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Freshwater Road
By Denise Nicholas
Reviews &
Interview of
author Denise Nichols
Freshwater Road is the debut novel
by Denise Nicholas. Ms. Nicholas is probably best known to you as
the pioneering actress who starred in the TV series Room 222
and In the Heat of the Night (for which she also wrote several
episodes), as well as a great many other TV shows and films. But
with Freshwater Road, she embarks on a stunning second act as a
brilliant writer of fiction. the book has already been highly
praised by pre-pub media such as PW (which gave it a
coveted "starred" review) and Booklist, and is
sure to garner even more such accolades.
Freshwater Road tells the story of 19-year-old
Celeste Tyree, who in the summer of 1964 journeys to the small
town of Pineyville, Mississippi, to help the organization One
Man, one Vote register local "Negroes" to vote. Like
Celeste, Ms. Nicholas also grew up in Detroit and attended the
University of Michigan, and like Celeste she took part in the
movement; as a young member of the Free Southern Theater, she
performed throughout the South, often in small churches, from
1964 to 1966. Drawing on this intensely personal foundation, as
well as razor-sharp skills for inhabiting characters and a gift
for expressive prose, Ms. Nicholas's new book is certain to be
recognized as one of the first novels of the year, and
ultimately as one of the most important novels ever written
about the civil rights movement.
And Freshwater Road couldn't be appearing at a
more important time: this summer saw the conviction in
Mississippi of reputed ex-Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964
abduction and murder of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and
Michael Schwerner, which The New York Times called "the
most infamous unresolved case from America's civil rights
struggles."
Freshwater Road brings that time alive in ways
that underscores its relative relevance today. It tells a
powerful, universal story of a young woman's coming of age
that's made even more resonant by its setting during this
flashpoint in recent history.
Freshwater Road is Agate's lead title for 2005
and we are doing everything in our power to bring it to wider
attention. Ms. Nicholas will kick off her ten-city tour in late
August in Los Angeles, where she's lived for years, and then
travel to New York, Washington, Chicago, Atlanta, and her
hometown of Detroit, among others, for live appearances,
readings, and signings.
The book has already drawn
significant pre-press attention--featured pieces are already set
in People, ebony, Essence, and Black Issues Book Review
magazines. Ms. Nicholas has a broad following from her TV and
film work (for which she's been recognized with multiple Emmy
and NAACP Image awards, among others) that will be eager to read
and enjoy her first book.
--Note from the Publisher
What a wonderful surprise Denise
Nicholas's first novel is. Her textured characters unfold
against the background of an historic encounter that was
destined to change America's forever.
-- Sidney Poitier
In Freshwater Road ,
Denise Nicholas brings alive all the colors and emotions of the
civil rights movement during the perilous adventure that was
Freedom Summer.
--Janet Fitch, White Oleander
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Book Description
Freshwater Road
is the story of one young woman's journey into adulthood via the
political and social upheavals of the civil rights movement. A
young black collegian, Celeste Tyree, leaves Ann Arbor to go to
Poplarville, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964 to help found a
Freedom School and a voter registration project as part of
Freedom Summer. As the summer unfolds, she confronts not only
the political -realities of race and poverty in this tiny town,
but also truths about herself and her own family.
As
Celeste gets to know her fellow activists and the people of
Poplarville, she grapples with her father's disapproval of her
decision to go to Mississippi. A numbers-playing bar owner in
Detroit, Shuck is proud of his daughter and proud of the
opportunities he's provided for her; Celeste's risking what he's
provided by going to the violent South is not what he had
planned for her. Long estranged from her mother, Celeste is
rocked by revelations of wrenching details of her past, while at
the same time, she develops a deep relationship with the woman
hosting her in Mississippi, Odessa Robbins, who helps Celeste
learn more about what it means to be an adult woman and a
"person of substance" in the world.
Before
her career as a TV star, Denise Nicholas herself was a Freedom
Rider in 1964, and in Freshwater Road, she reaches back
to bring that summer alive in this unforgettable first novel.
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Interview
Denise
on the Writing of
Freshwater Road
Has writing
always been something you've been interested in?
God
bless the late Carroll O'Connor. he gave me a shot to write on
the show and shepherded me through the process. What I learned
was that I wasn't supposed to write scripts. Don't get me
wrong--I love movies and what the camera does to paint pictorial
images on screen. I'm still a kid when I'm watching the way
Michael Mann shoots Los Angeles in heat and Collateral. Takes my
breath away. But I love words, phrases, and the images conjured
by words.
There's
no doubt I've always had writing in the back of my mind, perhaps
as a fantasy based on literary treatments of the lives of
writers, or even from watching movies and reading romantic
novels. I don't think that it was based on reality. I wrote
papers in my English classes and fumbled around with poetry. Bad
poetry. writing was a romantic girl's dream, and for me that
dream drew energy from reading the Brontes, Hardy, Dickens, and
then in college discovering the work of T. S. Eliot, Hemingway,
D. H. Lawrence, Baldwin, and others. I think in those days (the
60s) we always had a book in our hands and read and read and
read. What we retained is another story.
Freshwater Road draws on your own experiences in Mississippi in 1964.
Can you tell us a little more about that experience.
That
summer, I left the University of Michigan to join the Free
Southern Theater; I wanted to work in some area of the arts but
with a political bent. that theater provided the outlet. The
primary action of the story stems from that place and time. I
had no idea, when I began writing
Freshwater Road, just how many things stayed in my mind, incidents
that I pulled into the text of the book, things that really did
happen, though I've fictionalized many of them.
For
example, there's a scene in my book where a sheriff holds a gun
tot he lead character's head and threatens her while she's
helping some folks from the town to register to vote. In my
real-life experience, it happened on a street in new Orleans--a
cop put a gun to my head. He (the cop) had been watching the
Free Southern Theater's apartment in New Orleans and knew that a
number of civil rights people, including some photographers,
stopped there for food and rest. He threatened to kill me right
there on the street. He then confiscated the film and cameras of
the photographers, who were also on the scene at the time. It
was quite a moment.
My
experience with the Free Southern Theater was exciting,
eventful, and scary. We definitely were a part of the civil
rights movement. The main character in my book is assigned to a
town where she must live the entire summer to run a voting
project. I saw many people doing it, reflected on it, and saved
it in my mind because I thought it was such remarkable work.
With
the theater, we would arrive in a town, set up in the local
church, perform, and get out of there. This was more challenging
than it sounds now, 40 years later. A bomb was thrown at the
stage where we performed in McComb, Mississippi. Houses we
bivouacked in were shot into and we sometimes slept on the
floor; cars were impounded, members arrested. the most indelible
aspect of those experiences was terror, and I definitely tried
to capture as much of that as possible in the book. I hope it
speaks for itself.
What
inspired you to write this story now?
I
read a number of books on the civil rights movement, especially In
Struggle by Clayborne Carson, The Origins of the Civil
Rights Movement by Aldon D. Morris, and Free at Last? by
Fred Powledge, among many others. I studied photographs (I was
even in some of those photographs, with an innocence in my face
that I can barely comprehend today.) I listened to Curtis
Mayfield and the Impressions, Bob Dylan, and the rest of the
music of the early 60s. I tried to catch every documentary that
dealt with the movement to keep my spirits up during the long
lonely process of writing the book. There are wonderful things
out there, including Spike Lee's film on the Birmingham church
bombing, Four Little Girls; the PBS series Eyes on the
prize; and the HBO film Boycott, which is set earlier but
is inspirational.
At
first I was unsure about where to set my story, so I went down
to new Orleans, rented a car, and drove into Mississippi to
Hattiesburg, then drove a different route back to new Orleans.
Southern Mississippi is not the Delta (which I was more familiar
with). The area that used to be called the Piney Woods is the
area I was after . . . and so I named my town Pineyville.
What
do you hope your readers will experience by reading the novel?
I
hope they enjoy the story and the characters and that they get a
good sense of that place and time. I don't want the beauty--or
the horror--of that to disappear. for the young people who read
it, I'd like to encourage them to take meaningful risks, to
reach out to people, to open their hearts and minds to those
less fortunate all over the world.
What
authors have influenced your own writing?
I'm
still such a novice at this. I wouldn't want to drag any
heavyweight folks into my little cart just yet. I want to be
influenced by people whose work I admire--subtly. And then, my
own voice is what I'm really after, to make it deeper, freer,
better. But, the writers I've totally enjoyed most recently are
Jack Fitch, Pete Dexter, Toni Morrison, Annie Proulx, Marianne
Wiggens, Joyce Carol Oates (loved The Falls), Ian McEwan,
Edward P. Jones . . .
posted 30 July 2005 *
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posted 20 October 2007
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