The act of writing these pieces has been an act of questioning myself. From the start, one creative impetus was to cast myself as either the oppressor or fly on the wall. I saw it as a needful writing limitation – a writing requirement – being a White 2nd generation American. I’m not sure of the order.

Honesty time: I’m still never sure when to capitalize ethnicity or race. I know the answer isn’t sometimes.

Honesty time: I’m still weighing the weight of race in my work.

My goal was to write something that connects the bits of archived history that intrigued me during my research with the pieces from Fire!! that engrossed me with their timelessness.

My own craft interests – structure, enforcement of theme – guided me some more, along with the standards of the archival class.

And of course the archives themselves – I wish I’d had more time in the Schomburg and in my research to enliven the characters with more verbatim truth and with more texture in the stagings of Harlem that I present.

Though, in honesty, my attention was to the characters – my attention went to the domestic troubles that defined their arcs. My attention went to finding conflicts in the historical record, and words to support the feelings necessary to make verisimilitude. The words of popular thought-leaders, and regular people, and the boilerplate meeting-minutes language of the James Weldon Johnson Community Center, have all found their way into these pieces.

And, ultimately, characters still did things I had not anticipated.

In Hurston’s “Sweat,” the relation between its themes and the present day struggles of women at work and at home as objects of desire leapt out at me after I heard one word during class: MeToo. That word set the character’s actions under new light, though they were not different for it – this was still a story about domestic, physical, and emotional abuse. The light was just cast from another angle.

I set out to use Hurston’s “Sweat” as a structural template for a story about a woman suffering under too many indignities despite obvious and adequate protestation. Miscommunication is a killer of many relationships – working and personal. So I made the protagonist a good communicator (I hope). And I wanted the antagonist, Clark, our Sykes, to be punished for not listening, for not honoring boundaries. That was the thread I followed along Hurston’s beaten path in writing “Elbow Grease.”

Today is the one-year anniversary of living in my current apartment. “Public Grousing: A Revolt in Four Scenes” was inspired by Hurston’s “Color Struck” and my experiences of participating at my own tenant meetings while I lived for two years in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

What I saw while living in my building I interpreted as racially-motivated negligence. Or such a processual approach to the transaction of check or money order for small living quarters that humanity, let alone race, could not have been part of the equation. And if it was in the math, I knew that I stood as the sole beneficiary.

Helping a coworker figure out how to file a complaint recently, after hearing her describe her own living situation in the Lower East Side, I saw instant parallels: the invention of despair in people by landlords through simple means – many negligences in maintenance, the enabling of gentrifying forces, and the inherent favoring of style over substance in the creation of livable human spaces.

I was never able to get far in the tenant meetings. My apartment became so infested with roaches that I was allowed release from my lease. I suppose this piece is a bit of personal fantasy – to finish a thing started. But then I must question my own commitment. I am another who fled, who flew away before the real onset of troubles because I had access to opportunity and ability: I was lucky to find a place so quickly and to have, with my partner, the money to move unplanned.

Honesty Time: I hope I have treated the themes and subjects with respect. I hope I have not disregarded reality or created inordinate fiction in my treatment of these characters in these fictions, because I saw them as people, made up of people, in my head.

Honestly, I hope you enjoy these pieces.

Best,

Patrick