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.