“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.… Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
—Etta Fitzgerald
Atlanta, to me, is a city of pure magic.
I met my husband, science fiction novelist Steven Barnes, at a 1997 writers’ conference sponsored by Clark Atlanta University on “The African-American Fantastic Imagination: Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.” The city hummed with history and vibrancy. Our hosts in the college’s English department, Phyllis Briggs-Emanuel and Mary Arnold Twining, took us to a restaurant at an upscale black shopping mall, and someone at our table pointed out that the singers from the sensational a capella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock were sitting at a table behind us, near the wall. While we sat and ate, I saw lawyer Johnnie Cochran and an entourage pass before the restaurant’s large picture window.
Sitting in the company of wonderful writers Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Jewelle Gomez, Steve and I both felt as if we were at a family reunion in Chocolate City. We had both spent many years feeling isolated from other blacks, especially given that the kind of fiction we wrote had not been embraced traditionally by the black community. Horror? Science fiction? Please. But there we were in Atlanta, introduced to audiences of blacks who cared about our work. I felt as if I’d awakened in an alternative universe, just like the lead character in my novel The Between, who dreams himself to different planes of existence.
Steve felt the magic, too. Steve and I lived in opposite corners of the country—he lived in Washington State and I lived in Miami—but Atlanta had brought us together. Before we realized what was happening, we began to fall in love. “We could build an empire,” I said to Steve as we sat in Atlanta’s airport and stared into each other’s eyes like two teenagers about to go home from summer camp. I felt foolish, but I also knew my words to be the absolute truth. It wasn’t love at first sight, not exactly, but it was close enough that I now believe in those fairy-tale meetings I’d always believed were exaggerated. Steve and I had done enough hard soul-searching to take responsibility for our own faults and decide exactly what we needed in a partner, so we recognized each other virtually upon sight.
I will always love Atlanta for Steve alone. But at the start of 2001, in January, I needed Atlanta’s magic again.
Life had been progressing beyond my dreams since the time I met Steve in 1997—a new marriage and stepdaughter, a full-time career as a novelist for the first time, my first pregnancy—but suddenly events had taken a horrible turn. Both my grandmother and Uncle Mun had died on Christmas day in 2000. My phone on the west coast rang at 7:00 A.M. Christmas morning, when my cousin Muncko called from Miami to tell me that both his father and our grandmother were gone. He’d gotten both calls himself in the space of a half hour, soon after opening Christmas presents with his wife, Carol, and their young daughter, Jojo.
No one in my family ever wants to relive another day like that one.
Mom was handling the loss of her mother with strength that amazed and inspired me the way she always has, but I didn’t allow myself to be fooled by her outward display of what seemed like utter composure. I knew she had to feel like pieces of her were being torn to bits, that she was stumbling through a bad dream. My mother has spent almost her entire life taking care of others, and for once I wanted to try my best to take care of her. What could I do to help her?
Distraction, I decided.
Early January marked the start of my book tour for the paperback version of The Black Rose. The summer before, Mom and Dad had accompanied me during portions of my hardcover tour, going to appearances in both Chicago and Indianapolis. I always enjoy the chance to travel with my parents. In October 1999, I’d accompanied them to a CORE reunion in Des Plaines, Illinois, outside Chicago, where, for the first time, I’d met people like Marvin Rich and Jim Robinson, who had been on the national CORE staff, and former CORE field secretaries Gordon Carey, Dave Dennis, Rudy Lombard, and Mary Hamilton Wesley, whom my parents had known. (Lombard, who attended the 1960 Miami Action Institute with Mom and Aunt Priscilla, was arrested in sit-ins while leading the New Orleans CORE chapter. He later became CORE’s national vice chairman. Dennis also led New Orleans CORE.)1
Since The Between was first published in 1995, my mother has been my (mostly unpaid) manager. My mother approached my book career with the same methodical energy she’d always tackled other projects with, studying literary and film law, helping me schedule appearances, videotaping my readings, guiding me through this new, untested phase of my life. Along the way, she has always delighted and motivated the booksellers, librarians, and readers we’ve come in contact with. And while she was with me during the Black Rose tour the summer of 2000, everyone had been excited to hear that we were writing a mother–daughter civil rights memoir.
Since the same publisher, One World/Ballantine, would be publishing Freedom in the Family, I wondered if my editor, Anita Diggs, would be willing to pick up the tab so that my mother could spend a couple of weeks on the road with me for the Black Rose tour. I was thrilled and relieved when Anita said yes. Since we were also promoting our book, she said my mother could accompany me on the East Coast portion of the tour. The trip would not erase the pain of Mother’s death, but at least Mom and I would be together during that horrible period after the loss. Since I’d moved to Washington State after my wedding in 1998, Mom and I weren’t spending nearly as much time together as we once had, so this would be a treat for us.
We enjoyed ourselves as much as we could. We saw everything in hues of gray during that time, but we snatched a few bright moments of laughter. We bickered, vowing never to share a hotel room again. We found ourselves wanting to call Mother to share things, only to be faced again and again by the incomprehensible fact that she was not at home where she usually was. We fought tears at unexpected moments, neither of us wanting to cry in front of the other.
Mostly we did our job. We interacted with readers and booksellers, trying to stoke the fires of enthusiasm for The Black Rose and Freedom in the Family. We stayed distracted. As she learned to do long ago, my mother swallowed her emotions and went to work.
Our first stop was Washington, D.C., then Baltimore. Next, we flew to Atlanta.
Atlanta had a gift waiting for us.
As soon as we stepped off the plane, I began scouting for my driver. One of the real pleasures of touring, to me, is having a driver or escort waiting at the gate with a sign bearing my name, something that never happens to me in my “real life,” away from book tours. Sure enough, I saw a chauffeur waiting with a sign: TANANARIVE DUE. Most people don’t bother to spell out my first name, or they spell it wrong, but this driver had it right.
Waiting beside the chauffeur was a tall, smiling black man I had never seen before. When he saw us approaching the driver, the stranger said, “Excuse me, but are you Tananarive Due?” I said I was, so he said, “Tananarive, my name is Gregory Allen Howard. My uncle is William Howard, and he taught your mother at Florida A&M University.”
“Dr. Howard!” my mother cried, overhearing him. “You’re Dr. Howard’s nephew?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” the man said politely. “I’m here at the airport to pick him up. He’s coming to Atlanta, and his flight gets in a little later tonight.”
“That’s wonderful!” my mother said. “I would love to see him.”
“Uncle Bill has told me the story about how he had a student in his class in the nineteen sixties who named her daughter Tananarive, and she grew up to be a writer.”
“Yes, Mom’s told me that story,” I said. “And she had to call Dr. Howard so he could tell her how to spell the name, because she’d forgotten.” We all laughed, having heard the story many times before. My mind was swimming. What were the odds that one of my mother’s old college professors would be arriving the same night we did? And on a trip she had not been originally scheduled to make?
The stranger gave me his business card. “My cell phone number is on here,” he said. “Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow? I know Uncle Bill will be tired when he gets in tonight, but I’m taking him to dinner tomorrow, and I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see you two. I’m in Atlanta because I’m being honored by the governor.”
“Why are you being honored?” I asked him.
“I’m a screenwriter,” he said. “I wrote the screenplay for Remember the Titans, and we shot most of that in Georgia.”
I congratulated him heartily, my eyes shining with admiration. Remember the Titans, starring Denzel Washington, had been one of the biggest movies of the year. When I’d seen the movie, the screenwriter’s name had passed in a blur. I hadn’t known he was black, much less that he was the nephew of someone my mother knew.
The next night, we sat at a table in a restaurant with Gregory Allen Howard, his uncle, and various representatives from the governor’s office who’d taken part in the ceremony earlier that day. For my part, I was glad to be included in a celebration for Remember the Titans, one of the few successful mainstream movies to tackle a story about this nation’s struggle to bring understanding between the races. More than that, I felt a warm satisfaction as I watched my mother sitting at the end of the table beside Dr. Howard, huddling close in their own private conversation about life, losses, and an era in Tallahassee, Florida, they alone could remember. Dr. Howard had known Mother long before I was born, and I was glad Mom had someone she could share her pain with. Dr. Howard knew the essence of who my mother was, and she didn’t have to explain herself to him, nor he to her. There is so much comfort in unspoken familiarity.
Unfortunately, Dr. Howard did not have much longer to live; Greg Howard wrote me that his uncle had died in March 2002, only a year later. But that night, time had not yet marched on. That night, we created a timeless space for ourselves.
During that dinner, I told Greg Howard that I’d assumed Remember the Titans was based on a novel. Not so, he said. He told me he’d left Hollywood in frustration a few years back and ended up seeking a more quiet place and finding it in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the first things he noticed about the town was the unusual harmony between the races. He was in a barbershop one day, and asked somebody why blacks and whites in Alexandria got along so well.
“It all goes back to the Titans,” someone told him, and he heard the story of the high-school football team that had been forced to integrate and gone on to an undefeated season. It was all there: The racial hatred. A tough-as-nails black coach. High school boys who had been forced to grow past prejudice and become men. Lifelong friendships between blacks and whites.
Stories are like that. They’re always sitting there, waiting for someone to discover them.
I was in a state of calm awe that night, feeling a circle closing around me. Dr. William Howard was in Atlanta for an event to honor his nephew, and my mother was with me on my book tour, all of us celebrating family love, achievement, and pride rooted in the untold stories of our people’s struggle. Dr. Howard had helped prepare my mother and her generation, and my mother’s generation had sacrificed for mine. Gregory Allen Howard wrote Remember the Titans and a script for the movie that would become Ali, and I was about to write a book with my mother about the civil rights movement, honoring everyday heroes and heroines.
All of us sat there in the city of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth in a space somewhere between the past and the future. We laughed. And remembered. And dreamed some more.