Aquaboogie was first published seventeen years ago, and I still remember with vivid clarity how I felt when I got the news that the manuscript had won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize. I had a six-month-old baby and our car had just died, and I propped her on the kitchen counter in a carrier and had her hold the check, if random grasping could be thought of as holding.
My husband and I bought a car with the money. We had two more daughters, and then we divorced. But I still see him nearly every day, as well as all of our family and friends. I still live in the same house, and from the back window I can see the hospital where we were all born—us, our siblings, our kids. My children are nearly grown now, and they like to joke about how pathetic it is to see me gazing out that window, to think that I haven’t gotten very far at all from my beginnings.
But I have, and yet I have never wanted to leave this landscape and these people behind. Everything I’ve written since Aquaboogie has been connected to it somehow. The character of Big Ma, in “Cellophane and Feathers,” became Marietta, the soul of I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots. Darnell, whose girlfriend Brenda was pregnant in “Safe Hooptie,” was the hero of Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, and he has shown up in The Gettin Place and played an important part in Highwire Moon. Roscoe, Esther, and other characters are in the novel I’m working on right now, which is a sequel to A Million Nightingales.
Not many writers stay. I know this. Sometimes this place is a hard place to live. So many people we’ve known have died too young, or have lost their way. Seventeen years ago, I wrote that this is a large city, and it is larger now, one of the fastest growing places in America. We were “country” back then, and are less so now. But I have chickens, as do my neighbors, and my brother used to bring avocados and oranges, and my friends bring plums and tangerines, and we all live that way even now. Back then I wrote that this is a talking place, and it still is. I write alone, but at family reunions and gatherings there are usually hundreds of people telling me stories, and I always listen to the legends of our pasts and presents—slavery and broken-down cars and wildfires and cocaine, parties and dancing and love and betrayal. I always will. I said that I wanted some stories to be on paper, rather than floating in the air with our barbecue smoke and laughter and shouts, and so these stories remain on paper, and in someone’s hands.
Before they were published in 1990, I worked on these stories for years, often writing longhand in our car while my husband was fixing it in the gravel driveway. I would be sitting in the driver’s seat, holding my notebook, while he said, “Rev the engine now,” or “Step on the brake.” The exhaust colored my words, I thought back then. That driveway is now cement, and our three daughters shoot basketball there, often with their father. But I write in the car all the time, more so than at my computer, because I’m driving kids around these same neighborhoods, to practice or to visit someone. I write my stories longhand, in a series of notebooks, just as I always have, and I realize that maybe as a southern Californian it’s not the exhaust that shades my sentences, but the promise of movement and the air in the open window while my father-in-law waves at me and a cousin calls out, “Hey, girl, did you bring your rice? I got a place for it right here. And I’ve got something to tell you right now.”
Riverside, California March 2007