I tried not to write Redwood and Wildfire.
The story came to me while I was researching and teaching courses on blackface minstrelsy, Wild West shows, vaudeville, and early film. I fell in love with the people coming up from Georgia and making a life on stage and screen in early twentieth-century Chicago. These performers were tricksters, magicians, shape-shifters. The richness, complexity, and brilliance of their lives dazzled me. Here was a treasure trove of exciting stories that hadn’t been told, that were too good to keep secret! Yet I resisted writing a historical novel. My first novel, Mindscape (2006), was Afro-futurist science fiction. My second novel would be too, I thought. But my great-aunt and grandfather were in my head, haunting me, insisting that I tell this story! I made excuses: “I write about the present, the future. I don’t know enough history.” My elders replied, “You’re a professor, aren’t you? Don’t professors do research?”
Well, yeah, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about the turn of the twentieth century. Students often didn’t understand why any self-respecting African American would act in blackface coon shows or why Native Americans played in Wild West shows. Students hoped they would never have taken part in such demeaning and destructive productions but feared they’d have been grateful to land any roles. My question was, how do you survive these soul-shattering circumstances with your humanity intact? Redwood and Aidan regaled me with their secrets, challenges, traumas, and good times. So I tried to have these ancestor tales ghost around the lives of other characters in a near future novel. I wrote over 140,000 words, but it wasn’t working.
“Well, you’ve done the research.” My great-aunt and grandfather were still haunting me. “What’s stopping you now?”
I couldn’t know enough. OK, women were busting out of their corsets, riding bikes in pantaloons, and making movies. Alice Guy-Blaché (French) made the first fiction film. Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Dakota Sioux) was writing opera; Aida Overton Walker (African American) was helping to invent the American musical comedy; Lillyn Brown (African American and Iroquois) wore top hat and tails and sang the blues dressed as a man; Lillian St. Cyr, known as Princess Red Wing, and James Young Deer (both Winnebago) produced, wrote, directed, and acted in over a hundred films. There were more women film directors in the early twentieth century than right now in the twenty-first! Still, nobody talked to the women to understand who they were, what they dreamed, why they told stories onstage or -screen. Nobody asked what their lives were like, their intimate moments, their fears and joys. Scripts had been lost and so many films had disintegrated! I felt as if I grasped after ghosts, spooks, haints who would dissolve under close inspection.
My elders laughed at me. “Girl, you’re a speculative fiction writer, so speculate! Write what might have been. Clear away all that willful amnesia. The future is about recovering the past!”
I gave in. I pulled Redwood and Aidan’s story from the 140,000 words and wrote a screenplay. That became an outline for the novel. On a writing retreat at Blue Mountain Center, I wrote Redwood and Wildfire to celebrate folks like my great-aunt and grandfather who faced impossible choices. I wrote the novel to offer myself hope. The present wasn’t making me happy. A catalogue of disasters danced in my head: assaults on land, sea, and air; human misery on the rise; flora and fauna reeling. The future looked even worse. But how the hell would I have survived in 1910?
I speculated on what might have been. I imagined African American and Native American theatre and film artists surviving more oppressive social constraints than what we were facing in 2007, and still they maintained their humanity and expressed themselves eloquently. In the subjunctive text of what might have been, I offered myself and my readers a bridge to tomorrow. I imagined the folks who made me possible going against horrible odds to conjure a world they believed in. These ancestors had good times, love, and triumphs. They had vision. They did what had to be done.
By 2008 I had a draft of the story I wanted to tell on this world! Then lo and behold it was almost impossible to find an agent or a publisher for the book. Sending out the manuscript, I was told: Redwood and Wildfire is great work but there’s no audience for “such unfamiliar characters and different storyline.” There are “so few characters for the general audience to identify with.” The characters were confusing and weird, so “I only read to the end because it was so well-written.” Huh? And one white male agent had the nerve to tell me that I didn’t know African American culture, that I didn’t know my own idiom. In 2008, I faced the same dilemma my characters had faced a hundred years before me. I was caught in the stereotype warehouse! The stories I wanted to tell were supposedly peculiar, alien, confusing, and definitely not “universal.”
I was at a SF&F convention, Wiscon or Readercon, and I spoke with another BIPOC author who told me she was writing fantasy that featured dark-skinned people but wouldn’t have any direct relationship to American history, to colonialism or imperialism because no one was going to publish that. Huh? Eventually, I found a wonderful agent, Kris O’Higgins, who still challenges and supports my work. Timmi Duchamp bought Redwood and Wildfire for Aqueduct Press and was surprised that a large publisher hadn’t snapped it up. Of course, I could have assumed that something was terribly amiss in the writing, in the choice of “weird” characters, in my breach of Eurocentric fantasy with a hoodoo tale. My great-aunt and grandfather weren’t having any of that. “You ain’t about to give up on us, are you?”
No, I was not.
In 2021, this situation has shifted. We have made the way out of no way. So many more voices have spoken and been heard. Many BIPOC authors are telling universal stories based in our particular lives. There are editors who get the idioms that make the world home for us. In fact, we have invented a new world with the stories we tell. Audiences across the globe are eager for these stories and also writing their own. I am thrilled that Redwood and Wildfire has a new life in this landscape. I couldn’t give up. My ancestors fortified me. Redwood and Wildfire was/is a celebration of the sort of vision and love we need to make it to the very next moment!
April 2021, Florence, MA