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Interview by Ulrick Casimir, Department of English
Nella Larsen’s classic novel Passing (1929) features one hell of an ending. We know that one of its main characters, Clare Kendry, lies dead after falling from a window, but we don’t know whether she was pushed by her friend Irene Redfield or simply slipped and fell. We know what may have led Irene to do what she may or may not have done, but we don’t know whether the betrayal Irene suspects, between her husband and Clare, even occurred. We know the broad strokes and terminus of the connection between these two women—but the novel ends without the hinted-at intimate dimensions of their relationship ever finding air.
In her new novel A Death in Harlem (2019), Dr. Karla F. C. Holloway picks up these threads, spinning them into a detective-driven thriller that’s more a “what-if” that stands on its own than a straightforward completion of Larsen’s story. Clare and Irene are renamed Olivia and Vera; Harlem itself gets a speaking part. Even the death marking the end of Passing takes on new, telescopic significance. Inspired as much by the Harlem Renaissance as by Larsen’s novel, A Death in Harlem mostly follows Holloway’s protagonist Weldon Thomas, Harlem’s first and only “colored” policeman, as he picks through racial intrigue and thick layers of class, lies, and familial deceit to determine who really killed Olivia Frelon, and why. Holloway’s novel, her eighth book, is the academic’s entrée into literary fiction: Her recent visit and talk here, as featured speaker in the CSWS Lorwin Lecture Series, was prompted by this shift to prose fiction, as well as her distinguished career in academe.
When CSWS asked me to interview Holloway, I jumped at the chance for several reasons. One reason had to do with emphases in Holloway’s academic work: Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, two authors who’ve influenced my own writing, feature heavily in Holloway’s thinking, and her analysis often takes a linguistic bent that I appreciate. Another was her shift to the world of fiction. It’s fascinating to see a well-known academic make that transition in her career’s late stages.
But the main reason I agreed to interview Holloway was her influence on me as a teacher: The first time we met, she was Professor Holloway and I was a skinny teenager in a course she taught at NC State University, shortly before her stint at Duke. I remember her then as a kind, commanding presence in a class that was, for me, a real “lightbulb” moment: What I learned there, what she taught me, rewired my notions of reading and writing, and proved fundamental to the way I now help my own students dissect difficult prose and realize their thinking on the page. I kept track of her career after that class, but its final-exam period was the last time I saw her in person—until her visit to UO.
The interview took place a day after her talk, over a light breakfast near campus, in the restaurant of the Excelsior Inn. This was the morning before Holloway flew back home, a spring morning so beautiful that the pandemic chatter seemed almost impossible to believe. In anticipation of the visit, CSWS had organized two reading groups, one on Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2014) and the other on A Death in Harlem. I arrived with several questions from the latter group, and many of my own.
UC: Dr. Holloway, your novel is called A Death in Harlem, which seems to be a reference to the death of Olivia Frelon, one of its main characters. In Passing, as Clare Kendry, her death closes the novel; here, as Olivia, her death opens or occasions your story. But as the reading group emphasized, there’s still the matter of the death of Maisie, one of your novel’s many minor characters, a young black woman who is run down by her well-connected white lover after telling him that she is pregnant with his child. Can you talk about Maisie, and what her death means in the context of the novel?
KH: First, I deliberately did not write a classroom novel—this is a novel for book clubs, mine in particular. Even some of the women [in the novel] are named after women in [my] book club, because we all have old-school names. But I wanted there to be a question of which death in Harlem. I always knew it would be the main character, but in my head was Bessie, from Richard Wright’s Native Son, and how we never pay attention to her death, and the legal system never pays attention to her death. So the academic in me wanted a Bessie, and I wanted somebody in some book club to say, “But what about this other woman? Is it about her death, too?” And then there’s a section in the book that says all kinds of bad stuff happened in Harlem. Babies died, other people died. So I wanted that question out there as to what we pay attention to and why.
When I talked yesterday about, “This book is Downton Abbey meets Harlem” in terms of looking at the lives of black people who were as wealthy as black people could be, I wanted that “class” focus to also indicate what we do not focus on—and we don’t focus on Maisie. I loved her story, and I hated leaving her, but I needed to in order to say that this was not only going to be about Vera and Olivia, but it was going to be about the reader’s willingness to go there—
UC: So the title is like a challenge.
KH: I was going to say challenge, yes, of which death do you remember at the end of the story.
UC: Speaking of challenges, your novel is notable for its constantly shifting perspective and clever management of point of view. Some of its prettiest passages are essentially Harlem narrating itself, in highly poetic language and across time—
KH: Did it work for you, that shifting? Because some of the early feedback I got was, you know, “Your point of view changes.” And I thought: Yes, yes it does. My point of view changes. I kind of wanted Harlem to have a role in the story—place was really important. That style very much reflects my decision to be open to just being pulled back. You know, through time and space or whatever. And to really think through, you know, what was it like for a street to once be a road? I really did think about that—what was it like for things that were cobblestones to be paved over? So I wanted that movement of time to suggest that we were as fully participant in thinking through that space as we are in our contemporary space. I know that’s bothersome for some readers, who want the story to stay one point of view, but I don’t think I could write like that if I tried.
UC: I stayed in Harlem briefly two years ago, while I was in the city for a book event. There’s something about it—
KH: Harlem for me feels full of its history, all the time, even as much as things have changed. I remember being there one time, maybe in the mid-2000s, thinking: Where have all the black men gone? This was right at the time of stop-and-frisk, and it was just uneven to me, the proportions. I noticed their absence, and it felt like Harlem reflects what’s happening, even globally. When I wrote Passed On[: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial (2002)], it was a Harlem funeral director I talked to the longest about their experiences with the [1918 flu pandemic] and the small, white caskets. And because those were generational businesses, they had the sense of time passing. They were talking like it was their fathers talking through them—sometimes I think it was their grandfather’s voice coming through, because there was no distinction for them. So Harlem feels that way to me, too.
UC: Another question from the reading group: the “big reveal” in your novel that Olivia stole her short story “Sanctuary” from the librarian, Miss Silk. They saw this as an allusion to Larsen’s own short story, “Sanctuary,” and the plagiarism accusations against her—
KH: Absolutely, but there’s only a certain group of readers [who will know that] if you read it on a college campus [or] if they know about Larsen. It was definitely an allusion to that. I thought it was playful and not everybody would get it and those who did would say, “aha!”
UC: The group wondered, though, if that might be an attempt on your part to get a kind of “justice” for Larsen?
KH: No, I don’t think she deserved justice. She was a plagiarist. The opening to “Quicksand” is actually plagiarized word for word, except she changes “Chinese rug” to “Turkish rug.” The story becomes her own, but she took [Galsworthy’s] words. So bless her heart—not Larsen, but the librarian in the novel.
UC: The policeman Weldon Thomas—the reading group pointed out that he is the most developed character in your novel. The scenes of him reading, where he narrates sections of the book in the first person, the novel’s use of the “detective” POV—recalling the work of Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes. Basically, all those things work together to make us identify with and root for Weldon Thomas. Did you mean this novel as a sequel for Passing? Or did you mean to have a whole new detective story series with this novel as first in time, featuring Thomas as the detective?
KH: Yes to the second, but I didn’t know that until I had finished the novel. Because it really started out with my characters renewing Clare and Irene. I was going to answer the question my students always ask: “So what happened, how did Clare fall?” So I thought the best way to do that would be to, you know, just take up Larsen. But it literally froze me after a while, because these were Larsen’s women, and I didn’t care for them much anymore. I mean I couldn’t play with them the way I wanted to.
So at the point when I changed them into Olivia and Vera, it was still about me solving this question in a situation that recalled Larsen’s story, but could go wherever it wanted to. It could have its own past and its own outcome. Although Passing is a spare story, the underbelly suggests so much. She gives you that room to wonder is there a [sexual] relationship between Clare and Irene, which I could decide there is, and establish that relationship between my characters. So my novel is certainly inspired by her subtext.
UC: You know, it’s so interesting, the modern appetite for narratives with indeterminate endings—
KH: Mm-hmm—
UC: —and reading Passing kind of harkens back to a time when people were maybe more comfortable with that? To me it’s kind of beautiful and brassy, Larsen leaving these two gigantic threads loose—
KH: You know, it’s interesting, I haven’t really thought about that as a kind of modern quandary. But yeah, I want the end. I want to know what happened on Lost—
UC: Everybody does.
KH: I don’t like it when you’re leading me down here when y’all haven’t figured out what’s going to happen, and you’re going to leave me hanging, and then [I will] have to write the ending myself? No, I want it settled. I was saying to someone the other day that I think our interest in finishing the story is absolutely a feature of a modern body politic. We don’t want the dangle—we want the end of the story. We want it tied up. Maybe not necessarily neatly, but tied up.
But think about what kind of editorial influence Larsen had. Because during that period there were editors who were like, “Just give me the book.” You know? So I’m wondering to what degree the industry suggests, you know, “Tie it up.” In some books you can see where they said, “Ok, I’m just going to write a last sentence and turn it in.” I’m not convinced that Passing is not one of those books, although I agree it’s beautifully crafted. It’s a composed story. The reason I used that word “composed” in my last nonfiction book [Legal Fictions] is because I think that stitchery is elegant and fun to work with, and I think that Larsen got it right up until that last minute, and that ending almost doesn’t fit the story for me.
But about Weldon Thomas: What I thought you were going to ask me, and what still shocks me, is that I, the fierce feminist or whatever, wrote a book with this male character. You know, I have no idea where Weldon came from as a vehicle for this story. Although in Larsen, I know she says [toward the end of the novel, when Irene stands by Clare’s body]: “A strange man addressed her.” At that moment, I thought of him as a policeman, and the first colored policeman—and that took hold of me in a way that I had not anticipated. But still today I wonder, “What am I doing, my first novel with a male carrying the story? That’s not Karla Holloway’s book.” It was a surprise to me.
UC: I love Walter Mosley’s storytelling. The fact that you have a black detective—it’s a different time period from Mosley’s writing, sure, and Weldon Thomas isn’t Easy Rawlins. But your novel recalled Mosley’s stories for me.
KH: I love Walter Mosley, too. I think I’ve read just about everything that he’s written. My book club reads him, too. So I’m certain there’s a Walter Mosley influence. Maybe that’s why there’s a colored policeman, I don’t know. But Walter Mosley is in my head because he solves his stories. I didn’t know what the solution was going to be as I was writing, which at some point stopped worrying me. The story just came together. And [the librarian] Miss Silk was, you know, my heart.
UC: Miss Silk—I liked her character a lot.
KH: You know she’s alive and well, is what I found out from the Buffalo Public Library. She’s the librarian that I actually wrote about in Bookmarks[: Reading in Black and White, A Memoir (2006)] as being the librarian of my youth, and her name really is Miss Silk. She used to let me move from the children’s room to the adult section, and then she would bring me back to the children’s room with the books I had and give me a little space where no one would bother me. She’s like a hundred and nine years old. In [A Death in Harlem] I make her a black woman, but she’s a white woman. I may or may not see her when I go home, but as much as I liked Weldon, she was in my heart.
UC: The reading group also discussed the freedom of a well-established academic deciding to write a novel. Can you talk about this decision and the opportunities and challenges that attended it? Additionally, can you talk about the drafting process for this novel, how it differed from the drafting of your academic writing?
KH: I don’t know what the drafting process would be like for a non-academic, but this novel went through many, many drafts because at first it was Irene and Clare’s story. I think at one time there were English people in this story—I mean, multiple drafts. And I think each one got rid of excess and refined it. I don’t think my academic writing is much like that, which probably tells on itself. But with this I felt more responsible to clarifying relationships, to finishing storylines, to making the ambiguities ambiguous if I wanted to. So I think I was more attentive in this process than I am in academic writing. I mean fact is fact, so when you’re writing nonfiction, it’s not as much like storytelling. Although I like books that are more narrative in tone than others that might be more factual. But this is my chance to just be the storyteller, and that’s my sort of natural habitat: I’ve always been a fabulist, and this book gave me an opportunity to do it legitimately.
UC: The reading group also talked a lot about genre, particularly the “passing” narrative and the detective story, and the mystery novel. Can you talk a bit about your decision to fit these forms together in your novel?
KH: Oh my God, I had no idea there were genres until those people on Goodreads. I mean, the first time I got a review, it just showed up on Google as a review. And then I find this site where people review and talk about you like they know you. And some of them said, “Well, it’s not a true mystery.” The novel was billed as a detective story but does not fit the genre. I’m sort of glad I didn’t know that there were those expectations or those restrictions, because I think it would’ve changed things. I wrote from just wanting to tell a story. I think when it got to the marketing part, the publisher was trying to say, “It’s literary fiction of the detective version which has some historical”—you know, I think they were just trying to claim it all, and this was like totally unknown to me.
UC: One last question, and this one’s definitely from me: Academics often review one another’s writing, but things can work differently with fiction. I know that for my own fiction, I have a trusted group of non-writers who help me as readers. They often look for different things in my writing than other writers might, but I trust and respect them because deep down they value story more than anything else . . . and if the story’s not there, if it’s not grabbing them, they’ll flat-out tell me so. It sounds like you have a similar relationship with the members of your book club?
KH: Yes, because occasionally through the years I would read them sections of the novel. And there were times when . . . it’s not like they ever said, “You should do this or that,” but the response did not fit what I thought I had written. But as you speak, I’m thinking, “Oh, I need a writer’s group!” This is what creative writers do now. I don’t have that except, because I publish through TriQuarterly, I had readers for this like with my nonfiction, and they were extremely helpful. But I’m feeling some kind of way about the trade world now, because I’ve been negotiating and thinking about, “Does my next book go to a trade, or do I stay with TriQuarterly?” I just don’t know that I can take the machine that the trade world is now. The sort of space that an academic press offers to me feels both familiar and dependable.
UC: You know, this is an interesting exchange for us to end with, about the trade world, as the AWP conference is happening right now, in San Antonio, during this pandemic—
KH: I’m reading about that on Twitter, how some people dropped out while the convention went on? Part of me is thinking, what a good book this would make. But the thing about it is, as a black person, when you go to these events, not only in terms of what’s going to happen to your book's marketing if something were to go wrong—pandemic—where do you think you’re going to be on that list? It’s always the same thing—if America catches the flu, we have pneumonia. I mean that’s some real stuff. ■
—Ulrick Casimir is a writer, an instructor with the Department of English, and affiliated faculty with Clark Honors College. His academic writing and short fiction have appeared in publications such as Jump Cut and Plainsongs. Children of the Night: Stories, his debut collection of short fiction, was published in April of 2018.
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