Matt Katz: This is All Of It. I'm Matt Katz in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for listening. The latest novel from acclaimed author Tananarive Due is a heartbreaking tale based on a true story. Tananarive's, great uncle Robert Stephens, was sent to the now infamous Dozier School for boys in Mariana, Florida, and died there at age 15. Tananarive took that story as inspiration for her novel, The Reformatory.

Follows, a young black boy also named Robert Stephens, who is sent to the abusive segregated Gracetown reformatory. Robert is sentenced to a couple of months in Gracetown after he kicked a white boy who is making advances on his sister Gloria. Gloria does everything she can on the outside to help get her brother out. While on the inside, Robert learns something disturbing. There are ghosts on the grounds of Gracetown known as haints. They are the spirits of the boys who were killed at the school.

The terrifying superintendent, a violent man named Haddock, wants Robert to help catch these haints, but one stubborn ghost named Blue wants Robert to help him get revenge on Haddock at great risk to his own life. The Reformatory was the February Get Lit with All Of It book club selection and author, Tananarive Due, joined us on Wednesday for a live event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Here are some highlights from that interview, which was conducted by Get Lit book producer Jordan Lauf.

Jordan Lauf: I wanted to begin this conversation with where your novel begins with a dedication. Here's your dedication, "For Robert Stephens, my great uncle who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida in 1937. He was 15 years old." When did you first learn your great-uncle's story?

Tananarive Due: Really, it came at a time of grief for me. My late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was a civil rights activist. In fact, Carol is here, worked with my mother in the '60s and with Judy Beninger Brown, my godmother. She was such a huge force, not only in history, but in our lives. Losing her was a big hole in the family. During the aftermath, right after she died in early 2013, I got a call from the Florida State Attorney's Office to let us know that I might have a relative buried on the grounds of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which I had never heard of. I had never heard of Robert Stephens.

I really thought it was a call about another relative on my grandmother's side, another juvenile who was put to death by the States. My dad and I, my father, John Dorsey Due, Jr. If you've read the book, you know I named John Dorsey after him, we went to the school. We met survivors, heard their stories, and given that I had had a relative who passed away there, even though I never knew his name, or maybe because I never knew his name, I decided almost immediately that I had to write a book.

Jordan Lauf: Was it immediate that the character was going to share the exact same name as your great uncle?

Tananarive Due: Absolutely. I wanted to honor his memory. I never knew about him, I don't think my mother ever knew about him. I've since met another relative who was actually a namesake, who never knew for whom he was named. I think what just happened is that the trauma was so great for any family where you lose a child, that they just cemented over it. I didn't want that for him. Also, I wanted a better ending. I don't want to spoil anything, but I wanted a better--

Jordan Lauf: You can spoil it. It's a book club.

[laughter]

Tananarive Due: I wanted a way better ending for him. I wanted to write a story that could be inspirational rather than just depressing. It's not dishonest because most of the boys who were there didn't die there. There were several who did, and he was one of the unlucky ones. I really wanted The Reformatory to be not just about Robert Stephens, but about other children who were there. The fact that this institution existed.

Jim Crow as the monster of the story. I wanted it to be about our current mass incarceration system and parents who were, to this day, dealing with juvenile justice where in fact, I think children are more criminalized now for schoolyard fights, for example, than they would've been even in 1950.

Jordan Lauf: The school-to-prison pipeline is [crosstalk].

Tananarive Due: Oh, my gosh. Absolutely.

Jordan Lauf: You mentioned being able to talk with survivors and people who attended the school-- oh, attended is the wrong word.

Tananarive Due: I know, right?

Jordan Lauf: Who were sent there.

Tananarive Due: Who were sent there, yes.

Jordan Lauf: What's something you learned from those conversations, a detail that emerged that you knew you wanted to include in this novel?

Tananarive Due: Well, and most of you have read it, right? Because you're a book club. That's so great. That's so great not to have to hide things. One of the things that a firsthand account I heard from one of the white survivors actually, was that he was taken to the whipping shed, which in real life was called the White House. It's not the Funhouse. I just gave it an even worse name in my book.

He said that he had to cancel visiting day with his parents because the physician literally had to remove fabric from the wounds in his back. That's how deeply they were cutting their skin with these beatings in this shed. This was during a time when flogging had been outlawed for adult prisoners in Florida, but somehow children were being subjected to this kind of torture. That story really just stuck with me. I couldn't wrap my mind around it.

Jordan Lauf: I'm interested, you said that because something that really stuck with me in reading this book is that you don't shy away from those really graphic details. The scenes in the Funhouse don't fade to black. You really take us there and you take us into the violence. Why was it important to you to give us those details?

Tananarive Due: I apologize, first of all, for those details because it was difficult to write up to that scene. I knew I wanted it to happen. I knew I wanted it to be on his first night. It was a very difficult scene to write up to. I excerpted that scene years ago in the Boston Review as a standalone short story, because to me, it's the crux of the matter in terms of how I'm going to take the reader from the realm of the real into the fantasy realm.

It's during that scene that Robert is in such a horrific situation, being lashed in the real, that he first realizes that these haints are here, and he can really feel their presence. He was afraid of them up to that point. That was the scary part of being sent to the reformatory. In reality, they're not the scariest thing about the reformatory. In fact, there's something special about the bond, not only that he can create with at least one of the hints, but also, as I said in that chapter, knowing there's more than this, there is more than this moment.

He uses it in his awareness of the ghost as a way to elevate himself out of a horrific moment and find, even in that moment, something hopeful, something to hang onto, some piece of himself, like feeling his mother and all these other spirits is something he can hang onto, so he won't lose himself in that place.

Jordan Lauf: Let's talk about our protagonist, Robert. Although when we first meet him, he's known as Robbie. He's known as Robbie to his friends and his family. Once he gets to Gracetown, he says immediately, "I'm going to be Robert here. I can't be Robbie here." Why that distinction between Robbie and Robert? Why does he make that distinction?

Tananarive Due: That is a great question. In his mind, he was crossing a threshold. He did not want to be perceived as weak, first of all, because he was afraid he would be a target. He figured all these boys are going to be tough, and Robbie, that's not a good street name. Like Blue says, "We'll get you a better nickname than Robert, but okay, that's something to work with."

I think in his mind, I think he understood he was going to have to grow up. He was going to have to grow up at this place. He could not be a child anymore. My husband and I crowdfunded and co-wrote a short film called Danger Word, which has a similar theme about a young girl who in the zombie apocalypse, and Frankie Faison plays her grandfather saying, "You've got to grow up now. Stop being small." I think that's what Robert was feeling.

Jordan Lauf: What really struck me in reading it is that there's an interesting pacing choice that you make. The beginning happens rapidly. You've got the incident with Lyle, he goes to court, he gets sentenced to the reformatory. Then we really slow down. The next 100 pages or so, are just following Robert in this first day at Gracetown. You really follow him moment by moment, all the people he meets, all of the places he goes. Why did you want to really linger in that first day?

Tananarive Due: I wanted it to feel immersive. I wanted the reader to feel like they were there with him experiencing it as he was experiencing it. I think also as the writer, I was learning. That was the part that was the most intimidating to me, was to try to depict the reformatory itself. I've never been a little boy. I've never been a little boy who was put in a reformatory. Everything about it, like the social relationships, the hierarchies, the duties, they were very informed by photographs that you can actually look at the Florida Archives or online.

It's called the Florida Memory Project. There are a lot of digitized photos of the Dozier School. I literally was writing from like, this was what the kitchen looked like this is what that big freezer, that was a real freezer. That's what it looked like, and I think that was me as the author, immersing myself because I wanted the reader to feel immersed.

Jordan Lauf: Were ghosts always going to be a part of this story? When did they come in for you?

Tananarive Due: Ghosts were absolutely always going to be a part of the story, but there's a funny story about that. I had written maybe 250 pages. I had written beyond the first night when Boone comes in and wakes all the boys up and takes them to the Funhouse. I had written beyond that when my agent, Donald Moss said to me, "I think you might want to make Blue a ghost."

Now it may seem a little surprising to you that that was not what the case was in the beginning. When I first wrote Blue and Redbone, I was really just trying to create friends for Robert. When he gave me that thought, I said, "Well, let me see how many changes I would have to make for that to be true." It turned out not that many because he was sneaking around in the kitchen and nobody saw him. He said to Boone, "Can I go back to bed?"

Boone didn't even acknowledge him. [chuckles] It was as if I knew on one level that Blue was supposed to be a ghost, but I hadn't discovered it yet. That's what a good agent will do. Tell you things about your book that you don't even know yourself. That to me, I think, was a pivotal moment because it took the ghost out of the realm of spirits floating around over his head to, frankly, what I've heard in account from the former curator now deceased of the Scott Joplin House, and the whole reason I wrote the book Joplin's Ghost, was because he told me about a time he thought he had seen a ghost in Scott Joplin's parlor, and I said, "Was he shimmery? Was he transparent?"

He's like, "No. He looked just like any other man." That always stuck with me. I decided in creating the ghost that they can take that form where Blue has the power to just look like any other kid if someone is sensitive enough to see him.

Jordan Lauf: Why do you think the children are the ones who are able to sense these haints? The adults know that they're around, but they're not seeing them in the way that Robert and the other kids at the school can see them.

Tananarive Due: The Reformatory set in a fictitious town called Gracetown that I started writing about in short stories, maybe 10, 15 years ago, and my whole idea-- some people will compare it to Stephen King's Castle Rock, but in reality, I was thinking of William Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha County, going back to my college English literature days. I wanted to create a fictitious county, but being a horror writer. In my fictitious county, I wanted it to have a special impact on children.

I have done Ghost story set in Gracetown. One of them is Ghost Summer, which was the title of my last short story collection or my first rather, short story collection, but the point of them being children is because I have very vivid memories of that line of demarcation between being a child who was 12 and preoccupied with childish things, and then a page-turning when my perceptions deepened and the world became a little darker and scarier.

This notion that if there's some mistakes you don't come back from, and all this was very much in my mind. Also a strong sense of mortality. I wanted to create a county where younger children are still in touch with their spirit selves in a slightly different way. To me, I guess the comparison would be the way as children, we like to draw. There's almost no kid who doesn't love to draw, and there's almost no adult who hasn't stopped drawing. [chuckles]

You know what I mean? What happens to that? What happens to that part of us that used to like to draw, right? Or who would indulge our creative side? I'm so lucky as a writer, I feel like I'm living in my child self all the time, but a lot of us let go of that. I wanted that to be a parallel. While you have that childish sense of wonder and openness and you're hearing noises under the bed and you still believe in monsters, I wanted to capture that, but in a literal way.

Matt Katz: We'll have more highlights from our February Get Lit with All of It Event with author Tananarive Due in just a bit.

[music]

You are listening to All Of It. I'm Matt Katz in for Alison Stewart today. We continue airing highlights of our February Get Lit with All of It Event with author Tananarive Due, excuse me. We spent the month reading her new novel, The Reformatory. The interview was moderated by Get Lit with All Of It producer Jordan Lauf. Here's more of our conversation with Tananarive Due.

[music]

Jordan Lauf: We've talked about Robert, we've talked about the Reformatory, but there's also Gloria who's on the outside and doing everything she can to get her brother out. Was this always going to be a sibling duo for you? When did Gloria enter the story?

Tananarive Due: Absolutely. I think maybe in part it was because it was my mother's uncle and we were mourning my mother when I started writing the book that I felt like she needed to be in the story. Her middle name was Gloria, and she was my North star in terms of-- this woman was absolutely fearless. She was lying down in front of sanitation trucks in 1968 during the sanitation worker strikes, and she was teargassed by police, wore dark glasses her entire adult life after the age of 20, pretty much all the time, 80% of the time, because of sensitivity to light after being tear-gassed.

She was the first superhero. My parents were both the first superheroes in my life, and I knew I didn't want to just contain the story to Robert's experience with incarceration, in part, because that wasn't a world idea. I didn't want to be in there all the time either, but also as I was writing, I realized it's not just a story about one child, it's not just a story about one facility.

This is a story where the monster itself is the era, it's the Jim Crow era. It's the uncertainty, it's the lack of stability, the oppression, all of the barriers, the stifling. The reason my mother became a civil rights activist when she was in college was when they saw a way to fight the system through nonviolent direct action. Finally, there was a plan, a large-scale plan, and she always felt like, "I'm dead anyway if I don't have these rights."

The way that young people have that clear view, they don't have the conflicts of a mortgage, [chuckles] and a job by the way that they're afraid of getting fired from very often. It's just like, "This is wrong and I'm going to speak up." That is what young people do, and I wanted Robert to have that advocate. He wasn't going to be able to count on a system to help him, but he could count on his sister.

Jordan Lauf: Let's talk about Superintendent Haddock. Was he based on anyone in particular you learned about in your research, or--

Tananarive Due: Even if he had been I would not say so for legal reasons.

Jordan Lauf: Oh, okay.

[laughter]

Tananarive Due: Actually, no. In that sense, I did read a little bit about the real superintendents and there were superintendents who did take part rather in the whippings and whatnot, but I wanted Haddock to be a composite, not just really for all the wardens, but a central figure of the evil, even though I didn't want to let it off the hook. That had the possibility that people would think, "Oh, well, he was the problem," and hopefully, readers don't feel like he was the only problem.

He was not the only problem, but he was someone who apparently, is coming not just at Dozier School for Boys, but the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Boys. There's a whole podcast about that. The indigenous schools in Canada at the schools for unwed mothers in Ireland. There's this thing where the powerless are preyed upon, when they're incarcerated, and it doesn't matter if you're a child.

The weaker you are, the more you're preyed upon. I wanted to show what kind of dominion, someone with that kind of sociopathic, psychopathic, I'm not sure. I'm not a shrink. He's got something wrong with him. When someone with that kind of murderous mindset has that power that he can exercise with impunity, that's what happens, and the entire town is just accepting this and just covering it all up.

Jordan Lauf: It's not just Superintendent Haddock who gets caught in this. There are some people who come into the school and maybe they're well-meaning, or maybe they, whatever motives they have for working there, but there's something about that place that can transform people, and I wanted to read this quote from Ms. Lottie who talks about Junior when he worked at the Reformatory.

She says, "That place changed him, Gloria, worse than the war. Day by day he wasn't the sweet boy who'd gone to work there, day by day you could see something growing behind his eyes that wasn't him anymore." What do you think it is about this place that can change people even well-meaning people?

Tananarive Due: Well, for the purposes of fiction, it would be as if there's some kind of a curse on those grounds where people who work there get-- no one stays nice Redbones and Blues say that as you work there, it begins to overtake you how to talks about, I think, dreams that he had. Really it's just the mindset, us and them that emerges in these kind of power differential situations, and the dehumanization of people that society has deemed are less than for whatever reason. I wanted this book to be in conversation with the present because we still have a lot of vestiges of this era that we're still dealing with as people of color. For whites, it's mostly the mentally ill who have the kinds of experiences with police that Black people talk about. It's just so heartbreaking on social media when I see people posting, "Oh my son was having an episode and I called police." As if the police were going to help their son with their episode when I could say, "Do not call the police. They are not good with the episodes." If your son picks up a-- not even a steak knife off the table.

I've read a story about a naked white man shop because he was having a mental-- who exactly was he threatening? It's the dehumanization. You have been othered and when people are othered, who knows? The sky's the limit in terms of the kind of things that can happen to them.

Jordan Lauf: You've been out on book tour for a couple of months now, it's been out in the world. Have you interacted with anyone who went to Dozier, who read the book and what have those experiences been like?

Tananarive Due: As a matter of fact, yes. Quite by accident, we had a gathering much like this one. There was a signing line and a white young man, I would say was in his late 30s, maybe early 40s, was last in line and as he posed for a photo, he said, "I'm shaking." I was like, "Oh, are you a big reader of my work?" He's like, "No, I've never read any of your other works. I was at Dozier in the 90s."

He thanked me for writing the book, which I'm so grateful for because I would have been heartbroken if he had had critiques like serious critiques like, "Why are you writing this book?" That same morning I had spoken to an 88-year-old Black man who was at Dozier in 1950 when he was 12 and his name was Robert when he was there, who wrote his own memoir that I added at the last minute in my Knowledgeness page and I put him on the phone with my dad and he too, he started just telling all these terrible stories.

I've spoken to two survivors, one who had read the book and one who had not read the book, but was glad that I had included his book in my acknowledgments. The experiences in both cases were heart-shattering. It was like going back in time to that very first meeting because I wasn't expecting to meet survivors. I had not girded myself up for that emotionally and each time, in the morning, in the phone call with the older man, I was devastated.

Told the audience how devastated I was that same night in that same audience was another survivor who, even though he thanked me in the drive home, I was again devastated. I was devastated that I had met two men, generations apart, one Black, one white, both of whom felt seen by the fact that this book had been written and just the evil of the multi-generational terror against children just was overwhelming. Again, that's why it took seven years.

Matt Katz: That was author Tananarive Due in conversation with Get Lit with All If It book producer Jordan Lauf. Her new novel, The Reformatory, was the February Get Lit selection.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.