A poem: June 3, 2008--The Delegate Count

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!”

© 2008 by Tananarive Due

IMMORTALS RISING

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

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"

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

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?

© Copyright 2008 by Tananarive Due