By Nicole Sealey
I caught up with Tina McElroy Ansa on her way to the Up South International Book Festival in New York City. If you know McElroy Ansa, you’d know that she brought the spirit of middle Georgia with her. Her southern charm not only permeated the figures of speech she used to make this interview an absolute pleasure, but also the pages of her bestselling and anticipated novels—Baby of the Family (1989), Ugly Ways (1993), The Hand I Fan With (1996) and Taking After Mudear (2007).
She is the founder of the Sea Island Writers Retreat, co-creator of a South African/African-American book sharing program, and, most recently, an independent book publisher. McElroy Ansa wears many hats and is many things, but shy she is not. We talked plainly about the state of publishing, “urban” fiction, storytelling and the made-up town of Mulberry until—quite literally—the tape ran out.
Nicole Sealey: Congratulations on the launch of your publishing company, Down South Press. This must be an exciting time.
Tina McElroy Ansa: Down South Press is a dream that I’ve had for four or five years. It’s just amazing all that we’ve accomplished in such a short time, in only six months.
African-American writers are being pushed aside by mainstream publishers who say, “We’ve published this African writer…we’ve published that Caribbean writer…and we’ve published this Hispanic writer,” as if that sort of covers the whole color thing. So, we’re seeing fewer and fewer African-American writers and, therefore, reading less and less of the African-American experience.
It’s fine that some publishers want pulp fiction, westerns or romance, but that’s not what I publish. There’s enough room for everything. Literature is good, solid, involving stories that the author has taken time to craft. Here is where I—and people like me—come in. As a publisher, the onus is on me to find wonderful stories and serious writers. I can’t tell you what a joy it is to do what I do.
NS: I sat in on a reading you gave at the Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, Georgia earlier this year. You prefaced the reading with thoughts on the state of black literature.
TMA: Truly, Nic, mainstream publishers really aren’t giving African-American writers the respect, the attention, the time and the props that we should be given. In a sense, black books have really saved publishing. Black books sell well.
For serious writers to be told, as I’ve been told, “your writing is beautiful and the work is engaging, but do you have anything a bit more street, more ghetto?” is ridiculous. What they’re really saying is if you give me what I want, I’ll give you a book contract. What a carrot to dangle in front of an emerging writer. The burden is on us to stay the course, to write what we know in our hearts is the right thing and not what we think is going to be published.
I get emails from readers and writers saying, respectively, “I don’t have anything to read,” “I don’t want to read books that aren’t going to feed my spirit or remind me of my life” or “I can’t get a book contract.”
NS: The launch of Down South Press then is related to the state of black literature. It’s your reaction to it.
TMA: It’s totally related. I am not interested in getting into a back-and-forth with “urban” writers because I’m savvy enough and sophisticated enough to know that the market will bear what the market will bear; but, I also know that the only thing the market is producing is one kind of African-American experience. For there to be so much urban fiction right now and for it to be eating up such a huge part of the literary landscape is to the detriment of serious literature. Readers deserve to be given a choice as to what they want to read.
Fifty years from now I don’t want our children and grandchildren looking at each other saying, “What the fuck! What were they thinking? After all that we’ve come through, we got all the way to the 21st century and they just turned our literature loose.” And that’s exactly what they’ll say.
Not only do readers deserve a choice, but emerging and established writers deserve the opportunity to be published by someone who loves their work, who respects their work, who knows the culture, who knows that black folks buy books in different ways than other people buy books.
NS: Where does your work sit in relation to this?
TMA: I’ve heard Toni Morrison say that she writes the books she wants to read. I think every writer, myself included, writes the books they want to read. And, in some cases, we write the books we want other people to read. On the other hand, everybody in the world seems to be writing a book and everybody in the world isn’t supposed to be writing a book.
NS: You are definitely an author meant to write. The Chicago Sun Times wrote that your work is “rich in African-American rhythm and folklore.” How much of your storytelling is owed to your father’s juke joints?
TMA: The biggest influence in my life was the people in my life: my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles. I come from storytellers. I come from people whose stock and trade was story. Stories are real things to us. Stories are what we told at funerals, weddings, and trips to the north when I was growing up in Macon, Georgia. Stories were what we told before we went to sleep or while we sat on the porch shelling peas.
Lord were stories being told at my father’s juke joints! I can’t even imagine what my writing would be like if my father hadn’t owned juke joints and liquor stores. I grew up a little Catholic schoolgirl sitting on the edge of my father’s bar almost every day after school. I’d sit there—in my plaid skirt and white blouse—doing homework and listening to everything that was going on. At first, people censored themselves. That gets old if you’re there everyday. After a few months, people started being themselves. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. I became a part of the juke joint like the Lays potato chip rack.
NS: How much of your stories are owed to your mother?
TMA: My language is my mother’s language. That woman had a facility with language and was a ferocious reader when I was growing up and still is.
She had books all over the house. She was a very accessible mother, especially to me (the baby of the family), but not while she was reading. She had a big pink chair in the living room, her reading chair. I could interrupt her everywhere else except when she was reading in her chair. She taught me a lesson that I tell young mothers and fathers: Don’t make kids read, let them see you reading and don’t let them interrupt you while you’re reading.
I thought I was the center of her world. I would try to interrupt her and she would just say, “Not now, baby, Mama’s reading.” And when she got up, I’d pick up the book and look through it. I remember thinking, “There must be magic in this book ‘cause there aren’t even any pictures in here. There must be magic in these pages to make my mama not listen to me.” I wanted to create whatever it was that would keep my mama away from me.
NS: You’ve gone beyond that. You and your husband, filmmaker Jonee Ansa, are adapting Baby of the Family, your debut novel, for the screen.
TMA: It’s such a natural step from storytelling to filmmaking. We’ve been working on this project for seven or eight years now, which is not unusual especially for an independent film. We have a wonderful cast: Alfre Woodard, Loretta Divine, Vanessa Williams and others. It’s just ridiculous that we don’t have enough money to make it ourselves. We have everything we need except the money and the distribution.
Studios want finished projects. And, if they do put any money into it, the first thing they say is “isn’t there another character—maybe a white character—that can be added.” We’ve walked away from lots of money simply because folks felt we needed to have “a balanced cast.” What they really mean is that they’re not interested in an all-black cast.
NS: Speaking of casting, you tend to recast characters. Lena McPherson is a recurring character—she was in both Baby of the Family and The Hand I Fan With, and Taking After Mudear is the follow-up novel to Ugly Ways.
TMA: There is nowhere else I am truly “in charge” except when I’m writing. And, I’m not even in charge then because when the writing gets good the characters take over. They begin to tell me what’s going on, and in some cases they come back.
NS: Are any of these characters real people?
TMA: They’re real in the sense that they are real to me, but they’re all fictional.
NS: Will they venture out of the fictitious town of Mulberry, Georgia?
TMA: I don’t think so. When I created the town I had no intention of staying in Mulberry my whole writing career. It was just such a great literary device that there’s no reason to go anywhere else. I could spend my whole writing career there and not even begin to scratch the surface. Mulberry is a character now and it has changed over the years. It’s growing. It is a wonderful, wonderful place.