A Conversation With the Author
Kathleen Grissom, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Kitchen House and Glory over Everything, in conversation with Suzanne Feldman, author of the debut novel Absalom’s Daughters
Kathleen Grissom: This story of Cassie and Judith’s friendship and road trip enchants us entirely on its own, but from the novel’s title to its location and on through its theme of racial identity, you also seem to be casting a sly and critical glance at William Faulkner’s work. It takes a lot of chutzpah to tackle Faulkner. What made you want to try that?
Suzanne Feldman: I love Faulkner—from his graceful use of language to his gothic sense of mystery, particularly in Absalom, Absalom! But even though his writing and his themes have captivated me for years, I’ve always been less than satisfied with how he treated women and African Americans. I wanted to know more about Faulkner’s interesting but overlooked characters, so I decided to write about them myself. It took a whole tool kit of lessons from great writers, though, to help me tackle Faulkner—Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edward P. Jones, among others.
KG: One of the glories of this story is simply the fun of reading about two women on their own in an old convertible car in the 1950s. What is it about the idea of a road trip that is so American, so freeing, even in fairly dangerous circumstances?
SF: It is just plain fun to break free of the nine-to-five world and zoom off! I used to periodically have to drive from Des Moines, Iowa, to Champagne, Illinois. It was something like an eight-hour trip so I’d do it at night. I’d load up the car with snacks and music and just drive. All sorts of bizarre things would happen: Huge midnight accidents would block the road for miles—people would get out of their cars and have parties on the freeway while waiting. Snowstorms would hit. Police would catch me speeding and I’d have to use my sweetest voice to get out of a ticket. I imagine, though, that the road trip experience is different for everyone depending on their color. Cassie and Judith get stopped by the police while Cassie, the black girl, is driving.
KG: Judith is white, Cassie is black, and they are half sisters. Cassie was raised by a mother and grandmother who taught her that becoming light-skinned enough to pass as white was a worthy goal. Are you trying to show anything in particular about the relationship between one’s outer identity and one’s inner person?
SF: Everyone has an outer face that they show to the world, and an inner person reserved for the people we love and trust the most. As she grows up, Cassie doesn’t really have the luxury of showing her inner person to anyone—not even her own mother. Cassie is under a lot of pressure to one day produce a light-skinned child; her deepest wish is to escape this fate of “breeding” with a white man for light-skinned children, but she doesn’t know how to do this until Judith decides to make her getaway for fame and fortune. I don’t want to give away too much, but I will say that Cassie remains true to her inner soul.
KG: There’s music in this book. Not only is Judith a singer—or a wannabe singer—but there’s music in your writing and in the dialect. In early drafts of my first novel, the Southern dialects were so thick that I had to thin them out a bit before publishing the book. How did you handle your characters’ speech?
SF: I thought the accents in The Kitchen House were beautifully done. My source for the dialect in this book was the African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston was a bit of a road-tripper herself, and in the 1920s and ’30s took her convertible down south to record the stories and “porch lies” of the black folks there. She was very careful to document the differences in dialect in different places—Southern Florida, for example, sounds different than Southern Mississippi. I tried to make sure I did this in Absalom’s Daughters by varying the accents slightly from locale to locale as the two girls travel across the South.
KG: In 1950s Mississippi, which is the bigger impediment for Cassie, her race or her class?
SF: Cassie’s race is her biggest impediment. It’s what people see first, and people have expectations about what they see. Cassie could’ve been the wealthiest little black girl in Mississippi and it wouldn’t have helped her one bit. In fact, it might have made her a target.
KG: There’s a little bit of magical realism in Absalom’s Daughters, but the book is mostly realistic fiction. You previously wrote science fiction novels, and you used a pseudonym. Why did you decide to use your real name for this book?
SF: I enjoyed writing science fiction, but after three novels, I found I wanted to write something else. I used a pen name with my science fiction novels because I was teaching high school at the time and I wanted to keep my writing and my profession separate from each other. For a while I taught at a school in a very rural part of the country, and the daughter of the local KKK’s Grand Dragon was in one of my classes. She was proud of this and would tell people about it at the drop of a hat. Racism was intrinsic at that school—I saw and heard all kinds of things that no one should be proud of, and I did my best to combat it. I think writing Absalom’s Daughters helped me to feel I was fighting back.
