Tananarive Due's Reading Circle

VIDEO: Book trailer for MY SOUL TO TAKE (Sept. 6)

2011-08-09T20:32:00.001-04:00

   What happens when you combine a giddy author fresh from Hollywood with an iPhone video camera? A book trailer on a shoestring budget! (In fact, all it cost me was time and a 1.99 iPhone app called 8mm Vintage Camera that creates neat vintage film effects.)

   This is a trailer for My Soul to Take (Washington Square Press / Sept. 6). Fans of my African Immortals series will recognize the Underground Railroad and Glow from its predecessor, Blood Colony. Many readers will recognize the characters of Dawit and Jessica from the first books in the series, My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood.

     But for you newbies: Glow is a healing compound derived from the blood of immortals, although most people who traffic in it don't know its origins. All they know is that it can heal anything, and the government is determined to shut down its distribution.

In My Soul to Take, my immortal teenager, Fana, and her Glow network will learn exactly how powerful the forces against Glow really are--and how close they have brushed to the end of the world.

    Here's the trailer. Hope you like it! And travel safely, Glow healers.

"Secrets to a Writer's Life": my first audio MP3 on writing...for writers

2011-07-28T07:54:00.000-04:00

When I was four years old, I folded several pages of typing paper in half to create my first book, which I misspelled on the cover as "Babby Bobby." It wasn't a page-turner, just a simple story about a baby named Bobby who was sitting in his crib, drinking from his bottle and trying to get through his day. I did my own stick-figure illustrations.

A lot has happened since "Baby Bobby." With the upcoming publication of My Soul to Take (Sept. 6) [EXCERPT HERE], I have authored or co-authored a dozen novels and a civil rights memoir, in addition to short stories and a novella. I have also been thrilled to win several awards, including an American Book Award.

But it wasn't an easy road, and I didn't get to this point alone. I had great teachers, readers and advice along the way.

I also had to learn a few lessons the hard way...like, for instance, that writing never gets any easier. At a certain point with every project, I am besieged by voices that tell me my writing is terrible, my current project won't hold up to anything else I've written, and I'll be laughed out of the industry. Every project.

That's one of my secrets. Recently, when I mentioned this on Twitter, one of my followers confessed that her internal editor has prevented her from writing any fiction since January. That's no joke. For some writers, fearful voices might mean a project is never written at all.

Here's another secret: I have to fight to find time to write too. I've just been able to use my experience as a journalist to train my Muse to show up on a schedule, more or less, whether she likes it or not. To me, there is nothing mystifying about the "flow" process, and I have developed tricks to help put myself in the mood.

I think it helps writers of all levels to understand that we're all walking a similar road, fighting the same battles. That's one of the reasons I love teaching. I coach writers and teach at the graduate and undergraduate level.

But I can't reach everyone in person...so hubby (and co-author) Steven Barnes recently sat me down for a Q&A and chatted with me about everything we could think of on the topic of writing: from finding time to write to characterization to structure to marketing. So now I've "dropped" my first MP3, which is full of the advice I wish someone had given me. Just for fun, I threw in nearly 60 pages of bonus material on a PDF, including my keynote address at the 2005 Maui Writers' Conference and an in-depth lecture on adaptation and the process of adapting my novel The Good House to a screenplay.

This is my first MP3, but it won't be my last. It has a special price this week.

If you or a writer in your life could stand to learn a few secrets, CHECK IT OUT HERE.

VIDEO: Writing speculative fiction

2011-07-13T11:31:00.000-04:00

Recently, I had the opportunity to take part in Art Sanctuary's "Celebration of Black Writing" in Philadelphia. After I gave a talk on writing science fiction, I was interviewed by Maurice Waters from BlackSci-Fi.com. (I think these general principles apply to writing all speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy and horror.) Let me know what you think of these tips!

Family: the most important story

2011-06-25T11:45:00.000-04:00

I am generally a private person, but I was moved to write publicly about my mother's battle with thyroid cancer with an essay for CNN.com: "Behind Mom's dark glasses: A civil rights leader's biggest fight."
My mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, is also the co-author of our 2003 civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which I have discussed previously on this blog.
I often say that Freedom in the Family is the most important book I have ever written.
While I was growing up, my mother spoke often of her dream to publish the stories of the unknown foot-soldiers she knew, black and white, who sacrificed their freedom, families, sanity--and, in some case, their lives--to try to win the rights we all enjoy today. Mom never set out to write about herself, but we tried to capture all of their stories in the book.
While we were interviewing my grandmother, my father (civil rights attorney John Due) and civil rights activists to write Freedom in the Family, my mother and I often reminded others to sit down and interview family members whether or not a book project was in the works.
Once those stories are gone, they're gone forever.
(To hear an NPR "Fresh Air" interview with me and my mother from 2003, click HERE.)
Never forget that your family is the most important story of all.

EXCERPT: MY SOUL TO TAKE (Sept. 2011)

2011-04-21T17:13:00.000-04:00

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This excerpt was the original prologue to MY SOUL TO TAKE, although it has now been moved to Chapter Three. I chose this excerpt because it takes the readers full circle to my original story in MY SOUL TO KEEP, the 1997 novel that introduced a Miami newspaper reporter named Jessica and her husband, David, who is secretly an immortal.

My African Immortals series ponders the price of immortality, the price of power, and what it might be like to have blood that could heal any ailment. MY SOUL TO TAKE centers around Fana, an 18-year-old girl born with the Living Blood, who must stand against a supernatural plague that threatens the world population.

If you're not familiar with my novels, you might want to read MY SOUL TO KEEP, THE LIVING BLOOD and BLOOD COLONY before reading MY SOUL TO TAKE...but it is written as a stand-alone novel. (And any title similarities to a certain Wes Craven movie are purely coincidental.)

(Pub date: Sept. 6, 2011 / Washington Square Press)

*****

A broad-shouldered man stands at Jessica Jacobs-Wolde’s kitchen counter, stirring a bowl with slow, careful strokes while he watches her out of the corner of his eye. He slumps across the counter on one elbow, his face hidden by a shadow escaping the light from the bright rows of jalousie windows.

Not her husband, David. She left David sleeping in their bed upstairs. Besides, this man has the wrong shoes. Wrong posture. Wrong smell…shoe polish. And Old Spice, a smell older than David’s. The man’s face turns slightly, and light cleaves to his dark skin. Jessica blinks three times, more weak-kneed with each blink.

The man is her father.

Jessica’s father died when she was eight, in 1978. But now he’s in the kitchen as if he belongs with her in 1997, stooped over as he stirs the cobalt blue bowl she and David bought in Key West. Nineteen years have passed, but she knows his wide shoulders, salt-and-pepper hair, the small gap between his front teeth.

Time and death haven’t changed her father a bit.

But his clothes aren’t right. At first, he was wearing his dusty work boots, and in the next breath he’s in his gray Sunday suit with shiny black shoes reeking of Kiwi shoe polish—his only church suit, the one he was wearing when they closed the gleaming rose colored casket and lowered him into a maw in the earth.

I’m dreaming, she thinks, a late realization. She has to be.

“Thought I’d make us some breakfast,” Daddy says.

How dare he just show up now, out of the air! What has taken him so long?

Before she speaks, she talks herself down from her anger. Hasn’t he always been near them when she and her daughter, Kira, climb down into the tiny burial cave at the foot of their front yard, near the mailbox? Don’t the neighbors talk about ghosts in the mossy live oak trees? Maybe it has taken him twenty years to find her.

“Daddy?” Her voice reverts to childhood, almost too soft to hear.

Her father stirs his wooden spoon. Pancakes and fried eggs were all her father knew how to cook. It’s Daddy, all right.

“’Mornin’, baby girl,” Daddy says.

“What are you doing here?” She can’t say Daddy a second time.

His clothes change again, melting. Then he’s wearing his brilliantly aqua blue Miami Dolphins jersey, number 72. Bob Greise. Daddy has gone to the Orange Bowl to see the Dolphins play all season long, sparking a fuss with her mother. The tiles on the kitchen counter turn powder blue, like the ones in their childhood home. When Jessica blinks, the tiles pale back to white.

Is Daddy trying to trick her? Daddy’s face isn’t quite in focus. She blinks again. Now, he looks like David.

“You’ve been gone a long time, Jess,” he says. Her father had never called her by David’s nickname for her. When he was alive, he told her and her sister, Alexis, to stop letting neighborhood boys call them Jess and Alex because it sounded too tomboyish.

“Come on back with me, before you can’t any more. We miss you, Jessica.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Jessica is surprised at how angry she sounds.

“You know who I mean, mi vida,” Daddy says patiently. He heats a skillet on the stove, and butter sizzles sweet in the air. She has never heard her father speak Spanish, but his accent is flawless. He sounds like he grew up in Spain. Daddy’s voice drops to a whisper. “Fana. Me. Alex. All of us.”

What’s he talking about? Her sister, Alex, isn’t dead!

“Alex isn’t with you, Daddy,” she says. “She’s still here. And who’s…?”

She already can’t remember the other name.

As if the stranger’s name broke the spell, Daddy is suddenly gone. The skillet sizzles without him, the butter turning brown. No Daddy. An echo of his bright jersey still plays behind her eyes, but his absence hangs in the room.

Jessica holds her breath, waiting for him to reappear, her mind raging with questions and regrets. She is exhausted from grief. She wants to go back to bed, but her nightmares would come if she tried to sleep now.

“Daddy?” she whispers to the empty room, trying the word on her tongue again.

“Lord, girl, you’re burning up the butter!” Bea says from the kitchen doorway. Her loose multi-colored batik tunic fans across her arm like a choir robe.

Her mother was in last night’s nightmare, Jessica suddenly remembers. Something about an airplane. Her heart. The memory fragments are sharp as glass, like physical pain.

Still here.

Jessica clasps her mother’s warm hand, running her fingers across the soft, fleshy ridges of her knuckles, moistened with the Giorgio lotion Jessica gives her for Christmas every year. And the scent of Zest soap from her neck.

“Something just scared the crap out of me,” Jessica says. Already, holding her mother’s hand, she feels better. “Not you. It was…”

“Ommmmmm!” Kira hums, chiding her from behind Bea’s skirt. “You said a bad word, Mommy! Crap is a bad word.”

Jessica is surprised to see Kira up and already dressed for school—in her pink Flower Power T-shirt and slightly too-short blue jeans she wore because she loved the pink belt. The laces of her sneakers clash in bright orange.

Jessica feels sick to her stomach. A sour taste prods the back of her throat.

“Well, let’s see what Grandma can whip together,” Bea says, opening the kitchen cabinet.

“Kira has school, Mom. I’ll fix her cereal.”

“Hush,” Bea says. “We have all the time in the world.”

Kira gives Jessica her prettiest bright-eyed stare. “I love you, Mommy!” Kira says, and crushes herself against Jessica for a tight hug. “Forever.”

Jessica kneels to the kitchen linoleum on one knee to hug Kira and savor every part of her. The sure, steady fluttering of her heartbeat. Her tiny rib-cage. The sweet Crest toothpaste on her breath. The honey scent of her uncombed hair.

Honey? Bees. Her nightmare tries to surface, but Jessica fights it back.

“You need to let her go and give her to me, Jessica,” Bea says. “She’s my best helper.”

Kira cheers, flying to Bea’s side by the stove. Smoke rises from the skillet. In the smoke, Bea and Kira are hard to see.

“Jessica, go fetch me flour some from the cellar,” Bea’s voice says in the smoke.

The smoke is pluming, filling the kitchen, but Jessica sees the cellar door wide open in her path. Two steps, maybe three, and she’ll be inside the doorway. We don’t have a cellar, Jessica thinks, but there it is. A bright light shines, and a shadow moves against the wall.

Maybe it’s her father. Maybe this is where he wanted her to follow him.

Kira gives a small cough, and Jessica’s head whips around. All she sees is smoky profiles; one taller, one tiny. The kitchen smells like sweet-spicy incense.

“Mom…” Jessica begins. She had a thousand things to say. A thousand questions.

“Don’t worry about Kira,” Mom says. “I’ve got her, baby. You go on, now.”

“’Bye, Mommy!” Kira calls, and Jessica’s throat burns with pain.

The shadow in the cellar moves again. A disembodied arm beckons, or seems to. “Daddy?” Jessica says, and goes toward the open cellar door. The incense smell is stronger from downstairs. Bea and Kira giggle behind her.

Jessica takes her first step down the cellar stairs.

But it isn’t a cellar, just as she’d thought. It’s the burial cave at the end of their driveway with smooth dirt walls, built by the Tequestas to store arrow root; Kira’s outdoor playhouse. The most charming fixture of her yard. Jessica’s favorite place.

Jessica doesn’t remember a doorway from the house to the burial cave. But here she is.

In 1997, she reminds herself. Still here.

Jessica hunches over to walk down into the cave.

A man sits cross-legged against the packed dirt of the cave’s far wall. The cave is bigger than Jessica remembers it—as big as their bedroom. This time, the man isn’t her father. He is nude. His face is hidden in a bright light, but she knows his body.

“Why are you in here?” Jessica says.

“You know why,” her husband says. “For you, Jessica. To find you.”

His voice sets her soul afire.

“You haven’t lost me,” she says. “You’re right here.”

Slowly, he shakes his head. The light plays across the burnished skin of his face, unbridling his beauty. His face brings tears to her eyes.

“The man in the bed upstairs isn’t me,” he says. “He’s a memory, Jessica. A lie.”

When he says the word lie, the ground shakes beneath her, a rumble. Her stomach aches.

“It’s not a lie,” she says. “I taste it, touch it and feel it every day. I’m still here.”

“It’s a dream you made for yourself.”

Suddenly, she can’t remember her husband’s name. The cave is dimming around her. She feels sleepy, her eyes coaxed open by the light on her husband’s face.

“We live at 296 Tequesta Road,” she says. “I work for the Miami Sun-News. I’m a reporter. We have a five-year-old daughter named Kira. She’s right here. And so is Mom. My mother is cooking breakfast with Kira right now.”

Her husband’s jaw clenches with what looks like anger, but in the light she sees it’s pain. “We lost Kira, Jessica,” he says. “We lost your mother.”

“That's not true!” Jessica screams.

Tears water her husband’s cheeks. “I wish it weren’t, Jess. If I could make your dream real and step back into time, I would find a way to spare you all of it.” He swallows a sob. “I would change everything. But I cannot. We cannot. I dream of your memory, too. I wish we could travel back together.”

For the first time, Jessica remembers her husband’s true name: Dawit.

“You lied to me,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You stole everything.”

“Yes.” A whisper.

And yet, she loves him. Her love for him is deeper, somehow, than her love when she had known him only as David. But their love was brighter then. Innocent.

“Then why shouldn’t I stay here?” she says. “Why shouldn’t we be happy?”

“We will be happy again, Jess,” he says. “We can.”

“How?”

She can’t remember everything about her nightmares yet, but she is waking from her dream. Not the cave—somewhere else. An underground temple. Another child.

Not Kira. Her first daughter is dead.

Fana. Her second child’s name.

Fana is where Jessica’s nightmares begin.

My African Immortals Series--next installment, My Soul to Take (2011)

2010-09-27T00:53:00.000-04:00

In 1997, I published a novel entitled My Soul to Keep that marked the beginning of what I now call my African Immortals series. The story centers around a 500-year-old Ethiopian immortal named Dawit and the Miami newspaper reporter, Jessica, who is unwittingly married to him. At the time, I had no series in mind.

The novel was a watershed for me: It has endured as a reader favorite, and was blurbed by Octavia E. Butler and Stephen King, who wrote that it "bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire." The genesis of the story was simple: What would it be like to discover that your husband has a secret? What if he never got sick and never aged, and his Brothers were ready to summon him home?

Ultimately, My Soul to Keep is about the price of immortality.

In 2001, I published what I thought would be the definitive sequel, entitled The Living Blood, which won a 2002 American Book Award. With the birth of an immortal child named Fana, this book wrestled with questions of parenthood and destiny: How do you raise a child who is more powerful than you are? This novel also introduced the concept of how dangerous it might be to have blood in your veins that could heal any illness with only a drop. (Think of nations rich in oil or diamonds, and you get the idea. Conflict follows riches.)

In 2008, I published another unexpected sequel, this one entitled Blood Colony, which revisited my powerful toddler as a headstrong teenager bent on distributing her blood to the world in the form of a an underground drug called Glow. I also introduced the idea that my African Immortals are not the only ones with the Living Blood to give them eternal life...and that even a great gift can be badly abused. Blood Colony was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Unlike with its predecessors, I knew that I wanted to write another installment after Blood Colony...because the story of Fana's meeting with her immortal Bloodborn counterpart was far from over.

Last week, I turned in a manuscript for a novel my publisher has tentatively entitled My Soul to Take (no, it's not the Wes Craven movie coming out this month), which will be what my sister jokingly refers to as "the fourth novel in a trilogy." This novel will begin a year after Blood Colony, which was set in the year 2015, and it picks up the story almost exactly where it left off. This installment is about the price of power.

Unfortunately, the fourth African Immortals novel won't be published until the fall of 2011, which is a long wait for all of us. To help give readers a "fix," I've launched a Facebook fan page for Fana [see sidebar], written in her own voice, to help establish the world of the novel with snippets from the character's life. In my writing blog, "Tananarive Due Writes," I'll post soon about how difficult it is to pull myself out of the daily writing of that book and walk away yet again. (Thank goodness I can leapfrog to other projects like the Devil's Wake zombie novel I'm co-authoring with my husband, Steven Barnes.)

I can't thank readers enough for the support they have given this series, which has truly changed my life. I first met actor Blair Underwood through My Soul to Keep, since he was electrified by the immortal character Dawit. Now, Blair, Steve and I have published three installments of the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series you have seen on this blog. (My Soul to Keep is currently in film development at Fox Searchlight, where it has been for about seven years. Blair is one of the producers who helped get it set up at the studio. Whenever there is news, I will post it here and on Fana's Facebook page.)

There is plenty of time for readers to reacquaint themselves with the first three books in the series, or to discover them for the first time. I hope to meet readers new and old through Fana's Facebook page, and I'll do everything I can to make the next year pass quickly.

Let's have some fun while we wait!

From Cape Town with Love: Now showing on an iPad near you! (Or an iPhone...or your computer...)

2010-05-27T17:33:00.000-04:00

One glance at our new novel, From Cape Town with Love (Atria Books), will tell you that it wants to be a movie. The title is a riff of the James Bond movie From Russia with Love. The cover looks like a movie poster, and the book has its own iMix soundtrack.

That was the idea behind the Tennyson Hardwick series the three of us envisioned: me, my husband, Steven Barnes, and actor Blair Underwood. We want to give readers good books, and we want to see those books on the big screen. Why not?

This week, Tennyson Hardwick came to life in the Vook (video ebook) version of our novel, which officially launched today for $6.99. The Vook and the hardcover versions are the same story, but the Vook is only about 85 of the novel’s 350 pages. The writing is less steamy, with an eye toward a younger audience.

But the Vook has something the novel doesn’t: Video webisodes to illustrate key scenes. In the scene below, an Oscar-winning Hollywood actress hires Tennyson to be her bodyguard when she visits an orphanage in a South African township—setting From Cape Town with Love in motion.

[WATCH THE SCENE ON YOU TUBE's VOOK TV CHANNEL HERE:]

(Blair Underwood and Noa Tishby. PHOTO CREDIT: Tananarive Due)

As soon as he heard about Vooks from Atria Books publisher Judith Curr, Blair jumped at the chance to direct, produce and star in the webisodes. His book trailer blew us away.

When I downloaded the Vook to my iPhone and experienced it for the first time, I giggled at how much the experience reminded me of being a kid reading a book with pictures, delighting at unexpected video stills that captured the moment just right. I missed the text we cut out, but the videos added a new dimension. (Also available for iPad and computers.)

For this writer with long-held dreams of crossing from books to film, this process has been a magical Hollywood affair.

One sizzling video stars Underwood and Kellita Smith (“The Bernie Mac Show”). The actress playing Oscar winner Sofia Maitlin, Noa Tishby, is the co-executive producer of HBO’s “In Treatment,” the series where Blair was nominated for a Golden Globe.
The shoot was covered by “Extra,” and its coverage will air Saturday and Sunday. (Check local listings.)

(Blair Underwood and Kellita Smith. PHOTO CREDIT: Maria Rivera Savoy)

Blair interviewed on the set by "Extra"'s Terri Seymour

(PHOTO CREDIT: Maria Rivera Savoy)

Buy the hardcover too. But when you’ve read From Cape Town with Love, you won’t want to miss the Vook.

From Cape Town with Love: Launch week! Blair Underwood on "Today"

2010-05-17T16:20:00.000-04:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This week marks the hardcover publication of From Cape Town with Love (Atria Books) and a Vook video e-book edition with exciting video clips dramatized directly from the book's pages by Blair Underwood and other familiar faces, inluding a memorable appearance by Kellita Smith ("The Bernie Mac Show").

From Cape Town with Love is a collaboration between me and my husband, Steven Barnes, and actor Blair Underwood. This is the third in our Tennyson Hardwick mystery/thriller series that began with Casanegra and In the Night of the Heat, which won a 2009 NAACP Image Award. [Read earlier posts to learn more.]

Today, Blair Underwood appeared on NBC's "Today" Show to promote From Cape Town with Love and his new NBC series, "The Event," where he'll play the President of the United States. (Mondays at 9 p.m. this fall--our old "24" TV viewing spot!).

During today's interview, "Today" played video clips from the footage Blair shot from our novel!

Read the unabridged hardcover AND the abridged Vook--which will be worth the price for the video clips alone. Bring a computer or iPad to your book club meeting with a bottle of South African wine, and you'll be a hit!

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE UNABRIDGED HARDCOVER NOW:

From Cape Town with Love: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel

Hollywood, meet Tennyson Hardwick... (NEW VIDEO TRAILER!)

2010-05-11T01:49:00.000-04:00

I first met Blair Underwood years ago through his efforts to mount a film version of a novel I sent him when I was a new writer. My husband, Steven Barnes, and I have been collaborating on fiction and screenplays for a dozen years.

In 2007, the Tennyson Hardwick series was born as an answer to the lessons we have learned in Hollywood—Blair as an actor, storyteller, director and producer, and Steve and I as writers. We wanted to create high-quality fiction with a cinematic sensibility, so readers couldn’t help imagining the movie version.

Why three authors? There’s power in numbers.

We all bring different strengths and tastes. And we all wanted our books to blur the line between books and film so that we wouldn’t be limited by budgets, delays or stereotypes. We wanted strong characters, plenty of action, and memorable love scenes for our hero.

The book titles riff off of classic Hollywood movies. Plots are ripped from the celebrity headlines. The hero, Tennyson Hardwick, is an actor who moonlights as a bodyguard and detective, and his past as a gigolo to powerful women comes back to haunt him in unexpected ways.

The first novel, Casanegra., was an Essence Book Club pick. The second novel, In the Night of the Heat, won an NAACP Image Award.

The newest novel, From Cape Town with Love (Atria Books), will be published May 18 in hardcover—but on a new platform called a Vook on May 20. Vooks, which are video e-books, are the perfect home for Tennyson Hardwick. This time around, we wanted a James Bond flair.

With Vooks, readers read an abridged version of the novel on their computers, iPhones or iPads. (To find out more about the process of creating a Vook, visit www.tananarivedue.wordpress.com.)

What does it really look like when publishing meets Hollywood?

We think it looks something like this.

   CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE!!!

   From Cape Town with Love Vook (abridged) with video clips available at Vook.com, Simonandschuster.com and iTunes on May 20.

Original hardcover available in bookstores everywhere May 18.

ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE UNABRIDGED NOVEL NOW

   READ AN EXCERPT: FROM CAPE TOWN WITH LOVE.


  BELOW: A discussion featuring Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes as they discuss the Tennyson Hardwick series.

EXCLUSIVE book excerpt: FROM CAPE TOWN WITH LOVE (May 18, 2010/Atria)

2010-02-12T20:12:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it, but in May we'll be publishing our third novel in our Tennyson Hardwick mystery series, From Cape Town with Love. These are the books I'm co-authoring with my husband, Steven Barnes, in partnership with actor Blair Underwood.

This book literally begins where 2008's NAACP Image Award-winning In the Night of the Heat left off, so there's plenty of time to catch up...but all of these books are written so that first-time readers can follow them too!

Before we post the excerpt, here's what other writers are saying about From Cape Town with Love:

****

"Bold, sexy and engaging, From Cape Town with Love is an amazing novel penned by extremely talented storytellers! Tennyson Hardwick continues to be one of the most superb characters in contemporary literature."

--Zane, New York Times bestselling author of Total Eclipse of the Heart, executive producer and screenwriter, Cinemax Original Series "Zane's Sex Chronicles."

****

"I've been a fan of the Tennyson Hardwick series since Casanegra--and Ten is back and better than ever. From Cape Town with Love has something for everyone: the trademark sex and sizzle, and a nod to James Bond that makes this a high-octane thrill ride. Underwood, Barnes and Due don't disappoint. If you like great fiction penned by superb writers and brilliant storytellers, get onboard!"

--Eric Jerome Dickey, New York Times bestselling author of Resurrecting Midnight and Dying for Revenge.

****

"Heart-stopping and crazy sexy, From Cape Town with Love will keep your pulse pounding through the night. Tennyson Hardwick is a hero for the 21st Century. Easy Rawlins, say hello to James Bond!"

--Paul Levine, author of Illegal

****

Here's your sneak peek!

FROM CAPE TOWN WITH LOVE

Prologue

They called themselves the Three R's: R.J., Ramirez and Reiter. Reiter was female, but not exactly the nurturing kind. I was sitting at a table in a cold, windowless room, in the worst pain in my life. I'd been in the same chair for hours.

Sitting upright wasn't easy because of the pain.

R.J. stood over me with a folder. He did most of the talking.

"The FBI is writing a book on you as we speak,” R.J. said. “Usually that’s the bad news. But in your case, that’s the good news.”

I couldn’t resist. “Then what’s the bad news?”

“You seen that TV show…? What’s the name?” R.J. asked Ramirez and Reiter.

“What show?” Reiter said.

At first, I thought he was talking about my old series, Homeland. I’d played an FBI agent working with the Department of Homeland Security. But I was as wrong as I could be.

R.J. snapped his fingers. “Without a Trace,” he said. “It’s about people who’ve disappeared, right? One day they’re here, bam, they’re gone. That’s a fascinating show.”

There was wildness in his eyes.

“You ever heard of the Patriot Act?” R.J. asked me.

I suddenly realized how hungry I was. I wondered again if it was day or night.

“That’s got nothing to do with me,” I said. I wanted to force him to say what he was hinting at. “I’m not a terrorist.”

“But you’re an interesting guy,” R.J. said.

“Fascinating guy,” Ramirez agreed in a sing-song.

R.J. went on. “And if we decide we want to talk to you for a while, get to know you better, we can keep you around as long as we need to.”

“But nobody wants that,” R.J. said.

“Pain in the ass,” Reiter said.

Cold, steel reality unfolded in my head: I was in an interrogation room in an unknown location. My body felt butchered. I had been promised a long stretch in prison. I had just lost my oldest friend. I had barely survived the night, and a man had died at my hands.

No. Why mince words? I had killed a man. For the first time in my life.

I wondered how many people R.J., Ramirez and Reiter had killed between them, or what measures they were willing to take when they wanted information. I didn’t get along with most cops already—but they weren’t cops, or anything like it.

I wished they were. I understood the rules with cops. There were no rules at all now.

****

ONE

Seven months earlier

November 5, 2008

South Africa

April Forrest's eyes widened. “Ten…what happened to your face?”

In the bosom of beauty, ugly comes as a shock. The swelling and bruises across my face made me look like I’d just been attacked by a prison gang. Might as well have been—although it was just one man. In the swamp.

When April left Los Angeles to teach in South Africa for six months, she’d left me too. We had passed the one-year milestone right before she changed her mind about us, and an ocean and ten thousand miles had suddenly seemed like a small toll to see her again. I wanted to know what had scared her off—but maybe it was written all over my face.

“Long story,” I said. “I tried, but I couldn’t find flowers this late. May I come in?”

Apparently, long story wasn’t enough to get the door open any wider. April was lithe and fine, with skin the color of ginger.

She was living in a tiny cinderblock house on a street of modest but well-kept homes in a middle-class section of Soweto, outside of Johannesburg. In the bright light from the porch, I saw her jaw shift with uncertainty. Her delicate chin and gently swaying braids, adorned with regal white beads at the ends, reminded me why some men could be driven to beg.

Two or three loose dogs I’d seen outside of the gate were barking at me from the unlighted street. Two yipped harmlessly, but one sounded like thunder. A week before, I’d killed a German shepherd in the Florida swamp. The memory of the dog’s last yelp, and his master's last labored breath, still iced my blood.

“You look like you almost got murdered, Ten. What happened?”

“The T.D. Jackson case.” My investigation into the death of football star T.D. Jackson had taken me places that were hard to put into words. Dad had told me that an LAPD officer who had been through my ordeal might have been considered like an OIS, Officer Involved Shooting, and sent to counseling. “Like I said, April… long story.”

April’s look told me that I was failing my first test since our breakup. In her place, I might close the door on me. Dying hope flashed hot in my chest. I knew it, then: I shouldn’t have come to see April without calling her first, like my father and Chela told me before I left.

“Ten, I can’t…I’m not alone.”

She’s already with somebody else? A foreign rage tightened the back of my neck. I didn’t know if was more pissed at her for moving on, or at me for flying across the world to witness her new life up close.

When an older woman appeared behind April in the doorway, I wanted to hug her. April was boarding, so she was living with her hostess! The woman looked about fifty-five, but her skin was so smooth that she might have been ten or fifteen years older. Bright silver hair framed her forehead beneath her colorful head scarf. The slope of her nose and sharp cheekbones reminded me of Alice. Beauty, timeless. Another woman. A different time. Despite the severity of her frown. the stranger’s face forced me to stare.

“I’m sorry it’s so late, Mrs. Kunene,” April apologized. A faint living room light was on, but the woman might have been asleep. It was ten p.m. in Johannesburg; late for an unannounced visitor. I hadn’t thought about the hour when I jumped into the taxi at the airport and told the driver to go to the address April had given me. A lot had changed since the last time I was in South Africa.

The streets were so dark, I had no idea how the driver found his way.

“This is my friend, Tennyson. From the U.S.”

April said friend as if it was the whole story. I could barely smile for the hostess—not that a smile would have helped my face. Mrs. Kunene looked like she was trying to decide if she should call the police right then, or wait for me to look at her the wrong way.

After a twenty-two-hour flight via Amsterdam, I couldn’t fake pleasantries with a hostile stranger. “Come away with me for a long weekend,” I said to April's ear, not quite a whisper. I’d planned a more elegant approach, but the sight of April’s face had drained my memory. My palms were damp, like my virgin friends used to say in high school.

April touched her ear, coaxing away a strand of hair. “Ten…slow down…”

A broad-shouldered man with snowy white hair appeared next, wearing only his slacks, roused from bed. Mr. Kunene might be my father's age, but his motion was agile and his face was as smooth as his wife's.

“April, this man is your friend?" he said. "He looks like a tsotsi!”

I admired his lyrical accent despite the insult: He'd just said I looked like a gangster.

April planted her foot in the doorway to keep the door from slamming in my face. Her foot was as firm as her voice was gentle: “Yes, yes, he’s a good friend. It’s all right.”

“Is he drunk?” Mrs. Kunene called, stepping back. The rolled R’s in the woman’s accent were music. She made drunk sound like a state to aspire to.

“Sir and madam, I am not drunk,” I said. “Please accept my apologies for stopping by so late. I have to talk to April right away.” When they heard my reasonableness, and my American accent, some of the alarm left their eyes.

I pointed out the gate, where the tattered taxi that had brought me waited—a dingy gray VW Citi Golf that had once been white. One of the back tail lights was missing, and the other glowed dimly. The driver sat inside, awaiting my verdict. The yipping dogs still barked, but the larger one had moved on. April saw the taxi and realized delays were costing me.

“I’ll be right here on the porch,” April said to her hosts, and slipped outside before they could object. The white curtains fluttered at the window as they watched us.

On the porch, I had an impulse to pull April close—but I followed her lead and kept a two-foot distance. If I tried to touch her and she flinched away, no words would rescue us.

“Sorry, but she’s a minister,” April explained, hushed. “They're strict with boarders.”

Good. I hoped they ran the house like a damn nunnery. “I need a face-to-face conversation with you,” I said.

April’s eyes fell away, and my throat burned. A month ago, April would have fussed over my bruises, planting her soft lips on mine.

“Let me take you somewhere beautiful,” I said. “Don’t we deserve time, April?”

“Yes, but…I’m working until Saturday.”

“Make up an excuse.”

“Lying comes easier to some people, Ten.” No irony or malice; just a fact. And she was right. If I’m not careful, lying is my nature.

“Then meet me for coffee tomorrow.” The exhaustion shredding my voice must have sounded like desperation, but I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a week. “Tell me when you have a break, and I’ll come pick you up.”

Silence again. I’d envisioned myself staying with April—yeah, right—so I didn’t have a reservation at a hotel. Another hassle waited, and the day was already ending on a sour note.

My driver, Sipho, was watching me through his open driver’s side window, eager to see me give him our signal: thumbs up if he could drive away, thumbs down if he should wait.

When I gave Sipho the thumbs-down, I heard him click his teeth with disgust. “Eish! No woman wants the nice guy!” he called from his window, repeating his mantra from our ride.

When I’d told Sipho the story of how April left the States to teach and then broke up with me by telephone, he’d let out a shout as if she’d shot me. A rich man like you, treated this way by a woman! Maybe he was merely angling for a tip, but he was my only friend that night.

I was getting mad, and so far anger had nothing to do with April and me. I hoped I wouldn’t have to scorch April in those flames. Neither of us would salvage anything from that.

“April, if you’re through with me, help me wrap my head around it.”

April touched my forehead, just above a bruise, and her touch extinguished my anger. “Where would we go?” she said. “If I get the days off.”

I stepped toward April and cradled her cheeks with my palms. Her chin sank against the heels of my hands. For a precious few seconds, she trusted me to hold her up.

I did not try to kiss her. Holding her face was enough.

“I know the perfect place,” I said.

Cape Town might be our last chance.

Apps & the Art of Relaxation

2010-01-26T13:51:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, my sister Lydia gifted me with an iPhone. While I'm not thrilled with the cost of keeping it up and running, my relationship with my iPhone has become so strong that I often joke that it is unwholesome. I literally sleep with my iPhone under my pillow at night.

Why? Originally, it was to feed my bedtime audio book habit, but I can use my old iPod classic for that. Instead, I've grown more and more dependent on my iPhone apps to relax me and help me sleep. During a recent trip to my parents’ house, sleeping in my mother's room with several interruptions a night because she was ill, I used hypnosis and relaxation apps to help me fall right back to sleep.

2009 was a stressful year for me, and insomnia has been an ongoing problem in years past, so I searched through reviews to find the apps that users thought were the most helpful. And I’m cheap—so I weigh the decision to spend even three bucks very carefully.

I have a few apps that I love so much that I want to share them. I'm also curious about which relaxation apps work for you. They also work for iPod Touch, which may even be a better choice—because there’s nothing less relaxing than a phone call in the middle of your relaxation.

Here are my favorites:

RELAX WITH ANDREW JOHNSON ($2.99 version / Free Lite version)

Maybe it’s the accent (Johnson is a hypnotherapist from Scotland), but his apps conk me out. I’ve never had traditional hypnotherapy, and I don’t necessarily feel like I’m in a “trance,” but his lulling voice always does the job. I use this one when I need a quick nap, or when I have a moment to meditate during a stressful day.

Hint: With Johnson’s apps, use the “controls” to program how long you want the induction to be (I suggest using the long induction) and whether you want to sleep or wake afterward. The first times I used it, I didn’t realize I could control whether or not he wakes me up, and I was in blissful slumber when I heard this loud voice saying “WAKE UP!” as if he was standing over me. Great if you need to get up, but not so much at night. It’s not an alarm clock, but you can also set the time you want to wake up. (I haven’t used this function, though.)

There is also a Free RELAX WITH ANDREW JOHNSON LITE. (I got the paid version before I knew about it, so I don’t know the difference.)
*****

DEEP SLEEP WITH ANDREW JOHNSON ($2.99)

Ahhhh…sleep! I have used this app several times, but I have to admit I have no idea what Johnson says after the induction, or only part of the induction. Why? I’m ASLEEP! I’ve never heard his Relax app all the way through either. I hope he isn’t planting messages that I should run naked through my neighborhood, but I’ll probably never know.
*****

POSITIVITY WITH ANDREW JOHNSON ($2.99)

Sometimes you just need a voice in your ear to remind you that YOU are in control. For me, when the answer isn’t a nap or a good night’s sleep, the Positivity app is the perfect break from the day to remind me to keep a positive outlook. It really works for me.
*****

BRAINWAVE ALTERED STATES (.99)

There is no voice induction in this app, just what’s called “binaural tones” that are designed to trigger mental states in the listener. There is also soothing background noise like ocean waves or thunderstorm, and you use the controls to set the volume on the tones, volume for the background noise, or how long you want the session to last.

I have meditated for years, on and off, and I use this app when I want to do straight meditation. The different tones are named “Chakra Meditation,” “Euphoric Bliss,” “Lucid Dreaming,” etc. This app probably would work better for someone who has some experience with meditation. My husband, Steve, meditates with stillness, which is probably best—but sometimes I need help shutting down my thoughts. This app helps do the trick.
*****

AMBIANCE (.99 version / free Lite version)

If sound effects are your thing, whether or not you want to use them for relaxation, Ambiance is a terrific app that’s like an app store unto itself. There are more than 3,000 5-star reviews for this app on iTunes, and for good reason: It’s an amazing effects library. For 99 cents, you install the app and then browse for sounds you want, which are updated frequently. You only download the sounds you want to your phone, but you can sample them all.

My personal library is pretty standard so far: “Canadian geese,” “English country birds,” “Evening waves,” “Seagulls,” “Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir,” etc. But new updates include “Riding through a Victorian Street,” “Forest Fires,” “Bees,” etc.

All I can say is: Different strokes for different folks. I’m not sure why someone would want to listen to combat sounds or a washing machine spin cycle, but I saw reviewers with infants who had great luck getting their kids to sleep with some of the repetitious sounds.

There is also AMBIANCE LITE, which is free—but again, I don’t know the difference. You might want to check out the free version to see what you think.
*****

Of course, iPhone apps aren’t my only tools for dealing with life’s challenges and stress: There’s prayer, which I still do the old-fashioned way. (Although I’m sure there are apps for that!)

And I’m very lucky to be married to a life coach, Steven Barnes, who has a lot of terrific tools for tackling life on his website at www.DiamondHour.com Steve is the one who taught me how to meditate with his Heartbeat Meditation, which I use every time I meditate by feeling for my pulse in my fingertips. Ideally, Steve suggests listening to your heartbeat without touching your fingertips or feeling your pulse, but I know I’m working toward stillness when I can relax into my pulse. When I’m trying to still my active mind, my pulse is the perfect anchor.

I often combine Steve’s Heartbeat Meditation with the BRAINWAVE ALTERED STATES and AMBIANCE apps to create an even more cleansing experience.

Between my husband and my iPhone apps, I survived 2009—and I’m ready for everything 2010 has in store. Bring it on!

Celebrating our friend E. Lynn Harris

2009-09-25T15:40:00.000-04:00

CAPTION: Posing with E. Lynn Harris and my mother, Patricia Stephens Due, at Books & Books in Miami.

OK…send prayers up. I'm off to my meeting with one of Hollywood's most powerful ladies. Got the suit on and the new scent I purchased yesterday and I'm ready for my close up.

--E. Lynn Harris’s last Facebook update to 3,800 friends and readers,
posted the day he died

When I think of E. Lynn Harris, who died on July 23, this is the moment I remember: I’m walking in a sea of humanity in Manhattan, hitting a crosswalk as two waves prepare to meet from opposite sides. There, dead-center in my path in a bright crimson jacket, walks E. Lynn Harris—with a grin for miles. That is my mind’s snapshot of Everett Lynn Harris, New York Times bestselling author, trailblazer and stellar friend. The prince of the city, afloat on effervescence, a warm face in a sea of strangers.

E. Lynn, how do I count the ways? You gave us all so much. Did you live your life to the marrow because you knew you would only be visiting with us for so short a time?

Friday, Sept. 25, is E. Lynn Harris day, and many of us whose lives were touched by E. Lynn Harris’s work and spirit want to help him fulfill one of his last unrealized dreams: E. Lynn wanted to be #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He had ten New York Times bestsellers—remarkable for a black male writer—but he never hit #1.

With his posthumous novel MAMA DEAREST, we hope to help make that happen. I will join writers nationwide to participate in E. Lynn Harris Day Friday. I will appear at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, at ESO WON BOOKS, 4311 Degnan Boulevard in Los Angeles. (For more information, call 323-490-1048). A complete list of E. Lynn Harris Day events can be found at www.elynnharris.com/tour.htm.

Nationwide this week, authors like Eric Jerome Dickey, Victoria Christopher Murray, Tina McElory Ansa, RM Johnson and others have been appearing in Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Dallas, San Francisco, and other cities.

*****

In both fiction and in life, E. Lynn Harris was a giant. In the world of African-American fiction in particular—those tightly-knit networks of book clubs, readers and writers—a mighty tree has fallen, shaking our forest floor.

E. Lynn tried to clear the path for the rest of us.

Read the remembrances on the news and the internet, and person after person cities E. Lynn Harris’s generosity, whether or not they knew him personally. He offered grace to everyone in his presence. He embraced the spirit of entrepreneurship while enchanting readers with his novels again and again. But it wasn’t just his novels readers fell in love with: Reader after reader remarks that they feel like they knew him, that he was a member of their family.

To me, what is most remarkable about his ascent is the unlikely way in which it came about. The black community is not unique in its history of homophobia, but homosexuality was far from a comfortable topic in black America when E. Lynn began publishing.

Then E. Lynn Harris introduced a sexually conflicted character named Raymond in his novel Invisible Life. He hauled self-published novels in the back seat of his trunk because he had a story to tell. He wrote from his heart, and his heart was so big that legions followed him.

E. Lynn Harris’s fiction told gay readers that they were not voiceless, nor were they alone. For straight readers, he opened the closet door and shined in a light. Gay or straight, readers loved him. He made his characters feel real, which our readers demand, and the author’s sweetness and love always shone through.

The proof is in the pictures: Reader after reader, me included, displayed photos of themselves posing with E. Lynn at a book signing. In city after city and town after town, E. Lynn Harris made his readers’ day. In his photos, his smile never faltered.

He was beloved.

No one ever forgot an E. Lynn Harris book-signing. He was a showman whose main act was being himself, a gentleman author in the truest sense. He wanted the last person in line to feel as cherished as the first person in line—and his lines were hundreds of readers long.

When I first started publishing, I was lucky enough to be seated next to E. Lynn Harris at a Black Expo at a convention center, where his line snaked as far as I could see. I was still shocked to be published in those days, and only a handful of readers knew who I was.
While E. Lynn Harris signed autograph after autograph, I watched the master at work.

He was personable. He looked into readers’ eyes. He was happy to stand up and pose for pictures. He was willing to sign a stack of books, no matter how large. If he was tired, he didn’t show it. Everyone left his table with a huge smile. Once in a while, Lynn looked up and addressed the waiting crowd: “This is a new writer, her name is Tananarive Due, and you have to read this novel--THE BETWEEN.”

Each time he did, three or four people bought a copy of my book.

And so the day went on.

In the years to come, he became my most consistent mentor. He had advice at every stage on the business end of publishing. Even if he was on book tour, it seemed that any email sent to E. Lynn was usually answered within the hour—if not immediately. (And this was in the days before Blackberries.) He once told me that he answered 200 reader emails a day!

My mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was my manager in the early part of my career, so she and E. Lynn ran into each other often on the book circuit. Once, she gave Lynn a mantel clock and pen holder styled with books—and when he later gave us a tour of his Chicago apartment, the clock was prominently displayed at the top of his desk. When we told him that we wanted to write a book about the civil rights movement, he got excited and encouraged us with instrumental advice. That book later became Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, which I co-authored with my mother.

E. Lynn told me he wanted me to make an appearance in Arkansas—and announced that he was going to fly me in and put me up in a hotel out of his pocket. “More people need to know you,” he said.

I wasn’t the only one, by far.

*****

In recent years, I had not seen E. Lynn Harris often—which was why it was so thrilling when we were both nominated for NAACP Image Awards this year, and I was able to give him a long-overdue hug at a party at CAA in February.

Even then, he was on the phone with our agent, taking care of late-night business. At the time, Lynn was on his tenth week on the New York Times bestseller list. Like me, it was his first NAACP Image Award nomination in a long while, and he was excited. (He first heard the news of the nomination from a friend, author Victoria Christopher Murray.)

Ironically, although he was in California on book tour, he had a conflict on awards night, so he wasn’t able to make it for the red carpet and awards ceremony. But he asked me and Steve to look after Brandon, a 21-year-old young man he’d adopted as his son. Brandon sat in our row, excited to see the likes of Will Smith on the stage. (When Brandon graduated from college in the spring, E. Lynn plastered Facebook with photos, bursting with pride.)

Although we were nominated in the Literature category for our collaboration IN THE NIGHT OF THE HEAT (co-authored with my husband, Steven Barnes, in partnership with actor Blair Underwood), I never felt any sense of competition with E. Lynn. (E. Lynn helped launch our Tennyson Hardwick mystery series with a blurb for CASANEGRA.)

He emailed me after he heard that we’d won: Congrats to you guys. I had a feeling you would win. You're a fabulous writer and your time on the list is coming. Thanks for looking after B. He texted me and the excited me was busting out of my phone.

We sent each other comments back and forth each other’s Facebook pages from time to time, but that email after the Image Awards is my last real correspondence with him.

Gracious, vintage E. Lynn Harris.

*****

A MIGHTY TREE

I was first introduced to E. Lynn Harris through Blanche Richardson, the longtime owner of Marcus Books in Oakland—the oldest black bookstore in the nation. At my first book signing in Oakland, she laid a stack of my first novel on a table with Post-Its listing several names: Terry McMillan. Octavia E. Butler. Tina McElroy Ansa. Bebe Moore Campbell. Walter Mosley. E. Lynn Harris.

I was blown away, so nervous that my hand practically shook as I signed the books. Blanche wanted to make sure I as properly introduced to the titans in black fiction.

I don’t know how my career would have caught any wind without independent black booksellers like Blanche, and our black bookstores are dying. The loss is incalculable.

Now, in the midst of ongoing hardship, has come a terrible blow. An unimaginable blow.

I heard about E. Lynn Harris’s death on Facebook, that chaotic village square that is rife with town criers when there is news to share. R.I.P. E. Lynn Harris, read several status updates from my friends, reminiscent of the R.I.P. Michael the weeks before.

This had to be an internet hoax! I steadfastly refused to believe it could be true.
In my mind, I had just talked to E. Lynn Harris the day before, because he had posted a giddy update from Los Angeles during a book tour stop.

On Thursday, I fired back a cyber pat on the back—Let’s all storm Hollywood together!!!—as did at least 70 of his other Facebook friends. A writer’s Facebook friends are a fascinating blend of complete strangers who read your books, current real-world friends, family, and people you haven’t seen since elementary school. They’re a supportive bunch. E. Lynn went into his meetings with the Facebook winds at his back.

As far as we were concerned, we had just talked to him and he was doing great.

I like to think that E. Lynn died happy.

By accounts I’ve heard, he had a great day of Hollywood meetings—which is, in itself, a kind of Hollywood ending. Hollywood is the writer’s last mountain, and E. Lynn might have felt that much closer to his dream of bringing his work to movie audiences.

He had optioned his works before, and he wrote screenplays and teleplays in addition to novels. According to a Facebook posting, he also had a Broadway show in the works. (He appeared on Broadway as the narrator of Dreamgirls in 2001, and later appeared in Love Letters to America.)

Actress Lela Rochon Fuqua posted a remembrance on his Facebook page: What a loss...what a talent. Wish we could have gotten one of those books made into film. Thank you! Thank you! for all that you have contributed to the arts. My prayers got out to your family. Rest my brother. Love, Lela

I remember him telling me how devastated he was when Aaliyah died in her 2001 plane crash, when he was left with the same sense of disbelief: But I was just talking to her!

E. Lynn, we were just talking to you.

The passage of days doesn’t make it any easier to believe that you are gone.

My Father's Oral History Mystery: Lyles Station and the 1857 "Round House Battle"

2009-06-25T00:56:00.000-04:00

CAPTIONS: [Left] Black schoolchildren at the school at Lyles Station, circa late-1800s. (My great-grandmother may be one of the darker girls on the right.)

SOURCE: Lyles Station Historic Preservation Society.

[Right] Me posing at age 11: "My Own Roots"

**************

By 1977, Alex Haley’s Roots had swept the nation—and suddenly I was interested in knowing my family history. Had there been a Kunta Kinte in my family’s past? A Kizzy?

As a parent now, I can only imagine how happy my father was when his 11-year-old eldest daughter—whose biggest preoccupation was stealing his legal pads to write stories about kids on space ships and talking cats—approached him and said, “Dad, do you know any stories about our ancestors?”

My father’s face lit up. "Did I ever tell you about Lyles Station and the Battle of the Round House? It’s a story my grandmother told me, and her mother told her.”

The story she told my father about Lyles Station, Indiana, is recounted in the book I co-authored with my mother, Patricia Stephens Due: Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. (My great-grandmother in Indiana, Lydia Stewart Graham, died only three years later, in 1980, when she was 89.)

I was so enthralled by the story that I created a school project called “My Own Roots,” illustrated with my father’s drawings and family photographs, pictured above.

THE STORY MY FATHER TOLD ME

“In the 1850s, not long before the Civil War, a slave master in North Carolina decided to set his slaves free. He bought them a parcel of land in Indiana under his own name. Now these freed slaves had somewhere to go, land where they could build their own houses and start their own farms. So they packed up everything they owned and drove the wagon train from North Carolina to Indiana.

“When they arrived, they began to farm the land. They had bumper crops, better than they expected. In town they sold what they grew, so they were not only feeding themselves, but they were earning money. And they were so prosperous that they started attracting attention to themselves. The white farmers who lived around them started getting jealous. And this came at a time when a lot of folk in Indiana were putting pressure on the governor to make it a slave state. They started thinking, ‘Now who are these niggers making all this money?’ That’s when the trouble started.”

Even as a child, I had heard plenty about that kind of trouble. Stories like that didn’t have happy endings for black people.

My father went on: “Well, sure enough, one night after it was dark, the neighbors of those freed slaves came in a surprise attack. The freed slaves were sleeping in their beds when the shooting started. But they had thought about what to do in the event of something just like this, so they all ran to what’s called a ‘round house.’ That was a big, sturdy building where they stored their farming equipment. They had their rifles in there, too. The men passed out the rifles and shot at their attackers through the narrow windows of the round house, while the women climbed up into the loft and reloaded the guns.

“Suddenly, the door came crashing down. The armed white farmers began swarming inside. But again, the freed slaves were ready for them. They had lined up on either side of the door with battle-axes raised over their heads. When the farmers broke in, they swung those axes down. They won the fight, but it caused a big problem, of course.

“Even the governor had to get involved. He helped them move to a settlement called Lyles Station. Freed slaves from all over came to Lyles Station to settle in a place where their neighbors wouldn’t bother them. They built a thriving community. And my grandmother was born in Princeton, Indiana, which is near Lyles Station. They still have family reunions at Lyles Station.”

When my mother and I were researching Freedom in the Family, I was unable to verify my great-grandmother’s story of the Battle of the Round House, although I contacted the Lyles Station Historic Preservation Society. (There is a children’s book about Lyles Station by Scott Russell Sanders, A Place Called Freedom, which does not include the Round House Battle either.)

But my Great-Grandmother Lydia always stood by her story.

MY FATHER—INTERNET DETECTIVE

My father, John Due, is now a retired civil rights attorney with his own grandchildren, but he has never forgotten that story he heard at his grandmother’s knee. He also has great curiosity, a fondness for the internet and a skeptical mind.

This year, he and his cousin Glenn in Indiana began researching to try to verify the story of the Round House Battle—and their digging mined gold. The most definitive account my father found was an article by university social sciences professor Randy K. Mills that ran in “Black History News and Notes,” a quarterly publication of the Indiana Historical Society Library, in August of 2005. The article is entitled “’They Defended Themselves Nobly’”: A Story of African American Empowerment in Evansville, Indiana, 1857.”

The article details how a family named Lyles journeyed from Tennessee to Indiana after being freed by their slave-master, quoting a direct descendant named Carl Lyles who said they were told to only travel at night and follow the North Star, and that “records show that by the mid-1850s Lyles men had purchased substantial holdings” in Vanderbergh and Gibson counties. [My father believes that our family journeyed some time later, from North Carolina.]

As in my great-grandmother’s story, the article says that the freed black thrived, and a community of about 200 freed blacks and escaped slaves lived in a remote community called The Bayou. “In truth,” Mills writes, “the Lyles probably could not have found a more anti-black region of the state in which to live.”

At a time when kidnapping a freed black was a lesser offense than stealing a horse, as Mills notes—and when lynchings and fears of slave uprisings abounded—an altercation arose between the Lyles family and white neighbors over a hog. According to newspaper accounts, the Lyles’ hog escaped into the field of a white neighbor named Thomas Edmonds. Twenty-four-year-old John Lyles was outraged, although the whites claimed they were merely trying to trap the hog to return it to its owners. The Lyles men were reportedly armed with “clubs and guns,” according to the newspaper The Daily Enquirer.

John Lyles allegedly struck one of Edmonds’ sons with a gun muzzle, causing a serious injury that appeared life-threatening, and the elder Edmonds was also injured. The Lyles men were charged with “assault and battery, with an attempt to commit murder,” according to Mills.

Five Lyles brothers were arrested and freed after posting $1,000 bail—itself almost unheard of at that time. As local newspapers reported these events, the public grew inflamed. The Enquirer urged whites in Union Townships to “[rid] herself of the large numbers of free blacks who now infest it,” according to Mills’ article.

Then, on July 25, 1857, a group of up to 100 heavily armed white men converged on the Lyles family cabin. As Mills writes, they would have brought a cannon if they had not been thwarted while trying to steal it from the courthouse. Instead, they began their attack armed with guns. Before it was over, at least one white man was dead and there were scores of injuries.
The sheriff convinced the Lyles brothers to go into protective custody in Evansville to await trial, and they eventually resettled in what became known as Lyles Station.

MY FATHER’S QUESTIONS

Despite a few discrepancies, the article seems to corroborate some key elements of the story my great-grandmother told my father—but it still left gaping questions in his mind. First, how were so few whites killed? And how did the Lyles family avoid extermination? During the 1960s civil rights struggle more than a hundred years later, Southern blacks lived in terror of being killed for far milder offenses than the Round House Battle.

In Tulsa in 1921, between 25 and 300 blacks were killed in riots that erupted after reports that a black youth had tried to rape or assault a white woman; 35 blocks in the black community of Greenwood were torched. John Singleton’s movie Rosewood recounts the tragic destruction of an entire black town after a black drifter supposedly raped a white woman in 1923. And Emmett Till, only 14, was beaten to death in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white woman.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, my mother and other civil rights workers were shot at in Quincy, Florida, at for trying to register blacks to vote while she was a field secretary for the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). Southern blacks lived in terror of reprisals for civil rights activism.

The more my father researched the Battle of the Round House, the more questions he had, especially when the characters and personalities came to life: He learned that a man who was killed (or severely injured) in the attack was a county commissioner, Alexander Maddox. And the sheriff who supposedly intervened to help ferry the blacks to safety, John S. Gavitt, would seem to have been the last person to take on that role.

“He was a federal marshal before he was sheriff. As a federal marshal…he had a reputation for arresting famous abolitionists. One of them was from Philadelphia who helped blacks escape from Alabama. He caught up with him in Indiana, arrested everybody, got a judge to find them guilty, and while he was transporting them to abolitionist allegedly tried to escape and got killed. This guy was a character, just like Wyatt Earp in the west. It seems very odd.”

But then again, maybe not.

"Let’s look at the choices he has: They had telegraphs in those days. They could have telegraphed the governor’s office and gotten permission to bring over the Indiana militia, and they could have gone down and protected the blacks from that attack. They could have used the same relationship to arrest white attackers. The newspapers would have a field day about not providing law and justice for white people.”

Mills’ article does not mention an intervention by the governor, but my father believes it was inevitable.

"The paper said the sheriff moved the Lyles group back to Gibson County,” Dad says. “The sheriff had no authority to do that in another county. He had to have authorization from the governor.”

Dad goes on: “The story from my grandmother makes more sense, that it was the governor—who controlled the Land Office—who provided new lands for the brothers and our foreparents back in Gibson County, which was only about 15 to 20 miles away from Union Township. But this was an otherwise secret arrangement, because the anti-black politics were very hostile, and the governor could not politically show his hand. The sheriff took the responsibility because he was a lame duck anyway.”

The intervention of Indiana’s governor could explain the sheriff’s stance—but why did the governor make his choices? Why relocate the blacks to new land?

Dad goes on: “All these years, I assumed the governor was some liberal—but this was a Democrat. [In 1857, Democrats were the pro-slavery party.] So what was the motivation for the sheriff and the governor to save our foreparents’ lives so that you and I could exist today?”

For the answer, my father studied the political landscape of the time, when slavery had divided a nation at the eve of the Civil War and immigrants were pouring into Indiana from Germany and Ireland. And, as noted by Mills in his article, a local newspaper lamented that some locals preferred to live near the freed blacks—who were successful farmers contributing to the community—than the immigrants.

“It was good business for the political parties to have these Europeans active in politics,” Dad says. “They became the backbone of a new Republican party that was developed in Indiana. Abraham Lincoln was reaching out to them in order to develop the new Republican party.

“President Buchanan and the Indiana governor and sheriff were allied with the Southern Democrats. The Germans and the Irish immigrants voted the sheriff out of office, so he was pissed off anyway. There was a class prejudice against the Germans and the Irish.”

Did politics and ethnicity trump race in the aftermath of the Battle of the Round House? And even if that was the case, why would Indiana’s governor go to the trouble of relocating the freed slaves and providing them with new land?

The answer, my father believes, lies with my ancestors' roots in North Carolina. The blacks were farming the land, but it had been purchased for them by a white slave-owner.

“It wasn’t for their rights—it was for the right of the former slave-owner,” my father theorizes. “The governor of Indiana, the sheriff in Evansville, had common understanding as Southerners. Evansville, although it is in the free state of Indiana, had a Southern culture. They were just interested in the slave-owners.”

Furthermore, Dad says, it was smart business to keep a profitable black community.

“Indiana was in a serious depression, basically the way we are today,” Dad says. “They went into serious debt using public funds to build the Wabash Canal and the railroad. The value of these farmers is that they were able to go into the market and help pay off the debt. Their produce helped supply profit for the buyers and the suppliers and traders using that railroad. It was about business.”

THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION

This was the same year as the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that slaves and their descendants—even if they were freed or born free—could never be U.S. citizens and were not protected by the Constitution. Since blacks were not deemed citizens, they also could not sue in court. Legally, blacks were at the mercy of their communities’ whims, as many blacks would be for generations to come.

My father’s theory is that the slave-owner made the original journey with the freed blacks on the wagon train to ensure their safety, and so that he could purchase the land for them. So not only did this North Carolina slave-owner decide to grant freedom to persons whom the law considered only property, but he shepherded their safe passage.

Why?

“We have been brought up on how slavery was one thing—horrible,” Dad says. “Atrocious. Mean-spirited. Treating people like they’re animals. It doesn’t have to be that way. In the western part of North Carolina, western Tennessee and western Kentucky, relationships between slaves and slave masters were much different than relationships between slaves and slave masters in Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama.

“One reason is, in the Deep South there were big plantations and the slave-owner practically didn’t know who the slaves were. But in Roots, remember the slave-owner and Chicken George working together? That was common in North Carolina. Slave owners and slaves worked together. It was more of a relationship. He knew that if he did not take care of them as freepersons, they would be taken in North Carolina to be sold to slavery to somebody else.”

And my father believes the roots of go deeper than a slave-owner who recognized his slaves’ humanity because they worked side-by-side.

After months of research and pondering, my father believes he found the core answer by looking at old family photographs. My great-grandmother and grandmother were both fair-skinned. In the historical photograph he found from a school at Lyles Station in the late-1800s, he notes that most of the black children pictured are also very fair.

What if the freedmen weren’t just slaves—what if they were the slave-owner’s children?

“He had no duty to free his slaves, no duty after freeing them to buy this land to settle. You can talk about laws or the Constitution, but human beings are social animals. And all social animals care for their children,” Dad says.

Most of us do, anyway.

Perhaps my father will never know if he’s right about his theories about the “Battle of the Round House” and the founding of Lyles Station, and his curiosity is not yet satisfied.

Who knows? Perhaps my forebears only survived because of a long-ago gift from a father who had a change of heart.

Whatever the answers to the mystery from history, my great-grandmother’s story has never died.

*******

John Due can be contacted at DueLaw@aol.com

MAY APPEARANCES IN L.A. & MIAMI—YES, MIAMI! (with Edwidge Danticat)

2009-05-06T00:34:00.000-04:00

In May, I have three appearances in Southern California—and I’ll be appearing with Edwidge Danticat in Miami May 21!!! I am not officially on book tour, but it feels that way!

LOS ANGELES—MAY 9 (Saturday) and MAY 17 (Sunday):

I’m honored to be a part of a group show at the Pounder-Koné Art Space, where my novel Blood Colony will be featured in “Cooperative.” The show runs May 7-31. I will attend the opening reception from 6 to 9 p.m. May 9 (Saturday), and I will return to read from Blood Colony at 3 p.m. --CORRECTED TIME--Sunday, May 17. The gallery’s address is 3407 Glendale Boulevard in Atwater Village (Los Angeles).

"Cooperative” features women painters, filmmakers and writers, also including Elizabeth Colomba, Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Tonya Engel, Loren Holland, Tamara Madden, Akosua Adoma Owusu, S. Pearl Sharp and Lisa Teasley. My book reading is at 7 p.m. Sunday, May 17.

If you’ve never been to the Pounder-Koné gallery, please come get an introduction. Like so many people, I have a lot to learn about art…and the shows here are terrific. The gallery is co-owned by marvelous actress CCH Pounder (“The Shield”), who is a gracious hostess. I’ve seen her personal art collection, and her taste is really special to behold. As a novelist, I’m just happy to be invited to share a night with fellow artists in a beautiful place.

******

LOS ANGELES—MAY 16 (Saturday)

I’m an alum of Northwestern University, and I’m attending my first NU Club of Los Angeles event: The “Author, Author! NU Authors Bookreading” scheduled from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Saturday, May 16. The event is at the Studio City branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, 12511 Moorpark Street in Studio City.

Also appearing: screenwriter and novelist Allison Burnett (Fame and Feast of Love); playwright, screenwriter and novelist Sally Nemeth; Richard Bangs and Douglas W. Kmiec, a Catholic law professor who was denied communion in Los Angeles for supporting Barack Obama.

Admission is free and open to the public. Books will be on sale for signing.

*****

MIAMI—MAY 21 (Thursday)

I am appearing with Edwidge Danticat in Miami, and I couldn’t be more excited! We’re taking part in a program entitled “Black Diaspora Authors: Edwidge Danticat & Tananarive Due” at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in Miami.

First, I don’t make it back home to Miami nearly enough, especially since my parents moved to upstate Florida. And secondly, Edwidge Danticat is a treasure in world letters—both in fiction and nonfiction. Her latest book, Brother, I’m Dying, chronicles the painful journey of her Haitian uncle, who died while neglected in custody of U.S. customs; winner of the National Book Critics Circle's Award for autobiography.

Edwidge and I will read from our work and discuss how living in South Florida has influenced our writing. I feel honored to appear with her.

The event is at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 21. The Historical Museum of South Florida is at 101 W. Flagler Street in Miami. For information, call 305-375-1492.

Martin Luther King's telegram to my mother at Leon County Jail

2009-04-06T23:44:00.000-04:00

I just returned from a trip to help my mother, Patricia Stephens Due, organize the library-quality papers she has collected since my parents were involved in the 1960s civil rights struggle. (Much of which we used as research while co-authoring Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.)

This past weekend, Mom reflected on Dr. King's assassination in April of 1968, recalling how her phone started ringing and didn't stop. How she had to swallow her own agony to try to comfort other activists, who were half-mad with grief while cities burned with hopelessness. My mother was especially upset that she was unable to attend the funeral—she’d recently had a Caesarian section to give birth to my new baby sister, Johnita. My father, civil rights attorney John Due, represented our family for Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta.

My mother knew Dr. King. She had his private telephone number.

Dr. King was the unassuming young pastor she first met when he made a presentation at a CORE workshop (Congress of Racial Equality) she and her sister attended as college students in the summer of 1960. Before CORE, my mother had been a typical college student practicing her music, discovering her social life.

A year earlier, a family friend had bribed Mom and her sister, Priscilla, into attending the CORE meeting at the tail end of their summer vacation in Miami. (He promised them a steak dinner at Wolfie's! Wolfie's, at the time, was the only restaurant in Miami Beach that served blacks.)

But they never got to dinner.

Dr. King and Rosa Parks had gained national notice during the Montgomery Bus Boycott from 1955-1956. Blacks had also launched a bus boycott in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1956, although it happened right before my mother and aunt arrived at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, where they attended college.

In the fall of 1959, still students at FAMU, Patricia and Priscilla Stephens organized a CORE chapter in Tallahassee. By 1960, six months later, she and her sister were in jail. They had been arrested after ordering food at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee during a sit-in. My mother, aunt and three other FAMU students were the first Jail-In in the nation during the student sit-in movement, choosing jail rather than paying a fine. Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Jail-In.

My mother and aunt ultimately spent 49 days in Leon County Jail, garnering international attention. At the time, my mother was 20 years old.

As my mother and I filed papers in her library these past few days, I ran my fingers across the yellowing stacks of typed and hand-written letters the jailed students received from all over the world--people of all races who were bewildered and outraged that black students could be sent to jail for trying to order food in a public restaurant.

On March 19, 1960, the five jailed FAMU students received a telegram from Dr. King. He knew a thing or two about being thrown in jail, and he offered these words:

"I have just learned of your courageous willingness to go to jail instead of paying fines for your righteous protest against segregated eating facilities. Through your decision you have again proven that there is nothing more majestic and sublime than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for the cause of freedom. You have discovered anew the meaning of the cross, and as Christ died to make men holy, you are suffering to make men free.

"As you suffer the inconvenience of remaining in jail, please remember that unearned suffering is redemptive. Going to jail for a righteous cause is a badge of honor and a symbol of dignity.

"I assure you that your valiant witness is one of the glowing epics of our time and you are bringing all of America nearer [to] the threshold of the world's bright tomorrows."

The world's bright tomorrows.

Brightness hasn't reached everyone, especially in this flailing world economy, but in 2009 we are all waking in one of the tomorrows Dr. King wrote about.

This past weekend, I sat with my mother while she remembered Dr. King's assassination. How she had to tend to that ringing phone. How concerned she was that people she cared about would be hurt in the night's riots. Wondering what the future held.

On April 4, 1968, these bright tomorrows must have seemed oh so far away.

Tananarive Due & Steven Barnes to appear in New York March 28, March 29

2009-03-18T16:39:00.000-04:00

I don’t get to New York nearly enough, so Steve and I are really looking forward to two appearances coming up on March 28 and March 29, and we hope to see you there!

The first appearance is bittersweet but very timely: A celebration of the life and works of Octavia E. Butler on Saturday, March 28. The next evening, on Sunday, March 29, a program in Harlem will celebrate Tananarive Due. (An incredible honor for me!) Both events are open to the public for $10 ($5 for students and seniors). More information follows:

Saturday, March 28

A few weeks ago, I realized that it was the third anniversary of Octavia E. Butler’s death. For me, it was a sad morning.

I remembered missing my last chance to see her at a Fledgling book-signing at Eso Won Books here in L.A. only months before she died. (It was Halloween, and my son was going trick-or-treating for the first time.) And how, months later, an email arrived from a magazine journalist who had a friend who lived in Octavia’s Seattle neighborhood and had heard a heartbreaking rumor. And how Harlan Ellison, her mentor, called us to confirm our worst fears: Octavia was gone. It is still difficult for me to see her photo.

But while these past three years have been a struggle for all of us who knew and loved Octavia’s work—and Octavia the person—she is not really gone at all. Her literature remains. Our memories remain. Her vision remains.

My husband, Steven Barnes, and I have been invited to New York to help celebrate Octavia, returning to a beloved and familiar venue.

The National Black Writers’ Conference Bi-Annual Symposium is celebrating the life and works of Octavia E. Butler Saturday, March 28. It’s a daylong symposium, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., at Medgar Evers College, 1650 Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. Steve and I will reflect on Octavia and the influence of her work early in the day.

Steve and I both knew and loved Octavia. Steve had known her for decades, and I met her in 1997 at the same conference on black speculative fiction at Clark Atlanta University where I met my soon-to-be husband. After that conference, my life would never be the same. Octavia kept a photo from that conference framed on her wall—me, Octavia, Steve, Samuel “Chip” Delany and Jewelle Gomez. “My other family,” she explained when we remarked upon it.

Now, a new family in black speculative fiction will appear to honor her: Other panelists throughout the day will include my hubby and fellow NAACP Image Award winner Steven Barnes (Lion's Blood and the upcoming Shadow Valley, his sequel to Great Sky Woman), New York Times bestselling author L.A. Banks (The Vampire Huntress Series) and fantasist Nnedi Okorafor, author of Zahrah the Windseeker.

For more information, visit http://www1.cuny.edu/forum/?p=3384.

Sunday, March 29

I have to put modesty aside to help promote this one:

UpSouth Inc. and the Medgar Evers Center for Black Literature are sponsoring a very special evening entitled “Voices and Visions of New American Dreams: Celebrating a Master Storyteller—Tananarive Due.”

To say that I feel honored and humbled is an understatement. I live every day in the knowledge of how blessed I am to be able to make a living doing what I love. I’m gratified that readers support my work, period. That’s something no writer can take for granted, especially during tough economic times.

When I started publishing, I had never heard of speculative fiction. I had read Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (and lots of Stephen King!), but I had never read other black writers who wrote about the supernatural, or who wrote about the future.

I’m embarrassed to say that Steven Barnes and Octavia E. Butler had escaped my notice until after I’d written My Soul to Keep (1997). (Now, the number of writers of color who identify themselves as horror, fantasy or science fiction writers has grown so much that they have their own internet networking sites!)

But I stepped out on complete faith with my first novel, The Between (1995), with the hope that someone would care about the stories I wanted to tell of life, death, healing and love—with a few spooky moments. Without the success of Terry McMillan and Waiting to Exhale, my road would have been much harder.

It has been a magical, life-changing ride ever since.

I want to thank my editor at Atria Books, Malaika Adero, as well as the other organizers for their hard work creating this event in my honor. And I want to thank my faithful readers for carrying me thus far on the way.

The event is at 5 p.m. at Faison’s Firehouse Theatre in Harlem, 6 Hancock Place/124th Street (between Morningside and St. Nicholas avenues).

Steve and I will be presenters, as well as poet and author Opal Palmer Adisa (author of Until Judgment Comes and Eros Muse).

There will be books for sale, and I will be happy to sign them. I don’t make it to New York nearly often enough, so I’ll also be glad to see friends and readers.

For more information, visit http://www.upsouth.org/

Hope to see you there!

An NAACP Image Award for IN THE NIGHT OF THE HEAT---and a complete list of winners!!!

2009-02-15T22:10:00.001-05:00

CAPTION: (left to right) Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes on the red carpet at the 40th NAACP Image Awards. Photo credit: WireImage.com.

I’m excited to announce that Steven Barnes, Blair Underwood and I received the 2009 NAACP Image Award for our mystery collaboration In the Night of the Heat, the second novel in our Tennyson Hardwick mystery series! (I was also nominated for Blood Colony, my latest African Immortals novel.)

Wow. [For a complete list of winners announced Feb. 12, see the end of this entry.]

The other nominees in the category were my friend E. Lynn Harris for Just Too Good to be True, Bonnie Glover for Going Down South and James McBride for Song Yet Sung. Formidable competition, to say the least. So I didn’t expect to win—especially since the blessing of a double nomination meant that I was likely to split my voters.

I’ve only been nominated for an Image Award once before—for The Black Rose in 2001. I didn’t win. It was an amazing experience, and an eye-opening one: Since that night, I’ve watched the Oscars with much more empathy for the nominees who ALMOST got to take the statuette home.

This time, I told myself I was simply going to go and enjoy the ceremony at Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. No expectations. My sister Lydia really wanted to fly in from Texas to support me, but she couldn’t arrange it—so I invited my friend Farai Chideya, an author and commentator. (Since Steve’s daughter, Nicki, couldn’t make it because of classes at UC Irvine, Steve invited his niece, Sharleen Higa.)

For almost a week, I was a ball of nerves. It took so much energy for me to prepare for the ceremony and the receptions and parties, I ended up writing notes for my acceptance speech in the car on the way. Even then, it felt like a foolish jinx to write anything at all.

The Novel category was presented in the pre-show, not televised live on Fox, but the pre-show had to run on time so that the live show could run on time later. (And no one wants to be the one cut off by the “get-off-the-stage” music they play at awards shows.)

We had 45 seconds for a speech. Blair had told us beforehand that if In the Night of the Heat won, he would accompany us to the stage, but he would leave the remarks to us. (Steve and I are the authors of the Tennyson Hardwick novels, and Blair is like our “producer,” with a strong hand in discussing content and the character who bears his face.)

Even split in half instead of thirds, that left only 22 seconds apiece for an acceptance speech.

And then there was the surreal element. When the name of our book was called, almost all rational thought fled my mind. I don’t remember the walk to the stage at all. All I know is that I ended up at the microphone first. I remember thanking my parents. I thanked Steve (“my collaborator and soul-mate.”) And I thanked Blair (“for his vision and a wonderful character in Tennyson Hardwick.”) And my editor, Malaika Adero at Atria Books. In retrospect, it seems as if I was just rattling off names.

Now that the fog of the day has cleared, I wish I’d had the time, or presence of mind, to say what the NAACP Image Award really means to me. My fantasy speech would have gone something like this:

“I stand here today on the 100th birthday of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, less than a month after the inauguration of the nation’s first black president, and I am humbled to receive this award.

First, I want to thank my parents, John Due and Patricia Stephens Due, who raised me and my sisters Johnita and Lydia to know our history—and to believe that an individual CAN change the world. For me, this is a homecoming. We were raised at NAACP meetings, attending NAACP conventions and demonstrations, and I was tested and trained as a young writer in the NAACP’s high school ACT-SO competition, founded by the late Vernon Jarrett.

I also want to give a special thank-you to the NAACP for being the only major Hollywood award that includes a Literary category! Thank you for recognizing that authors of fiction, non-fiction and poetry deserve a place at the Welcome Table, too.

I want to thank my collaborator and soul-mate Steven Barnes, an extraordinary teacher who has always given me room to fly. We have distinct voices in our solo work, but our collaborations have brought us new and surprising harmonies.

And thanks to Blair Underwood, who has taught us through example how to maintain grace and dignity in this battleground called Hollywood.

We conceived of the Tennyson Hardwick novels as a way to tell stories of healing and redemption that matter to all of us—while at the same time hoping to empower ourselves to have more control over how characters of color are portrayed on the screen.

We hope we are walking in the right direction.

Most importantly, thanks to God—who has brought us all thus far on the way. I have been blessed every day to make a living doing the thing I love. In these difficult economic times that are hitting writers hard, I cannot, and do not, take that for granted. I can only hope that through my writing I give back a portion of what has been given to me.”

Even that doesn’t sum it all up, but it’s closer.

The Image Awards included memorable performances by Jennifer Hudson, Stevie Wonder, Beyonce and will.i.am, along with a tribute to Nobel prize-winners Al Gore and Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai.

But my favorite moment was the tribute to Muhammad Ali, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and therefore could only sit on the stage. The crowd rose to its feet when he came into sight, and a booming chant erupted from the audience: “Ali! Ali! Ali!”

I was happy to have the chance to be in that room and shout the Champ’s name.

*****

BACKSTAGE AT THE IMAGE AWARDS

After we received our award, Blair ushered us out of the auditorium to walk the red carpet. Since red carpets are not a part of a writer’s normal life, we were happy for him to lead the way.

Even the walk out of the auditorium was great fun. As we passed through the rear, a gaggle of ladies who were fans of Blair’s let out appreciative, throaty hisses and calls, their voices just loud enough to be heard. “Hey, sexy!” “Love the book!”

Grinning, Blair turned to Steve and said, “See what happens when I hang out with y’all?” (Thanks, Blair—but book lovers or not, we doubt that the cloud of pheromones floating from those seats had much to do with our clever turns of phrase.)

Next, the red carpet, where a bank of about 40 photographers awaited. We stopped to pose at three spots along the carpet, and all the while the photographers tried to direct our gazes: “Blair, look up!” “Look left!” “Look right!” Flashbulbs strobed around us.

Other arrivals were posed behind us, and there were disgusted cries from the photographers when a publicist just behind Steve wouldn’t get out of the way of the shot.

Other arrivals that day included Halle Berry, Sean Combs, Dakota Fanning and a gaggle of other celebrities, so Blair made sure to explain who we were: “Image Award winners!” he said, and spelled our names out for them. When the cameras from “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight” found Blair, he made sure we were included.

Not exactly a typical day in a writer’s life.

After the Image Awards, at one point we were standing fewer than five feet from Will Smith backstage, although we didn’t have a chance to speak to him—or his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith, who was with him. At the after-party, Steve and I shared a table with actress CCH Pounder (“The Shield”) and actor Jeffrey Wright. I also stopped at NAACP chairman Julian Bond’s table to give him greetings from my parents, who know him as civil rights activists.

All in all, it was an unforgettable night.

*******

Here is the complete list of 2009 NAACP Image Award winners.

Congratulations to all of the winners and Image Award nominees!

Outstanding Comedy Series
"Tyler Perry's House of Payne" (TBS)

Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series
LaVan Davis - "Tyler Perry's House of Payne" (TBS)

Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series
Tracee Ellis Ross - "Girlfriends" (CW)

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series Lance Gross
"Tyler Perry's House of Payne" (TBS)

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series
Keshia Knight Pulliam - "Tyler Perry's House of Payne" (TBS)

Outstanding Drama Series
"Grey's Anatomy" (ABC)

Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series
Hill Harper - "CSI: NY" (CBS)

Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series
Chandra Wilson - "Grey's Anatomy" (ABC)

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series
Taye Diggs - "Private Practice" (ABC)

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series
Angela Bassett - "ER" (NBC)

Outstanding Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
"A Raisin in the Sun" (ABC)

Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
Sean Combs - "A Raisin in the Sun" (ABC)

Outstanding Actress in a Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special
Phylicia Rashad - "A Raisin in the Sun" (ABC)

Outstanding Actor in a Daytime Drama Series
Bryton McClure - "The Young and the Restless" (CBS)

Outstanding Actress in a Daytime Drama Series
Debbi Morgan - "All My Children" (ABC)

Outstanding News/Information - Series or Special
"In Conversation: Michelle Obama Interview" (TVOne)

Outstanding Talk Series
"The View" (ABC)

Outstanding Reality Series
"American Idol 7" (FOX)

Outstanding Variety - Series or Special
"UNCF An Evening of Stars: Tribute to Smokey Robinson" (Syndicated)

Outstanding Children's Program
"Dora The Explorer" (Nickelodeon)

Outstanding Performance in a Youth/Children's Program - Series or Special
Keke Palmer - "True Jackson" (Nickelodeon)

Outstanding New Artist
Jennifer Hudson (Arista)

Outstanding Male Artist
Jamie Foxx (J Records)

Outstanding Female Artist
Beyoncé (MusicWorld/Columbia Records)

Outstanding Duo, Group or Collaboration
Jennifer Hudson feat. Fantasia - "I'm His Only Woman" (Arista)

Outstanding Jazz Artist
Natalie Cole - "Still Unforgettable" (DMI Records)

Outstanding Gospel Artist - Traditional or Contemporary
Mary Mary (Columbia Records)

Outstanding World Music Album
Cheryl Keyes - "Let Me Take You There" (Keycan Records)

Outstanding Music Video
"Yes We Can" - Will.i.am (Will.i.am Music Group/Interscope)

Outstanding Song
"Yes We Can" - Will.i.am (Will.i.am Music Group/Interscope)

Outstanding Album
Jennifer Hudson - "Jennifer Hudson" (Arista)

Outstanding Literary Work - Fiction
"In the Night of the Heat: A Tennyson Hardwick Novel" -
Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes (Simon & Schuster/Atria Books)

Outstanding Literary Work - Non-Fiction
"Letter to My Daughter" - Maya Angelou (Random House)

Outstanding Literary Work - Debut Author
"Barack, Race, and the Media: Drawing My Own Conclusion" -
David Glenn Brown (David G. Brown Studios)

Outstanding Literary Work - Biography/Auto-Biography
"The Legs Are the Last to Go" - Diahann Carroll (Amistad)

Outstanding Literary Work - Instructional
"32 Ways to Be a Champion in Business" - Earvin "Magic" Johnson (Crown Business)

Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry
"Hip Hop Speaks To Children: A Celebration of "Poetry With A Beat" -
Nikki Giovanni (Source Books/Jabberwocky)

Outstanding Literary Work - Children
"Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope" -
Nikki Grimes; Illustrator Bryan Collier (Simon & Schuster)

Outstanding Literary Work - Youth/Teens
"Letters to a Young Sister: Define Your Destiny" - Hill Harper (Gotham Books)

Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture
Will Smith - "Seven Pounds" (Columbia Pictures)

Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture
Rosario Dawson - "Seven Pounds" (Columbia Pictures)

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture
Columbus Short - "Cadillac Records" (Sony Music Film/Parkwood Pictures)

Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture
Taraji P. Henson - "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (Paramount)

Outstanding Motion Picture
"The Secret Life of Bees" (Fox Searchlight)

Outstanding Independent Motion Picture
"Slumdog Millionaire" (Fox Searchlight)

Outstanding Documentary (Theatrical or Television)
"The Black List" (HBO)

Outstanding Foreign Motion Picture
"The Class" (Sony Pictures Classics)

Outstanding Directing in a Dramatic Series
Ernest Dickerson - "Lincoln Heights: The Day Before Tomorrow" (ABC Family)

Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series
Kevin Sullivan - "30 Rock: MILF Island" (NBC)

Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture (Theatrical or Television)
Gina Prince-Bythewood -"The Secret Life of Bees" (Fox Searchlight Pictures

Outstanding Writing in a Motion Picture (Theatrical or Television)
Jenny Lumet - "Rachel Getting Married" (Sony Pictures Classics)

Outstanding Writing in a Dramatic Series
Shonda Rhimes - "Grey's Anatomy: Freedom Part 1 & 2" (ABC)

Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series
Erica D. Montolfo - "The Game: White Coats and White Lies" (CW)

Inauguration 2009: The light beyond my parents' tall shadows

2009-01-28T13:35:00.000-05:00

“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”
--Zora Neale Hurston

*******

My journey to Washington, D.C., with my parents—John Due and Dr. Patricia Stephens Due—and my sister Johnita ended, in many ways, as my family’s journey began: with an act of defiance.

For weeks before the inauguration, my mother had talked about wanting to gather soil in Washington, D.C. to take home and mingle with the rich red clay of Gadsden County, Florida, where she was born and lives now. Then, she would plant a tree in honor of the fallen foot-soldiers whose shoulders Barack Obama stood on to get where he is. I suggested that we make a pilgrimage to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and collect her soil near the White House grounds.

It was the day after President Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration. Most of the masses had begun their way back home, but many of us still lingered. My parents and I reached the gate at the rear of the White House, an iconic image we know so well from movies and television—the visual symbol for the greatest power on planet Earth.

A sidewalk for visitors ran parallel to a restricted driveway where vehicles could only enter with proper identification. The only thing separating our pedestrian sidewalk from the restricted driveway was a thick ceremonial chain linked low to the ground—beyond the chain, a three-foot strip of colorless grass and soil, then the asphalt the police were guarding. The White House itself, closer to our sidewalk, was protected by a much higher iron gate.

After we posed in front of the White House gate, I noticed an eight-foot gap in the chain on the driveway side, so grass and soil were easily accessible. Seemed like a good spot! My parents agreed, so I brought out a little spoon and squatted to loosen at the hard soil so my mother would have enough to scoop into a little plastic bag.

With the White House gate less than six feet away and the Washington Monument behind her, my mother kneeled to gather the soil…and I readied my camera to take her picture.

We did not go unnoticed by the police officers monitoring the crowd. A uniformed young male officer approached my mother and said belligerently, “Move—NOW.”

My mother was kneeling, and in her heavy winter coat she was slow to rise. Instead, she tried to explain her purpose. When the officer cut her off, she seemed puzzled by his hostility.

“You stay on THIS side of the chain—that’s why it’s there. Move NOW,” he said again, in that voice that most people would leap to obey.

But my mother is not most people. She has never been one to simply do as she was told, whether by a police officer or anyone else. And this police officer had a sharpness in his tone that brought back bad memories of police officers in Tallahassee, Ocala, St. Petersburg, Miami and New York who had carted her to jail in the 1960s.

In those days, the only terrorism in the news was domestic—but those bomb blasts and attacks by police dogs and fire hoses were never called “terrorism.” On that winter day after the inauguration of the 44th president, my mother was still wearing the dark glasses she has been forced to wear since a police officer lobbed a teargas canister in her face during a peaceful Tallahassee march when she was only 19. Her eyes have been sensitive to light indoors and outdoors since.

My mother spent 49 days in jail for sitting-in at a Woolworth lunch counter. The police had tried to order her to move back then, too. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to her and the four other Florida A&M students, including my aunt, Priscilla Stephens Kruize, who were a part of that Jail-In. (It was the nation's first Jail-In during the student sit-in movement.)

The confrontations didn’t end in the 1960s: In 1992, in the wake of Hurricane Andrew in Miami, my mother faced off against a swarm of police officers who raided my parents’ property in the dead of night because of a mistaken report of a “suspicious black man in a white van.” By pure luck, my parents and cousin were not hurt that night.

At the White House gate, as I saw the growing defiance on my mother’s hardening face, I had a nightmarish vision of our once-in-a-lifetime inauguration trip ending at the police station and on the nightly news. My father and I hushed her and coaxed her away, promising better soil elsewhere. (For a time, two or three officers followed us, watching.)

My mother got her soil. Upon the advice of a kindly White House park ranger posted near the visitor entrance, we chose softer, richer soil in a non-restricted area. My mother was more afraid of the hungry, fearless squirrel approaching her than she had been of the police officer. She scooped up as much as she liked—far better soil than at the other site.

Later, we could laugh. My sister Johnita, who had stayed behind in our warm hotel room, was aghast at the story: Whey didn’t Mom simply do as she was told right away?

“Don’t you know your mother by now?” my father said.

*******

My family’s character has always been shaped by my parents’ courtship in the civil rights era. Instead of “dating,” they went to meetings and protests together—and fell in love.

My mother was visible and audible on the front lines. My father’s legal mind toiled and strategized behind the scenes. He once represented Dr. King after in arrest in St. Augustine, and helped pioneer an important strategy to bypass state courts in civil rights cases.

My parents raised us in meetings and on picket lines. Last year, we celebrated an early family holiday on Election Night, when my sisters and I brought our families to watch the returns in Quincy, Florida. I’ll never forget the shout of joy that rang through the house when the words “President-elect Barack Obama” first appeared on the television screen.

Naturally, my parents wanted to go to Washington for the inauguration.

But decades of community activism and political involvement had not borne any offers for tickets. My parents are great at giving, but not so good at asking—so my sisters and I asked on their behalf. I posted a blog entry right here, wrote letters and begged my Facebook friends.

My sister, in a leap of faith, booked us a hotel room to share. Tickets or no tickets, we wanted to experience the inauguration too.

Moments before my redeye took off for Washington, a sudden email appeared on my phone: TICKETS!!!! Andre L. Gaines, a screenwriter I met when I spoke at my alma mater Northwestern University years ago, had a friend who works for someone in the Obama administration. He’d forwarded the email with my blog essay, and when his friend read it, he offered my parents Silver tickets.

I rushed straight from the airport to the convention center to pick up the tickets. “After that email you sent…it was the least we could do,” Andre’s friend said.

The honor of your presence is requested is requested at the ceremonies attending the inauguration of the President and Vice-President of the United States…

Alone, when I held the two tickets in my unsteady hands and read them, I cried.

And so my trip to Washington began with tears.

And blood.

I’ve never had a nosebleed before—but as I sat in the Starbucks in the lobby of the Renaissance Hotel the morning I arrived with my tickets, I realized my nose was bleeding. Excitement? Dry, cold air? At the time, I was typing a journal entry on my laptop…and when the initial surprise passed, I plugged my nose with a Kleenex and typed one-handed, rapid-fire.

As I think back on it, the blood was symbolic. My mother and I wrote a memoir together, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights—not to mention our virtual home-schooling on black history twelve months a year—so I didn’t need Martin Luther King Day to remind me of how much blood had been spilled. A little nosebleed seemed like a small price to pay. I barely noticed; I didn’t even excuse myself from a crowded table to go to the restroom.

I had too much to write about.

******

SUNDAY, JANUARY 18

I was on a budget, as usual, so I didn’t pay to attend any balls—but my sister had been invited to two free functions and brought me as her guest: One to a Reception sponsored by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (a friend of Obama’s whom many political insiders believe taught Obama a thing or two about politics), and then to the Inaugural Ball sponsored by TheRoot.com, co-founded by Henry Louis Gates.

The Root’s ball was a Who’s Who. I ran into an old friend, author Amy Alexander, and we wandered the room with her friend Victor, who pulled me out of my shyness. I got a polite smooch from Spike Lee, who told me I was a “marvelous writer.” I had a quick chat with director John Singleton, who remembered me from an earlier meeting. I ran into my friend, author and commentator Farai Chideya, who was with her mother.

We even had an Oprah moment! We were standing beside an elevator when The Original O herself climbed out, and for a moment I was standing only five feet from her. My hand was practically outstretched for an introduction (we spoke on the phone years ago, and I know she enjoyed my novel My Soul to Keep), but her burly bodyguard was suddenly standing between us. Another elevator car opened, and she was gone in a blink.

(Maybe next time, Oprah!)

Other attendees included Alice Walker, Bob Woodward, Chris Tucker, Biz Markie (who deejayed!), a slew of former co-workers from The Miami Herald, and too many others to mention.

And the week was just getting started.

*******

MONDAY, JANUARY 19

Monday was Martin Luther King Day. My mother stayed behind in the hotel room, but Johnita, Dad and I went to the Washington Monument to join the eager crowds anticipating a history-making day. In August of 1963, married only since January, my parents journeyed to Washington on the "Freedom Train" to attend the March on Washington as special guests. Returning 46 years later, my father was brimming with memories as the past and present collided.

It felt like coming Home.

I’ll never forget the ocean of smiles. Smiles were our universal language.

Jumbotrons played excerpts from Barack Obama’s remarks on Sunday, his voice ringing across the Reflecting Pool and throughout the National Mall. Sojourners of all races, ages and ethnicities from across the country and the world snapped photos of strangers who asked. Wheelchairs were plastered with Obama stickers. Obama’s name was on hats, scarves, jackets, purses, and buttons, reminiscent of a giant sporting event where everyone was rooting for the same team.

Politeness unparalleled. Shining eyes. Everyone shining. All races. No races.

My father recalled his earlier visits for the March on Washington and the Million Man March, gazing at the wonder of Now. My sister, father and I took a photo in front of the Washington Monument, standing tall to stab the cloudy sky.

But there were no clouds in the faces of those of us gathered there.

There was an Illinois Ball in our hotel that night, and German shepherds on leashes led Special Police officers through the lobby. These weren’t the dogs of Birmingham, Selma and Tallahassee, even if they were the same breed. These were the dogs of The New Day.

Irony visible in every blink of the eye.

An older white woman sitting primly in ball finery in the lobby—someone’s grandmother—held a striking vinyl handbag with Barack Obama’s image, so I asked her if I could take a picture of her with my video camera. She agreed. “You should see the other side!” her female companion said, and she flipped it over to show another photo: Barack with Michelle, Malia and Sasha, all grinning.

The Obama family’s faces pulled me out of videographer mode, and I was just a witness again: I stared, struck anew. A black family so much like mine—on this woman’s purse.

(Why can’t I write about these days without tears?

As a child, my family was not welcome. When I was three years old, my parents tried to enroll me in Montessori school in Miami, but no school would accept me because of my brown skin. I went home and covered the offending skin in baby powder. “Mommy, will they let me go to school now?” In the fifth grade, young children and teenagers called me “nigger” as I walked to elementary school. Our neighbors threw tomatoes at our Cutler Ridge house and put rocks in our gas tank.

We were a part of the neighborhood, but apart from the neighborhood.

A part of the nation, but apart from the nation.

Pain with nowhere to go, except in my writing. Pain taught me how to write.)

“What a beautiful purse!” I said, smiling. The rest could not be put to words.

The lobby flooded with ball-goers and security officials as motorcades and police motorcycles wailed past on the streets outside. Red velvet ropes and blue security lights checking identification. A school-mascot style giant Abraham Lincoln strolled the lobby floor.

U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. passed me, walking toward the elevator, and I called to him to introduce him to my parents. “Congratulations to us all,” he said.

Inside the hotel bar, called the Presidents’ Sports Bar, a large black and white photo of Barack Obama as a young boy with a baseball bat had a prime spot—a stone's throw from photos of Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

What strange world is this?

Whatever dream this is, please don’t let me wake up.

*******

TUESDAY, JANUARY 20

INAUGURATION DAY

Our wake-up call came at six a.m. as directed, but when we turned on CNN we could see that we had overslept by hours. The Mall was already crowded with those who had been up since four, or those who could not sleep at all.

As we rushed to dress, Johnita learned that she had an offer for even more coveted Purple tickets for our parents—in the standing Senate section, right in front of the Capitol. We only had to make it to Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the Capitol, to pick them up!

By that time, my cold-weary sister had already decided that she wanted to watch the inauguration indoors at the Newseum rather than trying to use the Silver tickets, so I planned to walk my parents to their Purple section seats and then fare the best I could. We set out together, but we expected to be separated before the swearing-in ceremony.

A driver got us as close to our destination as road closures allowed, and then we walked, melting into the wall of humanity literally blocking the street.

It was 8 a.m. By inauguration standards, it was very late.

When there was no movement forward in the crowd, we found an alley. When police on the other side told us we could not pass, we ducked into the coffee shop on the corner to circumvent the blockage. We walked with a mission.

We had only been outside for a few minutes, but my fingertips and ears were already tingling in the cold. (Yes, Northwestern University is in Evanston, Illinois, right outside of Chicago, but I loathe the cold!) I cast suspicious gazes at my father’s thin, fleece-lined coat, wondering how in the world he would last the day.

Once we reached the Newseum, where our new tickets awaited, we stood outside with a crowd for 15 or 20 minutes while our entrance was negotiated with the guards at the door.
Inside—we savored the heated hallways.

From the rooftop, we had a great view of the Capitol building only three blocks down the street—seemingly close enough to touch!

One last family meeting, and Johnita hugged us before my parents and I set down in the elevator armed with two Purple tickets. Cell phone service was spotty, so I knew that it was possible I wouldn’t be able to get back inside after I walked with my parents—assuming I could make it back that far at all!

At the door, we asked a U.S. Marshal advice about the best route.

“This street is closed,” he said. “You’ll have to go to Seventh, and then the gates won’t even open until 11.”

Our resolve deflated. For a ceremony beginning at 11:30 a.m., that was cutting it close.

“What would YOU do?” I asked him.

“I would stay here,” he said.

And so we did.

(After reading about the horrific difficulties experienced by Purple ticketholders in particular, thousands of whom were stuck huddled in a claustrophobic tunnel for hours, I am thankful every day that we made that decision. I mourn for a nameless elderly black woman I read about who called it the worst experience of her life—and many others suffered too.)

We had a lobby and large television screen practically to ourselves indoors—and when we wanted to brave the cold, we could go to the rooftop and see Pennsylvania Avenue below us, lined with police officers on either side.

On one end, we could see the Capitol building—and on the other, almost out of sight, the blur of the crowds at the Mall. (I was on the rooftop when I saw former President George W. Bush’s helicopter fly away.)

A shout filled the streets, and we saw a motorcade pass under our noses on Pennsylvania Avenue. After snapping a rooftop photo of my parents with the Capitol in the background, we went inside to watch the proceedings on TV.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, hours before his collapse, looked hale and joyful on the monitor. The appearance of former President Jimmy Carter reminded me of being Malia’s age, when my family was invited to meet then-candidate Carter and pose for a photo with our family and the late Florida Rep. Gwendolyn Cherry at a Miami hotel.

Malia and Sasha appeared on the TV screen like Sunshine itself.

There were others in and out of the lobby—other observers whose names, for the most part, we did not learn. Cooks watched from a far end of the hallway while police officers with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the elevators and rooftop.

But my family might as well have been alone.

When the ceremony began, we sat in a row on a sofa, mesmerized, our hands unconsciously clutching at each other as we watched the images unfold—my father’s hand on my sister’s shoulder, my sister’s hands on my father’s knee and mine, my hand on my sister’s knee and my mother’s, my mother’s arm around my shoulder. A human chain. (We missed you, Lydia, but we know you were there with us, too!)

At noon, while the gorgeous John Williams musical composition played, a caption on CNN’s screen pointed out that Barack Obama had just officially become president although he had not been sworn in. On television, I saw Michelle reach to her husband from where she sat behind him…and gently squeeze his shoulder.

A human chain.

We watched the oath, practically holding our breath. There were no shouts, no cries—only the silence of our witnessing. We all shed tears.

During President Obama’s inaugural address, I grabbed my video camera and ran back up to the rooftop, where I could hear his voice ringing up and down the street. The words were muffled to my hearing, but the resolve was clear.

My family was on the rooftop together when President Obama’s motorcade drove down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the V formation of police motorcycles—Secret Service officers walking beside the slow-moving vehicles—and the street erupted with a roar that seemed to shake the walls around me. The floor beneath me.

The roar shook me to my bones.

“He’s getting out of the car!” a voice cried from the other side of our rooftop, and although we ran as quickly as we could to try to get a better angle, the new President and First Lady were out of our sight.

We rushed back inside to see with our own eyes on TV.

There on Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack and Michelle Obama walked, smiling and waving. They walked free of fear.

On inauguration day, we all walked.

*******

Our rooftop perch gave us a great view of the parade.

My mother was a junior at Florida A&M University the first time she was arrested, and my father attended law school there to become a civil rights soldier in his own way. Although women weren’t permitted to march in the band in the late-1950s, my mother played trumpet and bassoon in FAMU’s highly-esteemed concert and symphonic bands. (In junior high school band, I used to play trumpet duets with her.)

My parents contributed money to help the 400 members of FAMU’s marching band attend the inauguration parade—and we were watching from above as the band’s opening peals of “Celebration” filled Pennsylvania Avenue. My parents shouted and waved, as excited as children again.

When my mother was their age, she gave up childish things. And, like all veterans, my parents have not often made room for joy.

As the FAMU band played on, I saw the young people they might have been.

Thank you, Mom and Dad!

Thank you to the fallen of all races who did not live to see the day.

A simple appeal: Inauguration tickets for my parents

2009-01-12T19:34:00.001-05:00

CAPTION: John Due and Dr. Patricia Stephens Due with infant Tananarive

I am looking for Inauguration tickets for my parents, who are longtime civil rights activists in Florida named John Due and Dr. Patricia Stephens Due. Beyond my campaign calls and carefully-budgeted contributions, I am a political outsider…so I am making a simple appeal.

My parent celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary on Jan. 5, and the first lesson they passed to their three daughters was the most profound lesson there is: Individuals can change the world for the better.

My parents were foot-soldiers in the civil rights struggle. Like thousands of other activists of all races, they never got a holiday or a stamp—but without their sacrifices in the 1960s and beyond, we would not be inaugurating Barack Obama on Jan. 20.

As the late novelist Octavia E. Butler told us, “The only lasting truth is Change.”

But change always comes with a price.

To this day, my mother wears dark glasses even indoors because her eyes were injured by a teargas bomb thrown in her face by a police officer during a nonviolent march in Tallahassee in 1960. She was also shot at while trying to register Florida voters in 1963 and 1964. My father, who once represented Dr. King after an arrest in St. Augustine, got a call from the FBI warning him that he might be the target of a racist’s bomb—and that was in the late-1980s. U.S. bombings were in the news; home-grown, just like in Birmingham. I remember that call well.

So, yes—I want my parents to see the official ceremony up close; far more than I want to actually witness the Inauguration myself…although I surely do. My parents wouldn’t only be attending for themselves: They would be there on behalf of the countless other activists who did not, or could not, make it to witness this day.

In 2003, my mother and I published a memoir we co-authored: Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Researching that book about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, I learned first-hand how many of the 1960s activists did not make it to 2009 in body, mind or spirit. The war against them took a toll that is still vibrating through the next generations, and time is stealing them away day by day.

But some of them, like my parents, made it to Election Night. And Inauguration Day.

My mother talks about bringing back soil from Washington, D.C., to mix with the red clay of her birthplace in Gadsden County, Florida. Then she wants to plant a tree in honor of all of the foot-soldiers whose shoulders President-elect Obama is standing on.

Neither of my parents expected to get caught up in a political movement when they went to college. But in 1960, as a junior, my mother was arrested at a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee. When she refused to pay her fine, my mother, aunt and three other Florida A&M students spent 49 days in jail, becoming the nation’s first Jail-In.

They received a telegram of support from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and baseball great Jackie Robinson published a letter my mother wrote from jail in his New York Post column.

My father, then in college in Indiana, read about my mother in Jet magazine and applied to Florida A&M’s law school so he, too, could join the movement sweeping the South.

The rest is history. A lifelong match was born. This weekend, my father wrote my mother a heartfelt note explaining why he wouldn’t dream of attending the Inauguration without her if they couldn't both arrange to go: “To go without you—when we are life partners—would have been like going to the 1963 March on Washington without you. It would have been impossible.”

Most children think their parents are special, but my sisters and I had constant confirmation. We saw their names cited in books. The phone rang constantly; people and organizations in need of guidance or support. One day, my mother put in a call to the governor’s office, and then-Gov. Bob Graham called back within an hour.

Although I attended public schools, my parents practically home-schooled me and my sisters with children’s books about Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, black cowboys and other oft-overlooked figures in American history. Mom, in particular, didn’t just haul it out in February: We heard about our history all year long.

While my parents often reminded us that Martin Luther King Jr. was just a man like anyone else, we always took the day off from school for his birthday, long before there was a national holiday. We drove to Miami’s Torch of Friendship and stood in a circle to say what Dr. King had meant to us. Then we would have pancakes and go home, where often my parents opened up the house to guests—activists and politicians and students—and played speeches and watched footage. Dr. King’s vibrato delivery always brought tears to my eyes.

Knowing that history—and the pride and perspective it gave me—meant the world to me. That’s why history is so firmly fixed in nearly everything I write. History has great power.

When Roots swept the nation in 1976 and I wanted to learn my family tree, my father told me story about freed slaves who built their own community in Indiana called Lyles Station—and fought off an attack by jealous whites. He even drew me pictures of a rousing battle in a round-house barn, with women handing their men rifles as the men stood firing from the rafters.
I had never heard a story like that in any of my history books.

I didn’t follow the path of the activist, and my parents supported my passion to spread ideas using my writing rather than a picket signs or a megaphone. (Although, trust me, I’ve had plenty of experiences with picket signs, and even a megaphone…)

When I left the anti-apartheid takeover of the administration building at Northwestern University in the late-1980s to go out to dinner with a departing friend—rather than face arrest like my more courageous mates—I was embarrassed to tell my mother that I’d sold out.

But when I called Mom to relate the shameful tale, she said, “Darling, I’m glad you didn’t get arrested. I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.”

I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.

Those are powerful words for a child to hear from her mother.

Instead of celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas as a family last year, my sisters and I brought our families, including five grandchildren, to visit my parents in Quincy, Florida so we could all watch the election returns together. It was a night I’ll never forget.

But I can only imagine what it meant to my parents. And because of their sacrifices as students, I was permitted the luxury of an extended childhood throughout my college years. I had time to develop my craft by day and fill my nights with laughter.

My parents are in fairly good health, but they are 69 and 74. The trip to Washington, D.C. won’t be easy on them. But they want to go.

And since they’re going…I wish they had Inauguration tickets.

All I can offer is gratitude, but if you know of available tickets, please contact me at TheLivingBlood@gmail.com.

NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINATIONS for Tananarive

2009-01-12T19:07:00.000-05:00

Some months—some years—start out just right.

Last week, I was checking in on Facebook when I saw a note on my Wall from Blair Underwood’s publicist: CONGRATS ON THE IMAGE AWARD NOM!!!!

What nomination?

She said Blair Underwood, Steve and I had received an NAACP Image Award nomination for In the Night of the Heat.

I had heard nothing about it. I haven’t been nominated for an NAACP Image Award since The Black Rose in 2001, so I had gotten out of the habit of checking. When I saw the website at http:/www.naacpimageawards.net/40/releases/40th_nia_nominees_release.pdf, I almost fell out of my chair:

I received TWO nominations: for In the Night of the Heat, my mystery collaboration with Blair and my husband, Steven Barnes--AND Blood Colony, the latest in my African Immortals series. I am grateful beyond expression.

(The NAACP Image Awards will be broadcast on Fox at 8 p.m. Feb. 12. To cast a vote, join the NAACP at http://www.naacpimageawards.net/40/nom_info.php. Wish us luck!)

It’s not just a feeling of affirmation after years of walking a difficult literary road. It’s not just that In the Night of the Heat celebrates my 10-year life partnership, and creative collaborations, with the wonderful Steven Barnes. Or that it’s a sign that our partnership with the talented Blair Underwood is bearing fruit, helping pave the way for the movies we all crave.

It’s much deeper than that.

When I was growing up, my parents used to pack us up every summer to attend NAACP national conventions. I was raised on the oratory of Benjamin L. Hooks and Ted Kennedy, and on NAACP picket lines.

As a high school student, I was a winner in the NAACP’s academic competition—the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics, or ACT-SO, founded by Chicago columnist Vernon Jarrett. Each summer, I swam in a sea of brilliant high school students of color from around the nation, and we nourished each other’s dreams. The NAACP’s ACT-SO is one of the finest youth programs there is.

And, as the former president of the Greater Miami NAACP Youth Council, I know my NAACP history: The interracial civil rights organization was founded 100 years ago, in 1909.

Frankly, it all just takes my breath away.

And this is a month that is already full of might.

A presidential candidate who electrified my imagination since the day in April 2007 when I heard him speak at my church, First AME Church of Los Angeles, is about to be inaugurated the first black president: I am rarely right about any sweeping predictions, but I knew Barack Obama could win that day. I was so sure, I typed a transcript of his speech and sent it to my friends—and later posted it on my blog [1/7/08].

On election night, a shout of joy in my parents’ living room echoed against the framed plaques and newspaper articles that bespoke the price of the journey. A television screen as big as life proclaimed it: PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA.

On some level, I still don’t believe it.

This weekend, my parents and one of my sisters will meet me in Washington, D.C., for a family sojourn to the place where history will be engraved forever. None of us has a ticket to the actual Inauguration—not yet—but we want to breathe the city’s air that day. Together.

Even in these very scary economic times, it all feels like riches beyond measure.

Thank you, NAACP.

And thank you, readers, for the honor of telling you stories.

BEDTIME STORIES: My love affair with audio books

2008-12-20T20:24:00.000-05:00

My name is Tananarive Due, and I am addicted to bedtime stories.

I have grown so accustomed to listening to audio books as I go to sleep at night that it’s now very hard for me to sleep without the steady burr of a voice in my ear. Common sense tells me it’s a bad habit, like leaving the TV on all night, and yet I can’t take off my headphones.

When I was preparing a lecture on Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred last year and couldn’t bring myself to open her book—her loss was still too raw—I found that I could listen to the audio book instead. The storyteller gave me a bridge back to Octavia.

Now, it has become a full-fledged dependency. I just finished listening to the unabridged version of my novel Joplin’s Ghost. Barack Obama’s self-recorded version of Dreams From my Father, which I listened to during the primaries, was a revelation.

Fiction is my favorite, but college-level lectures make great bedtime stories too. (I listened to several great theology courses from The Teaching Company while I was researching Blood Colony.)

Rewinding is a constant fact of life—after all, I’m bound to lose my place when I fall asleep, and sometimes I’ve found myself listening to the same 10-minute patch night after night because I can’t stay awake longer—but that seems a small price to pay.

Now, my habit has followed me to my car, where I hook up my iPod, tape recorder or CD player through the car’s sound system. Or the supermarket, where I listen while I shop. Or in the kitchen while I’m cooking. I now officially spend more time listening to audio books than I do actually reading.

At Recorded Books, there are also audio versions of My Soul to Keep, The Living Blood, The Good House (which I also recently listened to while revising my screenplay version) and Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Tantor Media also released an audio version of Casanegra.

Wish I could tell you that my audio books would make great stocking stuffers, but the Recorded Books versions are expensive—more designed for libraries than purchase: Joplin’s Ghost, for example, is listed at between $61.75 to $113.75 on the Recorded Books website. But they do have a weekly rental rate for about the cost of a hardcover novel.

I loved actress Lizan Mitchell’s performance of Joplin’s Ghost (2005) for Recorded Books. I’m revisiting that novel because I’m ready to start brainstorming on a screenplay adaptation, so I got over my shyness about my own prose long enough to listen to the story.

Lucky me! I had forgotten enough that I was able to listen as if someone else had written the book. And while I couldn’t help making silent edits in my head, I never outright winced. I’ll just be honest: I was captivated. It was scarier than I remembered, and I enjoyed the love stories in both of the novel’s timelines. There were also strains of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” at the breaks, adding a new dimension. What fun!

Although My Soul to Keep and The Good House are both in film development at Fox Searchlight, voice actors are my only taste of how an outside artist would interpret my work thus far. In fact, with Lizan Mitchell’s performance fresh in my head, I did a much more convincing rendering of a scene between Scott Joplin and a country conjurer when I read from Joplin’s Ghost at Antioch University Los Angeles this week.

If you haven’t read Joplin’s Ghost, here’s the plot: An R&B singer at a crossroads in her career encounters the ghost of ragtime composer Scott Joplin at the Scott Joplin House in St. Louis—and he follows her. I came up with the idea after meeting the site’s former curator, who has since passed away…and he told me he had seen a ghost in Scott Joplin’s parlor.

Phoenix, my singer, is at a crossroads because she’s trying to record conventionally “black” commercial music instead of the music she hears in her head. And Joplin himself, who died in 1917 after debilitating syphilis and heartbreak because he wasn’t taken seriously as an opera composer, also struggled with the constant tug-of-war between art and commerce.

I wrote Joplin’s Ghost because of my own balancing act as a full-time writer—my writing has to sell, but I also want to write what’s in my heart. That is a battle that is becoming more pronounced for writers as tough times descend on the publishing industry.

I have also been saddened, over the years, to see the decline of instrumental music among black artists, when previous generations of black artists pioneered ragtime, jazz, funk and rock and roll. (I remember the days in elementary school when the music teacher rolled a cart from classroom to classroom so that students could choose the instrument they wanted to play in the school band. Those days, sadly, are long gone in most schools…)

The audio book brought Joplin’s Ghost to life, just as all audio good audio books do.

But just as when we turn the last pages of a book we have carried with us everywhere for days, weeks or months, there is a sense of loss when the story is over. The characters vanish. The world of the book disappears.

And I can’t let a night go by before I have chosen another.

This time, I have Stephen King’s short story collection, Just After Sunset: Stories. I’m a Stephen King fan from way back--and, like King, I think novelists should also keep their short fiction skills sharp. I want to publish a collection of short stories myself, so I’m eager to see where King will go.

Am I worried about having Stephen King’s stories romping in my head as I try to go to sleep at night? Maybe a little. But I prefer a storyteller’s fancies to the whispers about real life’s sorrows past and future that sometimes burrow into my head when I try to sleep at night.

Now...excuse me while I put on my headphones.

Wish me sweet dreams.

******************************

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

HOLIDAY GREETINGS!!!

It’s a time of great joy in many of my circles, but also great uncertainty…so my thoughts and prayers are with you during this holiday season and throughout 2009!

Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa and Happy Holidays, everyone!

A CALL FOR DONATIONS FROM UP SOUTH IN N.Y.

This is an announcement my editor, Malaika Adero, sent me in conjunction with a program being planned in my honor in New York this March. I promised I would pass it along:

We Need Your Support….
Join Up South, Inc.
in partnership with Medgar Evers Center for Black Literature
as we celebrate

TANANARIVE DUE

One of America’s finest contemporary authors of fiction and nonfiction

On Sunday, March 29th, 2009
In New York City
(venue to be announced by February 1st, 2009)

Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, and other special guests will read excerpts from her award-winning and bestselling fiction, participate in a discussion with the audience of her extraordinary career and life as a writer. A reception will follow the performances.

Please make a contribution today: $25 or more will secure you a seat in the audience and an Up South International Book Festival t-shirt or tote bag. Go to www.upsouth.org and write bluemedia@aol.com for more information.

Please send checks or money orders payable to:

Up South, Inc.
310 Convent Avenue, Suite 2A,
New York, NY 10031.

Your contribution allows us to present this and other extraordinary writers, artists, thinkers—especially book authors.

Up South, Inc. is the producer of the annual Up South International Book Festival, held in New York City in the Fall.

We are a nonprofit organization, 501 (c) 3, accepting tax deductible contributions.

Meet us Saturday at Eso Won Books: More than just another signing...

2008-12-02T22:46:00.000-05:00

AT 3 p.m. this Saturday (Dec. 6), I will appear with my husband, Steven Barnes, and Blair Underwood at Eso Won Books in Los Angeles as we sign copies of our new steamy mystery collaboration, In the Night of the Heat. The store is at 4331 Degnan Blvd.

Blair, Steve and I appeared at Eso Won last fall, and it had the feel of a community event: a full house, actress CCH Pounder and even a politician or two. And if you’ve never had the chance to meet Blair—or, heck, even if you have—it’s a great chance to make your friends jealous. (For video clips and an excerpt from our second Tennyson Hardwick novel, see the entries below.)

This is the only joint signing scheduled for In the Night of the Heat, which makes it special. The store will also have copies of Blood Colony (my African Immortals novel) and The Ancestors, the book of ghost novellas I did with Brandon Massey and L.A. Banks. But this event is exciting for other reasons, too.

Those of you who remember the glory days for your favorite black authors may have noticed that publishers don’t tour the way they used to—-and so I do signings less frequently. Family life also has a little to do with that-—with a husband and a 4-1/2-year-old at home, hitting the road has less allure than it once did.

But it’s not your imagination: Black publishing is changing. Publishing is changing, PERIOD. I just got an email from Zane on the subject while composing this blog. One publisher recently caused an industry-wide stir by announcing that it has asked its editors not to acquire new books right now. And with less disposable income in the hands of many Americans, authors and bookstores are struggling.

Eso Won is no exception. Owners James Fugate and Tom Hamilton were surprised by a marked decrease in book sales when they left La Brea and moved into Leimert Park more than two years ago. At this time last year, there was real fear that the store would be closing down.

So far, they are hanging in there. But how’s business?

“Slow,” says Fugate. “Black books are just not doing well in general.”

There are a lot of factors, perhaps: A bad economy. Internet book sales. Competition with chains. Fewer book tours to draw in the crowds.

But Fugate also says that he believes that in recent years, more of the books are lacking in originality and story. He wonders if some black readers may feel squeezed out by shifts in the marketplace.

The one bright spot: Barack Obama. For about a week after the election, buyers were flocking to his Barack Obama shelves. “The Obama stuff is helping quite a bit,” he says.

Eso Won is special to me, and it’s a Los Angeles institution. When I appeared at the store with my mother, Patricia Stephens Due, to sign copies of Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, I looked up and saw Angela Bassett sitting out in the audience! Long before Blair became my co-author, I always looked forward to seeing him at my signings at Eso Won too. The store has hosted everyone from Bill Cosby to Barack Obama to Octavia E. Butler to Walter Mosley, and the list goes on…

And I’ll be there Saturday. Leimert Park is a funky little area, worth the visit. For more information or to pre-order a book to be signed, call Eso Won at 323-290-1048.

Even if you can’t make it Saturday, don’t forget about Eso Won this holiday season. Or the bookstores in your own neighborhood.

Trust me, they’re struggling.

Barack can’t do it alone.

**********************

TELEVISION NEWS:

DSM CANCELED?

ABC is saying it won’t renew the series “Dirty Sexy Money,” which co-stars Blair, Peter Krause, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and Lucy Liu. Blair’s publicist assures me that all is not yet lost, so email ABC.com, click on CONTACT US, and tell the network that you can’t live without “Dirty Sexy Money.”

Spread the word. It helps. Really.

Exclusive excerpt from THE ANCESTORS

2008-11-17T13:47:00.000-05:00

Very soon, my newest book, The Ancestors, will finally be available: Amazon.com says it's available Nov. 25, although the official pub date isn't until December. This book is a first for me: I wrote a novella entitled "Ghost Summer," and authors L.A. Banks and Brandon Massey wrote novellas, too. (Yes, they're all about ghosts!) This is my first ghost story since Joplin's Ghost.

The Ancestors, as I've announced earlier, is also the Essence Book Club pick for January '09, which came as a great thrill and surprise to us. This is another lesson on strength in numbers: We all write about the supernatural and/or suspense novels, we all have individual readerships, and we wanted to publish a joint project.

Here's what Publishers Weekly says about The Ancestors:

Talented African-American authors Banks (The Shadows), Massey (Don't Ever Tell) and Due (Blood Colony) explore ancestral roots in intriguing horror novellas. Banks puts a time-travel twist into "Ev'ry Shut Eye Ain't Sleep," in which antique dealer Abe Morgan helps a friend, Rashid Jackson, protect Aziza, Rashid's granddaughter, from "the shades" after Aziza inherits her grandmother's house. In Massey's "The Patriarch," a crime novelist brings his fiancée to Coldwater, Miss., to introduce her to his mom's kinfolk, but runs afoul of a powerful family secret. Due's "Ghost Summer," the best of the trio, also works as a YA novel. Davie Stephens, who's determined to become a 12-year-old ghost buster, and various family members find themselves haunted by a 1909 cold case in Graceville, Fla. All three contributors successfully combine scary themes with rich historical detail. (Dec.)

But there's no reason to wait!

Here's an excerpt from my novella "Ghost Summer" in The Ancestors:

*****

The dirt in the area where his grandparents lived was called “red,” but to Davie it looked more like a deep shade of orange. It was still called “Georgia clay,” even though the Georgia border was a half hour’s drive. The dirt didn’t care which side of the border it was on, Georgia or Florida. The orange dirt was everywhere, right beneath the grass.

The orange dirt and gravel path ran through the center of the yard, presenting Davie with a clear choice-—the gate and the road were on one side of the path, and the fence and the woods were on the other.

Davie noticed that Grandpa still hadn’t repaired the broken logs in one section of the ranch-style fence that separated his property from the woods. The same fence had been broken six months before. Tell-tale hoof-prints gathered around Grandma’s fake deer near the driveway were evidence that woodland creatures were trespassing at night.

Dumb-butts can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, Davie thought.

Decision time: Hunting for snakes in the woods, or Rock Band?

Davie was about to take the path down to the road and head for the Reed house when he saw something move in the woods, beyond the broken fence. He heard dead leaves marking footsteps as it ran away, fast. Whatever it was, it was big.

A deer? Another kid playing?

Davie’s decision was made. He searched the castoffs from his grandparents’ own personal forest of pine and oak trees until he found a sturdy dead branch as his walking stick. The stick was almost as tall as he was, and Davie liked the way it fit in his hand. He stripped away the smaller branches until it looked more like Mad-Eye Moody’s staff from Harry Potter. He tapped the thick stick on the ground to make sure it would hold instead of rotting at the center. Satisfied, he headed into the woods.

Davie leaned on his stick for support when he climbed over the broken fence.

The woods behind his grandparents’ house wasn’t shady like the woods in movies. Most of the trees had thin trunks and not much shade to spare, but they were growing as far as he could see. While it might not be much to look at, Davie knew there were snakes, because Grandpa had told him he killed a rattler in the driveway only two weeks before. At the very least, he would probably go home with a story to tell.

Davie liked running in the underbrush, with obstacles every which way and snap decisions to be made. There—jump on the stone! There—watch out for the hole! There were stumbles now and then, mostly just harmless scrapes. Acts of coordination and fearlessness were necessary for any ghost-hunter. Most ghosts were friendly, but how lame would it be to leave himself helpless if he met a hostile? Plan B was filed under R for Run.

Davie didn’t have to run far. He’d gone only about thirty yards when he saw three boys huddled in a circle in a clearing. None of them were wearing shirts, only ragged-looking shorts of varying lengths. The three of them looked like brothers, each one younger than the next. The eldest could be Davie’s age.

Davie’s feet made a racket crackling in the dead leaves, but none of the boys turned around to look at him. When the boys held hands, Davie understood why: They were praying over a huge hole someone had dug in the ground. As he got closer, Davie saw a large German shepherd sleeping beside the hole.

Not SLEEPING, crap-for-brains, Davie told himself. The big dog was dead. Its face and muzzle were matted with orange-brown mud.

He’d interrupted a funeral! Davie backed up a step and halfway hid himself behind a rare wide-trunked tree of pale, peeling bark, thin as paper. Davie had never had a dog—Mom thought keeping a dog inside the house was a disgrace, as did her whole family in Ghana, where dogs apparently were not considered man’s best friend by a long shot—but he understood how sad it was when a pet died. He’d hat a rat once, Roddy, like in the movie Flushed Away.

Roddy was an awesome rat. Lay across Davie’s shoulder while he walked around, no problem. Rats were as smart as dogs, people said, but rats definitely got screwed in the life-span department. His rat had lived only two years. When Roddy died, Davie had cried himself to sleep for two nights, and hadn’t wanted a pet of any kind ever since. He, Dad, Mom and Neema had buried Roddy in the back yard, just like these boys.

But Roddy’s hole in the ground hadn’t been nearly so big, like a tunnel. The mountain of Georgia clay dirt beside the hole was as tall as the oldest boy. Someone had done some serious digging, Davie realized. Maybe their Dad helped, or someone with a jack. It would have taken him all day to dig a hole like that. Or longer.

Davie noticed that all of the boys were caked in red clay dust just as the setting sun intensified in a bright red-orange burst the color of a mango, turning the boys into shadowed silhouettes.

Watching their vigil, Davie made up an epitaph: Here lies Smoky, a Hell of a Dog / Crossed McCormack Road in the Midnight Fog--

Suddenly, the youngest boy turned and stared him in the eye, whipping his head around so fast that Davie’s rhyme left his mind. The boy was standing only ten yards from him, but his eyes were his most visible feature. The whites were, anyway. That was all Davie could see, a white-eyed stare vivid against dark skin.

“Sorry about your dog,” Davie said. No need to be rude. The oldest boy looked about twelve, too. Maybe he knew somewhere to play basketball. This clan could be a valuable find.

None of the others looked at Davie. The youngest, who looked six, turned away again.

It seemed best to leave them alone. Davie had never been to a funeral, thank goodness—-Mom couldn’t afford to bring him and Neema when her father in Ghana died, so she and Imani went alone—-but he figured funerals weren’t a good place to make friends.

If the boys lived nearby, he’d find them later. If not, whatever. Kids in Graceville weren’t always nice to him, as if he didn’t meet their standards. He talked funny and liked weird things, from a Graceville point of view, so he never knew what kind of reception to expect.

Davie left and turned for home, digging his stick into pockets of soft soil as he walked. He didn’t run, this time. It was getting dark, harder to see, and there was no reason to take a chance on breaking his leg. It would be ghost time soon.

Davie didn’t realize how relieved he was to leave the woods until he saw the welcoming broken fence in the shadow of his grandparents’ huge oak tree, which was covered in moss like Silly String. Home! The underbrush had seemed unruly, and he was glad to find his shoes back on neatly-cropped grass. He felt a strange wriggling sensation in his stomach. Until he climbed back over the fence, he hadn’t let himself notice he was a little scared. Just a little.

But the real scare didn’t come until he got to the house.

Davie decided to go to the back door instead of the front because his shoes might be muddy, and Grandma would have a fit if he tracked dirt on her hardwood floors. As he was climbing the concrete steps to the back door, he glimpsed the kitchen window.
What he saw there made his stomach drop out of him.

Grandpa Walter stood by the fridge, arms crossed and head hanging; he might have been studying his shoes, except that his eyes were closed. Grandma was clearing away dishes from the table, where Dad was sitting alone.

Muted through the window, Davie heard Grandma saying, “…It’s all right, baby. It’s all gonna’ work out. No court in the country will let her take them all the way over there, I don’t care if she’s the mother or not. What’s she gonna’ do, steal them? If she wants a fight, well, she’s got one. We have money put away. You’ll get a good lawyer, and that’s that. Don’t you worry.”

His father sat at the table, forehead resting against the tabletop, his arms wrapped around his ears. His father was crying.

****

All night, Davie lay in bed trying to unhear and unsee it. Every time he saw the snapshot of that kitchen window, remembering Grandma’s words and Dad’s grieving pose, his stomach ate him. Now he knew what people meant when they said Too Much Information: It wasn’t about stuff being too gross, or none of your business. Some information was too big for a single brain. Each time Davie remembered what he’d seen and heard, the enormity grew exponentially, with new and more terrible realizations.

His parents were definitely getting a divorce. Check. Hadn’t seen that coming, since they never argued or raised their voices in front of him. They snapped at each other sometimes, but who didn’t?

Okay, so Mom thought Dad worked too much. She’d never made that a secret. And Dad definitely liked spending time alone. There was no denying it. And Mom’s bad moods probably got on his nerves. So now, after twenty years, they were getting a divorce?

Divorce.

That nuclear bomb should have been enough for one night—-hell, one lifetime—-but there was layer after layer, and it unspooled slowly as Davie stared at his grandparents’ popcorn ceiling, seeing only visions of the kitchen window.

As if the D-word wasn’t enough, Mom wanted to take them to Ghana. Dad didn’t want them to go. Grandma and Grandpa were Dad’s war-chiefs, and they were about to go to war.

Against Mommy. And Mommy against Daddy, Grandma and Grandpa. And no matter what happened, he and Neema and Imani were FUBAR. Effed Up Beyond All Recogition.

The only tiny morsel of comfort Davie could take from The Worst Moment of His Entire Life was the knowledge that Grandpa Walter, Grandma and—-Thank you, God—-Dad himself had not seen him at the window. He’d had the good sense to duck away before a wandering pair of eyes found him and waved him inside to take his seat at the Oh-Crap table.

“Davie, we’re glad you finally know the truth… You’ll need you to be a man now…”
The very thought of that conversation with Dad made Davie want to vomit. He kept his palm clamped across his mouth, just in case of a surprise puke attack. He felt it in his throat.

As long as he ignored their sad eyes, went on with his life and pretended he hadn’t heard, they would have to keep pretending, too. All of them would be putting on a show for each other, like a reality TV show called “FUBAR,” but at least then Neema wouldn’t find out. Or Imani, who couldn’t possibly know, because she’d been in way too good a mood when she left for Evanston, Illinois, to meet her future as an incoming freshman in a minority summer program.

Let them have their lives a while longer, anyway. For the summer, anyway.
Ignorance was the only mercy he could still do for them. He only wished his father had his S-H-I-T together and could have kept him out of the loop a little longer, too. How the hell would he get through the next month?

Davie was on the verge of crying himself to sleep the way he had after Roddy the Rat died, but his unborn sob caught in his throat when he heard the footsteps padding against the hallway floorboards.

He thought he’d imagined it, so he sat up and didn’t move, not even to get his flashlight. His ears were his most important tool: He listened.

Click-click-click. This time, he heard not only the footsteps, but clicking nails. Like a dog’s paws. A heavy dog—about the size of the big German shepherd.

Davie had accidentally been holding his breath, and he needed to breathe. He took a long gasp of air, louder than he’d meant to, and stopped breathing again.
The dog’s feet padded closer to his closed bedroom door. Davie stared toward the crack between the door and the frame in the moonlight, and he saw a shadow cross from one side to the other. About the size of a dog’s nose.

Sffffff sfff ffffff. Sniffing at the door.

“Holy effing S-H-I-T,” Davie said, but only after the sniffing noise stopped and the sound of footsteps had padded away to silence.

Davie’s plan was to lie absolutely still and do everything in his power to convince the dog that there was no reason to try to get into his room. Good dog, bad dog, whatever, Davie didn’t want a ghost encounter with a dog. His central plan in case of a hostile entity-—Communication and Negotiation-—wasn’t worth crapola with a dog.

The first ghost he met up close should definitely be human.

But the ghosts were tracking him already.

© Copyright 2008 by Tananarive Due

On President(-elect) Barack Obama

2008-11-09T13:40:00.000-05:00

It is a joy so deep and quenching that, at times, it reminds me of grief.

Just when I think I’ve come to terms with the whole thing, there are tears at unexpected times. The night after the election, I turned on CNN in our hotel room after a long day, and I heard Wolf Blitzer say “President-elect Obama.” And then another newscaster after that. And then President Bush himself.

President-elect Obama. (The word “elect” is silent to my starved ear.)

The world feels turned on its head.

And I cry in front of strangers.

And I am full to the brim with it.

And my life has been changed: I can never go back to the time Before.

But these tears ride a river of joy unlike any I have ever known. Or thought I could know. Not just a massage-—a bath.

This joy, as sweet as it is, cannot replace my life’s triumphs. But it is a far deeper well. Like Jesse said, my tears are not just for me.

I feel joy for my grandmothers.

I feel joy for my grandfathers.

I feel joy for my parents—who watched the results at my side.

I feel joy for my son—who shrieked louder than anyone in the room.

I feel joy for my stepdaughter—who inherited a new world in time for college graduation.

I feel joy for my nieces, nephews and cousins.

I feel joy for my aunts and uncles.

I feel joy for strangers.

I feel joy for children everywhere.

I feel joy and grief for those who helped light the way, but who did not make it to this day. The fount of feelings seems endless.

But unlike with grief, I want to hold the feeling with all my might.

And never let it go.

*****

Steve and I are in Antigua for the Antigua & Barbuda Literary Festival, a precious event we have attended before. We're having a wonderful time with fellow writers like Eric Jerome Dickey, Lorna Goodison , Tina McElroy Ansa and Elizabeth Nunez. We began our trip the day after the election, so we are watching events in the States from afar.

Business-wise, this is a hard time for many people in the publishing industry. Most of the gossip I’ve heard during this meeting of writers, editors, agents and publishers is grim.

But Barack Obama is everywhere, changing the mood.

The streets bear signs: “Antigua for Obama.”

The Prime Minister, Winston Baldwin Spencer—-who addressed our group on opening night—-announced that he has declared a new name for the island’s tallest peak: Mt. Obama.

When Obama’s name comes up with local residents, faces break into grins.

Obama is the toast of our tables at every meal.

We tell each other stories of reformed slackers and friends who posed for pictures with Obama, or received personal phone messages from him. (Or who, like my husband and sister, shook his hand.) We recite our favorite passages from his speeches, and how amazed we were by the operation he commanded.

We marvel at the healing image of Barack and Michelle as the strong and steady couple we all aspire to be—and Malia and Sasha melt our hearts.

We trade stories about the ways we are looking forward to visiting the Washington monuments or make it to the Inauguration, contemplating our citizenship in a fascinating new way.

We laugh. We cry. The world is laughing and crying with us, a party like none I’ve ever seen. We are dizzy from giddiness.

But we are also realists. We do not underestimate the task.

The iceberg is upon us, and President-elect Obama must race to turn the ship around.

We have readied our oars.

With our new captain, we will bear down and row.

"Why Does Grandma Wear Dark Glasses?": My Family & the 2008 Election

2008-11-01T02:33:00.000-04:00

Last night, during nightly bedtime snuggle time with my 4-1/2-year-old son, Jason asked me, “Why does Grandma wear dark glasses?”

Grandma and Grandpa are much on Jason’s mind. He’s looking forward to flying on an airplane this weekend to see them in Quincy, Florida, twenty-one miles west of Tallahassee---along with my sisters and Jason’s uncles and cousins. We are traveling from Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta to gather to watch the election returns as a family. That’s how important Barack Obama’s candidacy is to us.

And the story of Grandma’s dark glasses is one of the reasons why.

My mother, Patricia Stephens Due, spent 49 days in jail in 1960 for ordering food at a Woolworth in Tallahassee, becoming part of the nation’s first Jail-in. Soon afterward, she and other Florida A&M University students took part in a peaceful march to protest the jailing of their classmates, and a police officer lobbed a canister of tear-gas into my mother’s face and eyes. She was 20 years old. It was 1960.

Both of my parents wear the scars of the civil rights movement. But my mother’s are so easy to see that even my preschooler noticed.

“Well…” I said, “when grandma was very young—younger than your sister, Nicki---she and other students were marching together. Hundreds of them…” I told him what I could. Some of it will have to wait. But I did tell him that Grandma had something called “tear-gas” thrown in her face.

“It makes your eyes hurt. And her eyes have been hurting a little bit ever since, so she wears dark glasses even inside the house, when there’s no sun. Even when there isn’t much light.”

I don’t know how old I was when I first heard the story behind my mother’s dark glasses, but I was about Jason’s age when I covered myself with baby powder after I was refused admission to several segregated Montessori schools in Miami. I tried to make myself white. “Will they let me go to school now?” I said.

I can only imagine how my parents felt trying to explain skin color and how it might dictate my place in the world—especially after all they had been through! Countless protests, arrests, court dates, sit-ins, a Jail-in and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had not been enough. Their black child was not welcome at those schools.

I wrote about growing up in a civil rights household in the book I co-authored with my mother, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. My father, John Due, is a civil rights attorney who defended Dr. King in St. Augustine in 1964 and dedicated much of his life to community organizing in Miami.

I have observed little changes—all those “firsts”—my whole life. And I had no illusions about how those changes came about. It wasn’t by magic or coincidence. In the words of Frederick Douglass, whom I quoted in oratorical contests as a child, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress... Power concedes nothing without a demand: It never did, and it never will.”

There is something unmistakably clear about the election of a black man to the highest office in the nation, ringing all the way back to the founders who argued over the abolition of slavery. And for activists like my parents who have felt sorrowed by lingering poverty, educational gaps and the incarceration rate in the black community, President Barack Obama is a strong counter-point.

He also happens to be an extraordinary candidate. Period.

When he is elected Tuesday---sorry, I can’t bring myself to say IF---Barack Obama will breathe life and hope into Americans of all ages who wonder if the American Dream is real or just spin. And to Jason, who woke up one morning this week chanting, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” and who once insisted on going to bed in a tie and dress shirt so he would look like Obama…

Let’s just say it’s a far cry from what happened to me when I was 4.

It’s healing.

My talk with Jason about my mother’s dark glasses didn’t carry nearly the sting it would have if a different world was waiting for Jason outside of the safety of his bedroom.

Still, I’m not naïve: I know that many American families still don’t have reason to believe that their children’s futures are safe. I know that teachers and police officers might still make assumptions about Jason because of his race. But it will be different than what has been.

Different how? I can’t say. I don’t even know how it will feel to stand on the other side of Inauguration Day in January. Or to see a family take residence in the White House that will remind me so much of my own.

But I’m eager to find out.

Jason will be too young on Tuesday to understand exactly what he is experiencing. No matter how many stories I tell him about our family history, he will never understand what it was like to walk in his grandparents’ shoes. Or his father’s. Or in mine.

But he will KNOW from the dawn of his waking awareness that he is a full citizen of the nation of his birth, and that no goal should lie beyond his precious imagination. And I will not flinch from telling him the unhappy stories, because I want him to understand how we arrived here. That he and Barack Obama are standing on his grandparents’ shoulders.

“I’m going to tell Grandma to make her glasses LIGHT,” Jason said after my bedtime story, as if the answer was that simple.

Tuesday, I can’t wait for my son and his grandparents to see the light come in.

#####

All parties at my parents’ house have music—and some, like the ones on Dr. King’s birthday, have speeches too. Here’s a partial playlist I suggest if you’re having an Election Watching party.

These suggestions are in no particular order.

**We Are Family (Sister Sledge)

**For What It’s Worth (Buffalo Springfield)

**Balm in Gilead (Sweet Honey in the Rock)

**Celebration (Kool & the Gang)

**Let’s Stay Together (Al Green)

**Walk With Him (The Highway Q’s)

**Seteng Sediba (Soweto Gospel Choir)

**This Little Light (The Montgomery Improvement Association: Sing for Freedom: Civil Rights Movement Songs)

**Respect (Aretha Franklin)

**I Got the Feelin’ (James Brown)

**Love Train (The O’Jays)

**You Gotta Be (Des’ree)

**This is How We Do It (Montell Jordan)

I also suggest the following inspirational speeches, which have particular power at this point in history. (They’re sprinkled within my own playlist! The excerpts below are VERY short and edited, with the exception of Obama’s 2004 address.)

** I Have a Dream (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: I Can Hear it Now: The Sixties, narrated by Walter Cronkite.)

*Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You: Ask What You Can Do for Your Country (John F. Kennedy: I Can Hear it Now: The Sixties.)

**Decides to Run for President (Robert Kennedy: I Can Hear it Now: The Sixties)

**Barack Obama’s 2004 Democratic Convention Address

Blair Underwood on "The View"

2008-10-31T18:41:00.000-04:00

Blair made a terrific appearance on "The View" Wednesday, and I've posted it in case you missed it. Everyone in the audience got a copy of our new mystery novel, In the Night of the Heat!

Quick trivia on In the Night of the Heat, which is about an actor and former gigolo hired to solve the murder of a football star accused of killing his wife: The entire novel takes place the week before Tuesday's election! My husband, Steven Barnes, and I wrote the novel---but Blair, as he explains, helped bring the book to life with the character of Tennyson Hardwick. It's the follow-up to Casanegra, and many readers say it's better than the first...and they loved Casanegra, too. (No, you don't have to read Casanegra first.)

Hope you enjoy the clip!

Fear Itself: A Breath of Hope from Israel

2008-10-10T14:26:00.000-04:00

The next few weeks will be rough.

As a former journalist, a political observer and an Obama supporter, it's going to be hard to watch the news, listen to the radio and read blogs between now and Nov. 4, especially if the rhetoric trying to cast Barack Obama as a "terrorist" (read: The Other) keeps getting ratcheted up. I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised.

Even with every poll indicating that voters have more pressing things on their minds, there are those in the opposition who want to traffic in fear. After all, fear is the easiest emotion of all to manipulate.

"Kill him!"

"Socialist!"

"Terrorist!"

And, thus far, so few admonitions of, "There there, let us keep our decorum and remember that we are all good Americans."

As a nation, I'm afraid we're about to stare ourselves in the mirror...and we're not going to like everything we're about to see.

But in the end, I am certain, fear will not prevail. That was something Barack Obama must have believed when he set out on his unlikely journey to the White House, and I believe it even more strongly than ever today.

But there will be bumps on the road to Election Day.

Israel knows a thing or two about bumps along the way.

At a time when cynics within our political system would fan the flames of fear in the hopes of winning votes, it's so nice to get this breath of fresh air from across the sea...

This video inspires me to keep working. Make more phone calls. Talk to more neighbors. Vote early.

I'll take hope over fear any day.

Essence Book Club News! (and a dab of football & TV)

2008-09-23T12:37:00.000-04:00

Lots of great news in the past few days—and utterly unexpected.

In December, my ghost story "Ghost Summer" will be published in a book of novellas called The Ancestors (Kensington). The anthology includes me, L.A. Banks and Brandon Massey. We're kind of a literary family, so we decided to do a project together.

What do we have in common? We all write supernatural and paranormal fiction with black and multi-ethnic protagonists. Urban paranormal. Supernatural suspense. (Yikes—in some circles, even called horror!) And we've been doing it for a long time.

L.A. Banks has set publishing on fire with her New York Times bestselling Vampire Huntress Legends series. Brandon Massey writes awesome supernatural/suspense novels like Don't Ever Tell and The Other Brother, and his Dark Dreams anthologies have enlivened the genre, shining a light on talented supernatural writers like Terence Taylor, Linda Addison, Christopher Chambers, Robert Fleming and Michael Boatman. (Yes, the actor. Also a writer.)

And I’ve been writing about my own ghosts, curses, gifts and demons. My latest solo novel, Blood Colony, is about African immortals with healing blood, a follow-up to My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood.

I blurbed the first L.A. Banks and Brandon Massey novels—Minion and Thunderland, respectively—so I like to pat myself on the back for having the good sense to recognize talent and drive when I see it.

Slowly but surely, the audience has been growing. Even the great Octavia E. Butler wrote her own unique version of a vampire story in her last novel, Fledgling. (If you haven't read it…why not?)

Still, don't think we chose a well-paved road. It has been bumpy. Any reader who has ever argued on behalf of our novels at book clubs meetings knows that we haven't always been an easy sell. ("It's about WHAT?")

We know. It has been lonely, at times, to write what we do. We have all traded advice and war stories. And one day, we all said, "Hey, let's do a book together."

Well, we just learned that The Ancestors is the January ’09 pick for the Essence Book Club. We're grinning ear to ear. We didn't expect it.

I feel doubly blessed. Last summer, my mystery novel Casanegra—the predecessor to In the Night of the Heat, was picked by the Essence Book Club too. Ironically, Casanegra is also a collaboration—with my husband, Steven Barnes, and actor Blair Underwood.

Hmmm. What's the lesson from this happy surprise?

There is power in numbers? Readers will find you, so keep on writing?

We're just all so grateful for your support as readers over the years.

Thanks to you, The Ancestors will be out in December.

Sweet dreams.

**********************

THE MIAMI DOLPHINS

The Miami Dolphins—who had been winless for twenty of their last twenty-one games—just gave the New England Patriots a legendary beating that has been the talk of sports television and radio. Some New England fans must be crying. As a Dolphins fan, I know how losses like that feel. (See my 12/16/07 blog on the agony of the 2007 season.)

So this win is not only big for Miami fans—it’s BIG, period. The Patriots! Last year’s Super Bowl contenders, who came within a fingernail of obliterating the Dolphins’ long-standing distinction as they only undefeated NFL team in a season, played like the 2007 Miami Dolphins. Trust me, that’s not a compliment.

It’s hard to fit it all in my head: The Miami Dolphins embarrassed New England 38-13. On New England’s home field. And no, the game was not just a dream—although that notion recurred persistently as I watched the rout.

Anything is possible.

Yes, we can.

******

TV NEWS:

I’m about to write my first television script! Steven Barnes, my husband, was just named story editor on BET’s “Hannibal” animated series, executive produced and directed by Vin Diesel—who will also voice the older version of African conqueror Hannibal. Steve and I are collaborating on a script, and we’re very excited. Watch for “Hannibal” in 2009!

**Blair Underwood will appear on "Live With Regis and Kelly" Friday, Oct. 3 to talk about In the Night of the Heat, our collaborative mystery novel. Don't forget to watch! (And see Blair's recent appearance on the "Today" show posted below...)

**I don’t want to miss Angela Bassett’s debut on NBC’s “ER” Sept. 25—all the more fun because she’s cast alongside true-life husband Courtney B. Vance, who will play her…husband! What a treat! I don’t know the storyline, but it’s bound to be powerfully acted. I’m one of the few people who has never seen an episode of “ER.” Guess I’m watching now.

** One word: “Dexter.” If you’re curious, rent Season 1 on DVD and see what all the fuss is about. Dare you to stop watching. The Season 3 premiere is Sept. 28 on Showtime.

**You know I’ll be watching Blair Underwood on ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money” Oct. 1. The billboards for “Dirty, Sexy” are up all over Hollywood. Great cast also includes Lucy Liu, Peter Krause and Donald Sutherland. Blair has a meaty role—a multilingual billionaire who is the main family’s nemesis. Go, Blair! Even if you missed last season, you’ll catch up.

Blair Underwood discusses IN THE NIGHT OF THE HEAT on "Today"

2008-09-15T21:32:00.000-04:00

Hello, readers--
It's hard to beat the fun of waking up in the morning to find Blair Underwood on national television talking about our new Tennyson Hardwick novel, In the Night of the Heat. The interview was fun, so I thought I'd share it! (Did anyone else see it?)

New novel excerpt: IN THE NIGHT OF THE HEAT

2008-09-04T21:57:00.000-04:00

Wow--time really flies!

I couldn't believe it when I checked Amazon.com and saw that In the Night of the Heat, my newest Tennyson Hardwick novel with Blair Underwood and my husband, Steven Barnes, is already in stock. Its official on-sale date is September 16!

With that kick in the pants, I thought I'd better post an excerpt and let readers know that this novel is about to drop. And here's a hint: It sounds like hype, but this novel is better than Casanegra, in our humble opinions. The story is better. The cover is better, as you can see for yourselves. And get this: The novel comes with its own suggested MP3 soundtrack you can download for yourselves to listen to while you read [see the list of songs at the very front of the novel, after the dedication]--Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Kanye West, Isaac Hayes, Alicia Keys, and lots more! I always listen to music while I'm writing, so this time we decided to make the soundtrack a part of the novel so it feels like a movie inside and out.

The story, as always, is ripped from real-life headlines. In Casanegra, we fictionalized the LAPD-hip hop connection that made headlines after the murder of Biggie Smalls.

In this new novel, Tennyson is asked to solve the murder of a football icon and film star recently acquitted in the murder of his ex-wife and her fiance--and Tennyson realizes that he can't solve T.D. Jackson's murder unless he can answer the question that captivated a nation: Who killed his wife?

Is it steamy? Guess you'll have to read the book for yourselves.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter One:

April didn’t use the doorbell anymore, not since I had given her a key. At ten after seven, she let herself in after two quick, shy knocks.

Who is THAT? I thought in the millisecond before I remembered she was my girl. April had changed her hairstyle, framing her face with chin-length braids in the front, elegantly styled into a shorter page-boy style in the back. Her haircut made a dramatic shift on her face, from cute and girlish to queenly. For a year solid, I hadn’t touched anyone else. Monogamy was the last thing I’d expected in this lifetime.

My girl. My girlfriend. My life had a new vocabulary.

April undressed herself bit by bit as she crossed the room toward me; her jacket on the coat rack, her hat on the sofa. April’s ivory sweater, stretched tautly across her bosom, made me wish we were on our way upstairs. April docked herself against me. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. Her lips brushed too quickly across mine. “You won’t believe...”

I interrupted her, holding her still for a kiss with a little flavor. Her lips relaxed, offering nectar. Then she pulled away shyly, as she always did when Dad was nearby. April was smiling, but she wasn’t planning to stay. I could see it in her eyes.

“So get this: The brother’s car blew up,” April went on. “They chase him for nearly eight miles, and his Ferrari flips into a ditch. This poor old lady he broadsided on La Cienega might not wake up, but of course he walks away without a scratch.”

April’s stories from work made me feel tired. After staring down a gun-barrel in the desert that day, I felt no schadenfreude. But April hadn’t been with me in the desert. She was a police reporter, and death entertained her just fine.

“They’re lucky nobody got killed,” April went on. “These police chases are out of control. Yeah, he robbed a bank, but sometimes guilty people go free. Deal with it.”

“Saw it on TV,” Dad called from the kitchen.

Dad had hooked April up with police sources more than once, old buddies from his Hollywood division, many of whom had risen high on the ladder and were willing to speak off the record. Retired Captain Richard Allen Hardwick and April Forrest were becoming a formidable team.

“Where’s Chela?” April asked me.

“Chess club, ‘til eight-thirty. She said not to wait.”

April lowered her chin, skeptical. “Chess?”

“I bribed her into giving it a try.”

“How much of a bribe?”

Dad wheeled himself into the dining room, a large plate of warm nachos on his lap. Suddenly, I was surrounded by observers.

“An iPhone,” I said. “Let’s eat.”

“Plainfoolishness,” Dad said, or something like it. With words at easy disposal, Dad would have been ranting. A nascent rant glimmered in his eyes. April sighed, too. Tag-team.

The fact was, it was Chela’s second chess club meeting in a month, which was more commitment than she had given the drama club. Chela needed to buy into something new, and chess had a nice ring to it. Better, by far, than her former hobbies. Besides, Chela hadn’t come around to liking April yet, and wasn’t sorry to miss Thursday dinner.

For now, separate corners worked best.

Dad mumbled grace too low to hear, the only time he spoke at length without self-consciousness. We couldn’t quite make out the words, but the gratitude in his voice needed no translation.

“Amen,” he finished.

April’s face lit up. “Oh, Ten, don’t forget—the Tau fund-raiser is tomorrow night.”

I searched my memory, and came up dry.

“The scholarship fund, remember? You signed up for the celebrity booth. People come up and take pictures with you. The committee chair loves ‘Homeland,’ and she was so excited when I said you’d come. Give me the dates for your episodes, and she’ll have all our sorors Tivo you.”

I’d forgotten all about the fund-raiser. When April’s work week ended, her community work began. Her exhausting schedule was one of the reasons we saw so little of each other.

“So you’re tied up tomorrow night?” I said.

“But if you’re there with me...” she said playfully, and grinned. Her dimples wrestled the disappointment right out of me.

“Okay.” It was hard to say no to April, another growing problem.

I felt Dad beaming silently across the table. He must have thought he’d arrived in Heaven early. If police captains had the same powers as ship captains, he would have married me to April on the spot. He'd just heard me commit my Friday night to a scholarship fund-raiser hosted by one of the country’s most prestigious black fraternities, Tau Alpha Gamma. Dad was a Tau, too, but I had refused to pledge during my year in college, mainly because I knew how badly he wanted me to. Dad never left the house except to see his doctor, so I knew better than to invite him.

“Thanks, Ten.” April draped an arm over me when she kissed my cheek, which gave me hope that she might come upstairs after dinner. “Guess who else committed today? T.D. Jackson.” Her voice soured. “He must be on a goodwill tour before his trial. You know it must be for a good cause if I can stand to be in the same room with him. I’ll have to meditate first.”

T.D. Jackson. Fallen football and action star, accused of murdering his ex-wife and her fiancé. Despite a mountan of physical and circumstantial evidence, he'd been acquitted in the criminal trial six months before. No surprise there. The rich and famous rarely go to prison. Justice would have another crack at him, though: The civil trial would begin in a week.

Twenty years before that, T.D. Jackson lived in my dormitory suite for about three months while I was at Southern California State. He was a star from the moment he set foot on campus. What I remember most was the parade of girls to and from his door. Once, I ran into him in the bathroom as he flushed a condom away at six in the morning. The lazy sneer on his face said: Most of you losers aren’t even out of bed yet, and I’ve already been laid.

T.D. Jackson made April crazy. The thought that he had gotten away with abusing and finally killing an upstanding sister seemed to keep her awake at night, as if his very existence set back the progress of civilization. Her teeth were already grinding.

“Innocent until proven guilty,” I reminded her.

Dad and April both made comments, but they kept them under their breath. The guilt or innocence of T.D. Jackson and what his case did or didn’t say about the roles of race and gender in the criminal justice system had already spiced our dinner conversations.

But I was glad I would run into T.D. again. I didn’t expect him to remember me, but I looked forward to shaking his hand and staring into his eyes. Wondered what I would see there. If I was right, T.D.’s eyes would probably broadcast the same thing April had just told me herself:

Sometimes guilty people go free. Shit happens.

Deal with it.

A Letter from my Mother: "It's Happening in Our Lifetimes!"

2008-08-28T18:32:00.000-04:00

Forty-five years ago, my parents--John Due and Patricia Stephens Due--participated in the historic March on Washington. Today, from their home in upstate Florida, they will watch Barack Obama give his acceptance speech as the first black presidential nominee of a major political party, a vital step in his quest to become the first black president. In November, our families and children will gather together in my parents' home to watch election returns. Today, we are only together in spirit. (My mother is the co-author of our book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.)

This is the email my mother sent to her three daughters and grandchildren today:

Forty-five years ago, Dad and I traveled from Miami on the Freedom Train to Washington, DC, to be part of the March on Washington. As we proceeded from Miami to DC, making stops all along the way, and singing freedom songs at each stop and as new passengers got on. By the time we arrived, we were exhausted, but the rainbow colors as we looked over the audience were exhilarating, so happy to see black and whites, Jews and gentiles, men and women, all coming together in the name of freedom and equality for all. Dad and I had been married less than eight months when we took this journey together and were so excited to be a part of history in the making.

I must admit that as I listened to speaker after speaker, my exhaustion at times got the better of me. We had been seated up near the front in a reserved section. I am sending you the card required to sit in that area. I am certain I'll write more tomorrow but as Dr. King said, it is time for us to honor that check returned with "insufficient funds." Tonight, after decades of trying to cash that check, Senator Barack Obama will receive those funds, giving millions the opportunity to share in the interest owed on that check.

We are in California, Texas, Georgia and Florida, but we are all still in that stadium in Denver. The energy of one to the other connects us as we are all suspended in time for this historic occasion.

How ironic that the continent of Africa has called on its own son to restore all that was taken from so many and to show by example how people should be treated. He is releasing us from those chains that shackled us from our motherland to this country--and others, as we were dropped off. Our ancestors are crying tonight because they are so happy and are finally being brought home, and by one of their own.

Now, I have begun to shed tears for Mother, Daddy Marion, Grandmother, Granddaddy, Grandmother Lucille, Mrs. Kelly, Mrs. Jones, Mr. Campbell, Ms. Daisy Young, Rev. Steele, Mrs. Steele, Mrs. Rosa Parks, Dr. and Mrs. King, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Robinson, Richard Haley, Calvin Bess, Velton Banks, William Larkins and the list goes on and on. Before us, we had stood on so many shoulders to get to this place tonight and they would all be so proud.
My heart is so full. Please allow the children to enjoy this with you and hug them tightly for me.

With love and gratitude,Mom/Grandma

Introducing...THE DARKER MASK!

2008-08-21T18:11:00.000-04:00

Every once in a great while, an irresistible opportunity comes along to participate in a unique project with a slew of talented writers. That was the case was Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter speculative fiction anthologies, and Brandon Massey’s Dark Dreams horror anthologies.

Welcome to The Darker Mask: Heroes from the Shadows, edited by Gary Phillips and Christopher Chambers, an anthology of black superhero stories that is unlike anything that has come before.

In addition to contributions from Walter Mosley, L.A. Banks and other award-winning writers, my husband Steven Barnes and I contributed a short story collaboration called “Trickster, set in a futuristic Africa. (Those of you who read “Danger Word” in Dark Dreams have already seen a short-fiction collaboration from us—these are stories that neither of us would have written on our own! It takes a village…)

I have to admit: Unlike Steve, who is an encyclopedia of such matters, I don’t know much about comic books or superheroes. Even as a tomboy growing up, I never found superhero stories that caught fire in my imagination. Perhaps if there had been more superheroes of color…? I’ll never know.

But I do understand the power of myth in comprehending our own infinite potential, and superheroes have always signified much more than capes and tights. That is especially true in this anthology. The Darker Mask is for everyone, but its contributors are well aware that children and adults of color, in particular, have been missing those nutrients in our national popular culture.

Well, hope you’re hungry. The Darker Mask is long overdue. The stories are varied and excellent, the illustrations are amazing, and the time has come.

Oh, and it’s good, too! Publishers Weekly’s review concluded: “Deceptively simple and entertaining while never skimping on serious topics, this tight anthology will satisfy any superhero enthusiast.”

In other words, get ready for a hell of a flight.

[When you finish reading, please post a review on Amazon.com and send me a line here to tell me what you thought.]

Tananarive Q & A

2008-07-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

I try my best to answer reader questions individually, but that isn't always possible. So...I've decided to start posting questions and answers on my blog. Thanks so much for your interest!
--Tananarive

Q: How can I purchase audio books on CD for My Soul To Keep, The Living Blood, and Blood Colony? These are my grandmother’s favorite books, and I routinely read them to her, but have just taken a full-time job and would like to give these to her as a gift. Please advise as soon as possible, as I would like to surprise her for her 85th birthday August 30th. Thanks for your help.--S.M.

A: That's wonderful that you read these books for your grandmother--and I definitely recommend that ALL readers check out audio books, especially older readers. I am currently listening to the audio book of The Good House as I fall asleep at night. (No, it doesn't give me nightmares!)

My Soul to Keep and The Living Blood are available on MP3 audio form (i.e., for an iPod) from Audible through Amazon.com. You may also purchase or rent them from Recorded Books at www.recordedbooks.com--although I warn you, they are expensive to buy!

Unfortunately, at this time there is no audio book for Blood Colony.

Q:I really LOVE your novels. I actually had the chance to make it out to your book signing in Burbank in June and it was truly a highlight of my trip to Los Angeles! I just finished reading the autographed copy of The Blood Colony. But one question has been nagging me since i read the living blood. Why didn't Teferi die from exsanguination when his son drained his blood from him? --Nicole B.

A: Ah!!! This is a question from a hard-core reader of my African Immortals series. In The Living Blood--the second book in the series--one of my immortals, Teferi, tells the story of being drained of his blood by his jealous mortal son, who is stealing blood to heal himself.

Why do some immortals die when their blood is drained and others do not?

The answer is simply this: magic. The kind of exsanguination performed on Teferi was by a mere mortal who slit him open. The blood would drain, but not ALL of it... and the remaining blood would rejuvenate. Fana is also not just any immortal: She has enhanced psychic abilities that enable her to exsanguinate mortals or immortals alike through the power of her mind. In Fana's case, exsanguination is COMPLETE. There are no remaining blood cells to rejuvenate. Because of her abilities, she can achieve perfection in a way a random throat-slitting would not. (There would still be some blood left SOMEWHERE...)

Q: Whatever happened to the film version of My Soul to Keep?

A: Blair Underwood and his production partners Nia Hill and D'Angela Steed of Strange Fruit Films got My Soul to Keep set up at Fox Searchlight a few years ago. Thus far, the studio has not been happy with the script...so the movie is still in development.

One bright spot: I'm working on a film adaptation of my novel The Good House with my husband and writing partner, Steven Barnes. We've already been hired to write two drafts, and we're at work on the third. (I got my WGA membership!) Since this is also in development at Fox Searchlight, we are hoping for an opportunity to write a script for My Soul to Keep ourselves. But please be patient--we probably won't know until later this year!

Why Blair Underwood Deserves an Emmy

2008-07-07T15:26:00.000-04:00

Dear Academy Voters:

OK, I admit it: I have known and worked with Blair for more than a decade now, and I’ve been a fan since “L.A. Law.” Many of Blair’s newer fans remember his work—and…er…his assets—in HBO’s “Sex & The City.” Or noticed him in Something New and Madea’s Family Reunion.

But a lot of us can take if farther back. Before I met Blair, when he appeared in 1996’s Set it Off as Jada Pinkett Smith’s love interest (if you haven’t seen it, rent it), I was moved to tears because I was a single woman convinced I would NEVER, EVER meet a man of the warmth, poise, intelligence and unabashed adoration Blair personified on-screen. (Turns out I married that guy after all, two year later—his name is Steven Barnes—but who knew?)

Blair deserves an Emmy for his work on television in the past year. Not just a nomination—which should be forthcoming next week—but he deserves to take home that statuette. If there was a category called “Busy,” Blair would win hands-down.

Blair is being lauded for his riveting portrayal of Alex, a Navy fighter pilot wrestling with demons after bombing an Iraqi school in HBO’s outstanding series "In Treatment." But let’s not forget that he was simultaneously appearing as the hunky Mr. Harris in CBS’s “The New Adventures of Old Christine” and as multilingual millionaire Simon Elder in ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money.” Not to mention directing his first feature film, Bridge to Nowhere. And, oh yes, promoting our collaborative erotic mystery novel, Casanegra.

Blair juggled all of that AND managed to pull out his best work on television in the difficult and intimate one-on-one format of "In Treatment," opposite Gabriel Byrne.

After more than twenty years in the business, Blair has taken Hollywood by the throat and forced television viewers to take a good, long look beyond his face.

As I watched Alex on "In Treatment," I knew that character. I’ve seen that combination of rage and vulnerability in people I care about, and Blair nailed it. Blair peeled himself away to show us the human devastation and emptiness at the core of the horrible tasks we ask our young men and women in uniform to carry out far from home.

Maybe it’s because Blair’s father is a retired Air Force Colonel who lived that feeling when the cameras weren’t rolling. Maybe it’s because Blair could be justifiably pissed off that despite an impressive career, the slots for Black Leading Men in movies are few and far between—especially since he’s so obviously meant to play a love interest, not a wise-cracking buddy or a spiritual guide.

Whatever the reasons he was able to access that rage, Blair’s portrayal of Alex is as authentic as his smile is bright.

Every once in a while, an actor we’ve admired for years reminds us why we first noticed him in the first place. And reinvents himself before our eyes.

True, I’m biased. But anyone who didn’t notice that this was Blair Underwood’s year must not have been watching enough television.

Prince's party & a new video on Blood Colony

2008-07-02T02:24:00.000-04:00

This year's Book Expo in Los Angeles was a truly memorable experience--mostly because Steve and I were invited to Atria publisher Judith Curr's famed party at Prince's house! I'd never had the privilege of watching this amazing artist perform live, and I was at the man's house, close enough to see his fingers on his guitar strings as he played "Purple Rain."

What a national treasure. Thank you for allowing us to share your space, sweet Prince.

(No, I did not see P. Diddy and Cameron Diaz. Frankly, once I noticed the waiting stage in the backyard, I simply planted myself there and waited for Prince to play. I could have been standing between Stallone and Dr. Phil, who were both there, and I wouldn't have noticed. I did, however, have the chance to talk to the lovely and brilliant Zane. We talked about her film project, Addicted, which is underway at Lionsgate. A success for one is a success for all. Zane is a one-woman dynamo, and I wish her nothing but good fortune!)

Peak moment: Every second of Prince's set.

Peak moment before his set: When the deejay played Michael Jackson's "Rock With You." At Prince's house! The term I have coined is "Disco Euphoria." Best...Party...EVER.

I left Prince a copy of Joplin's Ghost. I hope he'll read it...or just touch it.

Somehow, I did manage to pull off a coherent interview the next morning with Troy Johnson of the African-American Literature Book Club (AALBC.com), which is posted below from YouTube.
Thanks, Troy! You did a terrific job.

Hope you enjoy it...

A poem: June 3, 2008--The Delegate Count

2008-06-19T22:41:00.000-04:00

June 3, 2008—The Delegate Count
By Tananarive Due

Can you hear the joy in the resounding silence?
We are dancing in our living rooms.
My son is four, and wants to wear his tie to bed.
My pastor points out God’s hand, leading a cheer for the Unnamed.
Why are we quiet? Are we dazed?
The World: “How did this happen?”
Us: “We do not know.”
Every headline a marvel.
We are crying with our parents.
We are gushing with strangers at the train station.
I visit the Liberty Bell: I feel Frederick Douglass’s gaze.
My mother and father are dancing to Aretha and Marvin.
My son says, “Yes, we can!”

IMMORTALS RISING

2008-05-04T17:01:00.000-04:00

Finally! In June, my novel Blood Colony will appear as the third book in my African Immortals series. It can be read as a stand-alone novel—but I’m happy that readers who have followed this series since 1997’s My Soul to Keep will finally have a new installment. Readers, I have had a long and rewarding relationship with you, and I thank you for your patience.

Any new project is a bit scary, especially when you feel pressure to “live up” to previous works. That has been a particular challenge with Blood Colony, and it’s one of the reasons that seven years have passed since its predecessor, The Living Blood.

I knew I had to get it right, or as close to “right” as I could. That meant the right story.

But the African Immortals are back, and here’s what Publishers Weekly just said about Blood Colony in a Starred review:

“This profoundly moving third Blood book (after 2001's The Living Blood), set in 2015, finds that beneath the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East is another, secret war waged over the drug Glow, made from magical blood that can heal any illness and even bestow eternal life. Psychic teen Fana Wolde, the daughter of 500-year-old assassin Dawit Wolde, was born with this “living blood” running through her veins. The Life Brothers, Ethiopian immortals who believe the living blood first came from Christ, think Fana is a deity. When she escapes their American compound, wanting to control her destiny and dispense her healing blood via a complex underground railroad, the Life Brothers and her parents race to protect her from the Italian immortals of the Sanctus Cruor, false priests who want Fana to fulfill a terrible prophecy. Due brings Fana's complex and passionate story to life with her trademark flair.”

In addition, Blood Colony has some terrific blurbs from people I admire:

Talented actor Blair Underwood (“In Treatment”/ “Dirty, Sexy Money”) helped inspire my imagination as I created my first immortal character, Dawit. (Recently, Blair worked with us on the Tennyson Hardwick mystery novel, Casanegra, which I co-authored with my husband, Steven Barnes. The Casanegra paperback also comes out in June, and its follow-up, In the Night of the Heat, will be published this fall.)

Blair is also a producer on the film version of My Soul to Keep currently in development at Fox Searchlight. Here’s what Blair said about Blood Colony:

“The genius of Tananarive Due is in weaving an imaginative tale so expertly that the reader is convinced she has suspended time and all reason. …I found myself, once again, utterly engrossed by the heart-pounding odyssey of Dawit, Jessica, and their daughter, Fana. Her storytelling is at once intimate and wholly epic. Her characters, though otherworldly and supernatural, are profoundly relatable and eerily familiar.”

Award-winning science fiction master Greg Bear, author of Quantico, Darwin’s Radio and City at the End of Time, called Blood Colony: “an elegant, scary, richly exciting tale—all that we’ve come to expect of Tananarive Due.”

And powerhouse L.A. Banks, author of the New York Times bestselling Vampire Huntress Legend series, said: “Blood Colony will steal your breath on every impossible-to-put-down page. Due is masterful in creating this thrill-ride of a tale that was truly worth the wait!”

Of course, you’ll have to judge Blood Colony for yourselves. (If you can’t wait until June, I posted an excerpt, Chapter One, on an earlier post—January 15.)

In the mean time, I thought I’d share a little about the tale behind the tales. Your comments and questions are welcome below!

*****

It has been eleven years since I published my novel about a newspaper reporter, Jessica, who discovers that she is married to a 500-year-old Ethiopian immortal named Dawit. That novel, My Soul to Keep, has been vastly influential in my life as a writer.

I was a frustrated single woman writing feature stories and a dating column for The Miami Herald when I started My Soul to Keep, and bits and pieces from my life bled into the story. “What would it be like to discover that someone you thought you knew was a complete stranger to you?” “What would it be like to live forever?” “What if there a drop of your blood could heal almost any ailment?”

The answers to those questions became My Soul to Keep.

And so began a wondrous journey.

I first met science fiction giant Octavia E. Butler at a conference on black science fiction, fantasy and horror at Clark Atlanta University in 1997, and had the true honor of many visits with her. (I met my soon-to-be husband, Steven Barnes, at the same conference, and he had been Octavia’s friend for many years.) Octavia, whose sudden death and absence are still inconceivable to me, was generous enough to write kind words about my work as a fledgling writer: “I enjoy reading the kind of novel that seduces me right into it and makes me forget work or sleep. My Soul to Keep does that beautifully.”

Her words were precious then, and are more so today.

Shortly before publication, I also met Stephen King while playing keyboards and singing backup with the Rock Bottom Remainders at the Miami Book Fair—and I pushed myself beyond my comfort zone to later write the horror master to see if he would be willing to give me a blurb. I screamed when I saw his return letter from Bangor, Maine, in my mailbox.

King promised to read my advance manuscript, and he faxed his blurb to my editor on the precise day it was due. He wrote: “I loved this novel…it’s really big and really satisfying, an eerie epic that bears favorable comparison to Interview with the Vampire. Ms. Due accomplishes the hardest thing of all with deceptive ease, creating characters we care about on their most human level. I read it nonstop, and think it’s destined for bestseller lists.”

But the most enduring thrill has been reader response. In the years since, readers have read and re-read My Soul to Keep, keeping it in print, asking me to sign dog-eared copies, and forcing their book clubs to read it. Actor Blair Underwood—whom I imagined as Dawit while I was writing the novel—fell in love with the character and even traveled to Lalibela, Ethiopia, to shoot footage for a My Soul to Keep film. I hear inquiries from readers about that movie every week: WHERE IS IT?!

It will come. My Soul to Keep is still in development at Fox Searchlight, and once Steve and I finish our screenplay version of my novel The Good House for Fox Searchlight (we’re currently writing the third draft—wish us luck!), we want to tackle the My Soul to Keep script next. I have learned that patience is everything in Hollywood.

Come to think of it, patience is everything in publishing, too.

I never planned to write another novel about Jessica and my African immortals after My Soul to Keep. I expected it to be a stand-alone story, like my first novel, The Between. But as I wrote the epilogue set in South Africa, I began to wonder what would happen next. What was going to happen to Jessica’s baby born with immortal blood?

I eventually picked up the story about eighteen months after My Soul to Keep ends, when Jessica’s baby is three-and-half. What if a stormy toddler had supernatural powers?

Sounded scary to me.

But I couldn’t sell The Living Blood right away. Because My Soul to Keep had earned such buzz—optioned for film right away by Samuel Goldwyn Productions even before Blair and Fox Searchlight—I thought it would be a breeze to sell The Living Blood. I wrote three sample chapters and an outline, then I waited to hear how much my publisher would offer.

My publisher passed. That moment was one of my most jarring lessons about the uneasy union between art and commerce: Take nothing for granted. It took time—and a few detours—but I finally published The Living Blood in 2001, four years after its predecessor. The acquiring editor at Pocket Books, Jason Kaufman, is today the editor at Doubleday who discovered Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. My new editor, Malaika Adero at Atria Books, is highly influential in black publishing, responsible for publishing Zane and Nathan McCall, among others, and is a rare island of stability in a business full of turnover. I have been blessed with good allies.

The Living Blood won an American Book Award, and Publishers Weekly said it should “set the standard for supernatural thrillers of the new millennium.”

But my life had changed between the novels, so the stories are very different too. In The Living Blood, Jessica is flung from one part of the globe to another. While My Soul to Keep was primarily the story of one family, The Living Blood was the story of two. And Jessica’s world expanded, both across the world and across realms. The Shadows appeared, and the world’s oldest man. In that book, I took readers to the mysterious Life Colony in Ethiopia.

But despite the ways The Living Blood grew in scope, I always saw it as a very simple story:

Two parents must overcome their troubled past to raise a powerful child.

Again, I thought I had finished with my African immortals series.

But I always wondered what had happened to Fana, whose volatility and power were so overwhelming in The Living Blood. I knew what Fana was like as a toddler—but what would she be like as a teenager?

And so, Blood Colony was born.

In many ways, this novel picks up almost exactly where the previous one left off: A remote colony in the woods of Washington state, where immortals have chosen to share their healing blood with humanity. One drop can wipe out a patient’s AIDS. Or cancer.

The question that gave birth to this novel: What is the price of power?

In Blood Colony, 17-year-old Fana isn’t satisfied with her parents’ cautious distribution of the blood, with strict limitations on the nations where the blood and its healing powers are available. So, she and a mortal friend, Caitlin, have created an Underground Railroad to provide Living Blood on the black market as a street drug known as Glow.

But Glow is making the news, and a handful of Glow dealers are being murdered. Fana has brought an unknown force to her doorstep. Through a collision of history and prophecy, an immortal prince, nurtured on the Shadows, believes he has found his mate at last.

Blood Colony is unique: It’s my first near-future novel. Because I wanted Fana to be seventeen, the novel is set in 2015. That one difference was very intimidating to me, but the world of Blood Colony is very much shaped by our country’s foreign and domestic events in the past seven years. In science fiction, there is a common what-if that serves as the writer’s fuel: “If this goes on…” Blood Colony is written in that spirit.

If this goes on…

With great sadness, I have dedicated this novel to Octavia E. Butler, whose works never let us forget that our future will be dictated by our actions in the present. Her example has been an inspiration beyond words, and I miss her every day.

I hope you enjoy Blood Colony. When you read it, please let me know what you think.
Now I know I have more stories of Fana, Jessica and Dawit waiting to be told. Blood Colony is the latest in my African Immortals series, but it will not be the last.

Next time, I won’t make all of us wait so long.

Fear Itself: A Photo's Thousand Words

2008-02-26T18:39:00.000-05:00

I don't know who circulated the Photo.

It's to my own advantage to give the Clinton campaign the benefit of the doubt, because I've never tried to fuel my enthusiasm for Barack Obama with anger for Hillary Clinton.

There was a burp during the South Carolina race when Bill Clinton made a remark about Jesse Jackson--clearly, in my view, an attempt to derail the Obama freight train by trying to marginalize him as a "black" candidate--and I felt the first tendrils of anger. In a sudden flashback, I remembered how my joy at shaking Bill Clinton's hand on the campaign trail in 1992, and my profound sense of inclusion while I watched Maya Angelou recite her poem at his Inaugural, had been hammered down to much less warm feelings by the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency. Oh, yeah, I thought. NOW I remember....

Right after South Carolina, I got an email from a white Obama supporter, a friend of mine, and I could feel his disappointment and dejection that a conversation had begun from which he felt excluded, that the "race thing" was coming up. Neither of us was happy about it, and suddenly we seemed stuck on two sides of a fence. I realized then that it was a brilliant ploy, if the Clinton camp could pull it off. House Divided, and all that.

Luckily, they couldn't pull it off. Luckily, voters saw through it, so the tactic backfired. And after my husband and I attended the Democratic debate in Los Angeles, we walked out with a euphoric sense of party unity, dreaming of a Dream Ticket, and all was forgotten. Hillary might have been a fine president, we agreed, if only she hadn't run head-first into Barack Obama and the New Politics he created out of thin air. If only the last campaign of the 20th Century hadn't been rendered obsolete in the face of the first campaign of the next.

It's a classic case of bad timing. "The times, they are a-changin'..."

Then the Photo appears, just when the Clinton campaign must be feeling at its most desperate. It's easy to understand, Drudge Report aside, why Obama's campaign would assume that the dissemination of a photo of Obama in Somali tribal garb was the work of Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign. After all, nothing else has worked.

Cries of plagiarism seemed lame after a couple of news cycles--and in the midst of listening to Obama's audio version of Dreams from My Father, I've realized that Obama is a wiser writer than I am, and a better wordsmith than a good number of political candidates combined, past or present--and Clinton herself seemed to suffer a mental schism at the conclusion of the Texas debate, bracketing her clunky "Xerox" jibe with words that rang of John Edwards and Bill Clinton. As if she herself was eager to put the whole silly plagiarism charge to rest.

Clinton's sudden burst of anger over the Obama campaign's flyers about her health care proposal didn't seem like a good fit for her either. Sure, it's fodder for the debates, but voters won't buy the notion that Barack Obama is running a campaign that smacks of Rove. (Obama has re-imagined this process in ways that have stunned Democrats and Republicans alike.)

The worst thing anyone seems to be able to say about Obama is that his supporters like him TOO much, as if his oratory has somehow drained us of all sense and logic. That we sacrifice TOO much to send him money as often as we can, and we're TOO inspired to help make this nation as great as we know it can be.

But even that charge is only borne of Fear: If you don't "get" Obama, then somehow the rest of us must be under a spell; some kind of voodoo trickery. Obama must have a secret plan to lead us all chanting "Yes, We Can!" to the brink of some kind of crypto-Muslim-Black supremacist-hippie-socialist Apocalypse.

**Sigh** I feel sorry for those scared folks too. I hope they'll find out otherwise soon, once President Obama has taken his leadership skills and vision to the Oval Office and the world stage. And in the end, it's best to get what Obama called "silly season" out of the way--for his campaign to sharpen its claws swiping back at the ugly attacks that will await him from the party that has learned to rely on "Swiftboating" and fear-mongering rather than leadership.

But I still can't help wondering why and how the Photo appeared. It's true that candidates can't always control overzealous participants in their campaigns. No, Obama's campaign has not been perfect. "I'm not a perfect vessel," he has said. (But as we know, he learns pretty dang fast.)

Maybe the Photo of Obama was disseminated by Republican strategists who realized they could have a two-for-one shot: It makes Hillary look desperate, and it speaks a thousand words: "Be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid. Be afraid." We've lived under that refrain for seven years. But the Clinton's campaign denial of involvement seemed so anemic--and came so late in the day--that I'm left to wonder...

And then there was Clinton's statement in Dallas: "But let's just stop and ask yourself: 'Why are you - why is anybody concerned about this?' ... You can find dozens of pictures of me in different parts of the world. You can find me wearing African outfits, Latin American outfits, Asian outfits ... when you travel to foreign countries, it's a sign of respect. What does that have to do with anything?"

It's one thing to deny circulating the photo, but another (to claim) not to understand the fuss. Do you think, Hillary, that those costumes might look different on you if you were black? If your father hailed from Kenya? Or if there had been an underground campaign (not, God forbid, by your opponent's own operatives, I'm sure) to paint you as a "secret" Muslim? If recent history hadn't taught us how easy it is to prey on fears of the Other?

I don't like wondering. I don't like feeling angry. I'll give the Clinton campaign the benefit of the doubt.

But for her sake, I'll be glad when the Democratic primaries and caucuses are over, when voters have made their message for Obama heard loud and clear. Afterward, I hope there will be no way to mistake or spin the voters' will. For Clinton's sake, I hope her campaign won't inject poison into the political process by trying to subvert the will of the voters at the Democratic convention. That's the kind of politics I thought we had all learned to despise.

And in the end, when the speeches are over and she has able to sleep late a few days in a row and gain solace from her friends and family, I hope Hillary Rodham Clinton will still like the woman she sees in the mirror. For her sake, I hope she won't find herself staring into the face of a stranger.

Only then will she truly have lost.

© Copyright 2008 by Tananarive Due

Don't Forget to Vote! -- "Yes, We Can"

2008-02-05T10:17:00.000-05:00

Today is a major election day around the nation. Change is in the air.
Don't forget to vote. Don't forget to tell your friends to vote. Make sure your adult children vote. Make sure your spouse votes.
Yes, we can.
If you haven't seen it already--and no matter where your sympathies lie in the current election--check out this highly moving and creative video produced by supporters of Barack Obama. Even if you don't like music videos...this one is special.
--Tananarive

FEAR ITSELF: Climbing the Fence with Barack Obama

2008-01-21T14:10:00.000-05:00

PHOTO CAPTION: Protesters in Tallahassee, Florida—including my mother, Patricia Stephens Due (in sunglasses, front center), and my father, John Due (profile beneath movie poster)—demonstrate against segregated seating at the Florida Theatre in 1963.
(Florida State Archives)

I know a bit about fear.

Most of my novels are about otherworldly events, when unimaginable circumstances force my protagonists deep into their character to discover who they are. I revel in those stories of human grit; I suppose it’s my way of preparing for those times when life gets tough.

A death in the family. A child’s illness. An alarming medical exam. A car accident. A violent crime. Those specters frighten me far more than notions of ghosts, curses and demons. Since childhood, I have lived deeply within the awareness that life is only temporary. My civil rights activist parents taught me a long view of history, and I know how quickly today’s headlines are tomorrow’s archives.

In that spirit, I am saving my magazines featuring Barack Obama, and my parents are taping news reports. No matter how the United States Senator from Illinois performs in the primaries to come, those mementos are chronicles of change.

I’ll file those magazines and newspapers side-by-side with my parents’ archives from the civil rights era, like the telegram my mother received from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1960, after she and four other students from Florida A&M University (including my aunt) chose to spend 49 days in jail rather than pay their fines after being arrested for ordering food at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. They became the nation's first Jail-In during the nonviolent student sit-in movement of the 1960s.

My mother, Patricia Stephens Due, also has a letter Eleanor Roosevelt wrote on the arrested students’ behalf for a New York fundraiser. And a newspaper column written by baseball great Jackie Robinson, who helped publicize the Jail-In to the world by publishing my mother’s letter from jail. My father, civil rights attorney John Due, has campaign memorabilia from his 1966 run for the Florida Senate (“Do it with Due!”), when his fellow Democratic candidates got up and left so they wouldn’t have to share a table, or platform, with a black man.

Change in the 1960s wasn’t easy. It took a movement to make it happen.

But change can hurt in unexpected ways.

Today, in the midst of history-making times on the political front—with the nation embracing a black man’s candidacy with startling vigor—I sense that there are some voters who are allowing fear to dampen their enthusiasm for Barack Obama.

I exclude those voters who honestly think that Hillary Clinton or a Republican candidate would better serve the nation. And I’m not suggesting that any voter should embrace Barack Obama, or reject his opponents, simply because Obama is black. Poor leadership comes in all colors.

I’m talking about voters who share Obama’s vision, believe in his leadership capabilities, and would embrace him with jubilation...except for their fears.

I’m afraid he’s going to get shot. I’m afraid he can’t win. I’m afraid he’s too good to be true.

Or is it only shock? When Obama visited First AME Church of Los Angeles last spring and discussed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina [see 1/7/08 post below], he said that as a nation we go from “shock to trance.”

Some voters, I fear, are in trance too. In trance, we don’t pay attention to whether or not our voter registration cards are up to date, or note the registration deadline for the primaries. We don’t call up our friends and talk to our neighbors. We don’t execute a few computer keystrokes to make a campaign contribution. We don’t forward emails or write in our blogs. We don’t knock on doors or organize car pools to polls. We don’t wear campaign buttons or paste bumper stickers to our cars.

In the mean time, growing segments of America and Democratic party establishment—and even some conservatives—are doing exactly that.

They believe in the United States of America that’s written on paper—the one we all want to believe in. They believe that the American Dream can be real. And they believe Barack Obama is the best person to march us all into that future.

Why don’t they seem to notice he’s black?

Because of Martin Luther King, Jr., Oprah Winfrey and Sidney Poitier. Because of Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby and Shirley Chisolm. Because of Octavia E. Butler, Will Smith and Muhammad Ali. Because of Denzel Washington, Louis Armstrong and the Little Rock Nine. Because of Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett and the Tuskegee Airmen. Because of Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall and Billie Holiday. Because of Cicely Tyson, Colin Powell and Michael Jordan. Because of Jesse Jackson, Jesse Owens and Maya Angelou. Because of Alice Walker, Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Because of James Baldwin, James Brown and Toni Morrison. Because of Jackie Robinson, Tiger Woods and Mae Jemison. Because they loved Dennis Haysbert’s President David Palmer on "24."

Because of people like my parents.

Because of MLK Day, Black History Month, the March on Washington, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Greensboro sit-ins, the Tallahassee Jail-In, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act—and because of jazz, blues, funk and rock and roll.

Women and men of all ethnicities and races sacrificed for change here on U.S. soil—far too many to name. And arena by arena, battle by agonizing battle, color shock has been muted across the country. It doesn’t mean racism is gone, as the uninformed are so quick to claim—it only means that its power has diminished enough that a black candidate as powerful as Barack Obama can stand for more than his skin color. And he can stand at his full height, without having to stoop.

To the aging activists of all races who wondered if the seeds planted in the 1960s would bear fruit, Barack Obama answers that question with an exclamation point. His wildly successful underdog campaign thus far could bring a smile to a deathbed.

But the reasons for Obama’s wide support are much simpler than that. This campaign has been about more than a flashback to Dr. King, John F. Kennedy and a boyish, winning smile—although Obama gives us that, too.

He has an unfair advantage: We already know how singular he is.

He’s a freshman politician running an unprecedented campaign against not one giant, but two—including a former U.S. president—all the while taking candidates from both parties to school. He had the audacity to believe he could do it, and he’s demonstrating that he can follow vision with organization and action. He was one of the few voices against the Iraq War when too many of us were afraid to speak. His oratory rings with intelligence and heart, and he’s already proven he can change the face of American politics.

Oh yes, and he’s black.

It’s not a media fiction. It’s not a fluke. Voters of all races like Barack Obama—and in coming weeks and months, they will step forward to say so in their voting booths. They are proud of their campaign buttons and bumper stickers. They are not afraid. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Tomorrow is now.”

What if Barack Obama could get elected?

What if he didn’t disappoint us?

What if we didn’t lose him to a racist’s violence?

What if he could not only be the first black president, but one of the best?

Fear is a survival mechanism, so it must be powerful. But fear isn’t always healthy. Sometimes, fear lies. It feels like anger. Or fatigue. Or mistrust. Or apathy. Or self-righteousness. Fear has many names.

If I had let fear stop me, I never would have started writing my first novel. Or submitted it to an agent—and kept on submitting it when it was rejected. I wouldn’t have moved to Hollywood to try screenwriting, or sold my first script. Or married the love of my life.

I'm told that novelist Alex Haley used to say that you have to throw your hat over the fence and climb over to get it. Barack Obama has thrown his hat over a high fence, and he’s climbing. News accounts remind us every day that he’s already scaled up a mighty long way.

Are we going to climb with him?

Or are we afraid of the height?

BLOOD COLONY (June, 2008): Excerpt

2008-01-15T09:33:00.000-05:00

ONE

****

The Colony
Friday
6 a.m.
2015

Gramma Bea was the first to rise in the Big House.

Each morning, Fana Wolde found her grandmother in the kitchen with Mahalia Jackson’s soaring voice consoling her from the old CD player while Gramma Bea patted balls of dough between her palms, measuring drop biscuits. Gramma Bea cooked with care, hour after hour, as if the fate of the world depended on her getting the ingredients and temperature just right.

Beatrice Jacobs was eighty-four, but she looked youthful in the black silk kimono she wore all day sometimes, when she didn’t have the energy to get dressed. By lunchtime, she would be sweating from the heat, but she never left her kitchen. When she wasn’t cooking, she was sitting at the kitchen table, either dozing or reading her Bible. Sleeping and praying took up the time left after cooking. She spent more time doing all three since her heart attack.

Like most people, Gramma Bea wore her thoughts like clothing, so Fana didn’t have to peek inside her grandmother’s head to understand her. Fana could see it plainly: Gramma Bea stored her grief in her baking breads and stewing pots. Cooking was her meditation.

Fana’s grandfather had died five years ago, when his car had overturned in a ditch in the woods a half-mile from his kitchen table, during a rainstorm. The accident had happened at three-thirty in the afternoon, snapping Fana out of meditation. Fana, the first to know he was dead, had shared her grandfather’s last, startled gasp.

Grandpa Gaines was dead before anyone could bring blood to him, where a drop might have saved him—or Dad might have been able to perform the Ceremony at the instant his heart stopped, in the ancient way. It was so unfair: Gramma Bea had lost her first husband to a car accident, too. And to lose someone here must feel worse, Fana thought. No one died here. Fana knew why Gramma Bea always kept his chair at the breakfast table empty, as if she expected him to come downstairs to eat, too. His absence was inconceivable.

“Don’t just stand there, baby,” Gramma Bea said. “Start squeezing the juice.”

The kitchen smelled like oranges in the mornings because Gramma Bea was from Florida and insisted on squeezing her orange juice fresh. The oranges were already chopped and waiting, so Fana only had to pick up her dripping fruit, hold half an orange in her palm, and scrape off the pulp in the white plastic juicer with the methodical turns of her wrist Gramma Bea had taught her to perfection; one of the few things Fana believed she did well.

Mom had bought a mechanical juicer years ago, but Gramma Bea wasn’t interested in technology except to listen to Mahalia and the Mississippi Mass Choir and the other gospel she filled her silences with. Gramma Bea thought machines were a distraction, and the music brought her closer to God. And closer to Grandpa Gaines, of course.

Gramma Bea thought about dying for a long while every day, working her way up to the idea. Sometimes, she didn’t mind. Day by day, she minded less. She had begun to think of it as an appointment she had to keep, one she’d put off long enough. Fana wondered what else her grandmother would do with her time if she didn’t have to think about dying.

But she doesn’t have to die, Fana reminded herself. She knows she has a choice.

“You’ve got some nice little hips now,” Gramma Bea said, dropping her dough into neat rows on the cookie sheet. “Nice legs, too. My legs.” Gramma Bea’s kimono was cut high the way a younger woman would wear it, to show off her legs. Her calves were veined blue, but her smooth shins had resisted wrinkles. “You should wear a dress when you go driving tomorrow.”

Fana felt alien enough outside without Gramma Bea’s criticisms! Mom and Aunt Alex never wore anything except T-shirts and jeans either. Sometimes it was hard for Fana to believe that Mom and Gramma Bea were the same blood: Mom never had casual conversations with her about going outside, especially not about clothes. Mom only filled Fana’s head with warnings.

“Why do I need a dress?” Fana said. “It’s just a driving lesson.”

“And lunch,” Gramma Bea said. “At a nice restaurant.”

“Pass. I’ll pack some food from home.”

Gramma Bea tsssked, a click against her teeth. “Go to a restaurant, Fana. Sit with the people for a while. It’ll be good for you.”

Fana hated restaurants. They always smelled like meat, and the tension was thick behind servers’ smiles and the kitchens' closed doors. Restaurants never felt at peace.

“Don’t you want to feel more comfortable around people, Pumpkin?” Gramma Bea said.

Fana felt stung. Now Gramma Bea sounded like Mom. “What do you mean?”

“I knew a young man from Midway, Florida...a trumpet player,” Gramma Bea said, speaking in a story, as she often did, never going forward until she remembered all the details. She wanted to make sure her life’s adventures would be remembered, even in passing. “He swore up and down he loved me, but I came to find out he didn’t invite me to his sister’s wedding. He said he was worried I wouldn’t know which fork to use and what-not. So seditty! And I told him, ‘Billy Taylor, what kind of love is that?’”

Fana waited. Sooner or later, Gramma Bea always remembered her point again. Gramma Bea went on: “Baby, liking from a distance isn’t the same as liking up close. You can’t like people if you won’t let them close to you.”

Fana felt her teeth grind. How many times did she have to tell Gramma Bea that crowds gave her headaches? Her family tried to understand, but they couldn’t. Not really. And what good would it do to go out and meet people? She would only lie to them, too.

I care about people in the way that matters, Fana thought. I heal them.

“I have friends,” Fana said instead. When she wasn’t reading or meditating, Fana was posting on ShoutOut, where she had hundreds of friends around the world who knew her as Aliyah Martin, an American student and Phoenix music fan living in Tokyo.

But Gramma Bea was wrong if she thought she spent her days role-playing and gossiping. Fana never used her webcam, and only three people outside of the colony knew her real name. One person alone knew who she really was, and Fana hadn’t seen her best friend in three years. She and Caitlin saved their real communications for an encrypted site, at least once a week. They deleted and scrubbed each other’s messages immediately.

Fana hadn’t gotten any messages from Caitlin in two weeks. Something was wrong.

Anxiety nested in Fana’s stomach, and she knew the chewing sensation would follow her until she tried to go to sleep, just like last night. She dreamed in nightmares, and always about Caitlin. Was Caitlin dead like Maritza? She can’t be, Fana thought. I would have felt her die.

Was Caitlin on the run, then? She had to be. But where?

“Typing on a screen isn’t the same as talking face to face,” Gramma Bea said, prying Fana’s worries wide open. “Life is something you touch. Typing is easy. Touching is hard.”

Gramma Bea was right: Fana needed to see Caitlin in person. But Caitlin couldn’t come here, the one place she might be safest. One of the Brothers would know Caitlin’s thoughts as soon as she arrived, and Fana couldn’t count on masking her. If I were a normal person, I could just drive out of here and go find Caitlin myself.

It was the worst quandary of Fana’s life, and not talking about it consumed her. Was it time to tell her family the truth?

Fana almost told Gramma Bea everything, right there in the kitchen on Friday morning.

“...that dress I got you for Easter is casual enough to wear as a tea dress,” Gramma Bea was saying, and Fana enjoyed remembering how much her grandmother had loved buying her clothes, even if she never wore them. Gramma Bea hadn’t been on a shopping trip in a year, and her catalogues were piling up in the coat closet. “You’re such a pretty girl, Fana. Why won’t you let anyone see you? It’s like you want to bury yourself in the ground and disappear.”

Did Gramma Bea know? Fana had started trancing again, too.

Sometimes when Fana meditated, she let herself get lost, hiding from herself the way she first learned when she was three and the world had gone badly wrong, when she stayed lost for years. Life was hard again, and Fana wanted to step out of it.

Fana felt her grandmother’s fingers beneath her chin, and the kitchen came into sharp focus: rows of cookbooks, watermelon knick-knacks and a polished floor. Did I trance that fast? Gramma Bea looked her in the eye, knowing. “Try to get used to things on this side, too. Not just the universe in your head, Pumpkin,” Gramma Bea said patiently. “Start with this.”

Gramma Bea held up a tube of lipstick the color of ripe mango pulp.

“It’ll do wonders for your smile,” she said. “You just put some on and stare at yourself in the mirror. It’ll make you feel good. Sit in your skin a while, child. Now, pucker.”

Fana pouted her lips, and her grandmother painstakingly guided the tube while Fana smelled perspiration, talcum powder and sweet, familiar Giorgio on her skin. Fana would know her grandmother’s scent with her eyes closed.

“Look at that!” Gramma Bea said, glowing as if she and Fana shared a face. She held up the shiny aluminum toaster for Fana to see her reflection: blurred brown features and a shimmer of orange-yellow light. “A little color works miracles. See how it brings out your lips? I still feel naked if I go outside without my lipstick, and nobody’s noticed my face for years. But, once?”

She laughed, her eyes twinkling with memories both joyful and sad. Gramma Bea rarely saw how beautiful she was; she only noticed what had changed since she was seventeen, too.

“Don’t worry, Gramma Bea,” Fana said. “Nobody’s noticing me either. Ever.”

Everyone else who lived at the colony was either related to her by blood or marriage, just a kid, or old enough to be her ancestor. Not to mention that she was also a freak.

“Somebody will notice you when you’re driving,” Gramma Bea said, certain.

“Like who?”

“You never know who, Pumpkin,” she said. “That’s the fun part—finding out. Twice in one lifetime, I was blessed with a good man. Twice. True love is an experience everyone should have, but you can’t find anyone when you’re hiding.”

Gramma Bea was from a generation when girls got married right out of high school, Fana remembered. They couldn’t be more different, in that way. Fana had known since she was three that she would always be alone.

“Men have the curse of their eyes, Pumpkin,” Gramma Be said. “Their eyes catch on to things first. It never seems right or fair, but it’s in their makeup. Until a man sees you with his eyes, it’s like he can’t see you at all. And if a man’s eyes take hold of his heart? He’ll move a mountain for you.”

“That just sounds shallow,” Fana said. “Why would I want anyone like that?”

Gramma Bea shrugged. “We didn’t make this world. The Lord did. We just visit here.” Fana sighed and picked up the toaster again, adjusting its angles in the light from the window to try to see her face through a stranger’s eyes.

“Do you see what I see now?” Gramma Bea said.

Fana nodded, forcing a smile.

The lipstick’s color was a promising speck, but Fana still couldn’t see her face at all.

© Copyright 2008 by Tananarive Due
Atria Books—June, 2008

History in the Making: Barack Obama's Speech at First AME Church of Los Angeles

2008-01-07T19:35:00.000-05:00

In light of a few stunning developments on the political stage involving Barack Obama, I'm posting an essay I wrote for friends and family back in April 2007, after Sen. Obama paid a visit to First AME Church in Los Angeles.
I can't claim that I predicted then that Barack Obama would later so handily win the Iowa caucuses, and would be so likely to triumph in New Hampshire, too. I wasn't certain then that he had a realistic chance at winning the Democratic nomination, and the presidency beyond. The groundswell around Obama is nothing that could have been predicted outright.
But after church that Sunday morning last spring, I understood that it was POSSIBLE. For the first time, my eyes were wide open about the Obama phenomenon. I wanted to share the experience with everyone I knew, so I transcribed the speech myself from the church's video. Transcribing the speech took a long time away from projects on deadline, but I considered it community service.
Once you go back to that First AME service with me, maybe you'll understand too.

###########

"History in the Making: Barack Obama's Speech at First AME Church of Los Angeles"

By Tananarive Due

April 29, 2007—I'm always glad when I make it to church on Sunday, but never as glad as I am today.

I just heard Barack Obama give a speech at my church, First AME in Los Angeles. The pastor is Dr. John J. Hunter, and I have followed him since he was pastor of First AME in Seattle. On many Sundays, I have felt awed and renewed by my church, my choirs, and my pastor. But today's service was something special, even for First AME.

I didn't know that Obama would be there, but I knew it was possible, since I had heard that he was in town. Often, politicians who are in Los Angeles make a stop at First AME, which has a membership of more than 20,000. Political seasons always bring out the candidates.

My husband–Steven Barnes–and I had heard that Obama was in town Saturday night, when we attended a party hosted by a black producer here in Los Angeles. Two intelligent black actresses we met there, both very familiar faces, were rapturous after hearing Obama speak at a black Hollywood event earlier. "I think it must be like what people felt in the '60s when they saw Dr. King speak," one actress told me, earnestness burning in her eyes.

After seeing Barack Obama at my church the next morning, now I understand why.

Don't get me wrong: I've always been impressed by Obama, and I was even more impressed after listening to him read The Audacity of Hope. (It's worth getting the audio version to hear Obama read it himself.) Like most people, my first introduction to Barack Obama was when he addressed the 2004 Democratic National Convention; the only bright spot in an otherwise heartbreaking political year. He had me on my feet.

I hadn't felt that way about a politician in a very long time, and hadn't expected to again.

And when it comes to speeches, I have heard some of the masters. As a child attending NAACP conventions each summer with my parents and Johnita and Lydia, my sisters, I treasured opportunities to hear addresses by executive director Benjamin L. Hooks, a supreme orator. One year, Senator Ted Kennedy created a joyous uproar in the banquet hall when he ended his address with the last lyrics from James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing." At speeches like that, you get goosebumps. Your eyes fill with tears. A good speech is an act of magic. Dr. King's speeches helped electrify a nation, and the world.

Since both of my parents are civil rights activists and writers, I grew up with their speeches, too. My father, attorney John Due, recently addressed a funeral for Miami civil rights activist Johnnie M. Parris Marsan; and Dad quoted from a Barack Obama speech in Selma calling for the rise of the post-civil rights generation—which Obama called the "Joshua generation"—who must complete the work of Moses, leading their people to the Promised Land.

In 1960, my mother, Dr. Patricia Stephens Due, spent 49 days in jail for sitting-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida, becoming part of the nation's first "Jail-In." To this day, Mom wears dark glasses because her eyes were injured when a police officer threw teargas in her face. (We documented her experiences in the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.) Through her powerful speeches, Mom motivated other students to defy their parents and teachers to take part in civil rights protests and register blacks to vote. One fellow Florida A&M student who heard my mother speak—and was inspired to demonstrate and brave arrest—is present-day philanthropist Shirley Pooler Kinsey, who sat at First AME Church of Los Angeles forty-odd years later and heard a speech by Barack Obama.

Sometimes a speech presents its case so well that you have no choice but to act.

March. Vote. Contribute. The speech compels you to do something.

That's the kind of speech I heard this morning. It's the reason I want to share the experience. I wish everyone I know and love had been there.

First, the church was packed. The sanctuary and balcony were full, so a hundred or more of us took seating in the basement, where we watched the speech on a wide-screen TV.

Pastor John first led us in prayer for Obama. All of us held hands and prayed—although, frankly, many of us have been praying for Obama since the day he announced his candidacy and we feared we were about to lose another dear son to violence.

When Obama took the stage, we heard the stir of excitement as the sanctuary upstairs came to its feet. The walls could not separate us. Downstairs, we stood up, too. Obama began his speech by reflecting on the 15th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which were sparked by the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. (My pastor's later sermon was entitled: "Can't We All Just Get Along?")

Obama cited a newspaper story about a pregnant woman who was shot in the abdomen during the violence of the riots—and doctors discovered that the bullet was inside of her baby.

After an emergency delivery, a miracle: The baby was fine. The bullet hadn't even hit a bone, lodged in the baby's arm. Surgery removed the bullet. All that was left, the doctor said, was a permanent scar.

"That baby represents the rising up of hope out of darkness and despair," Obama said at my church Sunday. "But I also like the doctor's point that there's always going to be a scar there. That doesn't go away. You've got to take the bullet out and you've got to stitch it up, but there's always gonna' be a scar. When you think about us in this country fifteen years later, not only do we still have the scars from that riot—but in many American cities, we haven't even taken the bullet out. We still haven't stitched up the patient."

Applause swelled. So true, we all thought. Obama said that he's often asked if he thinks the Hurricane Katrina response was so slow because so many victims were black. "Actually," Obama said, "I think the response was color-blind in its incompetence. "But what I also said was that the tragedy struck New Orleans well before the hurricane hit. That the murder rate in New Orleans has been one of the highest in the nation, with young men dying far more frequently from gunshot wounds than they did of anything else in New Orleans. That the schools had failed in New Orleans long before the hurricane hit. There was a reason why the plan to evacuate them was ineffective, because the folks who were doing the planning assumed they had cars. That they could fill them up with gas. That they could put some Perrier in the back of their SUV and drive to a hotel and check in with their credit card. And that wasn't the reality of folks in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, any more than it's a reality in the South Side of Chicago or South Central Los Angeles. "There's been a tragedy there for a long time. Yet, you think about the response after Katrina, and it's similar to the response in Los Angeles after the riots. In this country, we go from shock to trance. There's nothing in-between.

"We wake up and we're surprised that there's poverty in our midst, and that people are frustrated and angry. There's recriminations as to what happened, and then there are panels and meetings and commissions, then reports. Then there's a little bit of money folks piece together to send it into the community to make sure the folks are quiet and go back to the status quo. But we never take the bullet out of the arm and stitch up the wound that has been made in this country."

Many people rose, applauding. "We don't need panels and reports and commissions. We need some surgery on the indifference to poverty in this country that has gone on for too long. We know what needs to be done. We know what it would mean to take the bullet out—the bullet of slavery and Jim Crow. We know what it would take to take that bullet out..." Then Obama stopped his speech.

"I've got to take a break, because Stevie Wonder's in the house," Obama said.

Stevie Wonder had just walked into the church. The audience laughed and applauded as Wonder was led to his seat. "I'm sorry," Obama said, "but when Stevie's in the house, I've got to stop preaching and say 'Thank you' to Stevie Wonder. I'm sorry. I was on a roll, but... [laughter]...but Stevie walked in—and I grew up on Stevie. I love Stevie Wonder." Suddenly, the presidential candidate had been transformed into a 10-year-old boy, grinning from ear to ear. Stevie Wonder, Obama pointed out, performed a fund-raising concert during his Senate campaign.

"My wife, that was the only thing I ever did that impressed her," he said, and the congregation laughed. "She didn't care, I was elected to the U.S. Senate, I'm running for president. None of that impresses her. But me getting Stevie Wonder to play a concert—that was something there." More laughter and applause. Obama had eased from sober indignation to folksy humor in the blink of an eye, with a comic's timing, seeming genuine all the while. Hardly missing a beat, Obama was back on point:

"The bullet of slavery and Jim Crow and indifference. We know what it would require to remove that bullet, the kind of surgery this country needs to perform. We know that if we've got young people without hope, if we've got more young men in prison than in our colleges and universities, we've got our children having to go to the emergency room for treatable illnesses like asthma, or undiagnosed and can't get a pair of glasses so they can learn in school because they don't have health care. They've got mental health problems, nobody's paying attention. We know what would need to be done. We know what works. "We know that if we put a dollar into early childhood education that we get seven dollars back in reduced dropout rates, reduced delinquency, reduced prison rates, that our young people can go to college. We know what it takes to improve our schools. We know that if children are learning in dilapidated buildings, with teachers that are underpaid, and textbooks that are twenty years old, and curriculums that are uninspired and don't reflect the experiences of our children, that they will not learn. But if we put some money into making sure our teachers are paid a decent wage and treated like professionals, and engaged and given flexibility, and if the textbooks and curriculum reflects the experiences of our children and made relevant, then our children can learn. There are models of excellence in every urban community; we just don't scale it up.

"And the reason we do is not because of the lack of knowledge of how to do it, but because in the back of our minds there's a part of us that still thinks that actually, not every child should learn. Every child doesn't need to learn. There's that bullet in our psychology. "We know what it would take to provide health care for all Americans. We spend two trillion dollars on health care every year in this nation—fifty percent more than any nation on Earth. And yet I read a report last week that infant mortality among African-Americans in places like Mississippi is going up. And we've got infant mortality rates in some of our communities that are the equivalent of what's going on in Haiti and Ecuador. Sub-Saharan Africa. Here in the wealthiest nation on earth. "We know that if we put money into preventive care and if we gave the chronically ill decent health care so that they were getting their medications on a regular basis, somebody's who's diabetic, if they were getting regular medications, we wouldn't have to pay thirty thousand dollars for a leg amputation." Applause. "That would save us all money. We can provide universal health care in this country by the end of the next president's first term. We can provide it by the end of my first term in office. There's no reason why we don't do that. Everybody should have health care."

The pianist played flourishes while the audience gave him a standing ovation. "We know what it would take to develop our communities economically. Some of ya'll notice gas prices aren't too good around here. It's worse here than Chicago. I was with my driver here in L.A. He was explaining how he still has a Durango, and I told him, 'You need to buy a Prius.'" Laughter. "He's driving fifty miles to his work every day. He fills it up, $78 to fill up, and it takes three trips before he has to fill up again. He's spending five-hundred dollars a month on gas. I said, 'That's right, and you know where we're sending it? Eight-hundred million dollars a day to some of the most hostile nations on earth. We're funding both sides of the War on Terrorism because we don't have an energy policy in this country.' "And in the bargain, we're melting the polar ice caps and creating climate change that is going to impact not just rich people, it's gonna' affect poor people more than anybody. Two-hundred fifty million people around the world, many of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, may be affected by climate change. But here's how we bring it back to right here in this community.

"You know, people think that thinking environmentally somehow is contradictory to economic development. It turns out that if we were serious about an energy policy in this country, if we're serious about dealing with the consequences of our dependence on oil, we could create jobs all through our community. We've got whole buildings here that if they were rehabilitated and insulated and refitted so that they were conserving energy, that everybody would save money. And you know who would be doing that work? It would be all the young men and young women out here who've got no employment. They can be trained. We know what to do. "But instead of increasing job training and developing an energy policy and making sure economic development exists all throughout our community, let's see what our current president has done: He has cut forty percent of federal dollars for Community Development Bloc Grants and job training and community policing, and we have now spent half a trillion dollars on a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged. We could have invested that money in South Central Los Angeles and the South Side of Chicago."

By now, Obama was nearly shouting. "Our jobs and infrastructure and hospitals and schools—why is it we can find the money in a second for a war that doesn't make any sense, but we can't find the money to take out the bullet of poverty in this country? And stitch up our communities so every child has a chance at a decent life?" Applause.

"...I am confident in my ability to lead this country. I wouldn't be running if I wasn't. I'm not half-stepping in here. This isn't a symbolic race that I'm running. I'm not trying just to get my name in the papers. I get enough attention without running for president. I'm running to win.

"But I will say this...I can't do it by myself. I can't do it on my own. There are gonna' be times during this campaign when I get weary. There'll be times when I'll get tired. There'll be times when I make mistakes. I haven't done this before. You know, we came out of the debate this week in South Carolina. They had a poll showing that folks in South Carolina thought I had won. But we had some of the pundits saying, 'No, Obama seemed a little bit stiff.' I said, 'Yeah, I'd say that was my B game.'" Laughter and applause. "But here's the thing: That's the first time I've ever done it. Can you imagine what I'll be like by the time I've done it the fifth time?"

Raucous applause and cheering. "God's not through with me yet. We're still working on this thing. But I can't do it on my own. I can only do it with you. We can only take the bullet out with you. You know, I watch some of these shows, 'E.R.' and 'Grey's Anatomy' and all that. The doctors, they're doing the operation, but you notice all these people around 'em handing them the scalpel, telling them 'No, doctor, the heartbeat's going down.' There's a team that gets that bullet out of that child. That's what I need here, is a team. I can't do it by myself. Change doesn't happen in America from the top down—it happens from the bottom up. "Some of you know I was down in Selma, Alabama about a month and a half ago, celebrating the 42nd anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. And it was a powerful moment for me, being in Brown Chapel next to John Lewis and thinking about what had happened back in 1965, when I had been four years old; where a group of college students and maids janitors and Pullman porters gathered together and decided they were going to march for freedom. And how they had gone to that bridge and seen the horses and the billy-clubs and the teargas, and they started to cross anyway. And had been beaten within an inch of their lives. And had staggered back to the church, bloodied, feeling that perhaps change wouldn't come. And how that recording of those events on Bloody Sunday had galvanized a nation. And thousands had come and descended on Selma, and marched with them in the weeks that followed, and how the waters had parted, and they had kept on marching over that bridge—not just to the courthouse, but all the way to the White House, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed. "And standing on that bridge next to those heroes—those who were responsible for me now being in a position to run for the presidency of the United States—standing on the shoulders of those giants—I thought to myself how even out of darkness, God finds a way to lead us through.

"And I came back from Selma to Washington, and some of my colleagues patted me on the back and they said, 'Senator, you gave a wonderful speech at Brown, and that was a wonderful celebration of African-American history.' And I said, 'No, no, you don't understand: That was a celebration of AMERICAN history.' Because at every step of the way in this nation, when we have made progress, it's because millions of voices have joined together and decided that a change was going to come. That's how the abolitionists organized to erase the stain of slavery from the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. That's the way that women decided to join together to get the right to vote, so they would be equal partners with everybody in remaking America. That's how workers joined together so that we'd have overtime and the minimum wage, and all the other benefits that we now take for granted. That's how the civil rights movement occurred—because ordinary people realized they could do extraordinary things. "And so, First A.M.E., I want you to know that 15 years after those riots, change is still going to happen because of you. This campaign may be a vehicle for your hopes and your dreams, but ultimately it's going to be because of you. And I am absolutely confident that if all of you make a decision that we are going to transform this country—that we are going to usher in a new America the way that newborn child was ushered in—still having the scars, not forgetting where we came from, not blanking out on what has happened, but recognizing that we can remove that bullet and stitch up that arm and move forward as one nation. If all of you make that decision, then I am confident that not only are we going to have health care for every American in this country, not only is every child going to have a decent education, not only are we going to end this senseless war in Iraq—but you might just elect a new president named Barack Obama."

The sanctuary roared with a standing ovation. The organ played. Women screamed.

"Beloved," the pastor said, "the Spirit has hit Stevie Wonder to sing a song." And so Steve Wonder came up to the pulpit and sang. "We're gonna' win this victory...yeah, yeah, yeah...We're gonna' win this victory...yeah, yeah, yeah...We're gonna' win this victory...yeah, yeah, yeah.... Barack Obama's gonna' be the next President, say yeah, yeah, yeah. ...We're gonna' win this victory, yeah, yeah, yeah..." The congregation joined him, singing Barack Obama's praises. After his first song, Stevie Wonder brought greetings from his church, West Angeles Church of God in Christ, led by Bishop Charles E. Blake. (Also a very powerful place!)

Then Stevie Wonder sang "Falling in Love with Jesus," and we remembered we were in church. Listening to Wonder, Obama looked full of rapture. This morning at my church, Barack Obama stood beside Stevie Wonder—with the Men of FAME Choir dressed in African-styled vests behind them. And above them was First AME's massive mural depicting painful chapters in black history: Capture. Slavery. And also the triumphs: Wagon trains. Black newspaper boys and the rise of black media. The black church.

And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was watching history in the making. Now I understand that light I saw glowing in the actress's eyes after seeing a speech by Barack Obama. He has the gift of turning us into believers—not believers in him exclusively, but believers in ourselves and our own power. It is the essence of a populist message. I understand Obama's poll numbers. I understand his fund-raising bonanza. All across America, a growing number of people of all races believe that Barack Obama can be our next president. He is transcending race, for now. Are we still half a generation removed, or has the day our nation would accept a candidate regardless of race already come, and we just hadn't realized how close we were?

Today, I looked at my 3-year-old son and realized that, yes, one day he could be the President of the United States. As a black parent, that makes my generation unique in American history. Today, it felt as real as a man standing in my church.

Here's why Barack Obama could win the presidency in 2008: He has a message, but he's not selling sound-bites. What he's mostly selling is his logic, his way of thinking. He's selling his nuance. He is in a unique position to see the world from multiple positions, and he often comes across as the tallest person in the room. He seems to know how we feel, no matter who WE are. You find yourself wondering: "Why hasn't anyone else put it that way? Understood it so well? Articulated it with such simple eloquence?" And he does it, so far, without a hint of artificiality. He is the living, walking embodiment of the future the 1960s activists bled to achieve.

We've canonized Al Gore now, but remember how his candidacy bleached him? Remember how hard he had to work not to say what he was really thinking? Remember how much we wanted to love John Kerry—and we admire his contributions to our national sanity both during the Vietnam era and today—but we never truly felt stirred by him?

Barack Obama makes candidacy look easy. And he does it with the eye of a psychologist who knows exactly what our nation's psyche has been through. We have been wounded, and Obama understands our need for healing. We are ready to take the bullet out. And you start to think, "Well...? Maybe he can do it..."

Maybe is just another word for hope. I do not know how Barack Obama's life story will read. Today, I believed I had just seen a speech from the nation's first black president. But...maybe Obama will lose the Democratic nomination or the general election. Maybe he will stumble. But even if Obama doesn't win, he's young enough that we know he isn't going anywhere.

One way or another, we are in the midst of history in the making. It's not every day you go to church and feel like you're witnessing a miracle.

–Tananarive Due
American Book Award winner, 2002
http://www.tananarivedue.com/

St. Clair Bourne: A sad loss to the film community

2007-12-19T23:33:00.000-05:00

I just learned that filmmaker St. Clair Bourne passed away after surgery Saturday, Dec. 15. My prayers to out to his family. He is already missed so much!
--Tananarive

Pan African Film & Arts Festival NewsletterLos Angeles February 7-18, 2008One City, 12 Days, Over 80 Countries...Film::Art::Culture::Community
Monday, December 17, 2007

PAFF Mourns Loss of Veteran Filmmaker St. Claire Bourne
Photo credit: Ian Foxx

Reknowned documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne died early Saturday morning (Dec. 15) in a New York hospital after an operation to remove a brain tumor. He was 64. According to his sister Judith, St. Clair made it through surgery without complication only to be attacked in the aftermath by a blood clot in his lung. Bourne was a veteran producer, director and writer of documentaries for HBO, PBS, NBC, Sundance Channel, BBC, National Geographic.

Bourne was the recipient of the 2007 PAFF Pioneer Award.
On Nov. 30th, before entering the hospital, Bourne wrote in his blog:
"I'm writing to let you know that the usual stream of CHAMBA NOTES will not be forthcoming for about a month. I am scheduled to undergo an operation within the next couple weeks to remove a benign tumor that is pressing against my brain. While this is scary, the operation is not as dangerous as it sounds. First of all, the tumor is benign but it does periodically causes spasms and numbness in my left arm and leg. Second, the surgery will not penetrate the brain itself because the tumor is located on the surface of the brain. Finally, this type of operation, while not quite routine, has become commonplace enough so that most of the previous difficulties in this procedure have been worked out. I hope to be back in action by the new year. Send me your best wishes, prayers and good vibes. - St.Clair Bourne"

As head of his production company Chamba Mediaworks, Inc., Bourne made more than 45 films concentrating on cultural and political themes. Among the most notable, Bourne produced the feature-length, Emmy-nominated documentary "Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks" about the photojournalist and filmmaker for HBO. With actor Wesley Snipes as executive producer, Bourne directed "John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk," a feature length documentary about the respected historian and Pan-African activist. He also directed "Paul Robeson: Here I Stand!," a 2-hour documentary for the "American Masters" PBS series followed by "Melvin and Mario at Sundance," a documentary short for the Sundance Channel.
At the time of his death, Bourne was developing two dramatic feature film projects: "The Bride Price," a contemporary thriller set in Senegal about a romance between an African-American businessman and an African holy man's daughter and "The Visitor," about an African Muslim filmmaker's visit to his African-American counterpart just as the 9/11 attack erupts. He was shooting two documentaries: one about veteran Black photography Ernest Withers (who shot the Martin Luther King assassination photos), and the other, a documentary series on the rise, fall and legacy of the Black Panther Party for the PBS network.

Bourne was a founder of the Black Documentary Collective, a New York-based documentary service organization as well as the LA-based Black Association of Documentary Filmmakers-West.

His popular blog, "Chamba Notes," was a personal commentary about current productions, new projects, opinions, musings, political analysis, even gossip...in short, any information about new and traditional media production and distribution with a special focus on - but not exclusively about - the African Diaspora.
Bourne is survived by a sister, Judith Bourne, a lawyer in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.
SOURCE: www.PAFF.org

Miami Dolphins: Victory tastes good!

2007-12-19T23:27:00.000-05:00

POST-SCRIPT: Once I found it within my heart to watch the Miami Dolphins play even when I didn't think they would win...my team finally won! The excruciating talk of a winless season is over. I watched players I've suffered with celebrate the fruits of their labor.
Final score: 22-16 over the Baltimore Ravens. Greg Camarillo ran in a touchdown after a pass from Cleo Lemon. And the dramatic overtime win unfolded with the 1972 undefeated Dolphins team members watching from the stands as they gathered for their reunion.
Next to fall...New England?
The Dolphins shut out New England last year. Win or lose, it sure is nice to believe.

Zen & the Art of Being a Dolfan: The 2007 Miami Dolphins

2007-12-16T03:07:00.001-05:00

Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to sit still.
–T. S. Eliot

When the way comes to an end, then change—
having changed, you pass through.
–I Ching

By TANANARIVE DUE
http://www.tananarivedue.com/

DECEMBER 16, 2007—Sunday’s home game for the winless Miami Dolphins is a sellout—and I’ll be watching from California. Nearly ten years after leaving Miami in 1998 to write novels full-time and begin married life, this year I finally made the switch to DirecTV so I would never miss a Miami Dolphins game.

This year. The worst year in franchise history.

Our beloved Dolphins haven’t won all season. They just lost their twelfth straight game, and the unlucky thirteenth may be today. They’re in danger, in fact, of becoming the first 0-16 team in NFL historythe team that carved the only undefeated season in 1972. A dazzling array of injuries has only added acid to the wounds. Week by week, I’m watching history unravel in a surreal tunnel of mirrors.

Yet, I can’t stop tuning in.

The heartbreak of the experience has redefined my idea of what it means to be a fan. While the Dolphins are crashing, I have turned a bend: I’ve rediscovered how to enjoy watching my hometown team.

Up until this year, I’d been in recovery. And denial. And in pain.

Dan Marino’s final playoff game—that ghastly 62-7 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2000 that was the worst loss in franchise history—nearly knocked the Dolfan out of me.

I was too young to remember the legendary 1972 Miami Dolphins, but I remember golden days in the 1980s and 1990s: Unflappable Coach Don Shula and his disciplined army. Receivers Mark Clayton and Mark Duper. The Bruise Brothers, Lyle and Glenn Blackwood. Quarterback Don Strock, who could lob bombs into the end zone when all hope was lost.

And Dan Marino, of course: the leader on the field who threw laser-beams and routinely called forced opponents to scurry with confusion and dread. The score never mattered as long as Marino was there, not until the clock read 00:00.

For a lot of us, I guess, Dan Marino was the Miami Dolphins.

Then came That Game in Jacksonville. With Fate and age against him, a retirement-bound Dan Marino was gone from us forever.

It hurt. It still does.

But we had no idea how bad it was going to get. That Game was only an omen of days to come, as if a santero in a bad mood had sprinkled powder on us.

A curse. Just as we suspected.

****

By 2000, I had moved away from Miami.

Soon after That Game, my husband and I had a pitch meeting in Hollywood with a television executive who happened to be a Miami Dolphins fan. It’s the kind of rapport you beg for when you’re trying to sell a TV series idea—but as soon as the exec brought up the Dolphins, my lips clamped shut. I was blinking away tears. Couldn’t even talk about it. So much for rapport. (We didn’t sell the show; I blamed the Dolphins.)

Since games were only aired once in a blue moon to those of us on the west coast anyway, my heart wandered. When we lived in Washington state, I tried to fall in love with the Seattle Seahawks. (At the time, they were losing too; no thanks.) My former Northwestern University coach Dennis Greene was with the Minneapolis Vikings, so I tried that too. And Indianapolis. I love head coach Tony Dungy, Peyton Manning reminds me of a young Marino, and I have roots in Indianapolis, so...

So, nothing.

Year after year, I searched for a new reason to be excited about football season. I could take satisfaction rooting against Dolphin arch-rivals, but it wasn’t the same. I found myself forgetting that it was Sunday afternoon or Monday night. As a fan, I was homeless.

I could admire other teams’ skills and artistry, but no other team could make me scream with joy, catch my heart in my throat or cramp my stomach. I realized that watching football wasn’t just about winning, or good players. What, then?

History, that’s what.

As a child, the only reason I started watching football was to try to spend time with my father, as he patiently—or impatiently—explained the rules of the game while I sat on the sofa beside him, mostly enjoying the feeling of being there. Dad took me and my sisters to see the Dolphins at the Orange Bowl stadium, and later at Joe Robbie Stadium. Those games are some of my most thrilling childhood memories.

What other team could inspire the memory of Thanksgiving and Christmas games on the widescreen TV at my Aunt Eva’s house, with my late grandmother sitting in the kitchen nearby, sneaking herself another plate?

I loved the Miami Dolphins more than the game itself.

If I wanted to care about football again, I would have to go back home.

****

Like most people recovering from a traumatic episode, I took baby steps. And trust me, the Dolphins haven’t made it easy.

Sports is all about familiarity. Players are celebrities on the field the way Will Smith and Denzel draw patrons to movie theaters. You’re a family, or at least you pretend to be. You learn players’ personalities and quirks, their weaknesses and strengths. Even if you don’t always like them, you know them.

Not in Miami.

Every year, there were so many new faces. New coaches. More quarterbacks than I can name—thereby poisoning other games for me, since so many quarterbacks who could not perform in Miami seem to be doing just fine elsewhere. At one point, even the Dolphins jersey changed color; I couldn’t recognize them on sight.

Baby steps. Before I had DirecTV, I listened to radio broadcasts on my computer. Since the offense never found its Dan Marino, I learned to love the defense. Zach Thomas and Jason Taylor embody the spirit of the Dolphins I remembered from olden times; some years, they seemed to be the only thing about the Dolphins that felt right.

I discovered preseason games, which had never interested me even when the Dolphins were winning—but for a while, the preseason games were the only ones I could count on seeing every week on cable. So, I found a way to care.

I checked out the new talent, especially the quarterbacks, to see if any cream would rise. I was thrilled to see a running back emerge, Ronnie Brown. I had the breathless exhilaration of seeing Wes Welker’s first spurts in a Miami Dolphins uniform. (I ain’t mad at ya, Wes, although did you have to go to the Patriots?)

During preseason, I thought Cleo Lemon was the most promising quarterback on the field—but the coaches never cared what I thought. Still, though, at least I had an opinion. I was on my way home again.

The sight of Pro Bowl quarterback Daunte Culpepper in a Miami Dolphins jersey on the cover of a sports magazine was the very portrait of Hope, as if the thrill-ride of the Marino days might be back on track at last.

Naive hopes, it turned out. So naive.

But two moments made all the difference: Last year, the Dolphins’ undefeated 1972 season was challenged by the as-yet unbeaten Chicago Bears. The Dolphins had been playing poorly, but their record was at stake.

Something close to miraculous happened: The Miami Dolphins won.

Later in the season, we shut out the powerhouse New England Patriots, sacking quarterback Tom Brady four times. The Patriots might be bound for the stratosphere in 2007 while we ere bound for humiliation, but for precious moments we remembered what it felt like to be a better team again.

I shrieked and shouted and celebrated.

I’m the only football fan in my household, unless you count my four-year-old son Jason’s insistence on rooting against whatever team I’m rooting for. But as the Dolphins pulled off their Patriots shutout, I gave spiritual high-fives to my father in upstate Florida and my sisters in Atlanta and Dallas.

We don’t watch games as a family together anymore—my sisters don’t even want to hear team updates since Marino left—but on that night, I knew I had made it. Finally.
If I could help it, I wouldn’t miss another game.

****

What fresh hell is this?

I was literally open-mouthed, watching the catastrophic game in horror, when Dorothy Parker’s words were the only ones that fit: What fresh hell is this?

There’s an aptly-named Internet forum called The Dolphins Make Me Cry, a place where Dolfans gather to commiserate, but I don’t cry over football games. I may rant and feel my mood dimming, but tears and sobs are for real-life tragedies.

That day, though, was the closest to tears I had been since 2000.

It was Week 5.

Our new quarterback Trent Green went down with his season-ending injury. When he was injured, removed from the field on a backboard, the players prayed on the field in a mass huddle that felt like a funeral. My husband, who has been very supportive, gave me a hug.

We’ve lost star running back Ronnie Brown to injury too. And star defensive lineman Zach Thomas. Chris Chambers, our most promising receiver, got traded. Pro Bowl running back Ricky Williams, whom we had lost to his demons in years past, returned to Miami only to be injured after only six carries. Gone. We’ve lost almost everyone this year.

What fresh hell is this?

Something snapped in me the day I saw that huddle of prayer on the field, with yet another quarterback gone and the prospects for our season disintegrating.

Either stop watching, I told myself, or stop needing to win. Let go.

I couldn’t stop. But I had to care in a different way. About different things.

Do I hope the Dolphins will break their losing streak Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens? Of course I do. I’m not surprised there’s a sellout crowd. At the very least, one way or another, fans will be watching history.

There’s a point in a game when fans know that winning isn’t probable; you can see your team is overmatched. But the Dolphins have almost won a lot of games. Often, that delicious feeling of not knowing lingers until the very end. The fighting spirit is there.

I missed the last Dolphins game against the Buffalo Bills, but I’m watching it piece by piece on my DVR. I’d read the breakdown of the score quarter by quarter on the Internet before I started, so I knew the first quarter was going to be painful. I knew the stats.

But stats and highlights aren’t the game.

It was only by watching the game that I could see for myself how Cleo Lemon rallied his team’s spirit by completing a 54-yard pass right after John Beck was pulled from the quarterback’s spot in the first quarter; the kind of pass we Dolfans don’t often see.

The Dolphins still give me reasons to smile.

Sure, it’s hard. I have to wallow through the pain and muck to find a single flower and savor every precious petal. It’s like a meditation, almost. For me, a fan who was spoiled rotten in my youth, it’s a wholly different way to watch football.

And who knows? Soon, we’re playing the New England Patriots on Monday Night Football. How sweet would it be to see the Miami Dolphins derail the Patriots’ undefeated season to defend the Miami Dolphins legacy?

Words couldn’t describe it.

I have accepted the possibilities. The Dolphins might go winless.

And next year, I’ll learn a new Dolphins team. Probably a new coach, I would think. Maybe a new quarterback, too, although Cleo Lemon is my favorite since Marino.

I really hope Zach Thomas and Jason Taylor will stick around. Too often, a strong defense to keep us from being humiliated was the best we could hope for, and they have come through year after year. But I feel guilty for wanting them to stay: They’re not rookies anymore, and rebuilding from the ground up takes time. I don’t want them to miss their chance at their Super Bowl rings. They’re true-life brothers-in-law now, so maybe they’ll end up somewhere together. (Just not the Patriots—please?)

If we lost them both, or one of them, I might even shed a tear.

But next summer, I’ll keep up with the preseason. Assessing the talent, especially the quarterbacks. Next fall will be hard. Maybe fall will be a hard for years to come.

But as long as my team is in Miami—and as long as they’re called the Miami Dolphins—I’ll be watching. Just like the pigtailed girl with the dog named Toto says as she’s clicking her heels together with hope and longing, there’s no place like it.

© Copyright 2007 by Tananarive Due

Coming soon...BLOOD COLONY!

2007-12-05T14:48:00.000-05:00

Hello, faithful readers...

I am excited to announce that my new solo novel, BLOOD COLONY, will be published by Atria Books in June of 2008. I am unveiling the mock book cover here so you can get a glimpse of what is to come... Soon after the first of the year, I will post an exclusive excerpt.

Here is a larger image of the proposed cover (which is subject to change before publication):

I don't usually post book covers this early, but this one is so striking that I wanted to share it. BLOOD COLONY continues the journey of my immortals---Dawit, Jessica, Lucas Shepard and Fana---as they strive to use their Living Blood to heal. But it's not as simple as it sounds: Something as miraculous as this Blood was bound to draw unwanted attention, and so it does... Fana is 17 in this story, so BLOOD COLONY takes place in the year 2015, making it my first near-future novel.

That's all I'll say for now. As I said, I will post more about this book later. But I wanted to share the cover with you right away!

ONE NOTE: As you shop this holiday season, please remember to support your black and independent bookstores. It may be less convenient and a few more dollars, no doubt, but we can't complain about the loss of our institutions if we're not willing to support them.

Happy Holidays!

Best, Tananarive