Dear Reader,

When I was growing up, my mother was a prominent local activist fighting against anti-Semitism and racism. She and my father were both clinical social workers, and they had a private practice in an old Victorian next door to our family house. Often, I’d come home from school and find my mom meeting with another activist or an official from the community. My mom was tiny, but she was fierce; I saw her scare the hell out of men three times her size. My dad was just as tough. My parents believed in standing up to bullies and fighting to make sure everybody got a fair shake.

But the year I turned eighteen—after years of threats and menace—my parents’ office was firebombed by a neo-Nazi group. We rebuilt the house and my mother doubled down on her convictions. Then the office was firebombed a second time. No arrests were ever made.

What happened to my family felt extreme back then, but the dog whistle of white supremacy and hatred is a straight-up shout today. With Copperhead, I wanted to look more closely at how our sense of morality both mutates and crystallizes as we come of age. I wanted to explore how hatred can complicate love, how love can make us blind to the danger around us, and how racism and hate are at work even in the lives of those who don’t think they’ve chosen a side.

I’ve been thinking about this story practically my whole life, and the place and time we’re living in propelled me to write it now. Doing so hasn’t brought me much certainty, but it has helped me articulate the questions that have dogged me. Is hatred as complicated as love? What if I had been another boy? What would my life have been like if I’d been raised with a different lodestar? Would I be able to step out from under the haze of bigotry? Who would I be now, as a man? What does it take to be good? And on the road to good, what mistakes will we make, what scars will all of us then bear?

Thank you for reading.

Alexi Zentner