An interview with Jewell Parker Rhodes.

On March 31, 1995, Jewell Parker Rhodes arrived in Warrensburg, Missouri, for a speaking engagement at Central Missouri State University. Her topic was Voodoo Dreams, published by St. Martin's Press in 1993, and now available in paperback from Picador, U.S.A.

In the two days Rhodes was on Central's campus, she visited a creative writing class and delivered a lecture to the larger university. Later, she held an author's signing at Warrensburg Books, along with Brenda Nelson, the model whose portrait graces the book's dust jacket. The person who arranged for Rhodes's visit to campus, Barbara C. Rhodes (no relation to the author), asked the author if she would agree to an interview about the making of Voodoo Dreams. Jewell Parker Rhodes generously suggested a one-hour interview, but when she warmed to her topic, the discussion lasted well beyond the allotted time. The interview that follows treats three general subjects: the author's preparation for writing the novel, the story of the novel, and the story of the author herself. The original text has been compressed for readability, but every effort has been made to maintain the author's original meaning.

Ramsey: You titled your novel Voodoo Dreams:, and we're wondering, why Dreams?

Rhodes: Actually, that title was selected by Hope Dellon, my editor at St. Martin's Press. My title was Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen. I worked with that title for several decades, but they didn't think it had the marketing appeal that it should. We went through a whole list of alternatives and, of all of them, Voodoo Dreams was the best. There were ways in which, once having said Voodoo Dreams, it made me think about dreams within the context of the novel - the dreams of a young woman trying to become a woman, the dreams of love, the dreams of spirituality, and Damballah possession - Marie dreaming Jacques home after he's been murdered. She dreams him home to Africa, which I see as her acting as a spirit guide or midwife to his other life. So dreams, I think, finally do work, but it was not my original title.

Barbara Rhodes: In your Author's Statement' you indicate that the experience of writing your novel gave you great satisfaction.

Rhodes: I think, since it was such a multi-year process, the satisfaction really came from the second time that I went back to the manuscript, the second comprehensive draft. There I learned to appreciate writing as a process, to identify with the pleasure of the moment, the pleasure of getting this paragraph right, this scene right, the pleasure of just thinking, well, what else can I do here that I haven't done? I took a great joy out of that. I always got, I think, a spiritual satisfaction because I felt so connected to Marie Laveau and so connected to my grandmother. There are ways in which I was writing to save my own life. When I came back to the manuscript for that second draft, I hadn't written for about three years - nonfiction, short stories, anything - and I had this feeling that if I didn't achieve this goal that my life would be diminished. So when I finally achieved it, or felt that I had achieved it, I felt wonderful. I truly enjoyed the journey, the process of getting there, and that became a kind of armor that kept me from feeling insecure about what happened next, the various stages of publishing.

Barbara Rhodes: I heard you say something like that last night when you were talking to the class, that you have to write for your own satisfaction. The writing comes first, and then you have to become the business person on the publishing side.

Rhodes: Yes, but it took three years before a publisher finally said yes to the manuscript, and accepted it for publication. And that was another three years in which I could easily have said, "I am not any good. I'm worthless as an artist." I think that is all connected to the struggle I had as an African American woman who was not surrounded by a family of books, not surrounded by my vision or the role model of other writers. It was very difficult for me to even say, "I want to be a writer." So I think that if I hadn't had that moment of satisfaction, of just sheer pleasure in the doing of it and doing it for myself, that, in the three years that I was waiting for New York to do its thing, I could easily have undermined myself. So the self-esteem became linked in a more adult way, a more responsible way to me in my own work and my own judgment and valuing my own work. That was a good thing for me.

Ramsey: What you strive for in the novel is realism, a lot of detail about voodoo ceremony, for instance. In that sense it's an historical novel. What genre do you assign it to?

Rhodes: I'll say historical novel. I'm comfortable with that, although I never thought I was an historical novelist in some sense. I think there are ways in which some people talk about the novel being magical realist or having magical realism qualities. But my argument is that it is a part of the folklore tradition. So in some sense, I'd say it's a cousin to Zora Neale Hurston's work in that there is an African American folklore experience that is embodied in voodoo. I am also comfortable calling it an historical novel, though history . . . everybody wants to know how much research, how much history, how much is true. It's almost as though the more I say, "Oh, this is true," or, "Yes, I spent a thousand years in a library," that authenticates the manuscript in ways which are essential to some people, and that's so strange because the art of fiction is telling imaginative lies. The notion that my book is somehow or other more satisfying to some people because they see it as rooted in history I find bemusing, and the answer finally is that history is very much fictional. I mean, we can talk about how certain events happened, but people's perceptions and detailing of that history sometimes result in a work of fiction or work of particular sensibilities. So, while Voodoo Dreams is an historical novel, it should be underscored that it is a novel, an imaginative lie that tells a great deal of truth about what it might have been like to be Marie Laveau in the nineteenth century, and this might be more authentic in some ways than so-called histories.

Ramsey: There is, of course, quite a history behind the story of Marie Laveau and the story of voodoo in this country. What kind of research did you do to shape your thinking?

Rhodes: I did a lot of work reading about the Dahomean western religions and the Dahomean faith of voudon, a lot of materials on the diaspora in trying to understand how various religions were shaped when slaves touched down in Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana. I began to understand that there was a kinship between voodoo and Santeria, Haitian voudon, Brazilian manifestations, and even the Jamaican Rastafarian movement. So there was a lot of reading in religion, in anthropology, and in history texts, and then a lot more general books, more . . . about the spirits, voudon gods. There is Tallant's book, of course, that everybody reads, Alfred Metraux the anthropologist; there were a slew of others. And then a lot of it involved looking at catalogs of dress, of clothing, of streets and maps of New Orleans - a lot of detail to get the landscape; a lot of looking at old newspapers and references within the Daily Picayune to Marie Laveau; a lot of talking to people; and then doing something on medical case histories of people who claim to be hexed by voodoo. I would say Metraux's Voodoo in Haiti had the most profound impact, because it's a very responsible, representative book that leads one to understand the true system of the religion in ways that are not demeaning, and that was really important for me.

Ramsey: Based on your research nowadays, or even back when you were writing, is there a resurgence of interest in voodoo in this country?

Rhodes: I think that there is a resurgence of interest in spirituality and that spirituality can be colored by African American and Latin American traditions, but I think that Americans in their quest for peace and sense of self and awareness of the world are really exploding with this sense of all cultures or cross-cultural spiritualities that might in fact speak to them, which I think is exciting and wondrous. So I don't think that there is necessarily a resurgence in voodoo per se. People are finding paths of their own and are much more open to trying to pursue all kinds of things. While African Americans are in fact buying my book, there are a lot of white women in particular, apparently, that are buying the book. I mean, the marketing people really think white women are a core audience, and I think there are ways in which white American women have really helped sustain and fuel, along with ethnic groups, the explosion in diverse voices. I think that in some sense there have been all these other premier teachers - if you talk about Ana Castillo, or Borges, or Toni Morrison, or Leslie Marmon Silko - that have opened up windows to the spiritual sense of the world. Women attuned to that are ready to open up the door, just open it up, to another one, and I think that is what helps Voodoo Dreams. Within African American cultural traditions, I think you do find that, because of the resurgence of interest in Zora Neale Hurston, and in particular the new editions by Henry Louis Gates, that you have more and more people within my cultural tradition now aware of voodoo and the respect for folklore. So that in some sense is the other drive; you have a drive within my own community of people seeking themselves - and now open through Zora Neale, I think in large part. This whole notion of folklore and folk speech is at the root of our cultural traditions. And then, because of all the diversity within publishing on college campuses, there are a lot of women who are outside my ethnic group and men - because men read the book, too - who are interested in the novel. There's a new explosion of people ready to listen to many different voices, regardless of color, regardless of gentler, and I think that's wonderful.

Barbara Rhodes: That is a wonderful insight, too.

Rhodes: When the novel was first sent out, besides the book not being ready, we had Alice Walker, Toni Morrison was just coming out, but there was no Amy Tan, there was no Leslie Marmon Silko, there was no Julia Alvarez, and the letters of publishers responding to what I was doing questioned whether the book was universal enough. That was perhaps twelve years ago; no one would say that now. Ballantine Books has One World in print; within all the catalogs of publishers you'll see a section on ethnic literature and women's studies. So, in some sense, I feel that the publishing world has changed, and that made it possible for my book to have an audience, to be published in a way that is very different from if I were trying to publish the book in the 1960s or '70s.

Barbara Rhodes: Even Zora Neale Hurston had this problem when she was writing her books. They edited and took out chapters, and they wouldn't allow her to do this and that.

Rhodes: Their Eyes Were Watching God sort of spread around to women's studies programs, became a cult classic. In ways women's studies programs have fueled the interest in multiethnic women's voices. But I don't think there was that sense of permeating across the nation until Gates did his edition. There are ways in which, all of a sudden, it became canonized within even African American studies. Henry Louis Gates's edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Harper Perennial - you know, the mass market, prestigious New York press - is smack-dab in the middle of the bestsellers list for 200 independent bookstores. Zora Neale Hurston, after death, is selling hundreds and hundreds of books every week, and that is such a cause for celebration! You know, her work is still alive, and that has a lot to do with the success of my voice.

Barbara Rhodes: Your book has moved up, too.

Rhodes: Yes! Yes! It has moved up.

Barbara Rhodes: How can I find out about that list?

Rhodes: Well, Wordstock, I think, the people who are on the list, and there are certain bookstores - Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, Left Bank Books in St. Louis, I believe, Vertigo Books off DuPont Circle - but I don't know all 200. My publishers just send it to me. Shipping News is number one; it's been number one for quite some time.

Barbara Rhodes: Shipping News?

Rhodes: Yes, the last time I looked at it, the book had sold 365 copies that week in just these 200 independent bookstores. So when you think about that, that Shipping News is having a resounding success across the country - because it doesn't take in Borders, Bookstar - that is wonderful, but Zora Neale is there; Shakespeare's As You Like It is there. Yes! The independent bookstores have a different audience. Apparently I am selling well at chains, but I think there is a way in which an independent bookstore - and here I'm generalizing - which has a much more eclectic, literary audience that's going into the independent store . . . I don't know that that is necessarily true, but the marketing people believe that the book is doing very well at the independents, maybe with a lot of independent readers, whereas the book might not be doing so well at the bookstores where they put more commercial titles front and center.

Ramsey: To get back now to the work itself. You have headnotes taken from a fictive journal at the top of your chapters. How did you come up with that idea?

Rhodes: Gosh, I don't know. (Laughter) I knew I wanted to have a white journalist who reflected the ways in which the Daily Picayune commented on Marie Laveau's activities - sometimes to her dismay, I would imagine; sometimes, really in support of this extraordinary woman, even the obituary, to which you'll find references in Tallant. Some say she was a devil and some say she was just a saint. I found it interesting how journalism impacted upon her life and probably had a great deal to do with her popularity, and how journalism, then, depending on who wrote it, vacillated between whether she was or wasn't a charlatan. I also wanted this notion of a white male to stand in for of all the other people, all the other white males who had written about Marie Laveau. But unlike a lot, who I think were misguided in their perceptions because they were limited by their time and place, I wanted Louis DeLavier to develop and grow. I wanted him as another sort of journalistic truth seeker, to witness and understand and overcome his biases to get to the truth of Marie Laveau.

I was also playing with the sense of what truth is. So in the scene in which Marie Laveau walks on water, there's a moment when Damballah has taken her to a quiet place. And then that scene is immediately juxtaposed with Louis DeLavier, saying, "It happened." You know, this woman walked. Now, there are ways in which the newspaper . . . it's true, but it's demeaning, less authentic, than the experience of my recreating the scene when Marie Laveau was possessed by Damballah. And so I was playing with the limitations of journalism. Just because Louis DeLavier, a white man, now says it's so, that has nothing to do with the fact that it was so - an authentic moment. But yet, still within that time frame, and even today, because somebody read it in the newspaper, there are ways in which they will give that more validity than even the experience itself. So I was playing with that, and I don't know that everyone understands that, but if you look at the language of that text of Louis DeLavier talking about a miracle, it's very, in some sense, hysterical, a sort of dulled-in comparison, I hope, to the actual experience.

Ramsey: So, you're saying that there was a body of literature in the Picayune?

Rhodes: Yes. There were pieces that appeared, and you can also find references in Tallant; they spoke about the walking-on-water scene; they spoke about the scene in which the two men were hung. They also then spoke about evil Marie Laveau; they also ran the obituary notice that Marie Laveau was, you know, dead, and there were charms. So, in some sense, the newspaper existed and served as a way to make Marie known within both the black and white communities, and then there's the whole interesting thing of how an African American woman can achieve a kind of celebrity. So there are ways that the Daily Picayune helped to increase her popularity. I wanted to maintain that sense of journalism and its presence within that world.

Then I had to create Louis DeLavier as a character. He only writes a few articles in the book, yet his diaries, as an expression of his intimate self, constitute the other narrative line that comes together within the context of the novel. I think that in some ways the diary is a predominant text because you have his search for understanding himself as a man, his tendency to be seduced by the sensual, his tendency to want to put women on a pedestal and not see women as women, and his Northern liberalism and his sense of God coming into question. So the diary is his journey, and when he actually makes his articles for the Daily Picayune, we see the private man trying to make a public statement about something he now believes in. Not all of these articles, of course, are accepted. As a matter of fact, I'd have to check the one about her walking on water. I think that might have been rejected.

Ramsey: I think that you do say that.

Rhodes: Yes, when he finally makes the true journalistic statement, or tries to lure people to the other woman behind this veil, that's not what that community wants to hear, and so the articles were rejected. I sort of play around with that.

Ramsey: About Marie Laveau herself, she seems to be alone in much of the novel. Why does this happen to her?

Rhodes: For a couple of reasons. When I was trying to do the research on Marie Laveau, I couldn't really find anything about her before the age of 23 or so. She's like a ghost person, and then all of a sudden she explodes on the scene. Then you have this other legend that, near the end of her life, her daughter imprisoned her, so she becomes another sort of ghost figure, while the daughter goes into the streets and says, "I'm my mother reborn." Those are sort of bookends: Where did she come from? . . . How did she really end? And this confusion about when she died made her kind of a ghostly, invisible figure. It seems to me that, if somebody has a sense of herself, she doesn't explode all of a sudden at 23 the way that history tells it. That leads into the whole idea of the ghost figure and creating that sense of Bayou Teche and having to be kept hidden within the bayou, which makes her invisible to her culture as well as invisible to herself, because she doesn't know her historical roots.

This probably also connects to my own development as a person and a writer. When I was very young, my mother left the family home and was gone for many years. We don't - or I don't - know where she went. She came back at another point, and then later on, when I was a teenager, she asked me to leave the household. So I was very much alone during my growing up years. I was the kid who went in the back and sort of curled up and spent hours reading books, or the kid that was different. People used to call me the little professor. There are ways in which I was always alienated in very profound ways that are connected, I think, to this sense of, Why did my mother go, and where did she go? So, when I started to write Voodoo Dreams, I did not realize that there were ways in which the novel spoke to my own history. I remember being in Buffalo, New York, when it dawned on me that I was writing about my own relationship to my grandmother and to my mother.

It's interesting that for many years, nearly a decade, I fooled myself into thinking that I was just writing about Marie Laveau. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks that I was writing about a daughter trying to find her mother. I think the sad thing - and I don't know whether this is a problem with my vision of the book - is that Marie never finds love. There are ways in which I have her pay the price for being who she is, a strong, wondrous one by the end of the book, but yet not having love. I don't think that I hit it too hard, but there is an awareness that she doesn't have a man that loves her that she loves. Louis DeLavier loves her, Jacques Paris loves her, but there's no man that she loves in a healthy way. She loves John, but that's just sex, and she really loves her own response to sexuality and has to discover that. Her daughter, whom she loved, leaves as well - that's getting back into the other part of the legend in the history of invisible Marie as an old woman.

So I wonder about that. One of the things about my life is that, in terms of male-female relationships, I have been incredibly well loved. My first husband, Eduardo Rhodes, and my second husband Brad, to whom the book is dedicated - both of these wondrous men very much supported me and helped my voice. So it's interesting that Marie never found her love. The real Marie apparently married and had sixteen kids. I mean, she had many, many different lovers, and maybe that had a lot to with it. I don't know. But I'm surprised that she didn't love and go off into the sunset.

I think there are ways in which, structurally, I can also understand it; it's like at the end of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie finds Tea Cake, but Hurston allows Tea Cake to die. There are ways, then, in which Tea Cake fuels and sustains her in his memory, in their love. I think that, in trying to talk about empowering a woman's voice, there are ways by which linking it with romantic love that you can just deflect. The strength is really in the woman, as opposed to the strength comes in the romantic love connection. So that might have been part of my hidden impulse; I wanted people to believe in the strength of Marie. There are, you know, ways in which Hurston, by not having Janie's husband sustain her, by never giving her children, makes it very clear that Janie is strong on her own. But Janie does have memories. I do not give Marie any memories.

Ramsey: Marie seems to be trapped in her loneliness partly because of her talent to go in to a voodoo trance. Is this her blessing or also her curse?

Rhodes: You hit it right on the head. It's the combination. I think that there are penalties that people pay for extraordinary gifts, and clearly there are ways in which Marie is extraordinary as well as ordinary. Both of those things are very important to me. She was not intended to be someone so extraordinary so that you say, "Marie Laveau makes this journey, but I can't." I try to keep her very human and vulnerable so that women can identify with her and perhaps even see the extraordinary in themselves. But I do think that when you have special gifts, spiritual or otherwise, people will sometimes want to put you on a pedestal or be pushed and make you other - negative or positive - or petty jealousy will get in the way, and so there are ways in which her gifts become a curse from her community. But she grows in her understanding that she has a responsibility to her community, and it doesn't matter how they perceive her. It matters that Marie becomes a lightning rod for them in some way that she needs. I think that her sense of strangeness, particularly when the means are first coming upon her - the total dislocation - might be akin to schizophrenia, to not understanding what's going on with you. As she matures, she actually has fewer possessions, but they are more profound. So my sense is not that Marie Laveau every day has a possession, but she has these key moments where extraordinary things happen that give her a vision of life, a wisdom. That probably stood her in good stead in terms of counseling and taking care of people. Does that make any sense?

Ramsey: Yes.

Barbara Rhodes: I see Marie, I see her voodoo dreams, I see the whole book as a celebration of women, really. But what about John? He's like a villain; in some ways he's like a pimp; tell us something about the character John.

Rhodes: Poor John, poor John. You know Dr. John used to be even more complex; there used to be, I don't know if you can still feel it, images of incest in the novel between Marie and Dr. John. I actually used to have it that there was a possibility that John was her father and she didn't know it, and then I took that out in one of the final drafts. But, in some sense, John is a wondrous man who has more power, more energy, more intelligence, more vision than his culture will allow him to have. So my sense of John is very much that he's a victim. The moment when he says, "I should have been a king in Africa," is a revelation - and then there's the way in which he fought, and made himself a free man, only to have this world give him very little scope for his talents. While he's evil, while he's abusive, while he's in some ways very much an insecure man, that's the flip side of having so much to give and so little scope in which to give it. He's the puppet master, and that's why he's threatened whenever Marie does anything that seems beyond his control. He needs to have control.

I think there are ways in which voodoo is not necessarily matrilineal. I mean it's equal between men and women, and there can be powerful voodoo kings as well. But John in his new-world quest for power and identity, the redefinition of himself, becomes so wounded by experience that he loses his spirituality. So there is a journey that he could've taken to become truly Papa John.

Barbara Rhodes: Yes, there was, and I saw such a deviation between this John and the one in history.

Rhodes: Yes, Papa John was a voodoo king, but my John . . . . My next book is very much about African American male identity, but there are ways in which I am preparing the ground for what happens to men who are given so little scope. Cholly within the novel is my answer to John. Cholly was named for the Cholly character in The Bluest Eye, the father who rapes his daughter, but who is also a man. Perhaps had he had more scope in the society, or had music, he would not have done such a tremendous, horrible thing. But my Cholly inverts that, because Cholly is a black man, a free man, who has his own business, takes care of his family - has everything that should constitute the core happiness of life. Then he's tricked into becoming a slave in order to save his family. So he plays the game - I will save my family, I will be a slave - only to discover one day that, no, his family has been destroyed, his business has been stolen. The impulse that makes Cholly want to see a free black person, to see Marie Laveau so badly he is willing to die for the opportunity, is very powerful. And then he is not a hypocrite who says, "Well, yeah, now I believe in spirituality, whatever, now I'll change my self." He really understands what it's all about - the power - and how difficult it is to get power in a repressive society. He very much admires someone who would achieve that.

Barbara Rhodes: May I ask a question about the dialect, or the absence of the dialect, in this novel? No matter what age they are, the characters all seem to talk the same. Did you have problems coming to terms with dialects? I mean, in that time period everybody was not literate.

Rhodes: I think one of the rights the writer has is voice. So there are ways in which I use my voice and my influence. Toni Morrison and Midore, I think, color a lot of the poetic language within the novel. With Nattie, I tried to get sort of Islander speech. I tried to get a sense of Ribaud as the illiterate yet wise person, but, with the exception of the moving d for th, his speech is not written as dialect. That choice has to do with how I approach language. There are, I think, oral patterns, rhythms in this speech, but I don't have a great deal of actual dialect. This may also have to do with the fact that I have no linguistic training; I don't know, it's just me. Ribaud and Nattie and Ziti have dialects, I think, but there are very minor modifications that suggest the differences in their speech. Marie's speech is, I think, very funneled through my poetic image and rhythm rather than based on sound changes in and of themselves.

Barbara Rhodes: I'd like to touch on this one question about the historic fact that voodoo mixes African religions with Catholicism. Is there a point in that, or were you just using historical truths as part of . . . ?

Rhodes: Well, that is historical truth, and I think the point of that is in fact part of the message at the end when Membe talks to Marie about being new world - that whole sense of creating new speech, new identities, new cultural traditions through a merger with what the slaves brought with them to these shores. It wasn't as though you came and you were a clean slate on which America wrote itself whole. The Africans had wondrous stories and their own rich cultural traditions, and they did not give these up entirely. The traditions might have gone underground, they might have become subtextual, but the slaves did not wholeheartedly say, "All white me, America."

But, in order to survive, you had to make that forged identity, because you were here; there was a large body of water between you and Africa. I think it speaks to the resiliency and the wonder of the people that they accommodated the degree of acculturation that blended into this other thing that's very harmonious and sustaining. If you look at the history of the spirituals or jazz, or the whole rite of African American music, it's the same, or if you look at the first literary form of the African American tradition, the slave narrative, it's the same. There are ways in which that speaks to the African move toward a new journey in formulating identities within the context of slavery, yet not ripped whole by what whites would have you be. So you get the slave narrative; you get black musical traditions that speak to black religious traditions - voodoo's link to Catholicism, and even the sort of linkages now with the Baptist and black churches and music and dance. You get this sort of forging of what I am, an African American, and that to me is wondrous and sustaining.

Ramsey: I'd like to give you a chance to talk a little more about your personal life. We're interested in where you grew up, and then your family and what was important to you - the formative things that have made you a writer.

Rhodes: I lived in a poor community in Pittsburgh, in Homewood, on the north side, until I was in the third grade. Pittsburgh is a wonderful landscape for nurturing writers. But during my early years my world was very much a black world, being with grandmother and tricycling through her kitchen and having her cook chitterlings and take care of my sister and me and my cousin - very healing. I remember the trolley ride, the street car ride into downtown, which was just across the river. When I saw white people for the first time, it was like, "Whoa!" You know, the world had opened up, but within my own community it was very closed and nurturing in terms of my own love and sense of self. But when I was in the third grade, we made the trek to California which, while it opened my horizons, also took me from the nurturing community of my grandmother. When I was fifteen, I was sort of, you know, put out of the house, although I wonder if my mother would remember it that way. And when I was finally out of the house, I went back to Pittsburgh; I was going back to my grandmother, who was my first mother. One of the things about that is that I rebuilt myself again within that family circumstance of love, and then I started at Carnegie-Mellon. I was going to be an actress, and, though I read books, my world with my grandmother was primarily a television world. I would rush home from school to see the 4:00 matinee movies. So I actually grew up on Betty Davis, Olivia de Haviland, Snake Pit, you know, all of these terrible movies, but my sense then . . .

Ramsey: Wonderful movies.

Rhodes: Well, wonderful, but terrible, too, because my sense - and I'm not even sure whether I got it from these movies, or just from the culture - was that I could become an actress. Although I had always written stories, I had no sense that I could become a writer, which is another form of development and one that I think I'm better suited for. Then, when I was at Carnegie, I saw this book by Gayl Jones, Corregidora, and it was like "Whoa!" At Carnegie, I happened to have a mentor named Jane Cohen, who, with my first husband Ed, always supported my going to school, and staying in school, and helped me find that background to sustain a voice and lead to this person who might one day be a writer.

Ramsey: Voodoo Dreams seems to have some of the elements of magical realism. Did you consciously employ this technique or did it just evolve?

Rhodes: I think that there is a distinction to be made, and I guess it depends in part on your definition of magical realism. I would say that, rather than its being a technique or something that I added to the novel, the magic comes from my African American cultural traditions; it's very much a part of these traditions. My grandmother was magical; her sense of teaching us to look for signs in the world was magical, as was her playing the numbers and her sense of dream imagery. So the magic is not this thing called a technique that writers employ. Also, there are ways in which magical realism can be very political for Latin American novelists: People say, "Speak to the magical realism," and then maybe don't speak to other things within that body of work. My grandmother just seemed to know things about life, you know, so the magic comes from the cultural traditions. That is the magic.

Ramsey: And part of your own experience.

Rhodes: Yes, that's right - my sense of the world and signs, paying attention to intuition.

Ramsey: Your novel also brings to mind Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Rhodes: Oh, no. No way. Toni Morrison's Beloved is such a brilliant book. My book in no way comes close, okay? Beloved is perhaps my favorite novel in the whole world. I adore Beloved. Beloved, it seems to me, is the pinnacle - although she'll have others, I'm sure - of all Morrison's talent and sensibilities. There are ways in which she invents, I think, new structural forms to speak to the African American experience. Structurally, conceptually, and linguistically, if I could one day do one sliver of what she's accomplished in Beloved, I would be very happy.

Ramsey: I was going to ask you if Morrison's work has been influential on you, and I think you've answered that.

Rhodes: Yes, but, in addition to Morrison, Charles Dickens. There are ways in which I'm very plot-oriented, and if you look, though there aren't per se chapters, there are a lot of little cliff hangers. The sensibility of just telling the story and having a convoluted plot - perhaps, at some points, too convoluted - I think that I got that from Dickens: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . ." Actually, one of my early reviewers picked up on the fact that mine was a Dickensian world. There are ways in which he characterized his England - all the different categories and classes and teeming city life - that were very useful to me in trying to make and create the landscape of New Orleans. So there are lots of scenes in which the crowd is not just a crowd. I tried to pick out people within the crowd, which, I think, is very Dickensian. Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison were like up there, goals for me to reach toward.

Barbara Rhodes: I have one final thing to ask. How does it actually feel to have written a successful first novel?

Rhodes: That's a good question. It feels wonderful, it really does. There are a lot of ways, I think, in which, in terms of your life history, you can become closed and frightened to the world. When I teach, I tell students to reach for what they don't think they can achieve, and that they will be rewarded for trying to attempt the complex, the challenging, the difficult. Growth, I think, comes when you reach for what you don't think you can quite make, rather than always doing what's within your grasp. Even if you don't reach that goal, you become enriched by all you learn trying to get to that mountaintop.

When I started researching Marie Laveau at 19, I knew that I wasn't ready. I spent years writing, and even then I always knew that there were ways in which the manuscript was simply beyond me - beyond my capacity to do. When I went back to it, though, I think that, while I may not have gotten it all right, I honestly gave everything that there was in me to give to finish that manuscript: I hadn't lied, I hadn't held back on emotions. We haven't talked about ways in which the novel risks melodrama - it really does. There are ways in which I pushed extreme edges of passion and emotion that were very risky for me. Lots of times I would be writing, and I would be crying or just torn up, but I think I risked my passion, my truth, my everything. And when I was getting done, when I was staying up in the middle of the night, I made my husband stay up. When I was doing that last line, I wanted him to be there to witness it. I had to know that I had gotten it right. I had known, by the time I got to the walking-on-water scene, "Oh, if you stay with me now, then I've got you. If you haven't put the book aside, then I think I've got you." I felt it, I knew it beyond belief. I celebrated just being able to say, "This is the best that I can do." Maybe I could do better now, but knowing that I had done my very best was my best gift to myself. I had not been found wanting, I had not shirked.

So there are ways in which I don't have to write another book, I don't have to do anything. But I will, because that's what I do; I write. There are ways in which I finally said, "Jewell, you are healed. You're okay, and the world that you seek to satisfy is not that external world but the world within yourself." There are ways in which completing what I wanted to do enabled me to say, "Yes, I love myself," in profound ways that I had never been able to say before. And I grew up. When I wrote, "Being a woman be just fine," I was in tears because I hadn't known that being a woman was just fine. I didn't know that being a woman was glorious, you know. I didn't know that you could move from painful experiences to a sense of triumph and wonder and an acceptance that everything that got you there becomes part of the stew of life. Everything that gets you there no matter who you are - being mixed blood, being whatever - is, in fact, life, and I knew that, and I felt really good about that. I think there are ways in which, writing the second novel, you feel a lot of pressure, and there are ways in which I think I am comforted by the fact that I wrote for years, years on a manuscript, and nobody in the world even knew my words, knew my name, knew anything about me, and I was happy. So that sense of writing another book and another book - that's the happiness that I want. Then, if the world likes it, I'll be overjoyed, it'll be wonderful; and if the world doesn't like it, then I hope I have the sense to know that. Before I let it go out into the world, I must feel as though I have done my very best, because that becomes my armor to keep me safe from the world.

Barbara C. Rhodes is Assistant Professor of English at Central Missouri State University, where she is also Director of Freshman Composition.

Allen Ramsey is Professor of English at Central Missouri State, where he has taught since 1972.