What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? The beginning and end of the writing of my first novel What Sammy Knew is a bit complicated because the book actually grew out of memoir that I wrote previously and never published.
After the publication of my previous book, The Family: A Journey into the Heart of the 20th Century, in 2013, I plunged into a period of darkness. Nothing sparked my curiosity, nothing inspired me to tackle another project – I felt sunk and marooned at the same time.
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In the winter of 2014 I began keeping a journal of this bout of depression and gradually, as the dark cloud lifted, I became fascinated and then obsessed Ethel Foreman, the Black domestic worker who lived with my family and essentially raised me for first ten years of my life. That obsession got channeled into a marathon self-assigned research project in the course of which I traced Ethel’s family two generations back into slavery on the Northern Neck of Virginia (birthplace of 3 of our 5 first presidents, slaveholders all), assembled her family tree, located the death certificate of her only child, and followed her journey from Virginia to the upstairs of our suburban New York house.
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By 2016, I had completed a narrative charting the intersection of my depression and the journey into Ethel’s past that pulled me out of it – but for various reasons that memoir was never published. But I knew I was not done with the story. When, after much searching, I found her grave at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester County, NY, I whispered her my promise that I would bring whatever I had learned about her to the world – and I was determined to make good on that promise. History and racism had silenced Ethel during her lifetime: half a century after her death, justice demanded that she should have her voice back.
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Sometime in the fall of 2017 the light bulb went off: why not take the facts of Ethel’s life that I had spent years uncovering and fold them into a novel? That was the birth of What Sammy Knew, in which the character Tutu Carter is modeled closely on Ethel. It took about two years to complete two drafts of the book – and Penguin accepted it in the summer of 2019. It was slated for publication in the fall of 2020, 50 years after the events it describes – but the outbreak Covid 19 scuttled that plan. I was terribly afraid that the story of Ethel/Tutu would fall victim to the pandemic – but Penguin decided to issue the hardcover last year, March 2020. A year has passed, and I’m delighted that the novel is now being published in paperback.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? My wife and I always dreamed of having a cabin in a rural setting and about five years ago we made that dream come true when we bought a piece of prairie outside of the small town of Joseph, Oregon (in the northeast corner of the state) and built a place with a view of the surrounding ranches and the mountains beyond. Much of the writing of Sammy was done sitting on a chaise longue on the deck of that cabin. It felt very strange to be immersed in imaginary scenes of young people fomenting revolution in the East Village of Manhattan and carrying out dangerous escapades in Central Park – and then look up to the irrigated farms and snow-covered mountains of Oregon. But I have always thrived on this kind of disconnect.
I actually finished the first draft in Oregon, had it printed, and sat outside in the hazy sunshine of late summer to read the manuscript through. It’s always impossible to judge one’s own work impartially, but I definitely got swept up in the excitement of the story. I concluded the narrative had a pulse – and many readers have concurred with this, insisting that they can’t put it down.
What I didn’t write on the deck of our cabin, I banged out at home in Seattle. My desk is always a disaster area – but it was far messier when I was working on research-intensive books of nonfiction. Sammy does draw on some historical research, especially into the Black Panthers and the 1970 Weatherman bombing in Greenwich Village, and of course there was a vast amount of material that I had gathered about Ethel’s life. But on the whole, fiction, I find, is far tidier to write (at least from a house-keeping point of view) than history.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? When I’m home in Seattle, my writing habits are very mundane and routinized: I sit at a conventional desk with a desk top computer, I usually have a glass of water or a cup of coffee beside me, I start at about 9:30 in the morning, work until lunch, and return again in the afternoon for a few hours. No music – I find that anything with a strong rhythm distracts me from the rhythm of my own prose.
When we’re out our place in Oregon, the pattern changes entirely. There is no set time or place that I work – it’s kind of where and when the spirit moves me. I use a laptop and almost always work outside sitting on a chaise – and I move it around depending on the weather – into the shade when it’s hot, out of the wind, into the sun when it’s chilly. I might start at 7 AM or at 3 PM – I might work one hour or five – no pattern, no logic, just spur of the moment. No music there either. Often it’s nice to have one of our dogs sitting with me when I work – very comforting, and when I read bits aloud to them they never seem bored.
No matter where I am, I always begin by going over what I wrote the day before and there are days in which there is no forward motion: I spend the entire day redoing the previous day’s work and sometimes deleting it altogether.
Some days things pour out – other days they dribble or leak or drip. The latter is more common. I wish I were a faster writer, but I’ve learned to live with the fact that I’m a “bleeder,” as my friend and mentor the late Ivan Doig put it.
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One element carries over to both places: when I’m struggling with a thorny passage, I often go back to it first thing in the morning, around 6:30, when I get up. I might tinker for 20 minutes or an hour just to get it right. And, when finishing a book, I tend to work at a fever pitch – time stops or flies as I race to the end.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
What Sammy Knew, Chapter One [pages 1 through 3]
This is how Sam Stein remembered drowning.
He was three years old, maybe four. The afternoon was stifling. Cicadas revved in the tops of the backyard trees like rusty chain saws. Or maybe they were chain saws? The air reeked of grass and gas. “Quit whining,” Tutu commanded in that voice like a slap – but he couldn’t. He wanted his mother! He was so sticky that his shirt was glued to his back and his undies wedged in his crack like a damp rope. “Kiddy pool!” his big brother Tom screamed and then the even bigger brother Ron screamed it too. “Kiddy pool.” But why, Sam wondered, would a kitty need a pool? They didn’t even have a cat. Tutu peeled his clothes off and told him to step into his trunks. She kept him steady with one hand on his back – her touch soft from the pearly lotion she was forever wringing into her palms. The pool was a circle of blue. A whiffle ball, a plastic bat and a couple of rubber duckies circled each other on the shining blue surface. Sam jumped through confetti of light that shook down from the trees. His two brothers were already kicking up stars and Sam joined in, hammering his legs through the cool slosh, stomping, marching, spinning, squealing. All three of them were as slick as eels from the baby oil Tutu slathered over their pale knobby backs and shoulders. “Wanna duck, Sammy?” his oldest brother shouted in his face. “C’meer, Sammy. Get the ducky.” But whenever Sam reached for the prize, Ron whisked it off, hid it behind his back, threw it up and swiped it back inches away from his greasy little fist. On the last throw, Sam lunged and fell flat on his face in the now tepid bug-flecked blue. He cried into the water and inhaled and choked. His throat screwed shut like a faucet. Still on his stomach with his mouth and nose submerged, he began to thrash and squirm. And then he quit and lay still.
Sam Stein at seventeen could not possibly remember any of this – but he did. He remembered it like it was yesterday. While stars winked on in the blackness behind his eyes, a shrieking whoop – “MY BABY!” – pierced his brain and Tutu – tall, brown, bowlegged Tutu, who hated to be hurried – came charging across the lawn, elbowed aside the paralyzed brothers, scooped Sam out of the pool and pressed him gasping and then screaming to the gray cotton cloth of the maid’s uniform she wore.
Sam remembered drowning – almost drowning – but the rest of them – his mother and brothers – only remembered “MY BABY!” From that day on, whenever Sam griped about a bully or a skinned knee or a vile teacher or a devious friend, one of them – usually Ron or Tom but sometimes his mother – wailed “MY BABY!” and laughed in his face.
But not Tutu. Tutu was strict and scary. She rarely smiled and never kissed. She punished Sam relentlessly and cruelly – not with her fists but with her scorn – but she never laughed at him, even when he deserved it. Tutu was the live-in maid – “I’m not your damn maid” she snapped whenever she heard one of them use that word – but Sam knew, had known from the day they brought him home hollering for all his newborn lungs were worth, that he was her boy. Born on her birthday, delivered into her arms by his desperate mother, Sam belonged to Tutu. He and his skinny white ass wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for her. It didn’t matter what he said or did, how he treated her, or whether he loved her back. He was hers. She was his. For good.
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Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This passage – the opening of What Sammy Knew – was one of those rare bits that came out rapidly and more or less wholly formed. I had already completed the first draft was done and was embarked on a major rewrite. I had not planned on adding a new opening – but one day (can’t remember the date) an idea came to me out of the blue. The working title of the novel was Dead in the Water – and that’s where I got the inspiration to open the book with a near drowning accident. Nothing like this ever happened to me, but my wife long ago told me a story she had heard about a friend’s toddler who came perilously close to drowning in this way – so I lifted her anecdote and just went to town. I wanted to dramatize Tutu’s importance in Sammy’s life – but truly very little of this scene was conscious. As I recall, I sat down, thinking, Hmm, what about this and just started banging away at the keyboard.
My friend Bill Kenower, who works as a writing coach, calls this “being in the flow” – working swiftly and deftly at an almost unconscious level. I find the flow is sometimes wonderful for first drafts – but often the results have to be heavily edited. In this case, very little editing was required. Since I already knew the story and its outcome, I had the metaphors and tone and voice ready to hand, as it were. It’s a bit like the introductions I write for nonfiction books: I always do those last and even though they loom large in importance and can be intimidating even to contemplate, usually they take shape quickly and require very little extra work after the initial drafting.
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Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. The major changes I made to this opening came at the request of my publisher. The Penguin people worried that the character of Tutu might veer into a stereotype of a Black mammy, and they urged me to recast some of the passages. In the excerpt above, I slimmed her down and gave her bow legs. They also asked me to change all the Black English into standard English: originally I had Tutu snap “I ain’t yo’ maid” – but that got altered to “I’m not your damn maid.”
David Laskin was born in New York in 1953 and educated at Harvard College and New College, Oxford. For the past twenty-five years, Laskin has written books and articles on a wide range of subjects including history, weather, travel, gardens and the natural world. His most recent book, The Children’s Blizzard, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for Nonfiction. Laskin’s other titles include Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals, A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence, and Artists in their Gardens (co-authored with Valerie Easton). A frequent contributor to The New York Times Travel Section, Laskin also writes for the Washington Post, the Seattle Times, and Seattle Metropolitan. He and his wife Kate O’Neill, the parents of three grown daughters, live in Seattle with their two sweet old dogs.
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Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html