LUCY BURDETTE: Today's guest is a dear friend who lives in Key West a few months of the year, and Greenville SC the rest of the time. She's been working on an historical novel set in her home town for several years, and I knew this book, THE EMPTY CELL, would make for a wonderful discussion on our blog. I'll let her tell you about it--welcome Paulette!
PAULETTE ALDEN: When I was growing up in Greenville, S.C., I'd never heard of Willie Earle, a young black man who was abducted from a nearby county jail and beaten, stabbed and shot to death by a mob of twenty-eight cab drivers in 1947. He had been arrested on suspicion of killing a Greenville cab driver. All the defendants confessed that they had participated in the lynching, though none admitted to firing the fatal shots. All were acquitted in a nationally-covered trial in the Greenville County Courthouse on Main Street, where my father had his radio and TV store, in the same month in which I was born.
It was quite by accident that in my late fifties I came upon a long piece of reportage called "Opera in Greenville," written by the famed British author Rebecca West, whom The New Yorker had sent to town to cover the trial. This brilliant piece of writing had two significant impacts on me: I was shocked and fascinated by what had occurred in my hometown; and for the first time I saw Greenville as having literary potential. I had written about Greenville but only as a setting; never a subject. I had left town to go to college and I just kept going. I returned home often while my parents were alive, but I considered Greenville dull and uninteresting. I thought I had "outgrown" it.
But reading West's depiction of Greenville—
Near the center of Greenville there stands an old white church, with a delicate spire and handsome steps leading down from a colonnade—the kind of building that makes an illusion of space around itself. This is the First Baptist Church. In there, on Sunday evenings, there is opera. The lovely girls with their rich hair curling around shoulders and their flowered dresses showing their finely molded throats and arms sit beside the tall young men, whose pale shirts show the squareness of their shoulders and the slimness of their waists, and they join in coloratura hymns with their parents and their grandparents, who sing, like their children, with hope and vehemence, having learned to take things calmly no more than the older characters in opera. As they sing, the women’s dresses become crumpled wraps, the men’s shirts cling to them, although the service does not begin till eight o’clock at night. But, undistracted by the heat, they listen, still and yet soaring, to the anthems sung by an ecstatic choir and to a sermon that is like a bass recitative, ending in an aria of faith, mounting to cadenzas of adoration. In no other place are Baptists likely to remind a stranger of Verdi.
—made me see Greenville as the rich material that it—like any place—can be.
The problem (among others) was that I didn't really know Greenville. I did and I didn't. I had grown up in the Jim Crow South of the fifties and sixties, and while I saw racism all around me (though I didn't know the word), I had been trained not to see. We had a maid, Edith, whom I loved, but who rode home in the backseat of the car and ate off separate dishes. I was aware in 1964 that the city had turned the municipal swimming pool into a "sea-quarium" to house six sea lions, rather than integrate it (the sea lions did not fare well). I was troubled, even outraged, in my awakening teen-age social conscience, but no one I knew talked about such things. It was only by getting away, and decades later, starting with when I read about Willie Earle, that I began to understand that not only was Greenville my subject, but also the racism I had grown up in.
The epigraph of my resulting book, The Empty Cell, is a line by Alexander Chee, from his essay, "The Autobiography of My Novel": "I made a world I knew, but not the world I knew, and told a story there." This apparently enigmatic line resonated strongly with me; I felt I knew just what he meant. Having grown up there, I did know Greenville, but the story I wanted to tell was about a Greenville I didn't know. I had to discover that Greenville through research, interviews, reading, and most of all, imaging characters whose lives and experiences would become more vivid to me and certainly more interesting than my own.
I had originally thought I'd end the novel with the trial of the cabdrivers. But I realized that to do so would be to leave my characters in a dark hole. Over the many decades when I kept returning to Greenville, I saw things that I had never expected to see there: Black people eating in the same restaurants as whites, being friends, having the same jobs. I decided to take the novel up to the beginning of change, when the civil rights movement came to Greenville in 1960 in the form of lunch counter sit-ins.
There were problems, uh, "challenges" in writing this novel. I knew one of the characters had to be one of the lynchers. It was necessary to include him as part of the story. And this character, Lee Trammell, being part of a lynch mob in 1947, used the "N-word" prolifically. There was no getting around that. When I finished the book, I put this in the author's note at the beginning: "I know that some may be offended by the use of the "N-word" by various characters in the novel. As disgusting as the term is, unfortunately it was in common use in the Jim Crow South. My fictional character, Lee Trammell, for example, being part of a lynch mob in 1947, would have used that slur. It's his, not mine. I don't use the word lightly, but I believe I do use it accurately."
Another problem: I wanted to write about a Black woman, Alma Stone, who had loved Willie when he was a baby, who loses her religion and flees the South after his brutal murder. I knew perfectly well that I couldn't truly understand what it's like to be a Black woman, let alone during Jim Crow, nor was I supposed (or allowed) to take that on. I also wrote about a gay prosecutor and a young white woman who has a biracial affair. I just had to put aside all the "shouldn'ts" if I was going to write this book. And I wanted to write it. It became the most important thing in my life for several years.
Which is not to say I didn't fret about criticism; I was afraid of it. But I took heart when I read Parul Sehgal's review of American Dirt, which received its share of knocks for cultural appropriation, in The New York Times: "I'm of the persuasion that fiction, necessarily, even rather beautifully, requires imagining an 'other' of some kind. As the novelist Hari Kunzru has argued, imagining ourselves into other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical urgency. The caveat is to do this work of representation responsibly, and well."
I hope I have done that, but it's not for me to say.
Writers, have you ever had to put aside any "shouldn'ts" in order to write something you wanted to write? Readers, how do you feel about an author imagining the other?
About The Empty Cell:
"In the wake of the lynching in 1947 of a young Black man named Willie Earle by a mob of cab drivers in Greenville, South Carolina, four people on the periphery of Earle's life find their lives upended: Lee Trammell, one of the twenty-eight cabbies acquitted at trial, is tortured by the idea that not guilty is not the same as innocent, and escapes in the only way he knows how; Alma Stone, who loved Willie when he was a child, loses her religion and flees the South, only to discover that Harlem is not the Promised Land she sought; Lawton Chastain, a closeted gay prosecutor, realizes he must destroy his settled married life if he is ever to have a chance at happiness; Betsy Chastain, on the cusp of adulthood, embarks on a passionate interracial love affair that teaches her the power and limits of love and sex. Against the backdrop of the social and racial strictures of the fifties, each of these characters struggles to find his or her own version of freedom. Each experiences loss, sorrow, and growth as the South begins its long march toward racial equality.
Bio: Paulette Alden is the author of two collections of autobiographical short stories, Feeding the Eagles and Unforgettable; a memoir, Crossing the Moon, and The Answer to Your Question, a novel. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she taught fiction and memoir writing for many years at the University of Minnesota. In 2016, she and her husband Jeff moved (in her case, back) to Greenville, South Carolina, where she was born and raised.
