilde, was also a hugely, again, taken from history. All the characters I took from history, the vast majority of them,
00:16:18
Speaker
And with characters like Wilde and Draper and Richard Etheridge, for whom there was a fair amount of history, I tried to, obviously I'm fictionalizing, but I try to hold true to who they were as characters. And I say that as a way to say, Alonzo Draper was another hugely interesting, important figure.
00:16:37
Speaker
He was sort of self-taught, read in the law, but hadn't been formally trained before the war, formally trained in the law. Had this, not just an abolitionist impulse, but egalitarian impulse. So he organizes, he's from Lynn, Massachusetts. He organizes the shoe workers in Lynn, sort of this before unions.
00:16:57
Speaker
this cobbler strike for better working conditions. He had this sort of egalitarian impulse. When the Civil War breaks out, he leads a white Massachusetts regiment, or he's a captain in it. But when the opportunity comes to serve with black regiments, he jumps on it, again, for noble aims. Interestingly, though, so there's a moment in the book where he makes a comment to a journalist who's accompanying them. The journalist asks him,
00:17:27
Speaker
man named Tewksbury, who was an actual figure, asks him the difference between leading white troops and black troops. And Draper says a thing similar to what the other man I'd mentioned. He says that training the men is like it equates it to training a dog and talks about how sometimes you have to cuff them on the nose. I took that straight from Draper's words, which demonstrates
00:17:52
Speaker
this sort of racist beliefs that he had about black people, but largely from not knowing. So the thing that I try to show also is the arc of his character over the course of the novel, because clearly his racist tendencies or beliefs weren't akin to the other one. The other person was just there for advancement. Draper was an abolitionist and believed
00:18:16
Speaker
as far as I can tell, in the capacity of blacks to advance, he just felt that they were at a lesser stage of development of civilization. And then the men of his regiment are going to, you know, show him otherwise. Sure. No. And I, his character, and I'm glad actually a lot of these, I did get a sense that there's a lot of actual history in your book with these characters and even news clippings and
00:18:44
Speaker
So I'm glad you're able to show it like that. So this brigade, in your book, they have a very particular purpose, which is to hunt down Confederate partisan soldiers, call them bushwhackers, in the novel. Was that the case? Was that their only purpose, or was that just this sliver of history, this is what they were doing?
00:19:10
Speaker
That was this particular sliver of history, and they were doing a little bit more, and it goes back to that from your initial question. This debate is sort of actively raging about the capacity of Blacks as soldiers, of African Americans as soldiers. Wilde, again, appropriately named, he recognizes that armed Black men in the South, they will cause terror.
00:19:36
Speaker
you know, they will cause fear in the local population. And there are parts of the South.
00:19:43
Speaker
like that area of Northeast North Carolina that is technically the South, right? I mean, it's the South in that the state seceded from the Union, but because the Union is in control to the North of it, and because the Union has a strong foothold in the outer banks to the South and East of them, they're in a sort of limbo. So in that region of Northeast North Carolina, there are still active plantations. There are active slaveholders, but there's not a Confederate army presence.
00:20:11
Speaker
So some slaveholders are unionists. Some may be by belief they didn't want us to see from the union, but they don't necessarily want to give up their slaves. They're slaveholders, they just don't, they want to be part of the union. They're not, they weren't for secession. Others were secessionist. And so in that sort of contested territory, oftentimes, this was the case in Missouri too,
00:20:39
Speaker
Bushwhackers, rebel units arose to try to support the Southern cause, to also to confront the Union army that's just to the North and the South. While recognizing this,
00:20:52
Speaker
decides that he's gonna be able to prove that black men are capable of fighting by getting them in the fight. And the nearest opportunity is against those rebel guerrillas just to their south. But the other reason, and I don't know this for a fact, but it seems fairly clear to me that he must have apprehended this or understood this, most of those men come from that region.
00:21:19
Speaker
So in going to that region, in confronting the guerrillas, they can also then confiscate slaves. Slaves are contraband of war. So all those slaveholders in the area, whether they're pro-union or pro-secession, Wild's aim is to go down there and liberate the slaves. And for his troops,
00:21:38
Speaker
A lot of them are going to be liberating friends, family, folks they've known. And so that was the other reason for this particular foray. So the sort of dual reasons showing that these black men can fight and at the same time, incentivizing them to fight by the area, the region in which the foray takes place. Yeah, it was striking in the novel how much all of these characters, like they know each other and of each other.
00:22:06
Speaker
And I thought that was really interesting. Let's talk about your main character, Richard Etheridge, who I thought was just a really compelling character and really thought you told Richard's story very well. And I know he was a historical person. So maybe first, let's talk about the historical Richard Etheridge. Who was he? What was his story?
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, Richard Etheridge, I mean, if you ask me, he's this sort of fairly, he's more and more recognized now. In fact, he's, I mean, to be honest, he's been, in the past 20, 25 years, we are catching up to recognizing Richard Etheridge for his heroic role in history. So I stumble upon Richard Etheridge with David Zobe for fire on the beach because he's, so during the age of sail,
00:23:05
Speaker
When most everything is traveling by water, you know, sort of, you know, before the 20th century, there were, in the United States, we formed what was called the United States Life Saving Service. It is part of what becomes the Coast Guard later on. So basically the early efforts at a Coast Guard was these land-based stations that were about five, six miles apart and that were staffed by crews of seven. There were about 200 long America's coastlines.
00:23:33
Speaker
And they would patrol the coast at night and keep a lookout from a watchtower during the day and just make sure that passing shipping was okay, right? And they signaled them this and that, whatever. If a ship was in trouble, they had ways of going to their rescue. Of those 200 odd stations, the Lifesaving Service was first formed in the United States in 1874.
00:23:56
Speaker
Of those 200 odd station, there was one that was staffed and run by African Americans, and that was on P Island, North Carolina. And Richard Etheridge was the first keeper of the P Island life-saving station. So just the fact of that makes him interesting. But his service as a Coast Guardsman, as a lifesaver, was also heroic. I mean,
00:24:19
Speaker
Five months after he takes control of the station, the station is burned to the ground, right? There's local resistance to the fact of these black lifesavers. He mans his crew with rigor and discipline, again, against the odds. And then in 1896, 16 years after he takes over the keepership, he performs this really heroic rescue.
00:24:40
Speaker
During a hurricane, the life-saving crew to the north and the life-saving crew to the south have quit their stations because the land is being overwashed by the sea. They stay out there. They can't patrol, but they keep a watch as best they can during the night from the observation deck again during a hurricane, which in and of itself, I wouldn't want to do.
00:25:05
Speaker
They spot a light. They go down abreast of the ship. They can't use their equipment.
Family Dynamics and Loyalty
00:25:09
Speaker
And so what they decide to do, rather than just sort of let these people perish out in the ocean, the ship had grounded about 75 yards off the shore. What they decide to do instead of the equipment they can't use is they tie a line between two surfmen and then those men
00:25:26
Speaker
anchored by another line to the shore, to the rest of the crew, go out to the ship. They swim out to the ship and take all the seamen, the seamen is actually a woman on board too, take all the mariners from the ship and save the whole crew. That's heroic in 1896, particularly in 1896. Just two years down the coast is the Wilmington racial massacre. So again, in this turbulent time,
00:25:49
Speaker
They're out there saving folks doing what they need to do. The only recognition they got for it in their day is the picture that's on the cover of the book. The picture that my co-author, Zobi, stumbled upon and made him go because he knew the lore of the life-saving service. He goes, wait, there was a black crew. And that's the only recognition.
00:26:07
Speaker
So, um, Etheridge was notable in that way. Fire on the Beach tells that part of his story. And because that part of his story, there was some record later on in his life. Uh, yeah, this is in the end, you know, the civil war ends at 65. He joins a life savings service a decade after that. And then this rec, you rescue is two decades after that. So he's more well known for that. And then, and then your, your account is, is the beginnings of his life.
00:26:36
Speaker
exactly and for specific reasons, which is to say, when Zobi and I first start for Fire and the Beast, start telling the story of the later Richard Etheridge, where there is a fair amount of documentation,
00:26:49
Speaker
we uncovered a lot of it because a lot of it would just sort of been dispersed and a little bit lost. It wasn't hard. I'm not a particularly good historian, but just nobody had done the work. Folks believed that the records were lost, that they didn't exist, blah, blah, blah. With a little bit of work, we found out otherwise. So we were able to document the later Richard F. Richard. Consequently, I felt like I had
00:27:10
Speaker
You know, as a writer, I'm a writer who sort of character-based writer. Character is what's interesting to me, interesting to me. And I felt like I had a notion about who Richard Etheridge was. So I was interested in the young Etheridge. But one of the things that was difficult about the young Etheridge, and one of the things that Zobi and I uncovered, until we did our research, it was documented, believed, and then in the Coast Guard magazine in the 1930s, recorded that he had been born free.
00:27:40
Speaker
that he was half Native American and half black. And all those things just didn't jibe for a lot of reasons with some of the record that we had. But we couldn't prove it because for slaves, there was just so little documentation. Zobi and I found him in the census, not by name, but by birth date. And so it turns out he was a slave, but also all the evidence we came upon seemed to suggest that his owner was very likely his father. And that piece of it was super interesting to me.
00:28:10
Speaker
In Fire on the Beach, we talk about why we think this is so. We can't do a whole lot more with it, because there's just not the documentation. But that was the other piece of the story, the family piece of the story. That was really interesting to me, as interesting as a Civil War piece. And so for me, fiction was the vehicle by which I could try to explore that piece of the story.
00:28:32
Speaker
This is actually going to be, I'm going to try my best not to throw any spoilers out there. So let's talk about the fictionalized version of Richard. And I'm even more fascinated now that there is real historical evidence for this. His father,
00:28:56
Speaker
was a slave owner, was white, and his mother was an enslaved person. And this really comes to a head with his brother, because his brother is white, Richard is mixed race, and his brother Patrick, throughout the whole novel, doesn't acknowledge that he's even his brother. I thought that was such a thing to contemplate.
00:29:26
Speaker
and to think about why that was. Talk a little bit about this relationship in your book with his brother.
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah. Earlier you mentioned the sort of received stories that we get about wars broadly and about the Civil War in specific. I remember my earliest memories of learning about the Civil War in school were, you know, was this notion that it was brother against brother. That was my next question. That was my next question, David. I'm so glad that you just said that. One brother was white and one brother is black, right? And so I wanted to sort of
00:30:02
Speaker
weave that into the story. But then also this conflicted paternal relationship. You know, I'm thinking of a sort of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings story. You know, Sally Hemings raises an entire family by Thomas Jefferson. It's clear that they had some sort of relationship. So in the worst case scenario, you know, slave owners making babies by their slaves was just out and out rape. In other instances,
00:30:30
Speaker
which isn't the worst case scenario, but for me and my sort of understanding of just people and human nature, it's not the best case scenario either. And I think of the sort of the Sally Heming story, which is to say, clearly she and Thomas Jefferson had some relationship because he makes an entire family with her. And when he goes abroad, he brings her and her brother. So he's treating her preferentially as a slave, but still as a slave, right? So I don't imagine that as sort of like,
00:30:59
Speaker
necessarily consensual because of the power dynamic, if nothing else. And that part of the story was interesting to me. What do the, you know, what, what does Sally Hemings feel like in that situation? So I, I try to get at that, the complexity of that through the character of Richard's mother, right?
00:31:20
Speaker
at the same time that what do then the offspring think? Sally Hemings' children. Thomas Jefferson, when he dies, again, he may have treated Sally Hemings and her family better than the other slaves, but he didn't free him. He didn't free him in his lifetime. And when he died, he did not free them.
00:31:39
Speaker
And so I wanted to get at that. It seems to me that, I was talking about this earlier, this sort of, especially in the 19th century as abolitionism is really rising and strong, how there's this sort of more insistent propaganda campaign in the South to justify slavery. Black says inferior.
00:32:01
Speaker
What seems to me, it takes an act of will to be actually in a situation like that and not recognize that the person you've known your whole life is equally a person. And in a place like the Outer Banks, it's even more so. Because in the Outer Banks, the Outer Banks which stretches about 150 miles, before the bridges were built in the 1930s, it was super isolated.
00:32:27
Speaker
And the population of the entire Outer Banks at the time of the Civil War was about 2,000 people and about 500 of whom were slaves. That's a really small town. I grew up in a town of 15,000 and I felt like I knew everybody. In a community of 2,000 people, a quarter of whom were slaves, you know a lot about everybody. So in those circumstances, where there are cases where slave owners are making babies with their slaves or with slaves,
00:32:56
Speaker
how do you, it just takes an act of will to sort of not recognize equal humanity in that other person. And that's part of what I wanted to try to dramatize on the page. So Patrick Etheridge becomes a really, really important character for me in the book. I was talking to a book group last night and I was talking about this and this may or may not speak to you, but it's more of a fictional point, a sort of process point.
00:33:27
Speaker
because I'm interested in character and because I wanted to dramatize complex characters, white and black, southern and northern all together. Part of what I try to do in the novel is set up these juxtapositions. And so the obvious juxtaposition is Patrick and Richard.
00:33:45
Speaker
But then, as a way to sort of understand Draper, I try to also establish the juxtaposition between Draper and Patrick in their relationship to Richard. How their friendship evolves, you know, or in the case of Patrick, can only evolve so much. Wilde and John B. John B. F. Rich, who's Richard's father.
00:34:06
Speaker
Sarah Etheridge, Richard's half-sister, and Fanny, his betrothed, his beloved. Again, in setting up these folks, we have this different relationship to the central character that is complementary, but also in conflict, I hope gets at the complexity of the thing that we were just talking about. This act of will that it takes to
00:34:29
Speaker
again, be blood related to somebody, know them your whole life, you know, grow up side by side with them. And at a certain point be incapable of seeing them as more than what the larger society tells you they are. Absolutely. And I mean, Richard and, and Patrick, they are friendly at the very beginning of the novel. Um, but like you just said, that relationship can only go so far and he very quickly,
00:34:58
Speaker
demonstrate that when the father comes into the scene and treats Patrick much differently than Richard, even though they're both his sons. And I'm so glad to give the audience, I hope this isn't a spoiler either, to give the audience some context. So Patrick ends up fighting for the Confederacy.
00:35:23
Speaker
So you've got Richard fighting for the Union Army, and Patrick, his brother, fighting for the Confederacy.
Challenging Traditional Narratives
00:35:30
Speaker
And growing up, the story that's told, it's just like you said, you get very quickly when you start talking about the Civil War, somebody will say, it was brother against brother. And that's kind of like that images are conjured of like,
00:35:47
Speaker
two young white men in Kentucky and like one of them like goes off to join the union and one joins the Confederacy and they both love each other but they've got these torn allegiances or whatever. And that's the story that most people get told about the Civil War. And so I love what you did in your book in adding
00:36:11
Speaker
adding to the complexity of that with Richard and Patrick being different races. So what impact do some of these traditional narratives then, what impact did those have on you writing this book? That's a great question.
00:36:29
Speaker
So at the University of Illinois, I teach a couple of courses that are all about American-ness, all about American identity. And for me, in the background of all this, probably in all my writing, but certainly in the background of this novel, were some of those questions. One of the courses I teach, I call Slavery and Identity. And we look at, you know, sort of texts created over the course of slavery,
00:36:58
Speaker
and try to understand the history then of slavery through the popular representations of slaves and of slavery. And that's in the background for me of this novel. Again, what I was talking about a little bit earlier, this sort of hoops you have to jump through to imagine a Sambo figure of somebody who you grew up your whole life. To imagine that person is just sort of shucking and jiving or whatever, or not shucking and jiving, but is incapable of sort of
00:37:26
Speaker
the things that you might be able to do yourself. The flip side, though, is equally true. From the African-American perspective, you know, the shucking and jiving, the simulation becomes
00:37:38
Speaker
not just a defense mechanism, but a way of resisting, right? So I wanted to understand the black characters in the novel in their complexity too. They're aware of these images of themselves, right? Minstrelsy, these Sambo figures, they see those things too. And they know themselves to be fully human and fully capable. But during slavery, it's maybe to their advantage to shuck and jive some.
00:38:06
Speaker
after slavery or during the Civil War, we talk about it rightly as a fight for freedom.
00:38:16
Speaker
The black men are fighting for freedom, but not just that. They're also fighting to challenge that representation of themselves. They're fighting for full citizenship, right? The Civil War happens fully 50 years before Marcus Garvey. There are some back to African movements. I mentioned some of them in the book. Some of the soldiers are imagining, you know, once I'm through with this fighting, I'm going back to Africa. But that was pretty rare. Those men weren't fighting for an opportunity to, you know,
00:38:45
Speaker
get free and return to some idealized African homeland or even to lead the South. What they wanted to be was fully recognized fully as citizens. That's what they're fighting for. So not just their freedom, but their equality. And I wanted to try to get at that notion some too.
00:39:03
Speaker
Is that kind of answering your question? Yeah, it does. And, you know, I've got to say for in the sphere of Civil War literature, another reason why your book was very interesting to me, my first novel that I ever tried writing it was a Civil War novel.
00:39:24
Speaker
And so I tried to immerse myself in a lot of Civil War literature, just what other people have written. And your book is the first that I've ever read that has the African-American soldier experience at its heart. And before this interview, I was thinking, I was like, gosh, there's got to be some others out there. And so I think I did a Google search. But I couldn't find so many.
00:39:54
Speaker
I don't know if you had a similar experience when you were thinking about writing this novel. But I remember I read a separate article about a reason why a lot of African-American writers and scholars don't write about the Civil War. And I went back and found that article. It was actually by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2011.
00:40:18
Speaker
So the title is, Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? And his argument is really a lot of what you've been saying, is the stories are, you know, it's a story about white people, and it's told about white people and for white people. I guess first, I wonder if you agree with that, but then do you think that with books like yours, do you think there will be more
00:40:47
Speaker
Do you think stories about African Americans in the Civil War, do you think that will become more common? That's a great question. To the first part of your question, I guess I would articulate it differently from how 10 AC Coates articulates it, which is to say, and maybe this answers second part of your question too, historically, like you've mentioned, the Civil War was cast in a certain way.
America's Mixed Cultural Identity
00:41:17
Speaker
And that way tended to be about white people, about white society in the context of the benefits for white society. The thing that I think, the way that I would articulate it slightly differently though is that black folks have always been a part of that. From the very beginning, I talked about that act of will that it takes to sort of rewrite the history that's happening right in front of your face.
00:41:42
Speaker
That doesn't mean that the thing that's happening right in front of your face isn't happening. It just means that there's this great effort to cast it otherwise. If we think about the Civil War, this is slightly different, but if we think about how the Civil War story is told, our national understanding of the Civil War right after the Civil War is radically different. There's this sort of 50-year post-Civil War war that happens where the South sort of wins the propaganda campaign and we get all the statues and the monuments and the
00:42:10
Speaker
you know, military installations named after Civil War generals. But that's the propaganda campaign. It doesn't, and so if we apply it to what Tennessee Coates was talking about and what I'm responding to slightly differently, Black folks are there from the very beginning. They're instrumental from the very beginning. Their contribution, and it's not just as labor, it's American identity as a
00:42:36
Speaker
As a simple example, think about minstrelsy. There's a book by Eric Lott, came out 20, maybe 25 years ago, called Love and Theft. That's a history of minstrelsy. He's a professor of Virginia. It used to be Virginia, maybe he's not there anymore. He was at the University of Virginia when he wrote the book. So minstrelsy, you know, this sort of rises in the 1820s.
00:42:58
Speaker
in the South, I think it rises, but it becomes popular everywhere where white men put on blackface and then they perform these skits and they play music sort of imitating what they see as black culture. And so it's got this mocking element, you know, the blackface and the big red lips and the characters are sample figures and buffoons and all this.
00:43:20
Speaker
Lot's argument, which I find compelling, is that there's an element of love to that too, right? You're stealing something. On the one hand, the book's called Love and Death. You're drawn to that, not just to make a joke, you're drawn to it because you're also drawn to the music. You don't understand the music. It's different from what you understand music to be. You're drawn to dance, the form of dance. If you think about dance, European tradition,
00:43:47
Speaker
traditional European dance typically happens from the waist up, right? Think of a waltz. It's just your legs that move. African dance, your whole body's moving, right? White people are seeing that in the slave community. They don't know what they're seeing, but they're drawn to it. And so in that mocking appropriation is also an element of attraction. And I think that's the complexity of it. Another really clear example is what we're calling black music.
00:44:17
Speaker
In the world, beginning with ragtime, so late 1800s after the Civil War, ragtime in the world broadly, in the world at large, is sort of recognized as distinctly American music. In fact, they sort of acknowledge it as the first truly American cultural production, ragtime music. In the United States, it's seen as black music initially in kind of low
00:44:45
Speaker
music until it gains the same popularity. People want to call ragtime black, but that doesn't actually accurately describe it. So ragtime music is using African musical rhythms, a heavy emphasis on syncopation,
00:45:03
Speaker
But with the European instrument, the piano, it's a marriage of things. The problem is that as a society, American society, we tend to not want to see the marriage of the things, right? So that's a long-winded and a little bit abstract way of getting at it. The central question is, I think that Coates is right. The story has been told in a certain way, but that doesn't change the fact of the history, which is that the story is more complex. So to your second question,
00:45:32
Speaker
It's what I was hoping to do with a book, trying to do with a book. And I hope that more people will, and I think more people are, telling those stories in, I mean, sort of, you know, the current efforts in some state governments to, you know, cross these stories.
Looking Ahead: Future Projects
00:45:48
Speaker
That aside, I think people are trying to tell these stories in more complicated ways. And those are the stories that I'm interested in, frankly, you know.
00:45:55
Speaker
Well, I guess then, why personally? So I know you had written another nonfiction book about Richard. So then personally, why was this an important story for you to tell? All those. For me, Americanness is about mixedness. It's about, you know, months of first laws passed in colonial Virginia.
00:46:17
Speaker
were anti-miscegenation laws. They're not passing them because suddenly there are some slaves present and they might sleep with some indentured servants. They're passing them because they are sleeping together, right? Because they're creating their own society with their own interests that poses a threat to the ruling class. And so from that, we have created, America has created this really diverse cultural, multicultural identity
00:46:47
Speaker
and not just black-white, race broadly, understandings of sort of ethnicity, the way that they impact upon Americanness. And we tend to, as a society, and I'm using the word deliberately, want to whitewash it kind of. We want to kind of reduce it. We want to simplify it. So for me, my own interest is exploring the complexity of our mixed
00:47:11
Speaker
cultural antecedents, our mixed cultural identity. That's at heart of the story. So as much as it's a Civil War novel, a retelling of that piece of the glory movie, it's also for me just as much Richard Etheridge and Patrick and John B. How do they figure out how to be together in that same space?
00:47:32
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, I know our time is ticking down here. First, thank you so much for this discussion and for being on here with me. Am I wrong that there aren't
00:47:50
Speaker
Are there any other chronicles of novels about African-American soldiers? There are a few, but not many. I remember doing that research when I was trying to sell the book, so I had to sort of, you know, get the three letters for the competition. There aren't a ton. There are some interesting stories that'll fold some black characters in, but there are also
00:48:12
Speaker
The story of slavery, we've had more in the recent past, but it's also a story that we've tended to want to avoid and have tended to tell in a certain way. Roots sort of blows the top off that. So there are some, but they're not as many as there might be. Let's just say that. Well, David, what are you working on next?
00:48:34
Speaker
I, with that same theme of mixedness, I've got a novel, I have a complicated backstory, which is to say my mother was a French Jew, survived the war, survived the Holocaust. And after the war, she was a fairly young person. She was a little, Revolté, as a French say, she was sort of outraged by everything. So she also wore a Star of David, but she really embraced sort of communism, the anti-colonial movement, fell in love with a French, this was in France,
00:49:04
Speaker
a man from an African, a black African from the French colonies. They're young, they have this sort of turbulent romance fall apart, and she sort of impetuously marries a black GI. Later, she ends up getting back together with the African man and producing a child, me.
00:49:22
Speaker
As an affair, she's still married to the Black Key Eye. So that story of that love triangle intrigues me, not just because of the love triangle part, but the African man, my biological father, was descended from the kings of Dahomey. So that recent movie, The Woman King, that's about the slave trading king of Dahomey. Those were my ancestors. The man that I thought was my father,
00:49:44
Speaker
black American necessarily was the descendant of slaves. So it's that love triangle between a Holocaust survivor, the descendant of African slave traders, and the descendant of slaves. Wow. And is this a fiction or nonfiction? The one I'm finishing right now is fiction. It's a novel. And it's really just about the love triangle. But in so doing, I wrote a piece that came out in The New Yorker last summer called Mixed It. I think online it's called The Truth About My Father.
00:50:10
Speaker
And I was doing that in part as an exercise to try to understand the characters, because I was, you know, bumping my head up against the wall, particularly with the character based on my mother. And a fellow fellow at the library last year, I was a fellow, as you mentioned, at the New York Public Library, suggested I write her as nonfiction. And in so doing,
00:50:29
Speaker
I think I began a memoir, basically. So the thing that I'm finishing is a novel set in 1947. It's The Love Triangle. The thing that I will write next is more memoir and it'll try to open the story up and delve more into the history and all that. Well, you've definitely got a reader here. So I'll be waiting for it to come out.
00:50:53
Speaker
Finally here, David, where can people find you or are you on social media if somebody wants to get in touch with you? DavidWrightBooks.com is my website. Also just through the University of Illinois English Department, my email address is there.
00:51:11
Speaker
Those are probably the best ways, and please do feel free. I try to respond when folks reach out. It just seems weird to me to have somebody who's interested in your work and to not at least have the courtesy to say thank you or something. So it may take me a little bit. I mean, it's not like I'm inundated with mail, but it may take me a little bit, but I try to respond. So please feel free to the audience to reach out. Perfect.
00:51:34
Speaker
Well, thank you again so much. Um, David Wright followed a black cloud rising. Go buy it, go to the library and check it out. Um, read it. Uh, it's such a good story. And, uh, David, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been a really fun, wonderful conversation. Thank you.