Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Dr. Tara Green who has degrees in English from Louisiana State University and Dillard University. She has 25 years of teaching experience. She is currently a professor of African-American Studies at the University of Houston. Two books came out recently - Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson as well as See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era. So I'd like to first talk about your book about Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Most people probably aren't even aware of who she is, and if they are, it is probably in relation to her ex-husband, who is the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. I'm from Ohio and so Laurence Dunbar is someone that we talk about a lot here, and usually in a highly positive light. So if you'd like to just talk a little bit about the book, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, which is available from Bloomsbury.
Tara: Thank you for allowing me to be on the show today. I grew up in the New Orleans area, and I did not know about Alice Dunbar-Nelson. I was not aware of her work until I was a student at Dillard University. Just so happens I was an English major. I can still remember reading her work for the first time. Actually, I think I remember the impression that I got from her work. I can't even remember which short story I read, and that was when I found out that she had graduated from an iteration of the institution that is now Dillard University. She graduated from Straight University. Some years later I would wonder, why did she leave New Orleans to marry Paul Laurence Dunbar? Because I knew that colorism - the discrimination that occurs because of people of color, this is something that we deal with in various communities. Lighter skin people have a certain kind of privilege, and she was in New Orleans and she was very light-skinned. So why would she marry Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was a darker skinned man, even though he was a famous man? And so the book really looks at not only their relationship from her perspective, but the life that she had as a political activist, and as a teacher, and as a child growing up in New Orleans before she even met him. And then he was not actually her ex-husband, but her first husband. She would become his respected widow after his death. Then she would marry two other men, but she would continue with her careers as a suffragist, a political activist with the Republican Party. She just did so much. She was a member of the Black Women's Club that was certainly committed to the uplift of the black race at a time of severe and overt discrimination, not only in the south, but in other parts of the country as well. So there was so much to learn about her, and it took me 10 years to pull that project together.
Mindy: That is a real work of the heart then. That's a ton of research, a ton of dedication, a ton of delving into an area that I think people are really kind of beginning to understand. So many women, especially minorities, moving in the background, moving in the shadows to be active and to take risks and do the things that they did. And we don't even know their names.
Tara: Yeah, and she was just one of many. It's kind of easy to point to her in some ways, because she was well-known. And she was well-known because she kept her husband's, her first husband's, name in the air, if you will. So she became the one who had the access to his royalties because she stayed married to him. That was the smart thing. And she kept his last name even when she married twice more. She was one who was in the spotlight, but there were hundreds of black women who were involved with the Black Club Women's Movement in rural towns and larger cities in the country. And their names we do not know, but they were fighting for a better United States of America.
Mindy: Talking about doing that research and working on something for 10 years - how do you go about putting together all of that information? And how do you decide what makes it into the book? Because I'm sure, just as a novelist, I know how much research I do to write fiction and how little of it actually ends up in the book. Give me an idea of what that process is like when you're working on non-fiction and obviously just really dedicating yourself to research.
Tara: It was quite the challenge, and I think that's why it took 10 years. I would think that I was finished. I would send it out. Readers would say, "We don't like this because of these reasons," and it was usually because I didn't have enough. It was never because I had too much. Develop here. Why didn't you say this about that? So her archives, most of her materials were sold to the University of Delaware, and that was my starting place. They have housed diaries, scrapbooks, unpublished works, published works and their various iterations, letters. So all of these materials were available. There were some scholars who had done some work but no one had written a biography. So how do I come to it and make those decisions? I have to look at and think about what has already been published. So that's, of course, part of the research, and then I try to, as much as possible, trace a chronology. I also had to consider my audience. What is it that an audience - who does not have the training that I have as a literary scholar - what is it that they would need to know? So I would find myself repeating things at times and saying things that I might not ordinarily say if I had a primary audience of literary scholars who may have known her work, or maybe history bluffs who know loads of stuff about what happened in Wilmington, Delaware at a specific time, because that's where she spent most of her life. So I had to think for multiple readers, and that was something that I had not done before. So this was a different journey for me as a writer.
Mindy: And when you're talking about having to consider what else has been done, like what work is already out there, that's not so different from writing fiction where you really do have to consider the market. You can't just be someone who is like, I'm really passionate about this one thing and this one person, and I want you to be too. It doesn't work that way.
Tara: Yeah, and publishers will not publish if you're going with a certain kind of press. But publishers won't publish unless you can tell them that there's a market and then who that market is. So saying, "Oh... Well, this is unique and nobody has written about this before" - I just read an editor say this on Twitter - that's ridiculous. If this is so unique and no one has written about it before, there may be a reason for that. The marketing becomes really important. I really had to think, not so much as a person with this PhD in English. I had to use that to do the research, because I've been doing archival work since I was in graduate school. So I knew how to do that research, but writing that research in such a way that it could be an interesting story and to introduce to readers all of this work that people generally just don't know anything about because either it hadn't been published or, as you said, they just don't know Alice Dunbar-Nelson. They know Paul Laurence, but they don't know her. So how do I talk about her work and talk about it in such a way that it shows who she was as a person, who she was as a political activist, and who she was as a black woman living at a specific time.
Mindy: So many corners and so many pieces of the puzzle that create a whole human being. And yet also, you said you had her archives. So you're working with not only a person who is highly present in the public arena, but you're also attempting to construct part of a personal life as well. To bring about that whole picture. To bring about all of those elements together to create a whole person, and I think that can be extremely difficult when you're dealing with a historical figure that you also admire and uphold.
Tara: Yeah, and because I've done that before to write shorter biographies - I did that, I wrote about black men and their relationships with their fathers in a previous text - I knew that I could not get emotionally attached to her. That was really important. Try to see what she saw through her perspective and to tell that story, but to remember that I'm a biographer and that I'm not Alice Dunbar-Nelson. So that was extremely important to me because I've had a situation where I got too close to the subject and found myself crying and hoping that - this was actually with Malcolm X - and hoping that he wouldn't get killed at the end of his biography, which is ridiculous, right? Because the man was murdered in 1965. But I got so attached to him. I don't usually talk about that. It may even be obvious in my work. And I think I'm as protective of her as I would be with any black woman subject that I'm writing about, but not to the extreme that there are times when I say, "You know, that just wasn't right, honey. That was ugly, what you did there," right? I try, there are times when I just try to be objective and say, "This is what happened." She has affairs and she's married, and people have taken me to task. Well, that's what happened. She's a bisexual woman. I talked to Christian woman who have questions about that. That's not my issue. My mission is to present the facts in the story. This is who she was.
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. You're a biographer and you are bringing the truth to page. And a whole life, a whole person, is never going to always be pretty, and that's just the way it is. It doesn't matter who you're looking at, I don't think.
Tara: Yeah and that's what makes us interesting.
Mindy: Absolutely, I agree. I mean, God forbid, I don't want anybody to ever write my biography. Jesus, no. But I'm from a very, very, very small town in Ohio, and we actually have an author who was from here. Her name is Dawn Powell, and literally no one knows who she is. She is lost in the shuffle. She's an amazing novelist. She was friends with Tolstoy. She is just this really cool person that had a really cool life and did some amazing things. But she also had some tragic things in her life and some things that were questionable to certain groups of people. And when I read her biography - similar feelings, because I do feel drawn to this person who is a writer like me, from an extremely small town. She actually wrote a short story about the town that I live in and am from. I have a great affinity with her, and I can be emotional about her. But nobody is canonized here. We're all just people.
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Mindy: So I wanna talk a little bit too about See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era. So tell us a little bit about what that book is about and the spectrum of everything that it covers.
Tara: Again, it goes back to my interest in biography and the lives of black women at a particular time. In many ways, it's certainly in conversation with the Alice book, as I call it, Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. I almost wanna call it a sequel, but it's funny because the Alice book came out of January and this book came out in February. But again, I wrote Alice over a 10-year period, and this book was written maybe in the seventh, eighth year, I started writing that book. And why did I start writing that book? Well, because Alice Dunbar-Nelson gave so much of herself to activism, to uplifting the lives of black people, and of course, changing perspectives about black people in the United States of America. She was, along with those other black activists, the kind of American that we would want to see. She wanted a better country. She dies, though, in 1935. She had some ailments. She was in poor health for much of her life, and part of that probably came from the abuse that she suffered in her marriage with Paul Laurence.
But I began to wonder what about black women who are making a life and they put themselves first? Who did that? What did that look like? So then if the community or the race benefits from the work that they're doing, that's great, but what if it's not their priority? And so that's why they're in conversation because I wanted to look at black women from a different perspective, and this also comes with the fact that over a ten-year period, I'm also getting older. So my perspective is changing as well. And we have the Black Lives Matter movement, Obama's re-election, and so all of our country is changing in the time in which I'm writing. I looked at four black women: Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, W. E. B. Du Bois' daughter Yolande Du Bois, Memphis Minnie, who's a blue singer. So four black women from different walks of life who were born in the late 1800s, who lived late 1800s to 1900, who lived maybe into the 70s, 80s - Lena Horne lives a little bit longer - but what did it look like for these women who live their lives.
Moms Mabley was a comedian, so she certainly brought pleasure to others. She was very successful as a comedian. She was also a lesbian at a time in which same-sex relationships... people could find themselves being jailed. But everybody knew that she was a lesbian. So we have her. We have this eloquent woman in the form of Lena Horne, who was also a civil right movement. Memphis Minnie, very little work on her, but she was someone who was a pioneer in country blues music. As her name suggests, she was a southern woman. So I always wanna include some perspective on Southern-ness in my work because I'm from the south - for generations now. And I wanted to write about her music and what it meant for this blues woman to talk openly about finding pleasure in sex, what she would do if a man mistreated her. So I really enjoyed listening to her music and invite others to do so as well. And then we have Yolande Du Bois, who was a black woman of privilege, being of the upper class. Her father was the most renowned scholar in the country with an international reputation. I'm able to track her life through letters and found out so much about her because, like Alice Dunbar-Nelson, I wanted to separate her from this famous man and to look closely at who she was and what did pleasure look like for her. I enjoyed writing, and I finished writing it during the first year of the pandemic. So it ends with me discussing what pleasure looks like for me during a particular time. I guess I would say all of my books are my favorites because I wrote them. But that was a book that I feel like I'm glad that I wrote it. I started writing it before a pandemic that we didn't know what's coming, but that I was able to finish it at that time because I needed to finish it at that time. That was the book that I would have wanted to write during a pandemic.
Mindy: When we talk about women's desire, women's sexuality, and just women even having desire, I feel like to a lot of people, amazingly, this is still news. And I think that's ridiculous, number one. But being a woman and moving through the world and declaring that you do, in fact, have desires and have specific things that you are or are not attracted to, or that you have wants in the first place, it still seems to be kind of a shocker for a lot of people. And there's an extra wrinkle there when you're a person of color. So if you can talk about that a little bit. That would be fascinating.
Tara: Well, yeah, I do talk about in the introduction that we have to consider for black women this history in the United States and other parts of the world, also the history of slavery and of rape. And so then how do black women define themselves outside of that history? So what's the impact of that history of that trauma? Black women are often placed into these stereotypical categories. And so then if a black woman, especially if she's light skin, desires to have sex or desires to be looked at as a sexual being, then she's probably thought of then as this Jezebel figure. This slut. This woman who we see it now as being the welfare queen, the welfare mother. She has all these children. There are no fathers, and it's because she's just irresponsible. I think even in conversations about abortion and the impact that that has on black women, that in the back of the mind when we discuss the greater impact on black women, that stereotype is still going to force its way through. If black women are greatly impacted and they need abortions, then it's probably because they are more sexually irresponsible in this animalistic way than women of other races. We always have to deal with this history that was thrust upon us. This is the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade - one of many legacies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. And so what I had to do was to discuss that, but I couldn't stay in that. I do talk about what pleasure looks like for black women. It can be laughter. It can be being with a lover of choice, of consenting to that. Or during the pandemic, you know, for some of us, it could be something as simple as cooking. It could be listening to music or performing. Performance means so much - it's multi-layered. So those are some of the things that I get into in the book.
Mindy: I think it's so true, what you're saying about the pandemic kind of helping us to find other sources of pleasure, I think, in life. And yes, touch is amazing. And having a partner or someone that you're with... those are all wonderful things and I wouldn't trade them for anything. I think the pandemic really made us sit down and think about other ways to fulfill ourselves. So you were talking about using the time to write the book and it was the specific book that you needed at that time. I was similar in that I undertook some projects that normally I would not have done. This is my shut-in time. This is my sphere. This is my cone, and now is the time for me to do the introspective work and work on myself too, in a lot of ways.
Tara: Those are times where I think that we were asked to redefine ourselves. So some people gained weight, for example, during the pandemic. And I decided that that was gonna be the time where I was going to lose weight, and I began to do a lot of walking. And I had moved into this neighborhood a year before, and I was the person of color in the neighborhood. And this was also the time in which Ahmaud Arbery is shot jogging through a neighborhood in Georgia. So when I talk about walking, walking isn't just a pleasurable experience. It's also an experience where I have to navigate how I understand that the world sees me. And all of this is in the book. Because if I have to experience this in 2020-whatever, think about how these black women are having these kinds of experiences in the early 1900s. One aspect that I'm also talking about is black women's performance versus the voyeuristic perspective that she has to deal with and navigate - that challenge of the voyeuristic perspective. Which on one hand could mean, for someone like Moms Mabley, if the audience is looking at her, then she's making money off that. If she's not on the stage, what happens when she's walking around. Lena Horne has this wonderful line in her biography where she says there were times where she just hated white men looking at her when she performed. Now, her second husband was a white man. So we look at the multi-layers of complexity. What it means to be a black person in America - how some things change but some things are just the same as they always were.
Mindy: We all just have to listen to each other, because you took the opportunity of the pandemic to walk and to exercise and you lost weight. I did too. I started running during the pandemic, which I'd never done before, but my story as a white woman is completely different from yours. And the story of a man who says, "I'm going to start jogging during the pandemic," of a white man that makes this decision is completely different from the story of any woman, and a black man's story is completely different from the white man. It's just... I know that's all simplistic. I know I am not making any large discoveries here. It's just something that I am constantly reminding myself because you started to talk about - yeah, I started running and I wanted be like, "Oh my gosh, me too!" And then I'm like, “Oh yeah, but it was a completely different experience on your end, I'm sure.”
Tara: Yeah, it's the kinds of things that we have to think about before leaving. Of course, never leaving the house without a license. Putting on a t-shirt of the university where I work and not wearing other kinds of t-shirts that may present in certain ways. But certainly, I never would walk around that neighborhood without having the university t-shirt on in the biggest letters that I could have, these large letters. I would make sure that I have that t-shirt on because it showed that I belong to something that people respected.
Mindy: Wow that is so fucked up. I know you know that, but shit. Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find any of your books, but most especially Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, which is available from Bloomsbury as well as See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era.
Tara: Well, there are links to my work and more information about me at www.drtaratgreen.com. Those books are available by the publisher. See Me Naked is available through Rutgers University Press. As you've mentioned, Bloomsbury has the Alice Dunbar-Nelson book. They are available through online book stores, but I always encourage people to purchase their books from independent book stores - local independent bookstores. But you can also, if there is not a black-owned bookstore in your area, and that may be the case, then go online because there are many black-owned bookstores, such as Community Bookstore in New Orleans, which you can order from online. And I'm just saying New Orleans because I'm from there, and I've done a book signing there. So I know that they'll take care of you.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.