The Wicked Orchard

Several years before I reached the point where I could complete a manuscript from beginning to end, I was in contact with an old friend of mine, who was about to move to China. They are the kind of friend where you could not talk to for months, even years, but when you reconnect, it doesn’t feel strained or distant. In the conversations leading up to her departure, we talked about writing, stories and characters, and they told me something that I hadn’t even considered at the time. If you are a reader, especially one born and raised in the United States, you assume the characters in the novel are white.

 

I remember having to pause to think about their words. I was stunned to realize that they were correct. Unless the description specifically says otherwise, I automatically assumed that the characters are white. In case you all don’t know, I’m not white. So, it bothered me that this was the case. But it only takes a modicum of thought to understand why. Everything that I have absorbed in television, movies and print for the majority of my life has been dominated by white people. They have always been the default, so why wouldn’t that be so ingrained in me that whenever I picked up a novel by Stephen King or Dean Koontz, I assumed the characters were white, and most of the time, I’d be 100% right.

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The only time this wasn’t the case is if I knew going in that the author was Black. When I was in school and the girls my age were reading “Mama” by Terry McMillan, I quickly learned that she was Black. So when I read her novel, it was easy to picture them that way. The same is true for “A Gathering of Old Men” by Ernest Gaines, and of course, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker. Now, fast forward. I’m a woman in my 30s, and when I finally decided that I was going to give writing a go, there was absolutely, positively, no doubt in my mind that my characters would be Black. And I endeavored to ensure that whether one person read my work or a thousand, each of them would know that my characters were Black.

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Hang in there with me, because the situation gets stickier as time progress.

I write my first novel. And I follow it with another and another. Even though, there are some non-white characters within each novel, no one will misunderstand that the main characters are Black. But I write adult fiction. That is the only true unifying thread between my published and unpublished manuscripts. They fall into an assortment of categories: historical, supernatural, contemporary, psychological. But regardless of any of the aforementioned labels, you can be sure that the word adult is etched in stone in front of each. These are not children’s books or YA, or none of that. My characters get tangled up in adult situations concerning pain, trauma, violence, and sex, but the underlying tie that binds is love: the loss of love, the pursuit of love, the discovery of love, the falsehoods of love, how far we’ll go to attain it and what we’ll do when it’s taken away. And I mean love in all of its facets: romantic love, familial love, platonic love and the love of oneself.

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So now, we have my insistence on my main characters being Black, combined with my insistence on writing about deep adult issues, especially those concerning love and sex, and then suddenly the conundrum of the presentation of Black love and Black sex within fiction begins to unfold.

(I mean love and sex as it relates to Black people, just in case, I lost anyone.)

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I’m going to take a moment and use Black cinema to give you all a sense of what I’m referencing. When you compare the number of standard mainstream romantic comedies for example to the number of romantic comedies featuring main characters that are Black, then there is really no comparison. And although many of the Black romantic comedies in existence are extremely funny, with sweet love stories that result in happily-ever-afters; their content doesn’t linger on your mind.

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There’s no way that “Two Can Play That Game” can have the same profound effect as “The Color Purple”. I have talked about the themes, symbolism and layers of The Color Purple at length numerous times, because the material stuck with me. The handling of Black love and Black Sex in Two Can Play That Game was comical, yet neat. The handling of the same issues in The Color Purple was painful and messy. And to me, that is far more accurate and realistic, and I feel that many literary agents and publishers shy away from material that is too realistic when it pertains to Black people.

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Much of my fiction might be compared to the movie, Queen and Slim. Real Black people thrown into desperate situations, complete with the bullshit that comes with emotional damage, the situations that lead to love and the raw need that can lead to sex. But the difference is that in my work, one way or another, there is just ending. I am convinced that whether you love or hate the characters in the story, you will be satiated by the justice derived in the end. Mind you, I am not talking about Superman saving Lois Layne and delivering Lex Luthor to the authorities type of justice. I’m talking something far darker, yet utterly satisfying.

I write realistic, adult, contemporary and literary fiction that I am convinced many of those working in the publishing world are just too weak to deal with.

They want eternally light and fluffy. YA (Young adult fiction) and the like. If that’s your bag that’s cool, but I don’t have time for it. And my mind isn't geared towards it.

I prefer to write something that grabs a hold of you and etches itself in your memory, and provides you with fictional justice, especially since we experience very little justice in our daily lives.

For me, the search for a literary agent or a publisher will be a long and arduous on; and although, I will continue to query those that might take an interest in my work, I fear the likelihood of finding one is slim.

Most would rather wash, rinse and repeat the old flavors of the month, that have been hashed and re-hashed for decades because they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to do otherwise.