Questions from Students

about

Story for a Black Night

I have received emails from many students doing research for papers they are writing on Story for a Black Night. It occurred to me—since I quickly learned to copy-paste answers to the same or similar questions—that other students might find this information useful, and so I'd better include these questions and answers on the website. The questions are informally asked, and I answered them in the same informal tone. If you don't find the answers here to your own questions, feel free to contact me.

You might also find it useful to consult Something About the Author, available in most library reference departments, for more biographical information; also Children's Literature Reviews where most reviews of my books are compiled. Consult the index in the most recent volume to find the volumes that deal with me.

The students' questions are bolded, in no particular order, with my answers in plain text.

How much of the written story is authentic to the oral story you received from your student's mother? Did you make any changes? If so, why?

Good question, and I'm not sure how well I can answer it. There is much invention throughout, but most of the incidents did happen pretty much the way I relate them, with one significant exception. And the characters did all come from life—the boy, the ma, the old ma, the two stranger-women passing through, the auntie, the minister's wife—though their names, of course were changed, and their personalities all are my own creation, along with their thoughts and their dialogue. The details of the disease are all just as Kafee's mother described them to me, no invention there whatsoeve.

Here is how the story came to me. One night, Kafee, one of my students from St. Augustine Episcopal Mission School invited me home to dinner. This was the first and only time in three years that one of my students had included me so intimately in his family, and I was touched and grateful. It was a small house on the edge of the town of Kakata, Liberia, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer. While Kafee's mother engaged me in conversation, his Old Ma was making the meal, and I marveled at the way she could scale and gut the fish and manage the logs in the fire, completely blind, her eyes mere red slits in her scarred face. I also could not help but notice the even far deeper scars all over the face and arms of Kafee's mother. I don't remember how she began the story, but out it came from her, the story of how she got those scars, the terrible case of smallpox that was visited upon her and her family. I sat and listened, completely enthralled and horrified as her story unfolded, not just at the disease, but at the betrayal by her sister, and the lack of understanding by the minister's wife. I had never imagined such a thing, and that night when I went home, I couldn't sleep for thinking about it, and thinking about the courage of this woman to endure such pain and misery for such a long period of time.

In fact, many nights went by with me lying awake going over every aspect of this story. I was haunted by it. I kept telling myself that this story needed to be written down. I was experiencing so much in Liberia that I was sure that I would forget, and this story, I knew, I must never forget, and that I would want to share it with all my family and friends forever. So it was up to me to write it, I decided. I had never done any writing outside of college papers and letters. Ha! In fact, I had taken a class in Creative Writing, Poetry, because I was taking 21 units one semester and someone had told me it was an easy A. I barely squeaked a C because I had absolutely nothing, no poetry, in my head. Ha!

But now here was this story, and I had to write it. I remember that it was with a very heavy heart that I came to that conclusion, because I had absolutely no idea how to do it, how to start it, even. And then, on one of those nights, lying there sleepless that first line of the story came to me, in Momo's voice, and off I went.

Hello again, and thanks for offering to send me your paper when it is finished. I will be very interested to read it. Also, I appreciate very much learning that you think you remember the story from when you were little, particularly that episode of the old lady coming back to try to claim the baby. That episode is completely fictional, whereas the episode with Hawah at the market in Monrovia with the Mandingo woman coming up and touching her scars and saying, "Oh, you must give me your heart!" did truly happen. I knew from the start of writing that that would be the end of the story; I was very touched by that moment.

I lost contact with Kafee and his mother after I came back to America. I did, however, give them both a ditto copy of the story as it existed at that time. I also made copies for my entire class at Kakata Rural Teacher Training Institute where I moved in my final year, teaching English to future teachers. I wanted them to have a real African story to study instead of the few tattered American hand-me-down books available in what was called "the library" there. Liberia is a very impoverished country, even back in those days before the civil wars that killed so many people and depleted the country even more.

I made thousands of changes in the text after those first dittoed pages. I would revise it every time I sent it to a new publisher during more than a ten year search for an editor who would have the same faith in the story that children's author Sonia Levitin had in it. Sunny was my Aunt Bert's creative writing teacher, and although Sunny had told all her students not to bring in stories by sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, etc., Aunt Bert did bring her my story. It was late at night, Sunny later told me, and she decided not to scold Aunt Bert at that moment, but that she would read a couple of pages when she went to bed and then scold her the next day. But Sunny was so bowled over by the story, even in that primitive state, that she grew very excited, stayed awake devouring it, and then invited me to talk with her class! How happy that made me!

But how sad it made me, each rejection that I got from the publishers through all those years. Nevertheless, Sunny kept making contacts for me, telling new publishers, "I know this story that you must read." And with a sigh, losing all hope through so many years, I would put the ms. in the mail again. Each time, though, I would go through the entire ms. again—retyping the entire thing back in those days before computers—working to tighten it and get the right flavor to the dialect. For me, actually, the work of revising is never done. At the time of the Phoenix Honor Award in 2002, I retyped the entire book—this time by computer, of course—and even then, twenty years later, made quite a lot of revisions. This is how I came to discover that I had omitted a tremendously significant piece of the story in the original edition.

The significant change in the fictional story that I mentioned earlier might be something for you to consider very carefully for your paper since you have asked how much of the book is true to the original story. This change is core to much of the drama of this—and pretty much any story—it seems to me. It forced the main character to make a choice, a choice that was against the good judgment of her own Old Ma who would never have made this choice, a choice that perhaps took her own baby from her. As you know, in the book the two stranger-women leave their baby in Hawah's house. Horrible abandonment. In the true story, the two women, yes, had stolen away before sunrise, but they did take their baby with them.

I don't think I recognized, when I decided to make this change to the real story, the consequences to the story itself. The choice that Hawah now must make—either to care for the stranger-baby or abandon it to certain death in the bush—actually elevates the story from a mere incident, as dire as it was, into the realm of high literature, or so it seems to me now.

And to bolster that idea, I offer you the words below of Mary Renault, whom I can surely name as my favorite author for reasons that are both very personal and probably pretty obvious. Mary Renault is, in fact, the only author whose complete works I have read, many of them far more than once. I remember vividly that when I was a librarian at Widener Library at Harvard, when I had access to all the books she had written, I read them all in one long series. I wrote to her then, at her address in South Africa—I don't remember how I got her address, probably through her most recent publisher—and told her how much her work meant to me and also told her that I was going to send her my own story. What nerve! But this was the beginning of a fairly lengthy correspondence that I treasure.

Here is a paragraph from Mary Renault in her early correspondence with me that pertains to the question you asked about changes I made to the original story:

Ma’s dilemma would be real to anyone, but is probably especially complete to me because of my nurse’s training. Not having children, I can merely speculate on the point you make so well, that the mother is so closely bound to her family that they seem like part of herself which she is therefore called upon to sacrifice as she might cut off her own hand. For me there is the feeling that all of these are people, and would one have the right to sacrifice two patients for the sake of one? I look back on my time in the isolation ward and realise that everything was elaborately organised to be sure this dreadful choice should never present itself ; and it is with a shock of realisation that one sees, put so naturally in your story, the fact that in earlier ages, and in many places today, it has done so again and again. Of course everyone remembers how Thucydides says about the plague in Athens that the finest people died because they did not desert their friends or kindred ; but he does not bring in, because he may not have seen it happen, the question of sacrificing others. One can be certain, of course, that in this instance a Greek family would have put the strange child outside. Probably even one of their own, if it gave a chance of saving the others. But they did not have the Book.

Well, having quoted Mary Renault that far—which was expressly against her wishes, but she is now many years dead, and I think that it can now no longer be of consequence to her—I cannot stop myself from including here my most treasured response from any reader, ever:

Dear Bob Locke,

Thank you for a most valuable and moving experience. AND HIGHER MORE BROTHERS impressed me tremendously. Though I don’t know West Africa, never having got beyond the ports on that coast, it has the true feel of the African psyche, and I am sure that you yourself must have spent some time there. Details such as the making of the hut are all so right. But more than all, it is a gripping, universal moral dilemma, as old as time, which stays with one long after one has finished reading. How refreshing it is today to read a story which is really, integrally strong, not merely straining to seem so by flexing fatty muscles and making loud uncouth noises like some bar-room bully.

...

I have just one criticism, if you won’t think it an impertinence: the title. Even after one has read the story, though one sees the general idea it is a little bit off-key because nearly everyone in it is female ; but, more important, it is hard to say, and if you read it aloud it would almost certainly be received as AND HIRE MORE BROTHERS. (I once ill-advisedly called an early story of mine RETURN TO NIGHT, and everyone thought it was Tonight.) However, my judgement may very easily be wrong in this.

By the way, the MS was read by an extremely critical friend of mine who often thinks my enjoyment of this or that has been over-facile ; and she had nothing but enthusiasm and praise.

Of course the attentive reader of this website will realize that I did in fact take Mary Renault's advice and I did change the title, numerous times before I finally arrived at Story for a Black Night after I inserted the first two pages about the storm taking out the electricity.

And now, oh, doggone it, having quoted this far from the redoutable Mary Renault, so expressly against her wishes, I am going to offer up the entirety of our first few letters wherein she makes clear exactly why she didn't want anybody using her for quotes. Oh, how disrespectful of me. But what can it matter now? And perhaps these quotes will help some young readers and writers along? And I did keep them private for more than thirty years (look at the dates on the letters).

Why did you write the story from Momo's point of view?

I'm not sure, really. It just came to me one night, that original first sentence, as I was lying in bed going over and over the story and trying to find a way to begin and to simply get the first words down on paper. That original first sentence, by the way, is no longer the first sentence of the book, but it did get me started, and I knew that it was Momo's voice speaking inside my head. Well, I knew it was the voice of the son of the main character. I didn't come up with the names Momo, Hawah, Musu, Mrs. Gbalee for quite a while.

And please don't confuse the character of Momo with my student, Kafee, who invited me home to meet his Ma. It's not just that Momo is much older than Kafee, who was only about 18 or so when he was my student. Momo is completely distinct from Kafee in personality and attitude. Momo is perhaps 35 or 40, a father no doubt, probably the father of "Smallboy" though I don't believe that is ever stipulated in the story. Some readers have jumped to that conclusion because of the playful and fatherly way that Momo addresses Smallboy. In hindsight I realize that Momo is the right person to tell the story because he has "book" himself and therefore the language and insights needed to tell the story, but also because he would be the character with the most vivid memories of what happened to his Ma, and he would be able to convey the heroism that she herself would not be able to convey. Momo has the distance needed for that.

And I definitely did not want the narrator to be some white American Peace Corps Volunteer. Ha! I wanted, too, to try to capture the distinctive dialect which so enchanted me.

Momo also has the occasion and drive to tell the story, I realized later. It wasn't until long after I was finished with the first draft that I added the few pages at the beginning with the set up—or frame, really—of Momo, grown up, telling the village children the story on a black night when the electricity fails. The original first sentence that came into my head is now on page three, I think, something about things having changed in Kakata. Actually I forget exactly those first words now. In the final book that original sentence that came to me as I lay in bed, trying to find a way to begin the story, reads, "But around here it was different those days. Kakata was smalltown then, and this house where it stands was bush all around."

For more about my use of the first person narrative, and what a breakthrough it can be for me with writer's block, you might want to look on my website at the first and last chapters of Lonely Island. The history of Easter Island is a story that I have long wanted to tell, and I worked for years on the research. I started the first chapter innumerable times only to abandon it each time because I simply couldn't stand the way I was telling the story. Finally, I got the idea to tell the history through the mind of a young islander, and the book practically wrote itself from that moment on. In fact, I adore that narrator, Toromiru, who continually surprises me with the ideas and words that come out of that head. Ha! Hope this sparks some good ideas. In your email you say that you are intimidated by the talents of your professor. But you mustn't be. I trust that anyone who would choose this story as an assignment must have a great heart with plenty of room for understanding and encouragement.

All the best,

Bob Locke

Since the dialect gives the story certain aesthetics, how did you decide to use that certain dialect? How close do you think you are to the Liberian dialect that was used? Did you have any trouble writing the dialect into the book since you are not native to that area?

The narrative voice was merely the natural thing to do. As I've said elsewhere on this page, Momo's voice just came into my head one night. But Liberian English is unique and fascinating and I wanted to try to capture something of it for people at home. At that time I had no idea that I would ever seek publication.

I think the dialect was the most difficult part of it, and I rewrote the book many times during the next several years working to get the dialect closer to the Liberian English that I remembered. But, of course, the longer I was away from Liberia, the farther away that voice got. When I set to work on the 2002 Phoenix Honor Award edition I continued that process, even though the book had already been published 20 years earlier. I think I am more a REwriter than a writer.

I have no illusions that I did indeed capture Liberian English in the slightest. But the dialect I did create is distinctive and all of the reviews make note of its quality and how much it adds to the telling of the story.

You say on your website that you left out a "significant piece of the story" from the original edition of 1982. What was that?

Yes, I couldn't believe it! It was the part of the story that made kids squirm and squeal the most. It's so extremely grisly, in fact, that when I put it back into the 2002 edition, the proofreader looked at me very seriously and said, "You know, Bob. With this in the story, this is no longer a children's book."

Well, I happen to disagree with that. In fact, to me it is the most poignant part of this story of Mother Love. There is not only the mother's love that comes from Hawah, but there is the mother's love of Old Ma, and the filial trust of Hawah, that comes out of those times when Old Ma would have to take that sharp knife and carve open Hawah's mouth in order for Hawah to be able to breathe. What a mother! What a child! It makes me tremble now to even think of that. No, I am so sorry that somehow that was missing from this book for twenty years. You may be sure that I had no hesitation in putting that horrifying detail back into the 2002 edition. There can surely be no greater show of Mother Love than to take a knife to your daughter's mouth in order to allow her to breathe and to take in a little canned milk for nourishment. Horrible love, beautiful love.

How long did you stay in Liberia?

Three years. The regular PC stint—at least at that time in those early days of PC—was two years. I extended for a third year. The first two years I taught grades 7-12 at an Episcopal Mission school named St. Augustine. I taught all manner of subjects, including some that I knew absolutely nothing about, like Economics. American textbook about American economics in a little backwater town in West Africa. Absurd. But there was a national exam after 6th, 9th and 12th grades, and those students had to be prepared for it. They were giving up everything to get an education, and I was far more qualified to teach American Economics than any of the other teachers there. At least I had BEEN to America. Teaching there was very sad-making for me because there was no relevance in the curriculum to the lives of the people. Nevertheless, it had to be done. When I finished Story for a Black Night at the end of my second year, I now finally had a real African story to teach in my English classes. That was a huge incentive to finish writing what I had begun, when it kept appearing to me a too enormous task that I had undertaken.

If it is possible I would like to know a little about the area that you stayed in?

I lived in the Loma Quarter of Kakata (Loma is one of the many tribes of Liberia) down near the swampy area. I had moved there from a much better house near the coaltar road because I wanted to live more among the people and in a less Americanized house. I wanted to live like the people there live, which is one of the stated goals of Peace Corps, and a good goal for any ambassador. I gave up my electricity with that move, but it was worth it to get a much better flavor of Africa in my last two years.

I saw on your website that you worked with Rose-Marie Vassallo to translate the book. Did she only translate the book into French and work with that dialect, or did she also have an influence on the dialect for the English translation?

I don't know how Rose-Marie came upon the book, but she was the one to bring it to Flammarion, the French publisher, telling me later that from the moment she began reading the English book she recognized it as a story that needed to be told, a story whose author was devoted to it. Well, I don't really remember Rose-Marie's exact words, but I remember they exalted the book into what she clearly and sincerely considered a higher form of literature. "Gee," I thought.

No, the book was published in English without any input from Rose-Marie. I didn't meet her until after her work began. I asked her how she was going to handle the dialect, and that's how our friendship began. She's wonderful.

What was going on in Africa during the plot of the story? What historical significance or occurrences were happening?

Really nothing much that I know of. Since my student, Kafee, was probably around 18 at that time, 1970, I think that the smallpox incident with his mother and him as smallboy must have happened around 1957. President William S. Tubman had been in office for 40 or so years when I was there, I believe, and the country was very stable. Several years after I left, Tubman died and Vice President Tolbert took office. There was a bloody coup not long after that and the country fell into violent civil war, but none of that applies to the story. It applies to me, however, because I am heartbroken at the thought of those good people killed so violently, probably many of my friends and students from the three years I was in country.

Why do you feel this particular story was important to share with others?

I couldn't get it out of my head. It is a true story of true heroism, and that kind of story must always be preserved and shared.

What kind of research did you do in order to write this book?

In Kakata I had no way to do much research. There were very few books in even the Teacher Training Institute library, and none of those organized. I did have in my Peace Corps book locker (100 or so novels that Peace Corps used to provide all volunteers to keep us from going insane) Emile Zola's novel Nana that had an episode involving small pox, and I remember going back to reread those passages. I'm not sure Nana helped much. But the mother who became Hawah in my own story had been so vivid in her description of what had happened to her body that I had a good idea of it.

How do you feel about writing about a culture you were not born into? What were the difficulties of it? What were some major things you learned?

The Liberian culture is fascinating—or I should probably say cultures in the plural since Liberia has so many different tribes of people, all with different dialects, along with the Americo-Liberians who were in control of the government at that time, ex-slaves from America who began settling in Liberia as far back as 1822. I was very interested in Liberians' beliefs and superstitions along with the impact of Christianity, as I think can be seen in many of the wry comments by Momo, Hawah and perhaps most especially Old Ma.

You mention on your website how close you are to your parents and what good parents they were to you all your life...Did your feelings for your own mother come through in your story?

I am certain that my relationship with my mom and my love and respect for her influenced me a lot in the writing not just of this story, but many others. In fact, I have often made the sudden realization some time during the writing of so much of my work, "Oh, my God, I've just told the same story again!" That is the story of a mother giving up practically everything for her child. Look on my website for examples of this, particularly The Dolly and Howling Twain . A story that had huge impact on me when I was in high school was of a mother and child at the beach. A shark threatened the child, and that mother went into the waves and pulled that shark out of the water by its tail and killed it. I don't know if it really happened or was an urban myth, but it has stuck with me all my life. All the best on your paper, and I will will will try to get back to you soon on the other questions. I understand from another student in your class that there may be other emails asking questions, and that makes me very very nervous since I want to be responsive to all. But, gulp.

Bob Locke

P.S. Update to the biography. I still live with and take care of my mother who is now 93 and quite enfeebled. (Later update: Mom died June 26, 2007.) But we have a good time together, and I discover with relief that I am a good, attentive, cheerful nurse. One never knows ahead of time, I guess. (Later update: Mom died June 26, 2007. See "Hauntings" on this website.

You asked me to send you the rest of the autobiography from the website; so I'm attaching the entire file in hopes you have Microsoft Word. If not, let me know, and I'll send it to you in one long email. It's not really a biography, as you will see when you read the entire document, although it is substantial and does contain much biographical information. I wrote it in response to Something About the Author who had requested a bio. They ended up not publishing it, saying it was too long for their needs. But I think perhaps, too, it was overbold for their target audience, el-hi students. Still, it was a story I personally needed to tell to get it out of my head, and it was the way and length that I felt I must write it. So I am delighted to provide it to you. I think my last addendum is 2004.

Also on my website you can find more biographical material in what is essentially a resume. Since you found "Biography" just below "Resume", I imagine you've already looked at the resume, but just in case not...

Do you believe that in "Story of a Black Night" the narrator, Momo, is explaining his rite-of-passage into manhood?

My first inclination was to say no, and in fact I do think that is the correct answer to the way you have phrased your question, since you use the word "explaining". I don't think Momo is explaining anything, simply telling a story of heart and great courage that is at the core of who he is. Also, I do think that most "rite-of-passage" stories—of which my novels Tracks and Big Man and the Burn-Out are good examples—have the main character as a hero, accomplishing something manly which allows him to grow from boyhood into manhood. That is not the case with Momo. He is mostly an observer of the story in which his mother and grandmother are the heroes (or perhaps protagonist and antagonist, though Old Ma's antagonism is not what readers usually expect from traditional antagonists).

However, upon more reflection, I do think that this story is indeed the rite of passage for Momo into an adulthood of understanding basic elements of his confused world. At the center of the confusion is "Book", which is not natural to this world but imposed by another civilization. Book is not simply THE BIBLE, as some readers have mistaken it, but Book is learning, the kind of learning that comes from education and from reading. But what Momo learns in the story he tells is far greater than what is offered in Book. For example, he sees what Mrs. Gbalee and his auntie cannot see, that Hawah is the one with heart. He sees what the Mandingo woman sees at the end of the story, she who does not have Book at all.

I hope that helps, but a word of warning. If you use any of those thoughts, which are really more analytical than any that I have given any of your classmates, you must give attribution to this email. You might care to expound upon them or argue with them or in some other way illuminate your own thoughts, and probably the best way is to put my words into a direct quote with a footnote.

Also, what is your opinion on the subject that this book is or isn't a good selection for children's literature due to the structure of the book, that is having children depict that Momo is telling a story to a child of when he was a "smallboy" and the confusion that might bring?

I'm not quite sure I understand the question, and I'm also not sure that I do have any thoughts about it since this is really an educational question—and perhaps a good one—but I'm no expert on education. I can tell you this, however, apropos of the question: I did not write this story for children. It was based on a true story that touched me and I couldn't rest until I got it out of my head and down on paper. I didn't even have any thoughts of trying to get it published. I did have in mind, however, that I would use it in my 10th grade English class at Kakata Rural Teacher Training Institute. Don't be fooled by the term "10th grade" because all of my students were adults, probably none younger than 18 and some of them in their 50s and 60s.

The idea for the frame—that is beginning and ending with a grown man telling smallboy and the other young villagers this story that began on a black night long ago—came long after I had finished writing the shank of the story. For some reason I cannot quite explain without going into long and boring detail, I always find it necessary to have a frame—that is a REASON why the narrator in a first person narration is telling the story in the first place. This "reason" is often interesting for me to discover as the book unfolds out of me. I don't necessarily know the reason before I begin writing, and when I do discover the narrator's reason, I always have to go back and write it into the story later on. I enjoy writing and REwriting because of unforetold surprises such as that.

Plus, I would like to know your opinion on what is a good structuralism in children's literature?

I'm not sure that I've ever heard the term before, but I'm assuming your professor is dwelling upon it in class, and I think I can figure out a definition from context. I served three years as a juror for the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles for their Once Upon a World Award for books for age 6-10, and I've had to read a lot of schlock, I'm afraid. One of my immediate complaints upon opening book after book has been what I might indeed call structuralism. That is that there is no apparent reason for the telling of the story, and what does soon become apparent is that the author is merely trying to educate the child reader about some aspect of society. Often it is merely words words words and nothing more. One of the reasons, I think, that Story for a Black Night got such good reviews (after probably more than a 100 rejections by editors over more than ten years) is that it is truly a great story, utterly human, in fact the very essence of humanity: altruism. The conflict is one that all of us, no matter what age, can immediately grasp. That the story has a baby (two babies actually) right at the center of the conflict captivates every reader.

Going back to my declaration that I did not write this story for children. I did write it for all ages, and I do think it is a story for all ages. When I published my own edition of the book in 2002 to have on hand at the Children's Literature Association Convention where I was invited to speak upon receiving the Phoenix Honor—the 1982 Houghton Mifflin publication having gone out of print—I was surprised to find a significant omission in that earlier book. You can read more about that above. I hope that you have a post 2002 edition of the book so that you can look at the changes I made in that regard. But it's significant to your question about the suitability of this book for children; my proof reader, upon reading that incident that I now included in the new edition, said to me softly but very firmly, "You realize, Bob, that that change means that this is no longer a children's book." Well, if that's true, so be it. But I don't agree with the statement. This book was already very grim, and one more grim detail—and such a telling one in the story of a mother's love and sacrifice for her child, this one between Old Ma and Hawah— does not seem to me to remove the book from the realm of children's literature, if it was ever really suitable to that realm in the first place. I'll also tell you that back in 1982 I was introduced to a man who was a juror on the American Library Association's award for children's books, and he told me that though Story for a Black Night had been much admired by his committee, they had finally decided against it because they did not think it was really a children's book.

So, what can I say about all of that? Furthermore, perhaps we need to look at the definition for "child" and "children" as well as for "children's literature" because I believe there is a great variety, in aptitude, in understanding, in adaptability. I don't believe it is a one size fits all kind of thing.

The reason, I think, that Story for a Black Night was published as a children's book is that it has some of the aspects of children's books. It is short. It is told to children. I doubt that with its length it could have been published in any other way than as a children's book. I should think it is very challenging for children. I would be interested in hearing your own conclusions about this question, if you would be so good as to send me your paper after you turn it in.

Good luck on it.

Copyright © 2008 Robert Locke
All Rights Reserved