What is Home with Donna Hemans

[00:00:00] . What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black and Published, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. Today's guest is Donna Hemans.

[00:00:20] Set in Jamaica with a haunting that takes the protagonist back to the days of migrant workers in Cuba, Donna says this story was initially inspired by her want to know about the lives of her own relatives.

[00:00:32] Once I got into it and I started understanding a lot of what was happening, I started to think about what it was like to be a migrant worker.

[00:00:44] Donna is the author of two previous novels, River Woman and Tea by the Sea. She shares the book that made her want to be a writer. Plus, the lesson she learned about writing the story you want to tell, no matter the pressure of the publishing industry.

[00:00:59] And, what's more, she's also a writer who has a lot of experience in the field of black migrant workers. Next, we have Donna Hemans. She shares the book that made her want to be a writer.

[00:01:15] Plus, the lesson she learned about writing the story you want to tell, no matter the pressure of the publishing industry. And why she's still wrestling with how to define and hold on to home. That and more is next when Black and Published continues.

[00:01:53] I knew sometime when I was in college, when I initially started college, I had a grand idea that I was going to study law.

[00:01:59] And I started out as an English major, primarily because I thought that would be a good foundation for this law career I was going to have. And started taking some creative writing classes and also took some journalism classes.

[00:02:14] And it was in that process that I really realized that I liked writing and this is something that I wanted to do.

[00:02:21] One of the other things that also happened when I was an undergrad is that I took an independent study with a professor who had me read Their Eyes Were Watching God. And once I read that book, it really opened up a whole different world to me.

[00:02:37] You know, as a Jamaican growing up in Jamaica, going to school in Jamaica, I certainly read Caribbean literature. But I think I was probably at a different place and at a different age where it hit differently.

[00:02:49] And so, like reading that book, I saw culture and language and just everything about the Black experience and basically our language.

[00:02:59] Because these people were in Florida, but they sounded like people I knew, people I'd grown up with and everything that I was reading and hearing just felt like home.

[00:03:08] And I thought, you know, I want to do this. I want to do this for my community, my Caribbean literature. And so, you know, I think that's when I really started thinking seriously about writing as something that I could do or wanted to do.

[00:03:24] And finding home in the richness of the world that Zora Nohurston painted in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Did you immediately know that when you began writing, you were going to do the same for Jamaica and the Caribbean? Yeah, that's what I wanted to do.

[00:03:40] And I hope that's what I am doing, where she writes about small communities and just everyday ordinary people. And that's what I think I am doing and certainly what I want to do. Because I think, you know, that's where we live. That's who we are.

[00:03:55] That's where our life happens. And, you know, certainly there is a lot of other big things beyond that, but a lot of everything just happens in the community.

[00:04:06] In wanting to do that after reading that novel, where did that journey take you to actually doing it to where you are now? Not very long after I finished undergrad. I started writing a book which turned out to be River Woman, my first novel.

[00:04:21] And I knew that I wanted to write this book. I didn't necessarily know how to write this book. So I also applied to a creative writing program and worked on the book as my thesis.

[00:04:35] And so I think I did what I set out to do, what I wanted to achieve with that book. And I think I have continued to at the very least try to do that with the subsequent books.

[00:04:46] So it seems like a very straight and linear path, like read a book, decide you want to be a writer, get the MFA, start writing books. Was it as simple as it sounds? For the most part, yeah. I mean that's...

[00:05:01] You know, there are bumps along the way, of course. But I think one of the things at that point when I started the MFA program is that I had a solid sense of what I wanted to write and I had a solid book idea.

[00:05:13] So, you know, I went into that program knowing that that was going to be my thesis. This was what I was going to work on throughout this time there. Thankfully, I was able to do that.

[00:05:23] Certainly once I was done, you know, my first book came out in 2002, my second book in 2020. So, you know, there was a long gap in between. So no, it was not, you know, it sounds straightforward, but, you know, with every writer, every creative person, there are gaps.

[00:05:40] There are things that you have to figure out and new things you have to learn and change and grow. And so I think, you know, that was my period of growth.

[00:05:49] Can you talk about that 18-year gap and that period of growth and what you learned as a writer going through life before you published again? I think a lot of it really was one, perseverance. And in my case, trying to figure out how best to tell the story.

[00:06:06] Every writer, probably every creative person hears all the time, well, what's next? What are you working on next? When is the next book coming? And, you know, it can put a lot of pressure on you to do something just for the sake of having something out there.

[00:06:21] And the professor had said to me somewhere in the last few years, you know, once a book is published, it can't be unpublished.

[00:06:28] And that's something that I have taken with me to ensure that the story that I'm telling is the story that I want to tell and not something else.

[00:06:37] So I work very hard at trying to make sure that I am writing the story as I want it told as opposed to writing a story just simply to have something published. That I think is the biggest lesson.

[00:06:49] The second one is that there are different ways of seeing a story, different ways of getting to it. And certainly over that 18 year period, even though I didn't necessarily have a book written, I had worked on two separate books.

[00:07:06] One is this book that is just coming out, The House of Plain Truth, which I started writing on and off. And it took some time to figure out how best to tell that story.

[00:07:18] And so I think that for me is where the perseverance comes in, that the idea might not necessarily flow as fully the first time you sit down to write it or set out to write it.

[00:07:30] But if you keep thinking and looking at it and taking that step back, sometimes it's a distance that helps. And I think in this case, I step back. I put this book aside and try to figure out how best to tell that story.

[00:07:44] And that distance really helped significantly. In that distance, did you find that you needed to have better skill craft wise? Just have more world experience? What was it about this book that became The House of Plain Truth that kept you going back to it for years?

[00:08:05] I think there are two things. One, certainly, I think world experience in some ways, because I don't think that I would have written this book at that time. Initially, when I started writing the book, I was telling the story from the perspective of a 17, 18 year old.

[00:08:23] And she was telling this older woman's story. And a few years later, I recast the book and told the book from that woman's perspective as this older 60 something year old woman.

[00:08:35] I would not have been able to write this story or I don't think I would have been able to write this story 10, 15 years ago. I was not in that place.

[00:08:44] I didn't have some of the experiences that I now have to be able to or to be interested in telling this story from this perspective. So I think that's a part of it, just growing and seeing the world differently and experiencing the story differently.

[00:09:01] Because certainly an 18 year old telling this woman's story would have a different perspective than a 60 something year old woman telling her own story. So then once you found The Voice, did you always know that it was going to be this historical haunting type of story?

[00:09:23] No, that changed a little bit. That changed. Yeah. I mean, I knew the pieces of the story that were always there was the section, the part that took place in Cuba. That was always there.

[00:09:38] And there was always this idea of trying to find the siblings who had been left behind. But the way in which I tell the story, the way in which Rupert's story comes out was not a part of the original story.

[00:09:54] And I think that is a part of what the distance I needed that distance to be able to see that part. Because when I was initially writing the story, this 18 year old was in college.

[00:10:06] She was telling a very different story than a 60 something year old who's haunted by not just her father, but haunted by her father's story and this task that he has left her with. And an 18 year old would not be interested in that task.

[00:10:24] It's like, what are you doing? This is not for me. This is for older people. Yeah, or even obedient to it. Because the character is not just haunted. Your character is inhabited. Right.

[00:10:35] Once you had that perspective and really leaned into those, and I hope it's okay to say like some of those Jamaican rituals around the dead and paying respect to ancestors and elders in that way, did it become clear to you that you had to really kind of excavate not only the history of Jamaica and Cuba, but then also how that ties into the Americas as well?

[00:11:00] I think some of that was always there. And some of that came out initially in the research itself, because I knew that I wanted to write about the Cuba perspective or Jamaican migration in Cuba, partly because my grandparents went to Cuba in 1919 left in 1931.

[00:11:14] And I really didn't know anything at all about their experience. So, you know, going into the book wanting to understand what their experience was like was a big part of the book for me.

[00:11:24] And so once I got into it and I started understanding a lot of what was happening, I knew that this was a little bit bigger than just the way that I was going to look at it.

[00:11:34] And certainly there's some pieces of it I would, you know, I would know, you know, some parts from history. But I think the experience in Cuba was surprising to me. And I think that's what I was interested in. And so I think that's what I was interested in.

[00:11:50] And I think that's what I was interested in. I was in some ways surprised by the treatment of black migrant workers in Cuba. A lot of it was eye opening. And I don't think I could have told this story if I hadn't been able to.

[00:12:03] But I think that's what I was interested in. And so I started to think about what my experience was like. And I think that's what I was interested in. And so I started to think about what my experience was like.

[00:12:16] And I think that's what I was interested in. I would have liked to have done some research. But the first part of it was eye opening. And I don't think I could have told this story without looking at and talking about the, you know,

[00:12:32] the experience of black migrant workers in the diaspora. And having this historical story that you knew that you were going to start with and then really uncovering and researching all the details that you did, this is the next book.

[00:12:46] Well, actually, my publisher at that point liked the book, but I ended up with a different publisher altogether. And a lot of that was really timing and other issues, but yeah, they liked the book. OK. Well then, we've been talking about it, so then let's get to it.

[00:13:04] If you could read a little bit from The House of Plain Truth and then we will go into the story. Donna Heman's The House of Plain Truth is the story of a fractured Jamaican family trying to come together in the wake of their father's death.

[00:13:20] And while some family members would rather let sleeping ghosts lie, the main protagonist, Perline, finds neither she nor her late father will rest easy until she fulfills his final wish. Here's Donna. I'll read from the first chapter, just a short section. Rupert named his children and now Perline

[00:13:41] begins to think that some people refuse to be forgotten. They, these siblings of hers who have lived only in her family's collective memory of a moment on a wharf in Santiago de Cuba, want to be heard. That moment, which marks the last time

[00:13:56] the living members of her family were together, is stamped in her memory. She replays it now as she has done over the years. Rupert wears his best suit and hat. He's never without his hat. And her mother Irene wears a star-sh white dress,

[00:14:11] her belly big with a baby she would name Hermina. Perline is four and Eileen seven. Those are the two girls who return in 1933 to Jamaica. Their oldest sister Annie is already a married woman who chooses to stay behind in Cuba. And David and Gerardo, soon to be men,

[00:14:29] are staying behind too. Irene extracts a promise from Annie to take care of the boys. The goodbyes are loud and long. And the voices like a cacophony of birds, English and Haitian Creole, spoken by the people who are leaving and Spanish from those overseeing the departures.

[00:14:47] Annie leans over, whispers, on a clear day you can see Cuba from there. Perline believes her, and she and Eileen look out at the blue sea for a glimpse of the distant island, Jamaica. And then they're gone. The last two baby girls in the family

[00:15:03] repatriated at the government's expense to an island they'd never known. Ermena was nearly born on the ship, but Irene makes it ashore before the baby comes. There isn't room on the ship even for a song. A single whistle maybe, but not a song. Rupert wants no disturbance,

[00:15:21] no outward signs of displeasure or anxiety or disappointment. A ship's passage paid for by the government isn't the way he wants to return home. He wants to come home like the men who went to Panama, the cologne man with his gold chain and pocket watch.

[00:15:37] So he finds fault in everything. The waves that rock the boat, the men who report from deck on the land visible in the distance, the clouds that roll behind threatening rain. Perline and Eileen, nervous and fidgeting, looking forward. From where they stand, there is no looking back.

[00:15:54] Even if they could have looked back, Rupert would have ordered them not to. From the moment he stepped onto the ship, he turned his back on Cuba and his children left behind on the wharf until now. And that's this moment when he calls the forbidden names. Thank you.

[00:16:12] So the book is called The House of Plain Truth after what Irene, Rupert's wife and the matriarch of the children in the book called The House. Right. But it's evident that the house is a house of lies. Right. Why did you wanna play with that phrase

[00:16:36] in telling the story that you did where the main character is having to uncover all of these untruths and then figure out what really happened? Yeah, I think a lot of it is tied up in Rupert's sense of himself. Because just about everybody who migrates

[00:16:55] to another country goes because there is this idea that you're going to go, you're going to make it big. You're coming back with a certain amount of wealth to build a house or buy land or support your family. There is so much of that,

[00:17:09] that desire to go off and come back as the person who did well. And that's not Rupert's experience. And so there is then his desire or the family's desire to create sense of who they are. And this is what they have done.

[00:17:27] They've told this story about how they came back and bought this house and, or bought the land and built the house. And there is just so much else behind how they got the house, how they acquired that property that Perline has to uncover.

[00:17:42] Yes, and so about the property, not only are you looking at the migration patterns in the Caribbean, the main reason being work, but also the legacy of slavery in the islands. And there's a line on page 18 where Perline is remembering and she says,

[00:18:00] he said, coconut trees represent freedom unlike cane. And so the coconut trees were planted around the home in Jamaica. But when they were migrating, when Rupert first migrated, it was to harvest the sugar cane fields in Cuba by what I thought was funny. It's called the Havana Company,

[00:18:19] but it was a company based out of New York in America, which just shows the extractive capitalism that continued in the islands as well as in the American South that was based on the labor of black workers. In unearthing those callbacks to plantations and things like that,

[00:18:39] and the history and how families are created in that way, why was it what can be grown and what is grown around the island that helped you to symbolize what it means to truly be free? I think a lot of it is,

[00:18:59] well one, there's a line that I have an epigraph and it says sugar cane has always been for us an aggressive plant, foreign and invasive, linked to slavery, exploitation and power. The palm tree on the contrary assumes its on-demand in an indigenous freshness

[00:19:16] in its free, tall and slender trunk swaying rhythmically in the breeze. And that is from a book, Need of Freedom by Reynaldo Arenas. I thought that that really captured exactly what it really means, that you have a group of people

[00:19:33] or a group of men who have grown up in Jamaica or on other English speaking islands working in the sugar cane fields or their ancestors worked in the sugar cane fields. And again, when they wanted to make more money, what was required of them was to travel

[00:19:49] to another country to do some of the same things. And that's one of the things that Irene says, initially when Rupert says he wants to go to Cuba, is that the work that he's going to be doing in Cuba

[00:20:00] is the same work that he would be doing in Jamaica. Why go there? But a lot has shifted, I think, in the processing of sugar cane. But there was so much at that time that was just simply based on just simply labor.

[00:20:16] And that's what the sugar cane represented. It was hard work. Whereas I think the harvesting of coconuts was something that came a little bit later, in Jamaica at least, but was not necessarily fraught with the same kind of tension and history as planting or reaping sugar cane.

[00:20:37] In telling the story of the difficulties of migrating to do the same work, hopefully for more money so that you could come home and be wealthy, that was Rupert's experience in the 1920s and 1930s. But then Perline has that same experience with America

[00:20:56] in the present day that you said, you have a line on page 50 where it's like, Perline carried all of that otherness like a baby she would never birth, except it wasn't a weight she cradled lovingly. She struggled with it, struggled to overcome it, struggled to move past it.

[00:21:09] When she could no longer struggle with it, she set it aside, turned her life down like a plate left to dry, wiped her hands clean and left. And yet her sister still begrudge her the ease with which she can go back and forth between America and Jamaica.

[00:21:25] In speaking largely just about migration in general, do you think there is ever a place other than where you were born that you can truly be at home? I think for some people, yes. And I think a lot of it depends on your experience.

[00:21:42] If you have had a lot of political upheaval or a lot of trauma, then you might be, you might feel more at home somewhere else. But I think that's one of the questions that I think I keep asking in my work,

[00:21:58] is where is home and how do you define this home? Is it a place? Is it like a certain person? Because I think for all of us, I think we're all still looking for this place where we can truly belong. And that's one of the things here,

[00:22:14] I think in this book is that that's what Pearlene wants. And that's what her mother wanted because they had gone to Cuba, spent so much time there. And then were pretty much, I kicked out of Cuba when things started changing. And so many of these English speaking workers

[00:22:30] and French speaking, cause the Haitians were actually treated a lot worse than the Jamaicans were. But so they are all kicked out, rounded up and sent home. And so there is this sense that, you can always be removed and they wanted a place

[00:22:45] from which they could never be removed. So when you even take it a little bit further and look at our present day situation, a lot of what we saw then is also the same thing that's repeating itself now. We're just in this circular situation

[00:23:01] where there is just always a group of people who we feel we need to beat up on. It's just such a circular thing. Each time I look at it and I think about, the experiences of English speaking or French speaking people in Cuba

[00:23:15] or migrating in various areas to find work. And then I look at what people are experiencing now, whether you're coming from Africa or Latin America or even the Caribbean, a lot of it is the same. It's the same language. It's the same ideas about dirty in the blood

[00:23:32] of America or whatever that language is. But a lot of it was the same things that were used back then about Jamaicans or people from the English speaking and French speaking Caribbean migration to Cuba. And in addition to that otherness

[00:23:49] of not being able to find a place to call home where you can't be made to leave or that you feel comfortable enough to stay, there's also I think on the part of Perlin's sisters, Hermina and Aileen, where she notices that they've catapulted themselves

[00:24:04] from poor farmer's daughters and middle-class professionals. And so it's that class aspect as well. And I hear black Americans talk about it now with even some people who have come from different countries in Africa and immigrated and said, you know, you beg for scraps in America

[00:24:22] where you could have the same amount of money, the same job and live in Africa in a different country and live much better lives. Is there a comment that you're making about black people maybe perhaps feeling more safe

[00:24:34] or more at home in a country that looked more like them? I think there is some of that, yes, that you may feel more safe and more at home. But I think a lot of the same issues that you have here or anywhere at all in the world,

[00:24:52] you know, because of capitalism is probably even felt much more acutely in some of these other countries. So, yes, there's a certain group of people or certain percentage of people who will be able to live much better lives. And then there are others who can't

[00:25:13] because they either don't have the education or they don't have the money to get the education to then acquire the jobs that will allow them to live well. So they do come to a larger country like America and might not necessarily be living in the best of conditions,

[00:25:30] but it's better for them than where they were. Or it might be that the opportunities are more open or more available than they would have had access to at home. You know, I look at Jamaica, for example, like a lot of the jobs in Jamaica

[00:25:49] are tied to the tourism industry. And there are lots of issues with the tourism industry and that's for a whole different podcast. But, you know, you graduate from high school, you go to college and this is your option. And that might not necessarily be something

[00:26:08] that a lot of people want to have. And it's an option, but it's not necessarily the place in which you are made to feel like you belong at home. You are there to work for somebody else. You know, the entire industry is built upon catering

[00:26:25] to the foreigner coming in. And the foreigner coming in is the one who's getting just so much more benefit and so much more respect than you are getting as a person who's working on that property. Is that what you want? Do you feel better going somewhere else

[00:26:43] where you can make a little bit more money or you can do something else? So, you know, there are so many different layers that it's really hard to understand and really hard to look at unless you're there. And I think even for somebody like Perline

[00:27:00] who has lived somewhere else, her perspective going back to Jamaica will also be a little bit different because she has resources that her sisters probably don't have. She gets sick, she could come back to America to get the kind of medical treatment

[00:27:17] that her sisters won't necessarily have access to. And so a lot of that friction between Perline and her sisters is really about that. You are living here, but you're not necessarily living here in the way that so many other people are living here

[00:27:32] because you still have that opportunity to leave whenever you want. Mm-hmm. I had a Haitian writer on a few episodes back and she alluded to that she was talking about she wants to go on vacation, but then she has a really big problem going on vacation

[00:27:49] in the Caribbean because of the tourism industry and then you just kind of talking about that and saying that the jobs that are left are to cater to the foreigner. It makes, and that makes me wonder because I do understand, but I'm reminded of this thing

[00:28:04] that you wrote on page 237 and it's the voice of Rupert where he says, everything that go wrong in that country they try to blame on us. It's hard to live in a country like that when all the people show you day after day

[00:28:16] that they don't want you there. And still Rupert said stay. And I feel like that has been a lot of how black people no matter where they live, feel about where they live. It's like you're blamed for everything. It's all of these things,

[00:28:34] but then it's like, and yet we still stay. So my question, why stay? Well, let me answer it first with, in Rupert's case, he stayed because he did not want to go back home without anything, without money.

[00:28:48] He wanted, a lot of his life was built on this idea of success and success to him was going away, making enough money to come back, buy and build his little farming empire. And I think a lot of that is the same for very many people.

[00:29:07] It's like you leave from your small village, you come to America with this big dream and the big ideas, how do you go back without, with nothing? So that is one part of it. But the other part of it is, the other question is where do you go?

[00:29:25] That for so many of us or for all of us basically, whether you're in America or in the Caribbean, it's there is that you don't have that connection to another place where you can really be. So where do you go?

[00:29:45] Jamaica is home to us because that's where we have been for like what, 300, 400 years. America is home to us because that's where we have been for that period of time. So if you're going to find a place where you truly belong, where is that place?

[00:30:01] Even if you do your DNA test and you find where your people are from, it's who are you going to? So there's so many layers and I don't know how you really answer that question other than you try to find a place as Irene said,

[00:30:20] where you can never be removed. And that then becomes this place that is home. But of course you can't only live on that little place. There's so much else around it that might be infiltrating and disrupting that home that you have created.

[00:30:35] So it's, that might be another book. That might be the subject of another book. Where do you go? How do you create this place that is truly home for you and for many others? Beyond just, what is home? Why do you stay? Migration, the class differences,

[00:30:52] the privileges of having access to other countries when you leave. With all of those different layers and we haven't even gotten into the horror aspects I think, which I don't know if it's supposed to be a horror novel but I was like, this is kind of scary

[00:31:06] but I'm gonna still read it because it's good. Yes. What do you want readers to take from this book that you've written here? I think I want readers to really think about and look at, you know, like indeed what is home? How do you define that place?

[00:31:23] And not just how do you define it but when you find it, how do you hold onto it? I think for very many people there is always this sense of your family home. And I think the generations of 20 and 30 something and 40 something year olds

[00:31:40] have a very different perspective of the land that has been left to them or the houses that their older relatives are leaving. And I know there is a lot of question now about what do we do with this? We don't want it, you know

[00:31:54] take care of your issues before you pass on and don't leave us with what you have acquired. But I think there's also another side to that in this case, you have Rupert and Irene who were able to build something and buy some

[00:32:11] well, let me just say build something own property for the first time. Maybe. You know, well maybe, but it was theirs. It was theirs. They claimed it. But you have that idea, you know you have now passed on this legacy and this is home.

[00:32:32] So what do you do with it? Do you fight to keep it or do you let it go and build something else for yourself and quote unquote, move on to something better? So there is that sense about what you have and what you leave behind.

[00:32:46] And I think because so many of us are migrants you know, whether you're moving from the south to the north or from the Midwest to the West coast in search of work, there is still this foundational place where that your family is from

[00:33:04] that so many people have moved away from. So is that where you really do belong? Is that home? Is that that place that you should fight to keep or is that place that you should find to keep this new place that you have gone to?

[00:33:17] And, or when you look at us as a people and like historically, is this the way we live then? And do we move back to something else where we have this central place that is home or do we continue to be the scattered group of people?

[00:33:38] I don't have the answers, but you know, there is, I think it's a big part of questioning who we are and how we live. You know, are we going to continue to truly be scattered or are we finding this place where we are?

[00:33:54] Truly, truly, truly ourselves, whether it's, you know, as you, you know, one of the questions you asked earlier was about being in a place where you are, I don't think you use the word majority, but it's, you know, predominantly black and you feel at home.

[00:34:10] Is that what you go back to? You know, like these smaller communities where you are there, you know, and it's your group. It's, you know, like you feel more comfortable you're at home or do you make your way out into the world?

[00:34:24] But yeah, you know, I don't know. I don't have the answer. Again, that might be another book. I know you said you don't have the answer, but I'm gonna ask this anyway. How do you personally define home just for yourself? I think I'm still trying to define that.

[00:34:41] And somebody asked me that recently and I said, you know, I feel there are different times when I feel at home and depending on the situation, depending on what's going on. I was just in Jamaica and I felt very much at home.

[00:34:53] Each time I go to Jamaica, I feel very much at home. And I asked myself, why am I not living here? And then I, you know, then there are the circumstances, other things that I look at and I say,

[00:35:03] but I'm not ready yet to deal with some of the bureaucracy that I would have to deal with. So how do you define home? Is it really just a place where you're most comfortable or most comfortable for a time? Or is it, you know, I don't know.

[00:35:20] I'm still trying to figure it out. Thank you. So I want to move to a speed round in the game before I let you go for the afternoon. What is your favorite book? Oh, beloved. I absolutely love that book. I just love the way she blended history

[00:35:38] with this family story. To me, it was seamless. You knew exactly what she was talking about and you felt the power of it and the difficult situations that the family went through. But it was also just this story about a mother

[00:35:53] who was just feeling guilt about her child and her, you know, her family. So I think a lot of it is that. To me, it was just a really well done, beautifully written story that easily blends politics with family story. Who was your favorite author? Probably Toni Morrison.

[00:36:15] All right. Who was your favorite artist? Oh, I love Simone Lee's work. I just love how she, you know, I capture so much in these gigantic sculptures and they say a lot. They, you know, build on history and culture and something that really, on the surface of it,

[00:36:40] is sometimes just really simple. If money were no object, where would you go? What would you do and where would you live? By a beach, somewhere. And I would go, I would love to go through every single country on the continent of Africa.

[00:37:01] And that I think is what I would absolutely do. If somebody would like to pay for it, I will gladly go. Ha ha ha ha ha. Name three things on your bucket list. Oh, I don't know. I don't have a bucket list. I certainly want to travel more,

[00:37:23] but I don't have, you know, yeah, the kind of things that people have on bucket lists like skydiving and stuff like that. I don't have those. I just don't, I don't have any. I love that. What brings you joy? Lately, I have been doing ceramics, hand-building ceramics.

[00:37:43] And that brings me, I'm doing it because I love doing it. And I don't really, while I certainly have expectations that it will work and will look good, it's just something that I do. And I don't, right now, that's it. I just like doing it.

[00:37:59] It's easy to see, you know, to take something that's, you know, pretty much dirt and form something out of it. And I love watching that entire process of building something that is functional and useful and pretty. Okay, what brings you peace?

[00:38:19] Being at home brings me a lot of peace. Because it's a quiet space and it's my space and I'm in control. And so that brings me peace. All right, so our game is called Rewriting the Classics. Classic is however you define it.

[00:38:34] Name one book you wished you would have written. Their eyes were watching God. Okay, name one book where you want to change the ending and how would you do it? Oh, I can't think of any. Yeah, I can't think of any book off the top of my head.

[00:38:52] Okay, and then the final question is name a book that you think is overrated or overtaught and why. Oh. Now that is, there's one book I will absolutely say is what's a book about that whale? Moby Dick. Moby Dick. Can't even remember the title of the book.

[00:39:16] I remember reading that or starting to read it in grad school and I could not finish it. I still have no understanding of how and why that book is taught. And I, yeah, have never finished it. I will never ever go back to it.

[00:39:37] I love that answer so much. Your face was just like, I have a list of books that are overrated and overtaught. Oh, okay, so my final question for you today when you are dead and gone and among the ancestors what would you like someone to write

[00:39:55] about the legacy of words and work that you've left behind? I want people to say that I captured my community well. That I told stories that blended our culture and folklore and history and that I wrote about my people, our people. That's what I want.

[00:40:24] I want to tell Caribbean stories and tell them fully and honestly. And I want to make sure that at the end, at that point, that that is what people remember. That I told our stories. Big thank you to Donna for being here today on Black and Published.

[00:40:43] Make sure you check out Donna's latest novel The House of Plain Truth out now from Ziti Books. And if you're not following Donna check her out on the socials. She's at Donna underscore Hemans on Instagram and Twitter. That's our show for the week.

[00:41:00] If you liked this episode and want more Black and Published head to our Instagram page. It's at Black and Published and that's BLK and Published. There I've posted a bonus clip from my interview with Donna about telling the stories of history

[00:41:17] the way it happened and not how colonists would tell it. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. I'll holler at y'all next week when our guest will be Avery Cunningham author of the novel, The Mayor of Maxwell Street.

[00:41:32] It became much more than a gap to be retelling or simply a glittering exploration of Black wealth or Black prestige. It became about the great migration and the effect that that period in American history had on Chicago, had on the entire country, had on Black culture.

[00:41:47] So it became more a story of an era as opposed to a story of a particular group of people or a particular moment. That's next week on Black and Published. I'll talk to you then. Peace.