In your story “Children of the Good Book,” a boy goes to stay with his aunt, uncle, and three cousins in Washington State, and becomes involved in their troubled family dynamic. How did the idea for the story come to you?
Most of my stuff starts with some kernels of truth—either character-wise or place-wise or event-wise, because sadly I’m really not that creative. This one happened to have a little of all three. The three cousins I’m closest to are named Israel, Isaac, and Abraham. I had another story, published in my collection “How Are You Going to Save Yourself,” where their likenesses were used to create the characters. Unfortunately, I always felt that their radiance didn’t shine in that story, the way it always has to me. So I hope readers feel it in this one.
The story circles around the idea of Black masculinity and the ways in which these boys and men embody it, but also the ways in which that idea is imposed on them from outside. Bull has bought into a system that’s rigged to keep him down; it’s easy for the boys to mock him for that, but what choice did he have?
We all have choices. But I think sometimes as kids we imagine the world is going to be one way and then we grow up and learn that it’s not that way. And Black boys, we tend to grow up a whole lot faster, since there is still a not-so-subtle undercurrent of fear surrounding our bodies and our personhood in this country—especially if we happen to be as big, physically, as my family tends to be. And then, when we’re all together, we become even more of a target for that bullshit. I remember getting thrown out of a mall when I was thirteen or fourteen, ’cause security said we were intimidating paying customers.
That was a bit of a tangent. I think Bull reacts to Isaac because he understands that there is an element of truth to a lot of what he’s saying. The pseudo-omniscient Isaac voice is somewhat of a counter to the harsh Libra scale we tend to weigh people with as children. When we have a fuller view of why people are the way they are, empathy can creep in more. Sometimes we just gain understanding and choose to judge folks nonetheless.
The three brothers are all named after figures in the Bible. Is there a resonance between the Old Testament Abraham, Israel, and Isaac and your characters?
The Isaac metaphor/allusion might be too on the nose in the story, so I won’t go into detail about that, insulting readers’ intelligence and whatnot. But Abraham is the oldest patriarch in the Bible. He is involved in so many stories, but I’ve always felt (and theologians and Bible scholars would know a lot more about it and probably disagree) that he is, in many ways, the least willful figure: he pleads with God a lot, but is dutiful to a fault—the binding-of-Isaac story being perhaps the most glaring example of that.
Bull becomes engaged in a power struggle with Isaac, who is his stepson. Why is there so much bitterness and anger between those two characters?
This returns to the question about Isaac ridiculing Bull—and to the societal confines, and, often, after those have been internalized, the personal confines that are placed on Black men in this country. This is at the heart of the anger between the two of them: Isaac feels that Bull has kowtowed to society and shown the docility that this country has always wanted from us. Bull feels that Isaac doesn’t know shit ’cause he’s a kid. . . . It reaches a fever pitch ’cause somewhere, deep down, Bull has internalized the poison, and there is shame in the gap between who he is and who he thinks he’s supposed to be.
The struggle between Bull and Isaac culminates in violence. Did you know from the start how the story would end, or did that ending come to you in the process of writing?
It’s kinda crazy, but I really do treat violence very carefully when I write—I often kinda ache while I’m writing it. Especially when Black men are hurting people. That’s why I started Googling “Can Americans move to Bhutan?” after people thought the exact opposite about my début story collection. I couldn’t take people saying that my book was a glorification of misogyny or that it was damaging to Black men. Violence, to me, is never a means to an end—it has to express something societally, or personally, or culturally, and usually it’s a result of poisonous structures and expectations that are still rampant in 2021. So, short answer, no, I didn’t know how I intended to end the story, but once I pushed their altercation past a certain point, I resigned myself to the fact that anything less than violence wouldn’t be an honest exploration of the pain and fear that both of those men were harboring, and of the overwhelming shame that Bull feels.
The story is punctuated by italicized sections, in which an older Isaac addresses Bull and delivers a kind of political commentary on Bull’s choices and lack of choices as a Black man in America. What inspired you to layer those sections into the story?
The story actually started with those sections, more or less. The first iteration of this story was from almost a decade ago, when I was twenty-one years old. (It’s changed drastically since then.) But I was and still am one of the biggest Jay Electronica fans on God’s warm green earth. And he has a series of lines in “Exhibit C” that essentially amount to a conversation between him and some Five Percenters: “ ‘You either build or destroy. Where you come from?’ / ‘The Magnolia projects and the Third Ward slum’ / ‘Hmm . . . it’s quite amazing that you rhyme how you do / And that you shine like you grew up in a shrine in Peru.’ ” And that rang true of Isaac for me—he’s a building energy. There used to be a line in the omniscient sections where Isaac tells Bull, “You were the minus and I was the plus. No, you were worse—you were neutral.” So the Five Percenter wisdom filtered through Jay Electronica’s voice became a stand-in for Isaac’s in the story, and it kinda grew from there. If you’ve never listened to any of his stuff, it’s worth your time. I feel like I learned more from my family and from music than I ever did at school. (Disclaimer: This is not me endorsing everything that Five Percenters teach or believe in. There are obviously some things in their doctrine that I find fucked up and problematic—as one could argue for most religious dogmas—but there is some wisdom and Black self-love and empowerment there, too, that I can really get behind.)
