Interview with Tina McElroy Ansa May 17, 2001

Tina McElroy Ansa: Lena. I guess she is kind ofa piece of me. Only I have 2 sisters and 2 brothers, (now deceased.) As you know Lena was born with a caul over her head, and she can see ghosts.

Tina McElroy Ansa: I wanted to write a love story and I decided that everyone loved Lena so, that I would bring her back as a character. It was my husband who gave me the idea for making Herman a ghost though. When I was telling him about my idea, he said, "Who else would Lena fall in love with but a ghost?"

Tina McElroy Ansa: Mulberry is my Yoknapatawpa (Faulkner's fictional Southern town). It's a wonderful place to be when you're writing. Using a small Southern town is a wonderful literary machinery-it's a microcosm of the whole world. It's specific things and yet it speaks to the general and the universal. Mulberry is your typical little sophisticated town. They have their own Catholic school, museum, and town square. As a writer, there are very few places where you have control, but you can control your own little world when you're creating it. That also creates a sense of responsibility.

Tina McElroy Ansa: Yes, as Richard Pryor said, "A Black Funeral is different than a white funeral." I think for us funerals have always been part of the celebration of life. That too is another Africanism that has survived. 

I've received so many letters from women from all over the world about their mothers after they read Ugly Ways. This book has opened up a lot of dialogue, as this mother was more realistic of a depiction than the Mother Earth figures drawn of Black women in previous literature.

Tina McElroy Ansa: Yes, I live on St. Simon Island, 80 miles south of Savannah, GA. It's physically beautiful. Right now, I'm looking at my garden. It's one of the sea Islands near North Carolina and Georgia area. We have temperate weather. Beautiful live oak trees, palms trees, salt water marsh, a river on the north side. It calls to you. It is a wonderful environment.

During slavery, this was the home of cotton and rice plantations. The dykes built here came from Africa. You get to see the ironworks and some of the original African artisans' works here. There is a sense of the lingering pain and the hopelessness (from the ancestors), that’s so oppressive that people who visit here say they can feel it. It is so heavy, you can pluck it. It just hangs in the air. But somehow, that's balanced with a sense of music, joy, life, resurrection and transformation.

In the history of many of the Islands, before the 1860's there was a great deal of autonomy. Part of the year, the slaves on the islands were left in the hands of the black overseers. The white owners left because of the malaria. The slaves had a trait that protected them against malaria, that they had lived on the West Coast of Africa.

The people who were born here have been taught by the great grandmothers. I'm from the inland, but this is where most of the slaves first landed. The Island is called "Black People’s Plymouth Rock." We founded and participate in a Sea Islands Festival each year.

Tina McElroy Ansa: Reading was always important to our culture, particularly since reading was forbidden during slavery. My Great aunt was a spinster lady who taught adult and children how to read. They had a barbershop in the 20's. Extraordinary woman, and she would joke about adults who would come to learn to read after work. They wanted to learn to read the Bible, something with morals. For a while, after the resurgence of writers in the late 60's, with the advent of TV, we got away from reading.

But book clubs have put our authors on New York Bestseller's Lists. I think it's wonderful that we are reading again. People are getting together for readings and using books as a way to share their lives.

Tina McElroy Ansa: I have just completed my new novel about 3 generations of women in Mulberry. There used to be a sense of community and that's what this book is about.

My new book, You Know Better, centers around the Pine's Women.

Looking back, my mother was a sophisticated woman. She read and ordered Vogue so that we had a cosmopolitan view of the world, although we were in a small town. She imparted that to us.

Recently, my siblings and I were talking about it. Where did they get the money? My mother and the women of her generation--I call them "Big Women." My mother sewed us beautiful frilly dresses, read to us, etc.. My mother was an extraordinary woman, raising 5 children during that time period. My sister and I were the first to go to college and she always sent us money. I asked her not too long ago, how she did it. I still don't know how she did it. The women of her generation never seemed to complain and managed to keep it altogether. Our generation gets stressed out with one child.

Tina McElroy Ansa: I was a journalist before becoming a novelist. In 1971, I worked at the Atlanta Constitution. I was the first African American journalist to work there. To think that more than a hundred years ago, no one could read or weren't allowed to read, and now I'm making my living from writing, that in itself is extraordinary .

I cannot tell you the number of people who have written me through the years. A book you have written can affect peoples lives in so many ways, and such a deep way. Basically, it can help heal them.

Tina McElroy Ansa: Mary Washington and her anthology on Black Writers, Invented Lives and Black Eyed Susans. Of course, I like Toni Morrison. And our mother of Black Women writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Herman (the male lead in the Hand I Fan With was inspired by Tea Cake from Their Eye’s were Watching God.

Tina McElroy Ansa: Click off that internal censor. We don't have to wait for someone else to tell our stories; we have enough books to make our own movies.