KG: It was different for each character. For [Libertie’s college friends] Experience and Louisa, I was reading one slave narrative where they were talking about all the different names that this family of fourteen had. Some of them were biblical and some of them were obviously words they had picked out from either the Bible or some place that just struck them, things that we don’t normally name people. And with Black people and naming, of course, it’s a really fraught history in the US. When we name ourselves, we are often ridiculed for it, but we come up with absolutely beautiful names for ourselves and we have throughout our time here. I really liked that part of it.

With the character of Ben Daisy, I was thinking a lot about how much of our nicknames for people in our community are often very cruel. Just speaking from my own experience, I had an uncle who had an extra finger that got deformed, and when we were kids, we just used to call him Uncle Hooky. It wasn’t until I was like thirty years old when I was like, wait, we were calling him that because his hand looked like a hook, and that’s kind of messed up. And I don’t even know what that guy’s name was; we just knew him as Uncle Hooky. If you were to point him out to me in a picture right now, I would say, yeah, Uncle Hooky, but if my daughter were to ask me what his name was and where he was born, I couldn’t answer those questions. I wanted to explore that. And the name comes from a place of deep love but also a deep dark humor of how messed up this world is. I wanted to explore that with the character of Mr. Ben, later Ben Daisy, who is not a pariah within the community but more like the open wound the community has around slavery.

LB: Reading your lyrical prose got me thinking about how the act of creating art can invite transcendence. Like, when Libertie sings with Louisa and Experience, she feels like she has “entered something greater than my sorry, bitter self.” Does writing make you feel a similar way? Is there something else in your life that does?

KG: For me, that something is probably music, like for Libertie. With writing, I hope I get to that point. I write a lot about the past, so I don’t know if it’s really transcendent stuff, but that is what is so beautiful about the arts, any sort—visual art, music, literature, dance—that sense of transportation and that sense of being both distinctly within yourself but also being connected to something so much bigger than yourself.

The original and complete version of this interview first appeared at The Rumpus.

Questions for Discussion