In Search of “Farsanna”
February 16, 2011
Thanks to an Internet-savvy reader, it looks like I’ve gotten launched
ON A MISSION
–which, okay, makes me think Blues Brothers and shades.
But this mission starts with tracking down an old friend.
If you’ve read Blue Hole Back Home–and we can still be friends if you haven’t, I promise–then you know a central character in the story is a Sri Lankan Muslim young woman who has moved to an all-white town in the American South.
And if you read through the AfterWords pages in the back of the book, or if you grew up on Signal Mountain, Tennessee, in the 1970s and early 80s, you’ll know that Farsanna Moulavi is based on a real teenage girl by just this description, though different name.
The book is, as it says, a work of fiction–but based on some actual incidents: A cross-burning at the Sri Lankan family’s house, for example. A brutal shooting of five African-American women down in the valley on a main street, for which two white boys were let off without so much as a slap on the wrist, and a third served only nine months in jail. A swimming hole deep in the woods….
I tried over the years looking for the real woman–in her 40s by now–behind the character Farsanna. But no luck. Google and Facebook and White Pages–all of it surfaced nothing. And who knew if her last name was even the same? Or if she ended up living anywhere near where her family was headed after they gave up on our little town and moved North.
But then, in a book club that read Blue Hole Back Home recently, a member mentioned that she did geneological research, and belonged to several Web sites that allowed for more sophisticated searches for people and names. Within the week, she’d emailed me with my old friend’s name, an age that matched perfectly, and several locations of where she may have lived over the past many years–all of them residential addresses within fifty miles of where her family said it was moving three decades ago, before we lost touch.
So I’ve procrastinated long enough now, and noodled too much with the wording. (How,
exactly, do you apologize for a cross burning? Do you launch right in with a warm howdy after thirty-some years–and oh, by the way, you helped inspire a story, and I hope it was okay if the story got published….) Enough putting it off, thinking somehow I’ll get the wording just right. Sometimes, it’s just time to move forward, and hope the wording will do. Today, I’m mailing four letters off, exactly alike except for the four different addresses.
And we’ll see what comes of it all. I’d be honored and grateful if you’d like to join me….
So, here’s to a new day in American culture.
And here’s to the people of courage and faith who helped bring about a new day. Thank you.
Here’s to hate never getting the last word.
And here’s to hope.
Watch a television interview about Blue Hole Back Home and the story behind it.
If you’d like to find out more about or purchase the novel: Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel
For a reading from the first chapter:
Valentine’s Day Giveaway: Free Book for Book Clubs
January 27, 2011
If you’re part of a
Book Club
(of 9 people or more, please)
that hasn’t yet read
BLUE HOLE BACK HOME
(winner of the 2009 Christy Award for Best First Novel),
We invite you simply to…ask. We’ll send you a copy free.
Yep. Free. At least…well, until we run out of books set aside for this offer.
Just let us know in the comments below your name, the name and address of your book club, and the number of members–or contact the author directly through Facebook or at joyjordanlake@aol.com.
No one will check up on you, but if you DO like the book, we’d love you to recommend it to your club, and post something about it on Facebook, your blog–wherever you’d like.
Thanks for your interest. And may you curl up this winter with many good books…and much chocolate.
Blue Hole Back Home
“…beautifully crafted.”
–Leif Enger, bestselling author of Peace Like a River
Winner, 2009 Christy Award for First Novel
Chosen as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University
Featured at readerscircle.org
Watch a television interview with the author.
When a fifteen-year-old Sri Lankan girl moves to the all-white Pisgah Ridge, Shelby Lenoir Maynard invites her to join Shelby and her brother and her brother’s friends for a swim at the Blue Hole-less in a gesture of bold social reform than because it is simply too hot to think straight. Exotic, mysterious and fiercely independent, the new girl throws the entire town into turmoil. When two different members of The Pack, as Shelby and her brother and her brother’s friends call themselves, begin exhibiting interest in the new girl and a third hints he may be conspiring with the local Klan, the Pack itself threatens to splinter. Throughout the summer, as the town’s hostilities steadily increase along with the heat, the Blue Hole remains the teenagers’ only place of real peace-and even that has its limits. Eventually, the tensions outside the Blue Hole erupt in betrayals, cross-burnings and a deadly explosion. Ultimately, though, Blue Hole Back Home is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation, mercy and healing.
And now
in
LARGE PRINT,
published by Thorndike Press in 2010.
Story and the Past: When the Fictional Story is True
February 12, 2010
Here’s the awkward truth–awkward, as so much truth is: I was nervous about the five little words my editor suggested adding to the marketing description of my first novel. Her voice was all enthusiasm over the line–but then she gets jazzed by everything, everything, I tell you, from character development to comma placement, which is why writers adore her.
“What if we added,” she wanted to know, “the words ‘Inspired By a True Story’–what do you think? Because that’s true, right? And people would love to know the story behind the story. Right?”
Well, yes. Sure. Exactly. Sort of.
Because certainly Blue Hole would never have been written without the Appalachian Mountains.
Or the brutal 1980 shootings on 9th Street in Chattanooga, or a cross-burning at the home of a Sri Lankan family in my hometown, Signal Mountain, Tennessee, or my friendship with the daughter of that family.
It wouldn’t have been written if I hadn’t loved my little Southern town, and boasted to the friends around me as an adult in Boston that my mountain was home to some of the kindest people ever to draw breath.
And it never would have been written if I hadn’t also been knocked-flat horrified as an adult living in Boston to learn that my hometown had also been beloved by the assassin Byron DeLaBeckwith. After he’d been acquitted by an all-white jury twice in Mississippi for the murder of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, Ku Klux Klan member DeLaBeckwith apparently found our pretty mountaintop a safe, comfortable haven during the years I was growing up there. So all that was true.
But regarding this truth thing, I’d had fear struck into me when my brother–who is, okay, yes, at least a rough model for the protagonist’s brother Emerson–read an early draft of the novel and proudly pronounced, “Yep, I can pick out the real person behind every character.”
“What? No, see, this is fiction,” I was desperate to explain–like he might’ve gone muzzy on the definition of fiction.
True, all fiction writers draw on real life, of course. We borrow a dimple here, a balding head there, our own ugly experience of betrayal and forgiveness and deceit.
But the last thing I wanted was old friends of my brother’s and mine drawing lines from each character to an actual person–suggesting sometimes a not very flattering portrait that was never intended as a portrait at all. The characters in the novel came, perhaps, from what Jung calls the “collective unconscious,” a mish-mash of conglomeration and imagination. But in the end the characters were fictional creations, and while the story was based on historical events, it, too, was fictionalized. It wasn’t a strictly accurate rendering of events–and wasn’t supposed to be.
Still, the key words “Inspired By” convinced us all the tag was fair to use with the book.
Now here’s what’s been so intriguing to me about a fictional story rooted in Truth–that is, the truth that human beings are horrifically prone to finding others to despise in order to feel themselves superior. And that the stories of these hates are all around us, some covered up, some blazing away in full view. And that human beings also have access to improbable grace. To forgiveness. To change.
Since Blue Hole Back Home was published nearly two years ago, I regularly hear from people who’ve read the book, then give me the gift of their own stories. Sometimes these are people who grew up thousands of miles from where I did, but something in the novel triggers tales of similar hate–and reconciliation–they’ve seen and lived out. Sometimes it’s people from my own hometown telling what they remember of events that few of us talked about at the time.
One story-giver was a cameraman who’d been sent to interview me, a guy about my own age who’d grown up near where I had, but raised in a whole different part of town. Now both in our forties, one of us black and one of us white, we spun out stories together, his filling holes in what I’d known or seen or remembered–his having personally known, for example, the five African-American women described in my story as being critically injured by drunken white guys–two of them let off entirely by the jury, the third serving only a handful of months. He was the one who finished that thread of the truth for me: all five women died without one penny’s compensation.
Just this week, I received a letter from a man in a maximum security prison who grew up in a valley not far from my mountain. He’d just read Blue Hole, and wrote to tell me how he remembered much of what I described in the novel, and how his father had taken him as a boy to a Klan rally at a nearby elementary school (an elementary school! Dear God). And how he was heartbroken now by the cruelty and senseless of the racism that brewed in those days, long after the height of the Civil Rights era. His words, written from prison by a white man who committed I have no idea what kind of serious crime, spoke of gladhearted change. In our culture. In himself. A story in trade for a story.
So I’m thankful today for stories. For the way they get us offering up our own little peepholes on Life and on Meaning: our stories –some of which we rightly call fiction. But when they speak from the gut and the heart, they can also be terribly, painfully, startlingly True.
If you want to hear more of the actual events that inspired–note that key word INSPIRED–the novel Blue Hole Back Home, check out this television interview with Channel 12 in Chattanooga.
Or view the YouTube video below:
Blue Hole Meets YouTube
February 12, 2010
Listen to an excerpt from the first chapter of the award-winning novel Blue Hole Back Home
Story and Music–the Songs behind Blue Hole Back Home
February 7, 2010
As my musician buddies would be quick to remind me, music tells its own story–whether or not it involves lyrics. Often, we writers owe a great debt to the stories in the music we listen to during the weeks or months or years that our own stories are coming to life–or not–on the page.
In the case of Blue Hole Back Home, a coming-of-age tale of teenagers living in the still-racially and ethnically fractured South, I’d already included a good bit of music in the book by the final draft. But in the final weeks before the galley stages, my husband came home from the library with a CD of an 1960-70s compilation of Atlantic Records hits, including R&B standards like Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” That got me digging out old R&B favorites, just for fun. And, okay, also just because in the final stages of a book I become frantic for any distraction or excuse not to write. A peculiar thing happened, though: the songs began finding their way into the plot.
Below is Ben E. King singing “Stand By Me,” which figures significantly into the final chapters when The Pack is coming face to face with senseless cruelty, and what it means to stick by a friend, no matter the cost.
That same week, a friend of my son’s was staying with us for a few days and brought with him an Earth, Wind and Fire CD. I hadn’t heard them for years–or hadn’t paid attention if I had. Suddenly, though, I was finding that the story of Turtle and Emerson and Jimbo and Farsanna Moulavi and the Mangy Pack was all happening with a kind of soundtrack in the background– the most unlikely assortment of music, from James Brown’s “I Feel Good” to gritty, blues versions of “Amazing Grace.” Lots of these songs found their way into the plot.
No story that takes place in the Appalachian Mountains can spin out without the storyteller hearing a good bit of bluegrass along the way–at least in her memory. On the mountain where I grew up, people gathered on Friday nights for “Mountain Opry,” a jam session free-for-all where some of the best banjo pickers and guitars in seven states just show up and play with whoever is there–and the audience passes the hat. In the novel Blue Hole Back Home, Emerson plays a mean bluegrass guitar, but there’s also mention of banjo along the way. Here is Earl Scruggs with Wild and Crazy Guy Steve Martin on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”
And here is Martha and the Vandellas with their “Dancin’ in the Street,” which figures into the plot when The Pack is down in the city on Seventh Street, based loosely on Chattanooga’s former Ninth Street, where five African-American women were critically injured in a 1980 drive-by shooting by three white men.
One of the main characters, Jimbo, typically rides in the back of the pick up where he is teaching himself to play guitar. As they jolt down the old logging trail roads, he thrums out strange medleys of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Holy, Holy, Holy” (try finding that on YouTube). But below is another song Jimbo plays–this one with a few more posted public versions. Here is LeeAnn Rimes with a blues-inspired acapella version of “Amazing Grace.”
When Baylor University in Texas chose Blue Hole as its 2009 Common Book, my teenage daughter kindly bought and burned the songs for me that appear in the book, and I carted the CD to Waco with me to speak. Nervous as I was–okay, catatonic with fear–over having to speak to the 4,000 freshman who’d just read and were about to discuss my novel, I managed to raise one arm to hand the CD to the sound guy, who graciously popped it in as the students were arriving in the big hall.
Music is amazing. By the time Diana Ross had belted out her “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (which figures into the early chapters) and we’d moved on to “Dancin’ in the Streets,” I was forgetting to be nauseous and tongue-tied, and about two minutes away from dancing on the platform’s table with the microphone balanced on my nose.
Here is Diana Ross performing her inimitable “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1979, the year in which the novel is set.
May stories–in music and on the written page–inspire you today to offer outrageous forgiveness, to stand by a friend, and to find a good table to dance on.
Connect with Joy
