(C) Verite News New Orleans This story was originally published by Verite News New Orleans and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Q&A: Maurice Carlos Ruffin on historical fiction, family narratives and writing New Orleans [1] ['Josie Abugov', 'More Josie Abugov', 'Verite News', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width'] Date: 2024-03-15 Back in 2004, Maurice Carlos Ruffin was a corporate lawyer in New Orleans who spent his time looking through historical archives in the French Quarter on his lunch breaks. During one of those visits, he learned that the Confederacy hardly defended New Orleans, a powerhouse of industry and the largest city in the South at the time. The discovery puzzled Ruffin. “I just kept wondering, ‘Why would they give up like that?’” said Ruffin, now a fiction writer and creative writing professor at Louisiana State University who published his third book, “The American Daughters,” last month. Ruffin used his imagination and his own family narratives to fill the gaps that history left unsatisfying. He speculated on the resistance the Confederates could have faced that prevented a New Orleans stronghold. What if enslaved women played a key role in this defiance? What if those women, forced to labor in the French Quarter, were stealing money, poisoning food or freeing horses to disrupt the aspirations of their enslavers? “That sort of resistance was really going to make it hard for them to be effective fighters,” Ruffin said. This idea became the heart of “The American Daughters,” which traces a mother-daughter duo in 1860s New Orleans and a society of enslaved and free women of color who served as spies, the titular “daughters,” sabotaging the Confederacy and enacting their own dignity. “The American Daughters” is Ruffin’s first work of historical fiction, but all of his writing — he published his first novel in 2021 and a collection of short stories last year — is set in his hometown of New Orleans. Ruffin will discuss the novel and what it means to write culturally significant stories at two panels on Saturday (March 16) at the New Orleans Book Festival. Verite News sat down with Ruffin in advance to talk about his approach to writing about slavery and why he writes about New Orleans. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Verite: You mentioned in the acknowledgments that the story is based on family narratives. What aspects of the novel are rooted in your own family history? Ruffin: A lot of the family narrative stuff would be things that I learned from my grandmother and mother. So for example, my grandmother was in unions. And my grandmother and mother were both involved in The Eastern Star, which is a sort of civil society group that does aid and support to people. Hearing them tell stories of like, my grandmother hopping on a train and going to Washington to meet face-to-face with President Lyndon B. Johnson — this sort of history of them being involved in activism firsthand, I just find it very inspirational. Verite: What was it like to imagine but also fictionalize aspects of your family history as full, complex, flawed characters? Ruffin: The novel is loosely based on true events. And so what I did was, I took things I learned from documents and then I took my ancestors’ personalities that I knew of directly, and I just kind of imagined what it would be like if my grandmother was around in the 1800s. What would she have acted like? What would she have said? What would she have done? What were her friends like? Those kinds of things. And so for me, it was a great experiment of the imagination to bring back someone who is no longer here and see them in their full glory. Verite: Can you give an example of a document and a person you were thinking about in the story? Ruffin: For example, there are some exhibits in the book. One of the exhibits is a slave bill of sale or a slave bulletin, announcing that there are people who are going to be sold. You see the names, you see the ages, and you see their specialties, like this person is good at cooking, or this person is good at doing hair, or they’re a faithful servant, they often say, but then you realize that these are actual human beings. The two main characters, Sanite and Ady, there’s so much inside them I wanted to get out, that I want to let people see firsthand. I didn’t want it to be a story of just like, trauma and degradation, I want it be a story of like, what are they like between each other? What kind of love is the mother showing for the daughter and vice versa? And that’s what I got to see with my mother and her mother, watching them interact over the years. Verite: The epilogue ends in the 22nd century and debates the historical accuracy of Ady’s journals and novels written by her ancestors. Why end the story nearly 150 years in the future? Ruffin: It’s a technique that some writers will use where you want to give a greater perspective. I got that idea from Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” which is a book that I love. And it’s about the resistance of these women in this terrible future society. And then later on in the future, people are talking about them and some of the historical figures. For my book, I find it very interesting, because I know that a lot of the stories that have come to light recently about the work of people like Harriet Tubman and others was kind of buried for over 100 years. And so if you had asked, I don’t know, seventy years ago, “Hey, did Harriet Tubman do anything cool?” People will say, “Harriet Tubman, she was just some enslaved lady.” But today, we know that Harriet Tubman was somebody who worked for the government, she was a spy who was a part of the army, she got a pension for being somebody who went to dangerous territory, and freed people. So my assumption is that there are so many buried and suppressed stories. And by putting the epilogue in there, I’m sort of forcing the reader to go, “Oh, there is a lot more in here that I hadn’t considered. And it may take time for it to come out for me to understand what the whole story means.” Verite: The novel obviously documents the brutality of slavery — physical and sexual violence — but resistance and Black creativity are central to the themes. Can you speak more about how you thought about showing the resistance and at the same time documenting the horrors of slavery? Ruffin: One of the major choices I made was to focus the camera on the women, the Black women, especially — Sanite who’s the mother of Ady, who’s the main character, as well as Ady’s closest friends, Lenore and Alabama. In doing that, I made a conscious decision to show the slave owners as little as possible. So one of the main people is Du Marche. He “owns them,” you know, scare quotes. And I think in a lot of other stories, he would get a lot of screen time so to speak, and you would see him sort of talking and making plans and that kind of thing. I wasn’t interested in showing any of that stuff. If these women were real, what would they want to see? They would not want to see themselves being abused or treated poorly. They’d want to see the interactions they have with each other woman-to-woman and to show how much they cared for each other. Verite: You referred to any plantation in the book with the addendum of “also known as a slave labor camp.” Can you talk about why you made that decision and consistently kept up with it throughout the story? Ruffin: There’s so much injustice in the world and I think sometimes we become numb to it. And with something like “plantation,” because of movies like “Gone With the Wind,” or the fact that people to this day will get married at plantations, we think of them as the sort of benign institutions that are just really pretty and interesting architecturally. And I want to make sure that every time the word “plantation” is mentioned, almost every time, it’s like a speed bump. You think: “Plantation, but actually, people were being forced to work here against their will, for free for as long as possible until either they were sold off or they died.” So by doing that, I’m forcing the reader to reckon with the fact of this terrible thing that nobody would want to be a part of. Verite: In the story, New Orleans is almost like a character itself. I’m wondering for you what the setting of New Orleans plays in the novel? Ruffin: My work is pretty much always set in New Orleans. And I do that because it is such a unique place, both historically and today. It’s a great pleasure to be able to write about my hometown in ways I’ve never seen it before. We’ve had a lot of great writers who live there, but they were often outsiders who are writing with an outsider’s perspective. So whether it’s de Tocqueville back in the 1800s, or Tennessee Williams, they did good work. But for me, as somebody who was born and raised there and just wanting to see my family on the page and to see the community that I come from on the page — to me, it’s an interesting experiment. I think about other writers, like Faulkner basically invented his own little county to tell his stories. Toni Morrison would often tell her stories and her sort of fictionalized Ohios, and so to me, it’s like my version of New Orleans, in which people that know me or that are part of my community would go, “Oh, that’s us” for the first time. It’s a joyful experience to be able to present these stories, so that even outsiders can go, “Oh, I’ve never seen that before and I’m glad I get this experience of this insider’s view of the city for a change.” Related Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. 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