PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
This is Embodied, from PRX and WUNC. I’m Anita Rao. How do you feel about getting scared... like horror movie scared? Black Horror pioneer Tananarive Due has loved that experience since she was a little kid.
Tananarive Due
The point of horror to me is not whether or not we win in the end. The point is, how do you stand up? Where do you find your courage? I think that's one of the reasons horror appeals so much to black viewers.
Anita Rao
Good horror is entertaining, but research shows it can also be a tool for healing. Today we’ll talk with Tananarive about the art of crafting horror stories about real life traumas.
Tananarive Due
A book that's horrific is not fun to read. I'm adding moments of, of lightness, moments of hope, these little hints along the way that these two characters are not alone as they're trying to navigate a system which ultimately cannot be navigated and has to be destroyed.
Anita Rao
That conversation is just ahead on Embodied.
This is Embodied our show about sex, relationships, and your health. I'm Anita Rao. People have feelings about horror.
Scream Movie Clip
Do you like scary movies? Uh-huh.
Anita Rao
Some folks thrive on the thrill of horror movies and novels, and others hate it.
Classic Horror Movie Clip
[SCREAM]
Anita Rao
I mostly avoid getting too scared, but I'm really intrigued by the idea that horror can offer us catharsis and healing. It's something horror fans and creators have. Argued for a long time and it's been backed up with research. The idea is that when done well, the jump scares and monster stories that entertain us can also be safe containers for processing real world traumas. I experienced this phenomenon the first time I watched Jordan Peele's get out.
Get Out Clip
Sorry man. Get out. Yo.
Anita Rao
That movie artfully explores racial anxiety and the commodification of black bodies, while also being a fully immersive and engaging movie experience. One person who was thought deeply about horror as a tool for healing is Tananarive Due. She's an award-winning author and trailblazer in the Black horror genre. Her work centers social justice and personal challenges as much as it does suspense and thrills. Her most recent book is The Reformatory, Tananarive has enjoyed horror movies since she was a little kid, which I told her is very different from my experience.
So I don't think I watched a horror movie that really scared me until middle school, maybe when my friends and I watched The Exorcist at a sleepover, and even at age 14, I had to leave the lights on outside my bedroom for weeks. I couldn't be in the bathroom alone without my sister. So I was shocked to learn that. You have been watching horror film since you were really little. Talk to me about how and when you got introduced to the genre.
Tananarive Due
Well, first of all, it wasn't The Exorcist, so I'll just say that. I mean, I saw that much later. But as a really young child, my late mother, Patricia Stevens do, who was a civil rights activist, was the real first horror fan of my life. So we just grew up with the TV always on like Saturdays. It was creature features on. IX Channel six, as a matter of fact, in Miami and it was those old universal horror movies. So they were scary, but not like exorcist scary. It's like Frankenstein, where really. The monster is so tragic. You're almost not afraid of the monster, Frankenstein's monster. Right. Or the Mole people, which I revisited that as an adult. Like why did that leave such an impression on me? In some ways, it's such a bad movie, but then I saw they were whipping the mole people, and I think even as a child, I saw it as a slavery metaphor.
Anita Rao
Hmm. Wow.
Tananarive Due
So again, I was rooting. For the monsters. I think horror is a little less scary when you're rooting for the monster. But I will tell you my deep existential fright as a child was, I think it's the 1955 or so version of the fly with Vincent Price and, um, spoiler. But at the end there's a fly with a human head caught in a spider web just saying, help me.
Anita Rao
Oh my God,
Clip From The Fly
Help me. Help me!
Tananarive Due
And that still scares me. So that was my first deep scare, was the original fly.
Anita Rao
Do you remember what that kind of deep scare feeling felt like in your little kid body? And like what is that? What kept you going back for more as a little kid?
Tananarive Due
Horror is way more about just taking a roller coaster ride.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
Tananarive Due
So I think there was a big contrast between the way my mother approached horror and the way I did, and I never had the chance to discuss this with her. She passed away in 2012, but I bet you if I talk to her about it, she felt a connection to horror because it helped vent and leach out some of her trauma. Growing up in Jim Crow, Florida, being tear gassed and jailed as an activist in the 1960s, fearful for her children and grandchildren beyond the 1960s. I really think for a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people are able to use that fantasy lens of horror to confront trauma. Whereas as a little kid. I mean, I didn't have any trauma. Okay. I mean, maybe, maybe I, maybe I thought I did, you know, I had my little grievances or whatever, but I had a very comfortable life. Both of my parents in the home, two sisters, we were a very loving family. So I really had the privilege of just watching horror quote unquote for fun. Like, oh no, lemme cover my eyes. We, it wasn't pushing buttons. That reminded me of things that I had been through in my life. It really was just spectacle for me as a child.
Anita Rao
So you mentioned you and your mom watching these films together, um, but maybe having parallel experiences, your or your mom was a prominent civil rights activist, as was your dad. What do you know about the connection between her interest in horror and her activism?
Tananarive Due
Well, it's, it's funny because for years I thought it was a bug and not a feature that she loved horror. I used to tell people, well, my mom was a very famous civil rights activist, but she loved horror movies when in fact, I think it should have been, and therefore. She loved horror movies. I didn't see that connection until much later when the documentary Horror Andi, which was on Shutter, came out in 2019 and I was brought on as an executive producer. It was only listening really to other black people. Other black artists, talk about their relationship to horror and why it appealed to them, even though often we were left out of the movies or we were. mischaracterized and made into tropes in the movies. Yet there seemed to be a deep love for horror within the black community, and I started to make the connection, oh, my mom wasn't having the same rollercoaster ride I was having because she. She had a lot of fear and anger left over from her civil rights experiences. I mean, yes, you got the laws and you got desegregation, but there was so much left, which we can see even today in 2026. So where does that go? Where does that fear go? Oh, this zombie movie reminds me of what it feels like to be surrounded by people who might wanna see me dead. Right? Hmm. And, and because it wasn't literal. She would not have loved watching horror movies. I can't guarantee you if the mechanism for the scares was this person gets lynched. You know, it was never that, like the, the farther away from reality the better it was. The fantasy horror ghosts. Zombies monsters, whether or not they were empathetic monsters, they allow you to visualize the thing that scares you, and you watch characters stand up to them again and again and again, and sometimes to succeed and they win. And often in horror they don't. But the point of horror to me is not whether or not we win in the end because spoiler. We all die in the end, right? The point isn't whether they die or if we die. The point is, how do you stand up? Where do you find your courage? How fast can you run? You know, like survival lessons. I think that's one of the reasons horror appeals so much to black viewers.
Anita Rao
So you grew up watching these films together, but you've shared before that the first time that you felt true fear for yourself and for your family was when you were 14 years old as a kid in Miami. Can you tell me that story?
Tananarive Due
Woo. That is a story. Uh, 14 years old junior high school. It was around this time that a, a black motorcyclist named Arthur McDuffy was speeding. A police chase when police caught him, about a dozen police officers on the scene, they beat him basically to death. He didn't die immediately, but he died soon thereafter. And they realized on the scene, oh no, we messed up because they had beaten him with these heavy flashlights. So they tried to make it look like an accident. They banged up his motorcycle and they claimed in the police report that he had been flung from the motorcycle. And that was how he got these terrible head injuries. And that was how he died. Well, it turned out it was all lies. A reporter named Edna Buchanan uncovered it for the Miami Herald, and it became a huge scandal. Yet every single police officer was acquitted. That led to the My Insurrection of 1980, which was a very scary time. A, because the community is burning down B because literally the night the riot started, my mother and sisters were out at a protest. It was that protest where people grew violent and my family had to be ushered to safety, so I had decided I could not deal with another protest. I grew up with activist parents. We had been to many meetings and many protests, and I was so infuriated and really so frightened. It's like, oh my God, what about and liberty? Justice for all. You know, I say this Pledge of Allegiance every day. It doesn't apply to black people. It was literally my first Black Lives Matter moment long before we learned that term, when I realized that there was a separate justice system for black people, and it was. So eye-opening and so frightening that I kind of shut down and got a headache and went to see a comedy movie with my friend.
Anita Rao
Mm.
Tananarive Due
But when I came home, I saw burning cars on television. This was before cell phones, so there was a period of time when I didn't know if my family was safe, if they had been hurt, and that was very frightening.
Anita Rao
And you were just 14 and I'm, I'm trying to imagine kind of. All of these experiences in the course of a short period of time. Um, but you were a, a writer, like you had been writing since you were a young age, and I know that in the wake of all this, you were moved to write. Talk to me about that and what came out once you let yourself kind of pick up a pencil.
Tananarive Due
That experience taught me that writing was not just something I could do for fun or for entertainment or for the entertainment of my parents and friends. That experience taught me that writing potentially could save my life.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
Tananarive Due
Because I wrote a prose poem called I Want to Live, which was basically utopianism. I want to live in a society where. No one remembers what the N word used to mean and, and sort of like building this dream of where I wanted to live. And I showed it to my mother and she said, you're so lucky that you have writing. If those people out in the streets had writing, they might not be out in the streets. Their anger might have somewhere to go. And it really opened so many doors for me, not just in terms of realizing that writing could save my life, but that I had a cohort of writers around the country I hadn't met yet. Who were on the same path. We were all using art as a way and expression and oratory and speeches as a way to express deep, deep feelings
Anita Rao
Just ahead. The life changing interview that got Tananarive into writing horror and how she's used some of her own real life fears as inspiration for her novels. You are listening to Embodied from WUNC, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast. Follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today I'm talking about the healing power of horror with author and educator. Tananarive Due. She's written more than a dozen novels and is considered one of the pioneers of black horror. It's a genre that centers black experiences and perspectives while playing with classic horror elements. Tananarive's love for horror started early through watching classic monster movies with her mom and reading Stephen King novels as a teenager. But Tananarive didn't know that she wanted to be a horror writer until much later.
Tananarive Due
I started out very young writing fantastical adventures, which you would call fantasy and science fiction now about little black children. And then as I got older and older, especially through college, I went to Northwestern University, which was a great experience except that the can and I was exposed to did not have a lot of black women writers, and it certainly did not have any black women writers who were writing speculative fiction. So over time, my notion of what a story was. What is a story? A story is about a white male having an epiphany, and that's kind of how you're trained in literary fiction. Now, every once in a while I would branch out to write about a white woman having an epiphany, but it's so interesting without anyone ever taking me aside, without anyone saying, don't do. Or without anyone ever cautioning me. Oh, if you write black characters or if you write horror, you won't be able to sell your books. No one told me anything like that. I just internalized the canon and I had to really decolonize my own imagination. I had to reintroduce both race and genre, and this happened long after grad school. I got a master's degree in English literature. Specializing in Nigerian literature, but even in grad school, I was working on a novel about two white brothers, which is nuts when I look back on it because I was nowhere in the story. It was about a gay playwright dying of leukemia who lived in New York. I had never lived in New York. I wasn't gay. I hadn't ever had a disease. I didn't even have a brother. So for me, writing was almost more of an an exercise rather than what I think writing should be, which is more of an exorcism, which is like you are bringing something out of yourself. You're expelling something from yourself. You're expelling your experiences, your trauma on the page. And instead, I was borrowing the trauma of other people. And honestly, I think I was only drawn to writing a queer character because of the marginalization. Like I could see sort of kindred marginalization, although I had not given myself permission to see myself and my writing, and I was an adult. I was working. I was in the world before I read Mama Day by Gloria Naylor, which was the first time I had seen a respected black woman write about the metaphysical. And then again, I'm working. I'm met the Miami Herald. I was asked to interview the Great Anne Rice,
Anita Rao
The author of Interview with a Vampire, right?
Tananarive Due
Interview with the Vampire. Yeah, she was a rock star in the nineties. I cannot stress enough how big a name Ann Rice was, and I saw in my research that she had been criticized for writing about vampires, which I think was my deep fear. Like the race thing, that was the canon. But the horror thing, like not writing genre, that was also a canon, but also fear that I would bring shame upon my family. You know, just kind of weight, you know, of having civil rights activist parents. So when I asked Anne Rice about how she reacted to criticism that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires, she gave me a sermon. I didn't even tell her. I was a writer, but she gave me an absolute sermon that. I'm telling you, nine months later, I had finished my first book, The Between.
Anita Rao
Wow. What did she say? That gave you such a shit shift.
Tananarive Due
I knew you were gonna ask that.
Anita Rao
Yeah. I'm so curious.
Tananarive Due
This is how Ann Rice responded. Everybody knows who Jane Ay is. Mary Shelley. Everybody knows who she is and everybody knows who Frankenstein's Monster is. These are great, powerful, heroic images that really allow you to go outside of yourself to really talk about questions that change you. That's what Homer did for the people who went down to the Corner Tavern to listen to him. They didn't know Achilles. They didn't ever see the walls of Troy, but they sat there and listened to him talk about these enormous heroes and these enormous conflicts, and it was not just escape. But it was an escape that improves you. You go back feeling different and that's what literature should do. Mic drop, boom. I was, I was writing and I never looked back. I was writing my first novel and that was it.
Anita Rao
So you then published your debut novel, the Between in 1995, and this was the first of many of your books to explore death and loss, which is the theme that you have returned to again and again. But I, I am curious to ask about where this fear comes from in your own life. Like, can you root it back to a particular moment or, or story in your childhood?
Tananarive Due
As a matter of fact, I can, I'm gonna say I was about eight years old,
Anita Rao
Uhhuh.
Tananarive Due
We were visiting my great-grandmother, Lydia, with whom I actually had a relationship. It wasn't like, oh, we have to see this old lady. I really loved her. So she had emphysema at that stage in her life, and I was in the room with her and I heard the hissing of this oxygen machine while she was sleeping, and it terrified me. The first thought was, oh no, what if the machine stops and she stops breathing? What do I do? And then it morphed into. Wait a minute, she's old and one day I'm also going to get old and maybe I will have to be on an oxygen machine. And it was like a, like the Russian dolls, like every time I opened it, there was like one new thing to be afraid of. I felt like I was falling through the floor. Like it was the actual realization that life comes to an end and no matter what we believe comes next. I like. The way it is now. You know what I mean?
Anita Rao
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's such a, such a relatable feeling as a little kid because it kind of dawns on you all at once in this overwhelming way. Yes. Yeah. How did writing become a way to process these fears? Like how were you connecting the dots at the time that you were writing those stories?
Tananarive Due
It was just something that was more healing and satisfying than the more literary style short stories I was trying to write. You know, like in college I wrote a story about a white housewife who decides she's bored at home and wants to return to the theater. That was the whole story. And yes, even the story about the two brothers, I learned a lot. I learned how to write scenes. I learned how to sit back and sort of almost be a witness when two characters take over and you almost don't know what they're going to say next. So I had glimpses of the professional writer I would become, but what I was missing was the core.
Thematic questions I wanted to ask, and those core questions had to do with race and history and mortality, and anytime I wasn't writing about those things, I think those stories were just flat. No wonder it took me so long to sell a short story. I literally never published a short story before my novel came out, even though I had. Been trying for years, and I really think that's sort of fitting because it was only in my first novel that I reconnected with the childhood writer I was, and that was the writer who was writing about the things that matter to me.
Anita Rao
Hearing you talk about finding the themes that are at the core of your work makes me think about some of the interviews I've listened to of you where you talk about how the core of horror is entertainment, and it's really important for. horror writers and creators to keep that in mind that there is this, this line between, um, entertaining an audience and triggering or retraumatizing them. I would love to know about how you learn to kind of walk this line as a writer, as you were beginning to really write in this genre and find your footing.
Tananarive Due
That's interesting. I think as a, as a learning writer, I just instinctively grasped. That a novel, like for instance, the Between is is about a social worker whose family is being hounded by a white supremacist. So yeah, there's a lot of reality, a lot of headlines. I almost thought, is it over the top?
Anita Rao
Mm-hmm.
Tananarive Due
Which is laughable now. But I wondered was that over the top? Because that was the part of me sort of intuiting. It was a little too close to life, but I knew instinctively that I had to add a fantasy element, that it couldn't just be that that's a drama. It could be a crime thriller, but what makes it horror to me and what makes it more entertaining and less triggering is that he was supposed to die as a child and he has these nightmares where he wakes up in different realities. That's not real. So that gives you enough of an emotional distance so that the other stuff doesn't sting quite as much or doesn't remind you of something that happened to your grandparents, like a story that's been passed down.
Anita Rao
So we've talked about horror as you know that you need to have the entertainment piece, you need to have the ability to kind of pull someone out for a second to say, okay, this is different than something I may have experienced. But then moving to this level where the experience of something that's full of death and darkness might actually be healing. Sounds contradictory on its face to some degree. Like can you talk to me about that kind of catharsis or release that can happen from horror that's done well and and what that feels like to you?
Tananarive Due
Absolutely. I understand it doesn't work for everyone as a release. There are people who have been through trauma where the last thing they would wanna do is watch a horror movie, and I fully understand that. But I think when people have the opposite reaction, it's because. A good example is a is a small movie that I don't think a lot of people have seen called The Dark and the Wicked, which on the surface is about a brother and sister who will come back home to take care of their dying. Father. This is an experience that a lot of people have had. I've had that experience with caretaking losing my mother. It's the worst thing we go through until we lose someone even closer like a. A spouse or a child is watching a parent die, and I consider the dark and the wicked almost a comfort food because as much as it realistically depicts some aspects of caretaking, it's also about a demon. Right. So on the one level, you're watching this going, oh yeah, this sucks, but at least there's no demon in my actual life.
Anita Rao
Right, right.
Tananarive Due
Making this even worse, you know? And it's a terrible demon. It's such a bad demon. So I think it's, it's that, it's like sometimes it's skates very close to what we're actually going through, but then it hairs off and it takes this left turn into the fantasy realm that gives us an opportunity to really. Witness what we're going through. Like, oh my God, yes, this is so hard. But also to sort of sigh with relief. A, because of the validation of understanding, yes, someone else sees me, they see how hard this is and what it feels like is there's a demon, but there isn't really a demon. So what a relief that what I'm going through is just more mundane than what these characters are going through. If that makes sense.
Anita Rao
No, that definitely makes sense and, and I know that in addition to. Films like that. You, you went on this huge journey that turned into your next novel, also in the wake of your mom's death. And we'll talk more about kind of the healing that that allowed you, um, and your family. But I wanna first introduce. The premise of your most recent novel. So the reformatory published in 2023, an incredible example of black horror as a tool for healing, and so much that I wanna talk to you about, about the craft of writing in this book. But it's based on real history that involves your mom's side of the family. Can you tell us briefly about the true story that inspired the novel?
Tananarive Due
Yeah. Soon after my mother passed away, I learned from the Florida State Attorney's office that she had an uncle that I never knew about who had. Died at the Dozier School for boys in Marianna, Florida back in the 1930s. I believe it was 19 37, 2 years before she was even born. So either she heard the story and never shared it. But my bigger suspicion is she never heard the story because I think a trauma like that, he was 15 at the time. I think a trauma like that just sort of sinks into a family's bones. You're helpless to do anything about it, and it kind of. Became a silent thing and I didn't know what to do with this information at first. So my father, who's still living, he's 91 years old. My father John Dorsey de Jr. And I went to a meeting in Marianna on the grounds of the dozer school. Erin Kimberly from the University of South Florida was there. She does, um. Basically work to find dead bodies. You know, like she's been to war zones with equipment to find dead bodies and she'd been brought in to try to find the location 'cause they were burying children on the grounds of the dozer school without marking their graves. Yeah. It turned out to be almost 60 of them. I think they found ultimately including the remains of my great and Uncle Robert Stevens, and it was at that meeting when I met survivors of the Dozier School, both black and white. It was a segregated facility, so they didn't have much interaction when they were there. But as survivors, they had shared similar experiences, especially what was called the White House, the whipping shed. And I entertained the idea of trying to do it as nonfiction for about five seconds because I, you know, I was a former journalist, but it just seemed too difficult a story for nonfiction, to be honest. It, it didn't have a happy ending. It was just terror. I mean, there was terror without any real, I don't call closure at the time. I mean, what? What do you do with that? So instead I thought of a novel. Let me write a novel where I honor the name Robert Stevens, but I'll set it in 1950, which is a year I know a little bit better from my mother's stories about her childhood. And I'll create two characters. I'll make Robert Stevens a little younger. So he'll have more instant empathy than a 15-year-old. I made him 12, and I created a duo protagonist and his sister Gloria, who's named after my mother, because my mother's middle name was Gloria. Really, the book is about navigating the the prison industrial complex, but as a microcosm in a small town, it's too big to fail. And I added ghosts for that much needed. Fantastic element just because, honestly, it took me seven years to write the book because the research was just devastating. Like survivor, after survivor, after survivor, telling these horrific stories of abuse, sometimes sexual abuse, physical abuse, psychological abuse, being imprisoned, worked. They were literally worked. It was like a, a work farm for children. And it was so depressing.
Anita Rao
I, I had such an interesting, just to pull back the curtain for a second experience because I was reading your fictional book, the Reformatory in Real Time as I was reading. Some of your blogs that described your process of learning about all of this true story in real time, and you describe a scene where you, your father, your husband, and your son, who was just nine at that time, traveled to the school site to observe the unbearing of the remains. I'm so curious about what it was like to experience that as a family, having just gotten this huge dump of new personal information and then being there to kind of witness this history.
Tananarive Due
You know, sometimes I wonder. If I should have brought my son Uhhuh, you know, I mean, it's not, it's not that he saw any remains. They were, there were no skeletons dug up that day. It was just sort of the, the, the breaking of the soil that began the process. And he was nine. He was young. There's a photo of him hugging my husband Steve, where he looks so small and frightened, you know, and that haunts me. But on the other hand. It was very meaningful to be able to go there with my dad. My husband and my son all the generations to sort of honor these boys. And I'll say this about my son originally, I thought he would just show up with us and then we had actually found a nearby attraction to take kids where my husband planned to take him for the rest of the day. We didn't expect him to wanna stay. He wanted to stay. Wow. And, and he did find a way like children will. To take his initial feelings of unease and channel them in a playful way. Like to him, it wasn't looking for dead people, it was digging in the dirt. And I, I think I learned a lot from that because I think that's the superpower that my protagonist Robbie has. That's one of the, the things I love about child protagonists. It's not that they won't need therapy later, you know, theoretically, but in the moment they just process things differently. Like, I would've been sobbing under my bed all night. Or, you know, stoic and like hysterical as someone's driving me to this prison and he's like, Ooh, the car's going fast. Oh, let me look at these controls. You know, just being a kid, let's play in the freezer.
Anita Rao
Yeah. Just very in in the moment in the body. Yeah.
Tananarive Due
Yes. And And I think children have that, and that was his superpower. His superpower was his ability to adapt and I really needed. That lesson while I was writing the book, because in many ways he was adapting a lot better to being in the novel than I was adapting to writing the novel. It was so hard.
Anita Rao
How did your family react when you came to them and said, I wanna write about this as a horror novel? What kind of response did you get?
Tananarive Due
Well, again, I think because his name had been so erased. People just didn't know. People didn't know his story. And I think for people, I talked to cousins, I mean, it felt like a horror novel is the perfect way to tell this story because it is horror. The difference to me is when you're just writing it as straight nonfiction, it's horrific. And a book that's horrific. Is not fun to read and not that the reformatory is always fun to read, but I did try to add sort of a Paige Turner aspect. Every once in a while someone is making a joke. I'm adding moments of, of lightness, moments of hope through music or through an ally, an unexpected helping hand. You know, these little hints along the way that these two characters are not alone. As they're trying to navigate a system which ultimately cannot be navigated and has to be destroyed.
Anita Rao
Just ahead, we'll hear about how turning this real life history into a horror novel was healing for Tananarive, her family, and some of the real survivors of the Dozier School for Boys. As always, you can hear the podcast version of the show by following Embodied on your platform of choice. Please stay with us.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. We're talking about black horror and healing with writer Tananarive do her most recent horror novel, the Reformatory is based on a true family story. A little over a decade ago, Tananarive learned about her great uncle Robert Stevens. Robert died in 1937 while imprisoned at a reformatory school in Marianna, Florida. He was 15 years old that school, the Dozier School for Boys, operated from 1900 to 2011, and it was notorious for allegations of forced labor, floggings and sexual abuse. Tananarive's research into the school inspired her to tell this story, but she wanted to give her great Uncle Robert a different ending. So she wrote it as a novel and used ghosts to represent some of the real life stories she heard from survivors.
Tananarive Due
Well, first of all, I would say that someone once told me that, that she'd heard a rumor that this place was really haunted. Of course, if anyone's gonna be haunted, this place will be haunted. But I've never had an experience that I would consider a brush with a ghost. To me, it really is entirely fiction. Although I do listen to people's stories very carefully.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
Tananarive Due
So the events I write about in the reformatory are mostly, I mean, many of them are based on, on real life testimonies of, of things that happen, you know, change slightly, and of course preserving people's privacy. But what you were feeling as you're waiting to go into that whipping shed. How it was worse to hear other people screaming than to even face it yourself, how people vanished, how this kind of wrongdoing just went on and on and on without any kind of a sense of justice. So really the ghosts in this story, our stepping in to create a sense of, first of all, witnessing because you, you might have killed me. You might have buried me, but you can't stop me from telling my story. So there's witnessing the collection of the witnesses, the saving of the witnesses, because the warden at this reformatory is so evil,
Anita Rao
So evil.
Tananarive Due
So evil. He's not only overseeing the murders of children, but he's trapping their ghosts so they won't cause any trouble. I mean, really. So this novel is about. How people who feel small, like Robert's just a child, Gloria's just a 17-year-old, so-called colored girl in 1950, Florida, meaning you have no power. Two small people having to stand up to enormous forces. It's like what Ann Rice was talking about in her quote, enormous forces against them. And I won't give away the ending, but although there are a lot of difficult moments in this novel, I, I tell readers, trust me, I did not spend seven years working on this story to leave you in darkness.
Anita Rao
I wanna ask you more about the warden for a second and just. Evil and how you write evil. 'cause he was, he's just, he's so evil. And throughout the book, you know, I just like, he's the kind of character that makes your stomach, like, makes you sick to your stomach and you're just like, how can he do this? But then there were so many moments where you. There were like flashes of real humanity and, and nuance. He would reveal something where you'd be like, oh, I would never think that he would believe that, or he would have a moment of gentleness. And I'm, I'm really curious to hear you talk about like how you write. Villains and the so-called monsters in your horror stories.
Tananarive Due
Yeah. It's important to realize that no monster or villain believes they're a monster. Mm-hmm. Or villain. And I think that's something that a lot of us need to remember as we're watching current events unfold. Like we can look at people and say, wow, they are so villainous. They don't think of themselves as villainist, and it's, it's really scary to realize that. But if I, I had a couple of point of view moments, or at least one point of view moment from the warden's point of view, or I wanted to sort of shed a light on how his evil was born and we learned that he was, I think, the son or grandson of an overseer. And one of the things about slavery is when you think about it, the kind of violence that kept that institution alive, the, the whippings and the violence and cutting off people's body parts to keep them from running the rape, all of this. Seeps into the soil. Yeah. It's not like this can be going on in your family and it's not gonna show up in other ways. So yeah, his grandfather was very abusive toward him. Not just toward people. He was whipping, not just toward enslaved people. That violence was running through the family. So you get that little, it doesn't excuse him, but it gives you a little bit of glimpse of. How he was born. And I think the thing that surprises people most and what I had the most fun writing about him, is that because he's such a sociopath, or is it a psychopath? I keep forgetting which one. Maybe he's both, he's such a sociopath that he doesn't buy into the lies that keep white supremacy in place. Yes. In 1950, Florida. Yeah. Right. And I think that's part of the key of creating a compelling villain is to remember that what is it about him that feels more human? That feels more reasonable because if you don't have that, you don't have a villain, you have a caricature.
Anita Rao
So the heaviness of the research for this book, I know made it really challenging to work on. You interviewed numerous real survivors of the Dozier School. You heard some horrific stories like you have talked about. It took you seven years to write, and you've said that at points throughout the book when you'd get really stuck, you would ask yourself, what would mom have done? I wanna know more about the role your mom played in your writing and these conversations with her that you had in your head.
Tananarive Due
Yes, because one version of his story would've just been Robert inside the reformatory, realizing that ghosts were not the scariest thing about being locked up in a haunted reformatory. That's his story in a nutshell. But to me, it would not have been complete without his older sister trying to move heaven and earth to get him out. So I could show how difficult it was to navigate Jim Crow. So I could show how few rights black people actually had in Florida in 1950, and the courage my mother had as a young person because my mother wasn't that much older than Gloria Stevens when she went to college and she and my aunt, Priscilla Kaza, started a chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality and risked their lives. My mom wore dark glasses for the rest of her life after being tear gassed in 1960. So she had a lasting scar because of her courage. So I, I really wanted Gloria and Robert, but in different ways to represent the kind of courage it takes to navigate life. Because there are moments we are going to have to stand up. There are moments we're going to have to be uncomfortable or do things we never thought we could do in service to justice, in service to freedom. And that's what the reformatory is. My favorite review, well, I call it my favorite. I can't remember who said it now, but one of my favorite early reviews. I think it was just a reader who called it a call to action.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
Tananarive Due
And it doesn't specifically have a call of action attached to it. It's set in the past. The dozer school is already closed. You know? I mean, but it implies the actions that we need to take in our present time because history repeats and we can see it happening before our eyes.
Anita Rao
You wrote this book, worked on this process in the wake of your mother's death, and you and your father and your whole family were. Still really grieving the loss of your mom. How did the process of writing this book affect your and your dad's relationship and how you kind of healed in the wake of your mom's death?
Tananarive Due
That's a great question. My mother and I were very, very close. We had written a civil rights memoir together, freedom in the Family, and my dad was always the activist who was sort of outside of the house when I was a kid. So I didn't have as close a personal relationship with my dad, even though I had great respect for him. Well, after my mom passed away. We definitely turned to each other for comfort. I was teaching at Spelman College at the time. We were both living in Atlanta at the time, and we did a lot of road trips together. We interviewed people together, we visited the grounds together. We went to meetings together. Which is funny because as a kid I hated meetings, so I'm sure he was thrilled. I'm like, dad, do you wanna go to this meeting? So my dad and I grew to be very close. So in real life. I got to see sort of, and also he helped me come up with a scene in the judge's chamber. Like I literally could say, dad, if you were talking to a judge in 1950, which was a little bit earlier than when he was practicing, but honestly not that much a change, how would you handle this? Conversation, what would you say? Because these people have no rights, so how do you even talk to a judge? And he had great advice. He, he should almost get a co-author credit for that chapter because he gave me such great advice. And in terms of my mom, I was having these silent conversations with her where I was both trying to honor her true life courage. By saying her name, Gloria Stevens, which is part of her name, Patricia Gloria Stevens, but also in fiction to literally insert her personality the way she thought, things I would hear her say in the story to see how much power she could have had if Robert had been lucky enough to have a sister like her.
Anita Rao
You put this book out into the world in 2023 and have had the opportunity to meet and talk with more survivors of the Dozier School. I would love to hear about some of the memorable interactions that you've had.
Tananarive Due
Whew. There's one day that really stands out. It was in Atlanta. And in the morning I had been put in touch with a survivor who was himself 80 years old, and he wrote a, a memoir about his experiences there that I added at the very last minute. When I was published the book, so I was just lucky that I happened to see it. And I wrote, reached out to his daughter and I thought, let me let my dad, who's almost 90, talk to this guy who's 80 and see if they have anything to talk about. Well, the man was in so much trauma.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
Tananarive Due
And, and by the way, eerie, eerie similarities because at the time he was at Dozier, he was 12 years old at that time, his name was Robert. He told me things that I didn't even know about that were worse, worse than what I had read about and researched in my book. But he was in so much trauma that the first words out of his mouth when he talked to my dad were, it still hurts. And it was just, it was mostly a one-sided conversation of an old man's confession of his trauma and his grief. And I felt actually kind of bad afterward because. I didn't know if it had been helpful for him. I didn't know if it had been helpful for my dad, so I was kind of shook up about it. I almost felt like, am I intruding in this story by trying to even capture it in fiction? You know, I had to really take some deep breaths and calm myself down before my signing that night. Well, I went to my signing. It was packed. It was multiracial, probably at least half white. Readers or more very mixed. And at the end there was a, a white man waiting at the end of the line who wanted to talk to me. Earlier he had asked a question if I had written my book just for Robert Stevens or for all of the survivors. And I said that really, I started out writing about Robert Stevens, but by the end I felt like I was trying to represent them all and when he came up to get his book signed afterward, he said to me, I'm shaking. And he was, he was shaking like a leaf and it kind of scared me a little bit, you know, because you don't know what. Motives people have or why he's really there. But it turned out he was a survivor who had been there in the nineties.
Anita Rao
Wow.
Tananarive Due
The same day I talked to a black survivor who was there in 1950, a white survivor, younger man who was there in the nineties. Both of them still still drowning in their trauma, so. It was powerful, but very difficult to run into survivors, and I know there are countless more out there. I'm so glad that Florida at least signed a bill to give reparations to survivors. I hope that's actually happening. I hope they're getting the money, but there isn't. There's no amount of money that could pay them for what they went through.
Anita Rao
You worked on this for so long, it was a, a big part of your own family's story. There was a lot to work through. For you personally, I'm curious about what it's been like to return to writing since, like, where are you finding your self turn to for kind of inspiration or to keep that spark of, of horror alive in yourself after, after dealing with something so heavy?
Tananarive Due
Well, I'm very relieved to have written the Reformatory. I'll say that much.
Anita Rao
Uhhuh.
Tananarive Due
It's, and I remember, uh, Steve and I interviewed Octavia Butler once and she talked about how she'd written a book sort of as a reward for the hard work of writing Kindred, which was her novel about a woman who was whisked back into slavery. 'cause that was such a hard book for her to write. And I can really relate to that. So my next novel, which is coming out in September, is called Maisie Wood. And it's still about racism, but it's about racism in old Hollywood.
Anita Rao
Hmm.
Tananarive Due
My research is about gone with the wind and our gang and like all these kinds of things that while it was still painful for the people who went through it, it's not pushing the same buttons in me as what happened to Robert Stevens at the Dozier School. Plus, I have to admit, part of it is a contemporary survival, horror story with a creature. So that's just fun. You know what I mean? Like that to me was fun. I had way more fun. Writing Maisie wood that I did writing the reformatory, but at the same time, I did want to infuse it with that same history and, and there is a bit of a tragedy at the root of the story, but still with enough room for me to breathe. I didn't have that much room to breathe when I was working on the reformatory.
Anita Rao
I'm glad you have that more now. So horror isn't for everyone. We've acknowledged that at points throughout this conversation, but I am curious about an argument that you have for people kind of skeptical to the genre to invite them in because I think, yeah, there's a lot missing if you don't give it a chance. I'm curious what most kind of compelling elevator pitches for people.
Tananarive Due
Well, I would start with. Horror with social impact. You know, for people who feel like, oh, horror is frivolous, maybe I don't like slashers. You know, not everybody likes slashers. Not all horror fans like Slashers. Not all horror fans, like an unre redemptive ending or the villain who wins, you know? So don't feel like you don't like horror just because you don't like some of the flavors of horror. But what about Get out? What about sinners? Are you going to miss out on a cultural phenomenon because you're worried it might scare you? I think if people really were a little more discerning about finding the right horror, so I would say give horror a chance. Or at least stop giving your horror, loving friends a hard time because we love horror. Actually, horror helps you cope during hard times. You know, there was a study we reported in the New York Times about how during the COVID lockdown horror fans and people with a survivalist mindset fared much better than the general population because on one level we've been rehearsing for that moment our whole lives. Of course. You can't find anything in a supermarket, of course, you know you gotta keep doors locked.
Anita Rao
Yeah. We've watched that film 10 times.
Tananarive Due
We've seen this a million times. We know what to do. In fact, follow me and pick up a weapon and like, uh, Lupita's character said in Jordan, peels us. Put on your shoes baby. Put on your shoes. Be ready to run.
Anita Rao
Tananarive Due, thank you so much for the conversation and for your work. What a pleasure to talk with you.
Tananarive Due
Thank you so much. It was great talking to you too.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Tananarive Due and her work at our website, embodiedwunc.org. You can find all episodes of Embodied the Radio Show there, and make sure you're subscribed to our weekly podcast. Today's episode was produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Amanda Magnus. Sara Nics provided additional editorial guidance. Adesina Newkirk is our intern and Jenni Lawson, our technical director. Quilla wrote our theme music. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. WUNC is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.