originally posted 8/22/15 at imaginary people
Summer Update…
Summer is writing season for me, so I thought I would check in and detail it a bit. It has been a relaxing couple of months. Tomorrow is the first day of school, and my classroom is bright, welcoming and ready to go. I am as well, to some extent. I divide my thoughts between the upcoming school year and my new release Rise of the Gorgon.
I also got married this summer as soon as same-sex marriage became law of the land. Janette and I were planning to go to another state and wed, but there is just something comforting about being able to get married in your home town.
I also hung out Houston Pride fest with some other Bold Strokes Writers: MJ Williams, Laydin Michaels, Carson Taite, and Barbara Ann Wright.
I tried to blog and started on several brilliant trains of thoughts that did not land me anywhere, except this one. It is a subject that has come to the forefront recently.
Why Black Characters Matter
I did not become an avid reader until I was like 12 or 13 years old. Books just did not interest me before then. I liked playing Nintendo, watching cartoons, and reading comics. I enjoyed stories with action, adventure, and magic. Even though I was an exceptional reader, (I had one of the highest scores on one of those standardized tests) chapters of picture-less books about Baby Sitting Clubs, and orphans in box cars, and the required reading at school did not interest me.
Then, one day, when I was sick from school recovering from the flu, I began to bug my mother for something to do. A savvy Mom, she suggested I read a book. She even referred me to my father’s bookshelf. He had collections of Louis D’Amor western paperbacks, spy novels, and other manly genres. I expressed my doubt to my mom. I would never find anything to interest me on the shelf, and I certainly did not want to peruse her Harlequin collection.
Mom insisted I get out of her hair as she was busy with the day’s housework. So I picked up a novel called Shadow Fires by Dean Koontz. It’s about a scientist who goes berserk after experimenting on himself and goes after his ex-wife and her boyfriend. He mutates into a horrible reptilian creatures somewhere in the middle of the book. It was pretty gruesome to my young brain. I was hooked.
I began to methodically devour every book on Dad’s shelves. I especially enjoyed the Koontz novels; there was action, adventure, and scary parts. I didn’t even mind the romantic parts, or even the swearing. Eventually, I even like the swearing.
What did not bother me was the race of the main characters. I was a black kid after all, born in the early 80’s. Since I could first comprehend the concept of story, I’d been bombarded with white, mostly male characters. Magical adventures were reserved for little white boys like Sebastian from Neverending Story and the kids from The Goonies. My young brain never questioned these dynamics. I was addicted to the stories of mundane life turned on its ear by extraordinary phenomena.
A few years after that fateful day, I wrote my first novel. It was one of those spiral notebooks filled with my notoriously bad handwriting. The story was about some girls about my age, who live in a town close to Area 51. They foil of government alien cover-up and inevitably save the world from an alien invasion. The main characters were black, white, and Native American. I had no idea how important my creation was at the time. It was pure instinct when I gave these characters life, it just seemed important that a girl who looked like me should have her own awesome adventure.
I never gave up writing, and I never gave up on my female main characters of color. Their visibility became more apparent as I grew older. I began to search for black authors who wrote the kind of prose I wrote. I found authors like Octavia Butler, and Tananarive Due. In high school and college, I read to authors like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and Chinua Achebe.
Because of the genres that interested me, I often wondered if I would ever find my place among the shelves. I worked hard. I imagined a place for me on the shelves among my favorites. Eventually, one of my books was accepted by a publisher; Bold Strokes Books, to be exact. It was around this time that I realized that white readers and writers had a much different experience. They’d grown up seeing themselves in the pages of books, and on the jackets. Much more importantly, they related to characters on a different level.
This realization hit home during the Hunger Games’ Rue scandal. In the story, Rue is a young girl who forms an alliance with the main character Katniss Everdeen. She is killed in a tragic scene. The description of Rue is vague, but she has dark skin. In the movie, the character is played by actress, Amandla Stenberg who is half-black. Many fans criticized the casting choice and were angry because this beloved character was not white. They were so used to the absence of diverse characters they did not notice that the author had created a dystopian future much like our dystopian reality.
Of course, not every white fan of the Hunger Games was up in arms, and not every white fan interpreted the author’s description as Rue being white. What caught my attention was the ugly, racist comments on the internet. Was Rue not the same, sweet girl from the book just because she is of color? Did she not deserve sympathy? Was she no longer relatable?
It doesn’t end there. When the much anticipated trailer for the latest Star Wars movie was released in 2014, there was uproar that a black actor was beneath the famous Storm Trooper helmet. The online comments were particularly disgusting.
I wondered what would have happened if I had turned away from every wonderful story I’d come across simply because the characters were not black? What if my father had felt that way? Those Dean Koontz novels would not have been on his shelf, and I would have watched reruns that day. My father did not have that luxury, and to some degree neither did I.
As a teacher of inner city youth, I see are young, black women and girls on that same search, potential writers and artists looking for their own voices. Many of them turn away because of the lack of characters and writers of color. As a writer, and as a teacher, I want to ensure that the next generation of readers can experience characters that look like themselves.
In my novel Rise of the Gorgon, one of the two main characters is Elle. She is a black journalist and founder of a progressive news website. Elle reports on the stories that don’t normally get told in the main stream media. She is intelligent, feisty, resourceful and loyal to a fault. I created her in honor of black women struggling to just be seen and heard in a culture that does not necessarily value pursuits that don’t involve athletics, dancing or singing.
Perhaps one day, a young, black woman will come across one of my novels, see my face on the back and be inspired. I have always thought that I write for myself, that the subject matter I choose for my stories and the characters I write come from my own whimsy. In truth, the moment I took up the writer mantle at the age of fourteen, I accepted the responsibility of making minority characters visible.
