Susan Straight's third novel, The Gettin Place, is set in a Southern
California city called Rio Seco which is a lot like Riverside, the city where she lives and works.
"I've lived in Riverside all my life," Straight says. "I live three blocks from the hospital where I was
born. My husband and I were both born in that hospital, and our kids were all born there. I live
right near the river bottom, at the end of a street which is a dead end, definitely not a cul-de-sac,
and at the end of the street, it drops off into an arroyo and then there's the river bottom." She
chose the name Rio Seco because the river has become increasingly narrow over the years as
people draw on it for irrigation and water control.
The city is home to Hosea Thompson, a 76 year-old African-American who
settled in California after harrowing childhood experiences in the Tulsa riots.
He is shot and jailed when the police discover the burnt corpses of two women
on his property, and it's up to his son, Marcus, to try and uncover the truth.
Meanwhile, Marcus's nephew, Motrice, a member of a Los Angeles gang,
returns to his old neighborhood, plunging in a racially charged situation that
is set against the riots after the 1992 acquittal in the first trial of the police
officers who beat Rodney King.
RH: What led you to this particular story, framed around the
riots in 1920s Tulsa and 1990s Los Angeles?
SS: My husband's great aunt had her first baby the night of the Tulsa
riot, so I've known about it for years, as long as I've known my husband. But
no one else that I had ever spoken to outside the black community had even
heard of it. When the riots in LA happened and everybody got to see what
happened on TV, they were appalled, but nobody outside Tulsa saw those riots,
and they were almost completely erased from history. People actually went to
the library and took out the newspaper accounts. You can't find it in history
books. It took me years to find anything about the Tulsa riots that was in
print.
I wanted to write about the Tulsa riots, but I mostly wanted to write about Hosea
and his relationships with his sons, and then his grandson, because I think a
violent history like that . . . it can be repressed, but it can never be erased.
Hosea treats his family in a certain way because of what happened to him as a
child in Tulsa. He has a certain distance from the rest of the world because of
that. All the people who grew up then, how they treated their children and
their families, it was colored by what they had experienced, whether it's a
holocaust survivor or a survivor of something like the Tulsa riot. So Hosea
loved his sons but he could never coddle them or put his arms around themand
say, "I love you." That would be appalling to him, because he thought it would
make them soft and you have to be really tough to survive in this world.
RH: Motrice literally doesn't know who his father is, but at the
same time, Marcus and his brothers have a father they know
almost nothing about.
SS: Motrice was one of the characters I liked to write about the most,
even though he seemed scary to a lot of people, because he was always ooking
for something. Then what he finds is guns, but he's not a vicious, violent
person... I didn't know he was going to come out that way when I started
writing about him. I enjoyed writing about Marcus, too. But I felt kind of
sorry for him sometimes because he seems so alone.
RH: Marcus, Motrice's uncle, is somewhat isolated, too. He's
caught between the world of his family and the world downtown
where he's trying to make a living.
SS: That's exactly how I viewed him, too. He's floating. He has his
friend, he has the gourmet food downtown, he lives in a nice apartment, but
he's not really of that world. But he left Treetown, the neighborhood where
he was born, and he can't really ever go back there, either. I was glad that he
found a girlfriend, and the two of them are going to show up, briefly, in my
next book, too. While many of the characters show up over and over again, I
never wanted it to be where somebody had to go get the first book and read all
the sequels. They aren't sequels. I do it because people will come up to me and
say, "Well, whatever happened to so-and-so?" In the next book, I'll put
something about them, so they'll know what happened.
RH: Do you catch any critical flak for being a white woman who
writes about black characters and black families?
SS: I never have caught too much flack. When the first book,
Aquaboogie, came out, I was nervous, so I called David Bradley, a black
novelist from Philadelphia whom I had met. I told him, "I'm really scared, you
know." Well, his favorite answer for everything is, "Fuck that!" " If the
book's good," he told me, "it will stand up and then it's fine. Don't worry about
it, just wait and see."
I went to give a reading at Black Oak Books in Berkeley for my second book, I
Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, and a white woman
stood up and said, "Well, I don't know if you can really do this." Then a black
woman stood up and said, "Well, it was fine with me, so don't worry about it."
But the question that the white woman asked, I mean, it has weight, because
there is a tradition of white writers who go into, you know, an Alaskan Indian
community for a week and then come home and write a novel. And usually, if
they don't know the subject, they screw it up. But I put the book out there
because this is where I came from and this is what I knew. I've lived in my
neighborhood all my life, after all, and my husband is black. So I've been
really surprised by how little flak I've got, and I've been glad.
There are Chicano characters in the novel, too, and there are Vietnamese
characters. There's a Cambodian kid in this book who's based on someone that
I know here in San Francisco. He used to laugh at young black guys who
thought they were really tough because he'd be like, "You know, I've lived
through a war, where three million people died."
RH: So you've lived in this world. You can portray it because
you've seen it.
SS: You need to have an ear, too, to pay attention and keep your mouth
shut. I was always the person that sat in the corner and didn't say anything.
And everybody tells me stories all the time.
When my editor first started buying the books, she said, "I'll never mess with
your language." We can discuss the length of something, but she trusts that if
I have a word in there, that's what somebody would say. I work really hard to
make sure that people can understand my dialogue, but keep it so it still sounds
like it does in my driveway when everybody's arguing. They're always out
there fixing some old truck and arguing over car parts, then they come in and
ask me for something to eat.
RH: Had you known growing up that you wanted to be a writer?
SS: My mom taught me to read when I was three. I had to be quiet at the
babysitter's while she was at work. And I loved books and I spent lots of time
at the library. It was a safe place, the library. You can see how little and
skinny I am, and I wasn't very good at sports or anything like that. I wrote
little things growing up, but I think the first story I wrote, I probably was
sixteen. When I was nineteen or twenty, I wrote my first story about Darnell,
who shows up in this book and was the main character in Blacker than a
Thousand Midnights. But my first book wasn't published until I was nearly
thirty. It took me a long time to work on Aquaboogie because I always
had a job and I was already married, didn't have much money.
I always knew that writing was what made me happy. My friends all did drugs,
went out and did a lot of bad things. A lot of my friends are in prison. And I
really didn't want to do that. I was pretty happy going home and writing. It's
a cliché, but the typewriter was definitely my salvation. I knew I didn't want
to screw up my brain and do the stuff that my friends were doing. So, I would
go home and write a story about why it would scare me that they were doing
that. I would send those stories out to people in New York and they'd say, "Wow,
this is really bleak."
RH: But you don't picture yourself as a bleak writer.
SS: No. There are some pretty bleak things in The Gettin Place, but
I think that there's some redemption there at the end. I don't want anybody to
ever think that my stories are totally bleak. I usually try to at least have
something at the end where we know that somebody's come around a little bit.
RH: And you can afford to write full time now?
SS: No, I have a teaching job at UC Riverside, which is where I grew up
playing when I was little. We used to steal pennies out of the fountain, because
you could find enough pennies to buy a candy bar.
I wish I could write full time because it's hard between the three kids and the
job. I do most of my writing at night and as I get older, it's harder to stay up all
night. But I just won a Guggenheim award, so I'll actually be off this fall. For
the first time in fifteen years, I won't have a job that takes me out of the house
during the day. I'll be writing in the morning. That's what I wrote on my
application for the Guggenheim: "I have three kids, three rabbits, and a job, so
I have to write at night and I would like to write in the day and sleep at night
like everybody else. Love, Susan." That was pretty much the whole thing.
They must have thought it was so pathetic that they should help me out.
The next book I'm finishing up now is a lot more about women--a mother who
lost her daughter and the daughter who is trying to find her mother. [Editor's
note: That novel, Highwire Moon, has been nominated for the 2001
National Book Award.] That's pretty much the fear that comes into my life
every day now, having three kids. Somebody hit my van last week. It was
sitting in front of my house and this guy was being chased by the cops and he
just hit the van. Everybody was like, "Wow, you're not even mad. You're not
even upset." It's a van. I mean, if he had hit one of my kids, I would have
killed him right there, but I can get the van fixed. That's pretty much how I
judge everything now. You mess with my kids, I'll make sure you pay. If you
hit my house or my car or my fence or my tree, that's all right.
I'm supposed to be writing a book of essays, too. I've been asked for a couple of
years now to do a book of essays about life on my street, and my kids, and my
family, and . . . I've written ten essays that have appeared in magazines, but I
haven't really pulled them all together yet. But it's hard to write nonfiction
about your family. Although the memoir form is like bursting out all over,
some of the stuff I'd have to write about is so rough that it would be pretty
scary. I like writing about my kids but I don't ever want my kids to get mad at
me because I was making a buck off their back.
