2006 Coretta Scott King Author Award Speech
by Julius Lester
Day of Tears: A Novel in Dialogue
One question writers are always asked is, “From where do you get your ideas?” The book that would become Day of Tears began with a phone call from Garin Thomas, my editor at the time at Jump at the Sun.
She told me about the “weeping time,” the name given to the largest slave auction in American history. Over a period of two days more than 400 slaves were sold in Macon, Georgia. It rained torrentially from the moment the auction began and eerily, the rain stopped abruptly the moment the auction ended.
What interested me initially was not writing about the largest slave auction in American history. What spoke to my imagination was the rain and especially what the rain must have sounded like over the course of the two days. The novel began then, not as an idea, but in the incessant, unrelenting sound of rain.
How did I get from a sound to a novel? Well, there were a combination of elements. I am also a photographer, and in a photography magazine I saw a daguerreotype of a slave girl of about 8 or 9 years old holding a white baby of 3 or so years on her lap. When I saw the photograph, I knew I had my main character. I kept the photograph on my desk throughout the writing.
The second element was inherent in the story. The man behind the auction was Pierce Butler. He had been married to Fannie Kemble, the famous English actress. She had published her journal of the brief time she lived on the Butler plantation. Her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation graphically described the horrors of slavery and had an enormous impact on anti-slavery sentiment in England in the mid-19th century.
Research into Kemble’s life, Butler’s and their children gave me the characters of Butler and especially the two daughters. My research also uncovered a book by one of the daughters, Frances, which was an apologia for slavery.
The third element was a remarkable contemporaneous document I stumbled across somewhere in the nether regions of the Library of Congress website. I don’t think I could find my way there again if my life depended on it, but I don’t need to. What I found was a reporter’s description of the auction with the names of slaves, what they did, their family relations, and many of the tiny details that make an event come alive when one is trying to recreate history on the page.
In writing fiction the central question is always how to tell the story, what is referred to as point of view. Is it best to tell the story in the first person, third person, author omniscient? Having written so much about slavery, I wanted this story to have as much immediacy as possible. If I described how characters looked, what they were wearing, and what the house looked like, etc., etc., I felt that the immediacy would be lost.
I came back to the way the story was born inside me—sound. I began to wonder if I could tell the story almost entirely through voices.
Henry James described a writer as someone on whom nothing is lost. As I thought about telling the story through voices, I went all the way back to when I was in 7th and 8th grade at Northeast Junior High School in Kansas City, Kansas. I was a member of a voice choir. We did not sing; we recited poetry, but as a chorus broken up into soprano, alto, tenor, and bass speaking voices. The timbres and pitches of our adolescent voices had remained with me.
In addition I drew on the seven years I was a radio personality in New York from 1968–1975. I loved being on the radio because with my voice alone I created images and feelings in listeners. I trusted that even as mere words on the page, readers would hear both the melodious and harsh music of the various voices.
Now, I know many of you think that Day of Tears is really a play. Even my editor tried to convince me that it is a play. I am here to tell you that it is not a play. The reason it is not a play is because I do not like plays; I do not go to the theater; and I do not read plays. Therefore, I could not, would not, and cannot write a play. I understand if teachers want students to act it out in the classroom as if it were a play. Well, even though it’s not a play, if you want to treat it like one, that’s fine, but don’t invite me to the performance because I don’t like plays.
The other unusual element in the novel is that all of the characters’ stories are projected into the future. As I write I try to anticipate every question a child might conceivably ask and answer that question in the story. In writing Day of Tears that voice wanted to know what happened to Pierce Butler, the slave auctioneer, and the other characters. And so did I. I risked breaking the narrative flow of the main story by interspersing the stories of what happened to everyone.
I want to thank the members of the Coretta Scott King Award Committee for choosing Day of Tears for this award. The Coretta Scott King Award is special because it does not only honor books for their literary merits. Of equal importance are the moral dimensions of a work. I learned what it is to be a moral writer from the work of Edward Lewis Wallant, a young Jewish writer who died much too early. He is best remembered for his novel The Pawnbroker. I read all of his novels while I was still a struggling, unpublished writer, and what amazed me about his work was that he never took sides against his characters, even ones whose actions were despicable. The other quality I took from his work was that, more often than people are given credit for, humans triumph over adversity, be it crushing poverty, illnesses teetering over the abyss of death, physical or psychological limitations.
There is a transcendent dimension to the human experience, and it was this belief in a transcendent humanity that characterized the lives and works of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King. It is this belief in a transcendent humanity which the Coretta Scott King awards seek to draw attention in the books these awards honor.
I accept this award on behalf of those whose condition may have been slavery but whose lives, more often than not, transcended their condition. Many of them entrusted their spirits and their stories to me to bring to you.
We thank you.