On Breathing and Writing Through Grief: A Guest Post by Tananarive Due
No one writes horror like Tananarive Due, and her latest is her best yet. Sharp, tragic, heartbreaking and terrifying, The Reformatory takes readers back in time to an all-boys school in the 1950s American South. Read on for an essay from Tananarive on writing her latest spine-tingling novel.
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The Reformatory: A Novel
The Reformatory: A Novel
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Paperback $19.99
A gripping, page-turning “masterpiece” (Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman) set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
A gripping, page-turning “masterpiece” (Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman) set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
Grief is the reason it took me so long to write The Reformatory. But grief is also the reason it exists.
The Reformatory is a ghost story, but the monsters are human. History is the monster.
It is inspired by a tragic event in my family history: in 1937, at the age of 15, my great-uncle, Robert Stephens, was sent to a notorious reformatory, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, which was a prison disguised as a school. He never came home, buried at the makeshift cemetery known as Boot Hill. I never knew my great-uncle’s story until 2013 — when the Florida Attorney General’s office called to tell me about Robert Stephens and to ask me to join other relatives in giving permission to try to find his remains for a proper burial and to see how he had died. An untold number of children, most of them black, were buried at that cemetery: at least 55, it turned out. After learning more about the story and attending the opening day of excavation at the site, I knew I had to write about Robert Stephens. I had to give him a chance for a different story. Years before, in my novella Ghost Summer, I’d written about bodies being discovered on a developer’s land in my fictitious town of Gracetown, an anecdote I was sure I’d heard from my mother. (She denied ever telling me such a story.) Then I learned about Robert Stephens and the children buried at the Dozier School. My husband, writer Steven Barnes, and I have a son who is now 15 like Robert Stephens, and who was only nine when they accompanied me and my father to the excavation that oddly mirrored the one in Ghost Summer. The Reformatory breaks my heart daily because I am writing in the voices of a 12-year-old child and his 17-year-old sister, and I loathe the nightmare I’ve conjured for them.
Often, I hide the core of my grief even from myself: Robert Stephens was the uncle of my late mother, Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame activist Patricia Stephens Due — who died in 2012, about a year before I ever heard of the Dozier School for Boys. Gloria, the older protagonist in my book, has my late mother’s middle name.
In so many ways, I am writing The Reformatory for my mother, who is not here to read it. I am peppering old family references throughout a novel that fewer and fewer people would remember: like how my grandmother, who was married to Robert Stephens’ brother, used to keep a chilled mason jar full of water in her refrigerator. My mother’s siblings — my aunt, Priscilla Stephens Kruize, and my uncle, Walter Stephens — are the only ones left to remember living with my mother during the era I’ve written about. My father, John Due, who is 84, is my mother’s griot, but I want this novel to help preserve a part of his story too.
Injustice hurts. The hurtling speed of time hurts. Losing family hurts.
As I wrote The Reformatory, that pain sat beside me. Or on top of me.
This is what writing through grief feels like: I pause to breathe. Wipe my eyes. Get up and walk. Play my piano. Flee to Twitter. Flee away from Twitter. Pet my cat. Grade a student paper. Or two or three. Or a hundred, literally. Joke with my son. Dream new stories or watch TV with my husband. Load the dishwasher. Do a kettlebell workout. Listen to stand-up comedy. Check the fridge. Call my father. Close my eyes. Pray. Pause to breathe. Breathe again.