Fraser Sherman's Blog

My Southern Discomfort supporting cast was heavily shaped by one creative decision and one awkward realization.

The creative decision was setting it in 1973. Originally I’d had my protagonist driving into town with a friend (an approach I discussed last week did not work); once I settled on ’73, it seemed logical they’d show up by bus. Which meant someone would have to meet them. Enter: Joan Slattery.

The awkward realization was looking at my first novel-length draft — this was originally a novella but it kept growing — and realizing it was an awfully white book. Shouldn’t I have some POC in the cast? Of course there were ways to work around that. The community founders were Irish (and elves, of course) and I could see them discouraging outside visitors let alone new residents. That would keep the town lily white into the present.

Only rationalizing an all-white book still left me with an all-white book. Easier — I’m used to writing women but I haven’t done much with POC in stories past — but it felt cheap and cowardly. So I decided Pharisee did have a large black population, like many Southern communities. That meant having to think about race relations there, past and present. Enter: Liz Mitchell.

In my final draft, my protagonist Maria strikes up conversations with Captain Jefferson Carpenter — Vietnam veteran, JAG, part of his right arm gone — and Kirby Slattery, who left Pharisee to pursue an art career. It’s Joan “Squiddly” Slattery — as a kid she loved Hanna Barbera’s “Squiddly Diddly” cartoon — who meets Kirby at the bus station. And acting on guidance from Olwen, ends up identifying Maria as the person Olwen McAlister has seen in a vision, the one fated to bring Aubric McAlister’s killer to justice.

One publisher’s reader said Joan was the most interesting character and ought to be the protagonist. I dig that. She’s sweet, sunny, stubborn when she gets her dander up; like Maria the crisis in Pharisee forces her to step up and become more than she’s been before, though in a different way. Joan proves herself a hero. And also, I think she’s a very likable young woman. In romance-novel terms she’s the sunshine to Maria’s grump (though no, they do not have a thing for each other).

Liz Mitchell came along a lot later. My primary black character was a reporter hired by the Pharisee Beacon to cover black news in the county, a concession that white people doing all the reporting didn’t cut it in 1973. Slowly he discovers there’s more going on in Pharisee than he thought. Nobody in my writing group found him terribly interesting. Nor any of the subplots involving the paper.

I’m not sure what prompted me to shift focus to his sister, but it proved an inspired idea. Though in the finished draft, the reporter’s nowhere to be found. Liz is the daughter of Bridget Blake, one of the “black Blakes” who dominate business in the black community. There are white Blakes who run the white business community, another branch of the same family. They don’t like each other much — there was a big dispute over whether an interracial marriage 80 years earlier had been a marriage or merely a hookup, which determined who inherited a big pot of money — but hey, business is business.

The older Pharisee blacks, remembering when lynching was common throughout the south, are very appreciative they live in a community where the McAlisters didn’t allow that. Nor did visits by KKK night-riders pose a threat — part of the county’s legend, the “Pharisee mystery,” is that nobody in the Klan’s three attacks on Pharisee ever returned. Or so the Klan says, but who’s going to take that crazy talk seriously, right? Bridget was one of the first of the younger generation to think the county could do better: end Jim Crow, integrate, don’t be so afraid of drawing attention (something the McAlisters fear greatly, as the book explains). She locked horns with Olwen despite them being friends; after she went off to college she never returned.

Liz grew up with her mother telling stories about growing up in a town with elves. She took them in the same spirit as if she’d been told “When I lived in Canada, Santa Claus used to invite us over for Christmas dinner.” Bridget never went back but after her death, Liz and her husband moved to Pharisee because it’s become a bedroom community for upper class Atlanta blacks, close to the city but quieter and with less crime. And Liz and her four-year-old son get to meet her extended family there.

Liz was perfectly positioned to be a POV character. She has roots in the African-American community but she doesn’t know Pharisee’s secrets (yet). In a county that’s been largely resistant to women’s liberation, she’s a feminist. Because she was friends with Richard Cannon, who was killed along with Aubric McAlister, she’s angry. The mix worked.

FBI Special Agent Rachel Cohen is another POV character in my ensemble cast (I won’t be listing all of them). One of the first women to become an FBI agent, she has one spectacular case on her record, stopping a FALN (Puerto Rican independence militant group) terrorist bombing. Kenning, her superior in Atlanta, put her on the McAlister case less because of her success than because she’s inexperienced. She fails, every woman in the FBI looks suspect. Rachel is very conscious of the pressure she’s under. As a Southern woman, she’s supposed to wield an iron fist hidden in a velvet glove; she’s forgetting the glove.

I think a key scene for Rachel is when Joan’s father Sheriff Slattery calls her in for help with what appears to be a lynching. Cohen’s horrified but as she tells the sheriff, she’s there to solve the McAlister/Cannon murder. She cannot divert resources to solve a local murder. Nor does she believe Slattery’s argument that the killings all tie together (spoiler: they do). It’s a harsh decision but it’s the professional one to make. And she’s a professional.

My next post will deal with the characters around whom everything revolves, Olwen McAlister and her mysterious foe Gwalchmai. Stay tuned.

Cover by Sam Collins. Rights are mine.