Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers, I'm Joe Donnelly.
Mr. Hit Josephine with a palm of his hand across her left cheek, and it was then she knew
she would run.
That is the opening line of Tara Conkelon's Stirring debut novel The House Girl.
The Celebration of Plantation in 1852, a young house slave, tends to her ailing mistress,
creates exquisite paintings and plans to escape.
In 2004, New York, an ambitious young lawyer works night and day on the biggest case of her
promising career.
The book intertwines these women's narratives into a story of art and injustice, and it's
a great pleasure to welcome Tara Conkelon to the book show.
Thank you very much for being with us.
Thank you for the invitation.
It's a delight.
This is your debut novel, and one of the things that comes through in so many of the reviews
is how mature it is, how assured you are as a writer.
You may not feel that way, but that is the way to have a book come out and to receive
this type of praise, not only from critics, but also from the book buying public.
What has that experience been like for you?
Oh gosh, it's been amazing.
It's been a huge surprise and just an amazing thrill.
This was such a product of very late nights and early mornings, me writing in my pajamas
before after my kids went to bed, and the fact that it's been received so nicely is a great
thrill.
The story has been told, and it's an interesting one, you worked as a litigator in the New
York and London offices of a major corporate law firm, and then left to write a novel.
It interests me of how long this particular story has been in you and wanting to look
at these dual narratives.
Yeah.
I started it probably about six and a half years ago now, and I started with the historical
sections, and specifically with the section narrated by a slave doctor named Caleb Harper,
which is now the last narrative to peer in the book.
And I wrote his story and these two women, one of whom is Josephine Bell, who is the
housegirl, one of the housegirls of the title, appeared in his story, and I became completely
obsessed with understanding her and with her as a character and the history surrounding
her.
And so over the next several years as I was working full time and parenting two little
kids, I kept working on this story and it just got longer and longer and longer until
I really wanted to do something significant with it.
And I've heard you say that, I mean, you saw an image.
You saw a very defined image that helped you take this from a story or just a glimpse
of an idea into something that would become this novel.
Yeah, I mean, I had, I really could picture Josephine and I could picture her world.
And like I said, I became just obsessed with her.
I would dream about her.
And I became very interested in this period of American history, which I had never really
studied that much, certainly not as an adult.
So I started researching and reading and the historical sections kind of took on a life
of their own.
And I finished those and I sort of set them aside before I started working on the contemporary
sections.
And when I set them aside, I mean that I really said to myself, I can't work on this project
anymore.
You know, what am I?
I'm crazy to think I'm going to write a novel.
But I couldn't stop thinking about the characters or the story.
And I wanted to give it some contemporary relevance.
And that was when the 2004 storyline with the lawyer kind of came into the picture.
When you say it came into the picture, at some point did you know that you always wanted
there to be a link to the contemporary?
I wouldn't say I always knew.
And I was writing the historical sections.
I was very focused on those.
And after I finished the first drafts of those, it just felt, it didn't feel complete.
They were too long.
Josephine's story is told sort of through three separate narratives.
One is Josephine herself.
The other is the slave doctor, Caleb Harper.
And then the third is a woman who works on the Underground Railroad named Dorothy Arrounds.
And I wrote those three and I just felt, I didn't feel like they were finished.
And I also felt quite sad just leaving them in the 19th century.
And I wanted to bring their stories.
I wanted to give Josephine stories some contemporary relevance.
And so that was when I started thinking about the idea of a reparations lawsuit.
And also the art angle, the mystery about who created the bell artwork.
I want to talk about that art angle in a moment, but assuming that you don't set out to
write a novel, I'm going to write about race.
I'm going to write about slavery.
I'm going to write about Virginia that these things come and come out of the work and
the stories.
What is it about these particular stories and books that you were reading that gave
you an idea about the relationships between black and white, especially during this period?
Well, the book, some of the books that I was reading for my research purposes, I think
everyone, you kind of grow up with this idea of the anti-bellum south and the roles that
people played.
And in the research that I was doing, what continually struck me was how complicated things were
and how interconnected by blood, very often the families were with their slaves.
I mean, there were the Hemmings of Monticello, which is an amazing book by Annette Gordon-Reed
and a nonfiction account.
And that book lays out the family relations in Tom's Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.
And just the idea of how complicated these relationships were and how intimate they were
and that really played into my writing of Josephine's story.
When telling Josephine's story, we learn a lot about her, a lot about the relationship
and of course, subsequently a lot about slavery.
You have said, and I find this fascinating, there was a point where you almost learned
too much that there was too much research that you had to cut yourself off because otherwise
it would become overwhelming.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly was overwhelming.
And I also, this story really started with the characters.
And there was never a point in time when I thought, oh, I'm writing about slavery.
I was writing about Josephine and about Mrs. Liu and about Mr. the characters on this
Virginia plantation and doing the research.
I mean, the harm as Lena, as she's researching the slavery reparations case, she says at
one point, the harm is immeasurable.
And that sense of agony and loss and just immeasurable harm was overwhelming to me at certain
points in the research.
And I did have to sort of stop reading and say, okay, I'm writing this about Josephine
and this is the one story that I'm going to tell.
And that kind of helped me finish it.
When you think about what we know about what happened, it is incredible that we don't
talk about it more.
I agree.
I agree.
I mean, white people don't talk about it.
Right.
Absolutely.
Or even write about it in a way that you wrote about it in this novel.
Yeah.
I mean, I agree.
When I started this, I was living in London.
I was an expat.
And I think in a lot of ways, I couldn't have started this book if I was living in America
because I think maybe I would have been too afraid or too overwhelmed by it.
Because when you're living abroad, of course, you're not from the Northeast, you're not
a southerner, you're not white or black or you're an American.
And so that was really how I was coming at this, was that this was American history.
And this was a part of American history that, yeah, you're right.
I didn't know as much about it as I should have.
And I hadn't read the kinds of accounts before.
I had read some.
I mean, there are certainly novels that I used.
And that I had read.
But I felt that my own education in this time period was lacking.
And so in writing it, it was also a way for me to educate myself.
In a way, by asking that question, I'm leading the witness because it would seem to me to be
that a benefit to come out of the success of this novel is that people in book groups
and beyond can read about this time period, talk about it, discuss it, and have a more open dialogue,
which I assume is what inevitably is happening at your readings and events.
Yeah, definitely.
And that's a wonderful thing.
And I'm just thrilled that that's one of the results of the success of the book.
Because I think you're right.
I think it is a time period that we don't talk about enough.
Tara Conclin is our guest on the book show this week.
The name of the novel is The House Girl It Is Published by William Moro.
You talked about the art a moment ago, and I promised that we would go back to it.
And I do want to discuss it because it's such an integral part of the story.
And it's a fascinating part of the story because really at the center, it is a story about art.
What interested you in that and what brought you to that to that topic?
A couple of things.
One of the inspirations for the character of Josephine Bell, who is the artist in the novel,
was a 20th century African American artist named Mary Bell.
And when I was an undergraduate, I was a sort of assistant to the public relations director
of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Just a work study job.
I mean, lots of photocopies and that kind of thing.
But while I was there, they had an exhibit by this artist named Mary Bell.
And not a lot was known about her at the time.
And as I recall, she had either been born a slave, or her parents had been born slaves.
And she worked as a in Boston, as a house servant to a very wealthy family.
And she made these very kind of odd drawings of very wealthy women,
like with these extravagant gowns and extravagant jewelry.
And I remember thinking at the time, I mean, I was, you know, this was a long time ago.
But I remember thinking, I wonder why she didn't draw the people who were around her,
the people who she loved.
And I wondered what those drawings would look like.
And the figure of this woman of Mary Bell, she ultimately died in a mental institution.
She was committed when she was later in life.
And her history and her story really stayed with me.
And so when I was writing Josephine, you know, I remembered Mary Bell and I thought,
okay, I want Josephine to paint the scenes around her and to paint the things that she loves.
And so that was one of the inspirations for that storyline.
Another was, you know, just thinking about the history of slavery and thinking about
how many people were talking about over the course of 250 years
and their contributions to the development of this country
and how little credit is given.
You know, there, I mean, it's only in the past, I don't know, five or six years
that we've learned that that slaves, you know, helped build the White House
and things of that nature that are not that they're not giving credit for.
And so that was definitely one of the underlying themes in the art angle of the book.
So much of the story, much of the story is told through letters, through correspondence.
And what is it like to recreate that to figure out not only the voice of the character,
but how they convey their feelings to another character?
Yeah. Those are really fun to write.
And I love epistolary novels.
And so I spent a lot of time reading primary documents from the time period
and letters in particular and just sort of jotting down words and phrases
that they used. And I had to have a little cheat sheet of odd, you know, mid 19th century words
and turns of phrase that I had read myself in some of the primary documents.
But it was a lot of fun to do that, to kind of inhabit particularly the character of Dorothy
around, who's the young woman on the Underground Railroad, you know, because she's 17, 18,
she's kind of just starting to come into herself and it was very fun to sort of inhabit her mind
for a little while.
I want to touch on two points to follow up and what we're talking about earlier,
giving people an opportunity to discuss these issues and discuss slavery.
In the book, you include just a list of slaves.
You include just names.
And I assume that was something that a point you wanted to make.
And it is a very strong point that you make because it's something that you read
and you think at some point is going to connect to the plot and then you realize,
no, these are names.
And it's very striking.
Yeah.
I mean, one thing that amazes me in my research and still sort of amazing to me is that there's
no national monument to slaves.
And there's no place where one can read their names.
And again, the idea of credit being given, you know, it just seems like they're a nameless,
sort of faceless people lost to history.
And so that's why I wanted to give some sense of the scope and of the numbers by having
just this whole block of text of just names.
And those are real names of slaves taken from the Library of Congress website.
And so few of the names on that list and so few of the slaves, as you say, there's no
memorial, there's no museum.
And so few of those stories have been told, which brings up another topic in the book,
which is that of revisionist history, which is fascinating in and of itself because who
is writing that history?
Where do we get this narrative from?
Where are we finding out what we know or what we think we know about this topic?
Yeah.
Of course, and when you have a population that has kept illiterate as most slaves were,
there are slave narratives that are available now.
Many of them were written by white abolitionists.
But those are really amazing documents.
And I consulted a lot of those as I was writing.
But the numbers, again, looking at the vast scope of 250 years of human beings and their
voices for the most part are not heard in our history.
And they're not studied.
And the reason for that is, well, one reason is that they're so little written down that
we can look at.
I mean, there are oral traditions.
The stories are passed orally.
But again, if you're not within a family that has a slave ancestor, you probably haven't
heard those stories.
So yeah, that was definitely one of the themes in the book was looking at who writes history
and what are the voices that we hear and who are the voices that we don't hear.
And that's also for Dorothea.
I think she was a young woman who was struggling against her father to do something that she wanted
to do.
And women in that time period, whether you were, I mean, obviously, black women were certainly
had a lot worse.
But women in general did not have many rights.
So her voice was important to me to get in there.
I've interviewed many lawyers who have become novelists.
And it is safe to say that this is not the typical book that they write.
It's usually very much the procedural and the, and I'm putting them down in anyway because
some of them are great.
But it is, but you certainly went into a more historic route.
You went more into a, we're almost that is, is obviously writing about something that
you know, allowing it to become contemporary, but does not define the novel.
Was that, was that at all a balance for you?
I guess it, yeah, it was a bit.
And I think in a lot of way, you're right.
It isn't the typical police procedural novel.
But I felt like I was using my sort of lawyer skills and putting it together because of the
way that it uses different documents.
And I was a litigator when I was a lawyer.
And you know, that's so much of what a litigator does is go through, you know, literally rooms full
of documents looking for the pieces that make your case and then putting them together
in a narrative and creating a, creating a story about your client.
And in some ways, I felt like at the end of the day, I wasn't doing this consciously, but
looking back at now how the, how the story is structured, you know, I put, I use different
primary documents to tell the story instead of having just one straight voice, one voice
that you hear and one straight narrative.
And in a lot of ways, I, I definitely had my lawyer had on as I was writing.
With that said, it was a confidence in the work or even a thought of while you were doing
this and while you're doing the research that you say, okay, this, this could be the next
book or this is a good idea for the next thing or was it the furthest from your mind?
That was the furthest or what?
I mean, I never thought that this was, I mean, I never thought that this was going to
be a, not a published novel.
I mean, I was really, when I started off, like I said, it was very much something for my
own entertainment and my own enjoyment.
And I mean, I've always been a real scribbler of stories and, and, but I never did anything
with them or took them anywhere until, until these stories, the story of Josephine and
Caleb and where I felt like I had to, I had to do something with it.
So I always find this to be a fascinating part, especially with a debut novel of it comes
out.
It's a success.
So now you think about number two and what that process is like because obviously there's
an expectation not only from an audience, but from a publishing point of view.
I would assume personal as well and, and what it's like to follow that up and the pressure
that goes into that.
And I say it only because it's because I can't even imagine what that must be like.
Well, I'm just so excited that I get to write.
I mean, I'm, this is a dream, you know, to be able to, to do this and call myself a writer
with a capital W.
So I, I mean, I've already started another book.
It's very different from the house girl.
It's all contemporary.
It's, I, I hesitate to talk too much about it because it could all change, but it's about
a family and a death in the family and how that, how it affects the different members
of the family and, um, and it's not, it's not historical.
But it does use different voices in the same way that the house girl does, different
points of view.
So, and I'm really excited to be working on it.
Is there, and as exciting as this is and, and to put this out into the world does this
part of the job, IE, talking about it and going from town to town, take away from that.
You have that waiting for you when you get back home.
Yeah.
You mean does it take away from the enjoyment?
Well, no, does the, the, the traveling and talking about this book, oh, yeah, take away
from the process of, oh, yeah.
The excitement of writing the next novel.
Well, it takes away from the time that I can, that I can devote to writing the next novel.
But this, I mean, this is fun too.
This is, it's, it's such a different thing to sit in your room, you know, in, you know,
hunched over your laptop for hours on end, which is what is required to write a novel
as opposed to, you know, coming in and talking to you and, and, uh, and getting up in front
of people and answering questions.
And, um, and I was a little bit worried that this, you know, the public side of it, I,
I would not enjoy, but it's actually, it's been, it's been fun.
It's been quite fun.
Um, but I do, I am looking forward to getting back to hunching over my laptop and working
on number two.
Well, many writers have told me that there's nothing wrong with that process of having
people who've read your work who come in and want to talk about it.
That's, that's a pretty good feeling.
Yeah.
It's not a bad thing.
Tara Conkelman's new novel is The House Grill.
It is published by William Marrow.
Tara, best of luck.
Thank you so much for sharing with us and congratulations on a wonderful effort.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
It was delightful to be here.
We enjoy hearing from our listeners about our shows.
You can email us at book at wamc.org.
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I'm Joe Dono.
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