The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) will host an evening with the award-winning author, screenwriter, and scholar Tananarive Due at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 5 at The Beverly Theater.
This program is co-presented by the Program on Race, Gender, and Policing at the William S. Boyd School of Law, as part of their Black Legal Futurism conference. The program is free and open to the public but .
Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of Jordan Peele’s “The Twilight Zone” on Paramount Plus, and two segments of Shudder’s anthology film Horror Noire.
Due’s latest novel, , is a haunting work of historical fiction set in 1950s Jim Crow Florida and is based on elements of her own family history. A finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, The Reformatory was described by Stephen King as “one of those books you can’t put down.”
Due discussed The Reformatory and her upcoming Las Vegas visit with BMI’s associate director of programs .
The following conversation was edited for length and clarity.
BMI: You're coming to Las Vegas to present as part of this larger conference put on by the Race, Gender, and Policing program at . The conference is called . How would you say The Reformatory speaks to the future from the past?
Tananarive Due: I think some very impactful Afrofuturism is by people like Octavia E. Butler, who was trying to steer change through her work by bringing awareness to where we're headed if we don't change our ways, in writing about the future.
The Reformatory in some ways is sort of the opposite. It's designed to explain our present and our future trajectory by looking at the past, because I think those of us who are living in contemporary times are so quick to dismiss the people who have come before us, both their prejudices and their triumphs, because they're just a product of their time.
And there is a degree to which that's true, but my parents knew tons of civil rights activists who were white and who were anti-racist back in the 1950s and 1960s, so not everyone was a product of their time. And I often wonder what it must have felt like to be freedom-minded in history when there was no end in sight. No end in sight to Jim Crow. No end in sight to discrimination.
I definitely wanted The Reformatory to not just be a time capsule, but a primer. If a family has a child snatched away by police in 2024, they are just as helpless to get their child out of chains and get their child out of the cage as a parent would have been in 1950. So in a lot of ways, even though we're not living under this monster of official Jim Crow, we are definitely living within the vestiges of that system, which has set up biases in policing.
That bias is so insidious! And one of the things that fuels it unfortunately, is our national love affair with police procedurals. Television policing and actual policing are very different. And so we're driven by this kind of cop-aganda society, where we're forever in the point of view of the officers and much more infrequently in the point of view of the people who are being arrested or sometimes targeted for no reason. You don't often see police shows where people are targeted for no reason. That's not a good plot line.
So The Reformatory, although it is set in 1950, is really intended to show the roots of modern-day policing, where in 2024, I'm just as nervous if there's a blue light going off behind me, and I get pulled over, as Ms. Lottie was in 1950, when a blue light is pulling her over on a deserted road, because you don't know which officer is behind the wheel. The school to prison pipeline is real. It is something that Black and brown parents are dealing with on a daily basis, and frankly, children are more criminalized overall in 2024 than they were in 1950.
BMI: You’ve talked about the character John Dorsey being loosely modeled on your father, and Gloria being named for, and in some ways modeled after, your mother. Can you talk about how you negotiated bringing fact into this fictionalized world?
Tananarive Due: It's just such a tough, tough story that left so many scars on so many children, generationally, that fiction and horror were the kindest way to tell the story. The most gentle way to tell the story is to tell it with ghosts, because the ghosts pay homage to the fact that a lot of children died here, but I don't have to write page after page after page of children dying.
For me, even though I had chosen fiction as the the more palatable way to tell this story, I didn't want it to be so fictionalized that it didn't bear any resemblance to the true history of Florida, and one of the advantages of changing it from 1937 to 1950 was because 1950 was the era of my mother's childhood, and because I'd spoken with her so much about that when we were working together I just knew that era so much better.
But the main thing is, I wanted it to be at the cusp of the civil rights era. I wanted it to be right before Emmett Till. Right before the Montgomery bus boycott in the late 1950s, and moving into 1960, when my mother was first arrested. I wanted it to be just before that, with kind of a hint at a future that we knew as the reader is coming that the characters can't quite yet, except through metaphysical means.
One of the reasons I added the conceit that the way you summon a haint [the characters’ term for “ghost”] is to call out their name is because of that contemporary “say their names” movement. That was absolutely deliberate, because their names have not been spoken. Because it's been so long since anyone has thought of them or uttered their name out loud. So [in the book], that is almost irresistible to a haint, when you say their full name.
BMI: There's so much lore around ghosts and haints in the book, as you were talking about before. Can you talk a little bit about what you were drawing from, to construct the lore around the ghosts in the book?
Tananarive Due: I knew there would be ghosts in the story from the very beginning, and I knew that I wanted to use the model of ghosts that I heard from the former proprietor of the Scott Joplin House in St. Louis. I wrote a whole book called Joplin's Ghost based on one conversation with this man who believed that he had seen Scott Joplin's ghost. I asked, “Well, was he see- through? Was he shimmering?” And he was like, “No, he just looked like a regular guy.” I found that fascinating. And I wanted to return to that idea that a ghost would look just like any flesh and blood person if they choose, or if they have enough power to do that.
They do have their own little haint subculture. I mean, they want to be free, and they want their stories to be known, which is something familiar we understand about most ghosts. Often ghosts just want people to know how they died. But at a place like this, where there are so many of them, and the terrors have continued generation after generation, a lot of them have probably chosen to stay there to try to figure out a way to get their revenge, and Blue is just the strongest of them. He's like the sort of revolutionary leader of the haints.
BMI: You mentioned in the acknowledgments that you have envisioned this as maybe a television series or movie. Are you able to talk at all about any future projects related to the book?
Tananarive Due: This is my first novel that was optioned before it was published. It was optioned a couple of years ago by SK Global, which did Crazy Rich Asians and where one of the producers is my 10th-grade English teacher. Mr. Mitchell Kaplan, who, when I was 15, read an entire handwritten novel. We go way back. And now we're just trying to figure out how to navigate very, very difficult times in Hollywood to get it made. It's very difficult for everyone to get a project made, but when it's a Black project, it's always gonna be that much more difficult. And a Black period project is an extra layer of complications. So it'll need the right home and the right champion. But we are talking to a director that I like, and we're pitching it for TV. So knock on wood!
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