Evoking the "holy and the horrible": conversations with Joyce Carol Thomas.

Joyce Carol Thomas is a poet, novelist, and playwright. Through these three modes of perceiving the world - the poet's spare, sharp-edged wonder; the playwright's cunning orchestration of incident and character; and the novelist's urge to bring us smack-face against life's pain, joy, and recoveries - she evokes dilemmas and struggles which open the way to a better sense of self and often to a glorious personal epiphany. In whatever genre she's keyed to at the moment, Thomas peels back layers of life's complexities by focusing largely on the contradictions, catastrophes, and spiritual triumphs that unfold in a rural African American community. With this community serving as her frame, she constructs lean but expressive portraits of the destructive and redemptive power of love, explores the values and meanings of secular and religious traditions, and lays out stormy initiations for her young black protagonists. Rich in ambiguity and mystery, and steeped in mythical and religious tropes and metaphors, her writing resonates with a wonderfully bracing music.

Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the setting for three of her novels: Marked by Fire (1982), Bright Shadow (1983), and The Golden Pasture (1986). Throughout much of her childhood, she was a migrant farm worker, first in Oklahoma and later in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where her family moved when she was ten years old. She traces her love of language and story to the songs and tales of her Mexican co-workers and the expressive rhythms of those who testified at church services. She earned degrees in Spanish and French and taught foreign languages in public schools before pursuing a career as a writer. She has also held positions in English literature and creative writing at Purdue University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Tennessee.

In the 1970s, Thomas wrote poetry and plays for adults. Critical acclaim began in 1982 with Marked by Fire, her first novel. In addition to the National Book Award for young-adult fiction, Marked by Fire received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and Booklist's children's Reviewers Choice Award. The title also was listed on numerous best-book lists, including the New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year and the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. Bright Shadow, the sequel to Marked by Fire, was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Award Book.

Awards and honors have continued. Both A Gathering of Flowers, an anthology of multiethnic and multiracial short stories, which Thomas edited in 1990, and Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea (1993), a collection of her poems, were among the titles recommended for children and young adults by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea also received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and was listed as a Notable Children's Book in the Social Studies by the National Council for Social Studies/Children's Book Council joint committee.

Joyce Carol Thomas spoke to us by phone from her home in Berkeley, California, in September and December, 1995, and in June, 1996. This interview is a composite of these conversations.

Interviewers: Would you share something of your growing up in Oklahoma? Have significant people, events, and places found their way into your writing?

Thomas: I grew up in Ponca City, where my family lived on the black side of town. There was a park dividing the black side from the white side, and to get to the white side or downtown you had to walk through that park. For the first several years of my life I rarely went over to that part of town. So you see, this Oklahoma community was a very sheltered place for me. It doesn't surprise me at all that in my writing I am deeply concerned with what happens within a community and how these experiences form a person's vision of the world. The forces within the community interest me more than other circumstances and far more than forces from outside the community. I think what I'm saying is that, if you're taking care of the inner life, chances are you'll be strong enough to handle any onslaught that comes your way from outside. At least that's how I've learned to live my own life.

Interviewers: Are there specific experiences within the Ponca City community that appear in your work?

Thomas: In my community there were many beautiful moments connected with church and the extended responsibility of adults for children. This was very evident in my life and my friends' lives. Any adult could chastise you if you were caught doing something you weren't supposed to be doing. There was also a sense of pride in the achievements of any child, and everybody shared in that. It was absolutely wonderful to receive so much attention as a child. But there also were traumas. Once there was a young girl who got raped in the yard behind the schoolhouse. Before the rape, she'd had beautiful penmanship, but after the rape she couldn't write at all. She had to learn to walk again and to hold a pencil. That something like this could happen must have made quite an impression on me. I'm sure I was thinking, "Where is God in all this?" You'll remember that, in Marked by Fire, young Abyssinia loses her singing voice after she's been raped by a deacon from her church. Another gruesome event from memory which reappeared in my writing concerns a man who murdered his wife. When the police arrived, it was very hard to restrain him because he had developed a kind of psychotic strength. In my novel Bright Shadow, the Reverend Jordan murders Abby's Aunt Serena almost in the same way this man killed his wife. For me as a writer, there is always this pull to deal with the reasons why terrible things can happen to wonderful, kind people. These things do happen, and they do come up in my work because I continue to wonder about them as much as I wonder, I suppose, about the good things.

Interviewers: We were wondering about some of the motifs that keep surfacing in your work. Music, dreams, natural disasters, and the healing power of nature come to mind. These elements seem to create an unusual blend of fantasy and reality, as though you are defying the standard categories.

Thomas: I think these signs or motifs come from my subconscious. They creep into the writing without my necessarily ordering them to, and it's only afterwards, after a piece is done, that I see how these elements become keys to understanding my work. For example, whenever I first receive a copy of a book I've done, I put it up on my mantle and line it up next to my other books. I was amazed to see that I had been working with fire, air, water, and earth, the basic elements of all life, in Marked by Fire, Bright Shadow, Water Girl, and The Golden Pasture amazed because I hadn't realized previously that this was my plan. So, you see, there is something, some power at work that I'm following. Perhaps it's the presence of the muse and the revelations that come with respecting it. Natural catastrophes - storms and so on - are acts of God. By having them in my books, I may very well be revealing concerns regarding God's place in the whole pattern. God is always acting up all over the place. It's a power that just is, and it's a power I acknowledge in my books in all sorts of ways. Music is there as well, for music is a special way the spirit has of revealing itself.

Interviewers: And dreams? There's the dream of revelation in Bright Shadow, for example, where Aunt Serena appears to Abyssinia to tell her how to get on with her life.

Thomas: My characters often present themselves to me in dreams. When I was writing Marked by Fire, I had settled on calling a central character Trembling Slim, because I knew a person with that name when I was growing up. But then the character spoke to me in one of those waking dreams I've talked about. She told me her name should be Trembling Sally. So I promptly changed her name. People often wonder why I created such a mean character in Trembling Sally. They don't know the half of it. What was I supposed to do? Trembling Sally revealed herself to me. I couldn't judge whether she was a good or bad person. I just had to accept her, and let her actions speak for her. As a story keeps evolving, the characters keep talking, and then when they're done, it's done. I can't tell you how I know this, but I do know it. And sometimes they do come back to make their appearances in other books.

Interviewers: The power of stories and storytelling also keeps surfacing in your novels.

Thomas: I have my mother to thank for that. She was a great storyteller. Every year when we went out to pick cotton in Red Rock, the women told stories at night to entertain us. My mother, who was the lead teller, specialized in really scary stories. I remember that one of the women would slip away and put on a sheet, and when my mother reached the scariest part of the story, this woman would run out of the house in her sheet and scare us half to death. The interesting thing is that nobody told the same story twice. Nobody was allowed to. If you did tell one that somebody had heard before, folks would say, "Get out of here. Go set yourself down." So I never heard the same stories, but I heard stories with some of the same elements. The creativity of it, in the best sense of the word, had a lot to do with being able to make a story on the spot which could entertain and hold your listeners. Yes, storytelling is significant for me, but I'm not actually retelling the stories I heard as a child. Rather, the stories that appear in my work are in the tradition of stories I'd heard growing up, particularly those stories with elements of fear and humor and the participation that was built into storytelling through call and response.

Interviewers: Your novel The Golden Pasture is a considerable departure from the novels you'd previously written. For one thing, you feature the coming of age of a young male protagonist. For another, the isolated ranch, though not too distant from Ponca City, has replaced the familiar Ponca City community. What prompted you to write The Golden Pasture?

Thomas: That story has an interesting history behind it. I know that, when many people think of black characters and themes in young-adult novels, they often recall books either framed in an urban setting or remotely set in the slave era. While these stories certainly have their place, themes of slavery and ghetto tend to place black characters in a state of perpetual shame, because they are presented as victims and rarely as victors. I know of black boys and girls who squirm uncomfortably in their desks at the two-dimensional, unrelenting portrayal of young people as either victims of slavery or perennial do-rag wearers hanging out on a stoop next to a garbage can. There are black American stories somewhere between slavery and ghetto that also deserve telling.

While slavery and urban stories are very important, the heritage of blacks in the West is only recently finding a homestead in fiction. The fact is that black folks were often some of the best cowboys to ride the range. Another important fact about the history of African Americans in the West - though this rarely surfaces - is the cooperation that took place between blacks and American Indians. Native Americans and African Americans shared farming techniques, hunted buffalo together, and intermarried. Their coexistence was commonplace. When the Native woman is introduced in The Golden Pasture as Carl Lee's birth mother, I am remembering a legacy rooted in my personal history. The Appaloosa horse Carl Lee adores in the novel also figures into my personal history, but I'll have to backtrack quite a few years to show how it does.

In post-Civil War Mississippi my paternal grandfather, Grandfather Haynes, bought a saddle horse, which was a bold move on his part. In those days, it was all right for a black person to buy a mule, but anybody buying a saddle horse was not thinking about picking cotton. Needless to say, the Nightriders, the vigilantes who were forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan, did not take kindly to the discovery that my grandfather had bought the horse for himself and his family. A group of Nightriders tacked a sign on a tree for my grandfather to read. The message said, "Nigger, get the hell out of Mississippi." Well, my grandfather and Grandmother Haynes had been saving money - burying it in canning jars under the chicken house for just such an occasion, because my "uppity" grandfather had a mouth on him. It was this saddle horse that partially prompted my family to move to Oklahoma.

My maternal grandparents were also rural people. Like Carl Lee's grandfather in The Golden Pasture, they participated in the Boley Rodeo and lived in a place called Green Pastures, which, by the way, was the working title for the novel. Blacks in the West, the cooperation between Native Americans and African Americans, black cowboys, the Haynes family - these are pieces of a remarkable heritage to which I am indebted. This is the heritage that helped me fictionalize my Western, rural novel. The story I chose to tell, then, is about a boy in Oklahoma and his heritage as a descendent of Western cowboys.

Interviewers: You've written a number of plays, and Marked by Fire and When the Nightingale Sings have both been adapted for stage musicals. What do you like about working in the theater?

Thomas: The chance to be surprised! In the theater, everybody at one point in time becomes part of what's going on. The play is created not only by what the characters do and say and how the actors interpret their characters, but also by the community of the audience getting stirred by what is going on before them. A response like this can happen with books too, of course, but I never have the opportunity to see a reader's face lit up by a passage I've written. In the theater, I can sit there anonymously and enjoy the audience's reactions, and these keep changing because whenever you turn the corner in the theater there's something you hadn't expected to see. The real joy of being in the theater is the chance it gives me to work with all those artists who are responsible for putting the play together. When I was involved in the production of Abyssinia, I was amazed by how caught up in Abby's story all these people were. They actually felt responsible for her and intimately connected to her life. It's so thrilling to see that what I wrote fifteen or so years ago continues to enjoy a full life in the theater.

Interviewers: How involved were you in shaping Marked by Fire into a theater piece?

Thomas: I talked with the adapters a lot, and I've seen every production of the play at least once on its journey to Broadway. Although the adapters resisted at first, they've welcomed my comments. I was happy to see that they used one of my suggestions in the most recent production of Abyssinia.

Interviewers: Which suggestion was that?

Thomas: They put the character Strong back into the play. In an earlier production, they let Strong die. I felt they had missed a wonderful opportunity to show a dynamic black male character, but at first they ignored this suggestion. Maybe I wanted Strong in the play because I always try for balance. You recall that there's another black man in the novel, the deacon who rapes Abby. I thought it was important to balance this very negative image with a more positive one. But I didn't want this image to be represented only by a minister, a character so often found in black literature. What I wanted to see is a black man like Strong who's responsible for his family. In the novel, although Strong abandons his family because he's so burdened by life's trials, he does find the strength and courage to return. I was in the audience one night after Strong had come back into the play, and sitting next to me was a man who clasped his hands together when Strong returned home. I guess he was relieved to witness Strong's courage.

Interviewers: When did the opportunity arise for you to move into the picture-book format? That's a relatively recent development, isn't it?

Thomas: Because I write poems all the time, I always have a large reserve of poetry to draw on. In fact, my collection is so extensive that my editor is always threatening to come to Berkeley to raid my studio in search of poems that will form a nice collection. In a way, that's what I did for the collection that became Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea. When I dipped into that reserve, I emerged with a number of poems that worked well together.

Interviewers: Did you intend to have them published in a picture-book format?

Thomas: No, I just laid out the poems I'd gathered and saw an interesting movement through family and heritage and personal roots. It was my editor who envisioned them in a picture book. That has turned out to be one of those fortunate developments. I love the feel and look of Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea, and I love how Floyd Cooper plays with light in his striking illustrations. There's a real sense of cultural pride in Floyd's pictures.

Interviewers: Did Gingerbread Days take shape in a similar way?

Thomas: The poems in Gingerbread Days grew out of memories associated with my favorite brother, who died when I was writing Marked by Fire. He was an amazing person, so mischievous and so much fun to be with. I had visited his gravesite and all these memories about family ties came to me. And so Gingerbread Days was born. I wrote those poems in a few days. If you look carefully at this collection, you can't help but notice that I went after the same kind of balance that you find in all my work, a balance in terms of capturing both male and female experiences as well as experiences that unite children and their elders. There's also my longstanding concern for the joy and pain of living. Of course, I didn't see this until I could gain some distance from the writing. I could then look back and see what I had done in Gingerbread Days. Floyd Cooper's illustrations helped me to see more deeply. Because these are what I call "text- driven" poems, meaning that the writing came first and the pictures followed from them, the poems spoke to Floyd on their own and in their own good time. His pictures truly illuminate the poems, because he captured their emotional content. He drew the illustrations out of the emotions the poems called forth from him personally, not from my suggestions about what they mean.

Interviewers: You told us once that you're so busy writing, you don't have time to keep a journal. How do you trust yourself to remember experiences that might somehow influence your writing?

Thomas: I believe that, if an experience has made an impact, it will bubble up when it needs to. If it's so powerful that it has nerve enough to come into my study and sit down beside me, I trust it. I'm simply going to have to trust what demands to be told. The image that comes my way and persists is the one I turn toward.

Interviewers: Where does this gift of recognition come from?

Thomas: I truly don't know, but the mystery of it has always fascinated me. Early on I wrote a poem I called "Musing," which explains how I take hold of the insight once it comes my way. "Musing" begins this way:

You would fashion a poem song to fly away on And tall-y it scorched in fire You would show me your magic for a minute And never ask me to linger over The way you wove it Your notes are clear new shined crystal They lean out and stroke my spine And wobble against my belly Giggling with dancing breath breaks

I go on to talk about the poet's struggles and joys with the muse, but I always come back to the awesome mystery of it, because I have no idea why it calls me. I never take it for granted. People call it different things - a muse, inspiration, a gift. To me it's a blessing, and when it does come it bathes me in a glorious light.

Interviewers: Doesn't this poem predict some of the themes in your later work? For example, in "Musing" you acknowledge both the joy and pain of human experience. We've come to recognize this contrast as a central metaphor in your work. You once referred to it as the tug between "the holy and the horrible."

Thomas: To be honest, I can't say that I had previously thought of the poem in this light. It seems to me that the work is lived first and understood later. When I'm writing, ideas come rushing in and I seize them in the moment. It's only in retrospect that I might see how a particular piece fits into the large landscape of my work. After I've worked on a piece for a long time, reshaping it over many months, and then reshaping it again and again, I have a tendency to put it out of my mind once it's finally on its way to the publisher. I believe it's a tribute to my readers and critics when I say that they often help me to look again and to see aspects of my work that I might otherwise not see so clearly. I love to hear of the different meanings readers take from it; it's reassuring to know that what I write can touch a reader in such personal ways, that it can call forth so many different ideas and memories. Now that you've asked me to go back to "Musing," I can see how that final image of flying in the poem looks to Zelma's wish to fly in "Young Reverend Zelma Lee Moses," a short story I wrote much later for A Gathering of Flowers.

Interviewers: Flying spells nothing but trouble for Reverend Zelma.

Thomas: Yes, it does, until she understands that she doesn't need literally to fly to make her true spirit soar. That's also the kind of freedom Marigold conjures with her singing in When the Nightingale Sings. I'm thinking here of those final moments in the novel when Marigold's glorious voice makes it possible for her and all those folks she touches with her singing to transcend the here and now for the time being, until the next crisis comes along. What I wrote was this: "The people's spirits seemed to rise as one with the song until they were all changed into higher beings with angel wings." Come to think of it, the image of flying has always intrigued me.

Interviewers: To get back to the theme of "the holy and the horrible," what are you attempting to reveal by focusing on this tension?

Thomas: That dimensions of the beauty, the ugliness, and the grace exist for all of us and can touch all of us.

Interviewers: Is it important for young people to know this?

Thomas: In my work I'm revealing some of both the joy and the pain in this world. I think young people need to know about the full range of experience. They need to know about hope and joy because they are innocent and beautiful people, but they also need to know that not everybody is their friend. We wish this were not the case, but it is. You only have to read the newspaper or watch the news on TV to see that young black men are still being hurt or killed just by walking down the street. It seems to me that a need for caution is just as important as a need for celebration or affirmation. And I don't mean to restrict an awareness of this duality - of brightness and of shadow - to African American youth; while growing up, all young people should be alert to what affirms a life as well as what threatens it.

Interviewers: Yet your writing is deeply tied to an African American identity. Do you feel that you have something to say to readers who haven't been shaped by this identity?

Thomas: I hope that each person finds his or her own experience in my work and is able to say, "Yes, I understand these feelings. Yes, I can recognize or learn from this experience." Have I told you that Fox Television Network is using "Cherish Me," one of the poems in Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea, for a public service announcement been airing here in northern California? It features four children: black, white, Asian, and Hispanic. My point is that it's gratifying to know that in a poem of mine people can find a valuable experience for all children. I think it proves once again that, in regard to a culture, we get to the general through the specific.

Interviewers: What do you mean by that?

Thomas: "Cherish Me" is about a black child's experience, but the poem also touches a longing for connectedness that all of us feel at some time or another. This is what I hope happens to readers of all ages and backgrounds when they come to my writing, that they gain at least a little awareness of the lives of black Americans while also finding those universal needs and concerns that transcend the very special circumstances of a particular group. I also had the specific and the universal in mind when I put together the anthology A Gathering of Flowers. The stories represent the experiences of various ethnic and racial groups, and the emotional content is the thread that connects all those different experiences. The connection it seems is always through the emotion.

Works Cited

Thomas, Joyce Carol. Bright Shadow. New York: Avon, 1983.

-----. Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea. Illus. Floyd Cooper. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

-----, ed. A Gathering of Flowers. New York: Harper, 1990.

-----. Gingerbread Days. Illus. Floyd Cooper. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

-----. The Golden Pasture. New York: Scholastic, 1986.

-----. Inside the Rainbow. Palo Alto: Zikawuna P, 1982.

-----. Journey. New York: Scholastic, 1988.

-----. Marked by Fire. New York: Avon, 1982.

-----. Water Girl. New York: Avon, 1986.

-----. When the Nightingale Sings. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Darwin L. Henderson is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Cincinnati, where he teaches children's literature, multicultural literature, and literacy.

Anthony L. Manna is Professor of English Education and Drama at Kent State University, where he teaches children's and young-adult literature and drama.