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Black
women writers put their brand on the suspense genre
By Ellen Sweets, Staff Writer of the Dallas
Morning News
Published February 10, 1999
With the publication of "Inner City Blues" (Norton, $23.95),
Paula Woods officially joins a growing group of women mystery
writers. Actually, she has joined a circle within the circle—she
is part of a growing group of black women who write mystery
novels.
The book, which went into a second printing before the first
hit the street last month, is soon to be followed by a second
book. It has established Ms. Woods' protagonist, Charlotte
Justice, as a homicide detective to be reckoned with.
Ms. Woods, who lives and works in Los Angeles, came to Dallas
last week to read from her new book and talk about how it
came to be.
"I was one of those people who thought black mystery
writers kind of originated with Chester Hymes and Walter
Mosley. And because I'm basically a researcher, I started
looking into how many black mystery writers there were.
I was stunned. Black people have been writing mysteries
since the turn of the century."
That discovery led to "Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes: Black
Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction of the 20th Century,"
an anthology she edited with her husband, Felix Liddell.
It is a topic she clearly enjoys.
"I'm telling you, it blew my mind. Guess when the first
mystery by a black writer was published? Go ahead, ask me,"
she says gleefully. "1900. A woman named Pauline Hopkins
wrote "Talma Gordon."
"I found another, "The Conjure Man," that was the first
mystery to feature a black detective. And that was in the
1870s. Here was all that history that, believe me, very
few people knew about. It was genuinely exciting to be able
to share that with people."
"Spooks, Spies and Private Eyes" was not her first collaborative
success, however. She and her husband did several other
successful books, including "I Too Sing America" and "I
Hear a Symphony." Both celebrate the lives of black Americans.
"We felt it was important to be part of the effort
to get positive images of African-Americans out there,"
Ms. Woods says. "Once we progressed from that to "Spooks,
Spies" it was almost a natural progression to creating a
character of my own. It didn't happen overnight, but it
was there."
Her mother, Florence, died when Ms. Woods was a college
senior; it took much of the wind from her sails. She and
her mother were very close. An only child, she was equally
close to her father, Isaac.
"I kind of lost interest in everything after my mother's
death," she says. "Just to regroup, I took a job
as a telephone operator at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital
and became especially fascinated with the workings of an
inner-city trauma center. It gave me the time and perspective
I needed to pull myself back together and move on."
Ms. Woods, 45, went to graduate school and earned a master's
degree in hospital administration. She and her husband,
who has an MBA, started their own hospital consulting firm,
landing several high-ticket clients, including Kaiser Permanente
and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
When the 1992 riots broke out after the Rodney King decision,
Ms. Woods and Mr. Liddell were working on "I Hear a Symphony"—the
antithesis of rioting and anger.
Ms. Woods and Mr. Liddell went on to do "Merry Christmas,
Baby" before collaborating on "Spooks, Spies and Private
Eyes." By the time they finished editing it, the mystery
bug had bitten. The result was "Inner City Blues."
Heroine Charlotte Justice has the makings of a staple in
the mystery genre, along with Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone
and Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta.
Ms. Woods drew from friends, acquaintances, situations and
experiences to weave her literary tapestry. She also depended
on the kindness of strangers, such as officers in the Los
Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff's
Department. She pooled her new-found knowledge with her
emotional responses to the riots.
"I mean, you don't know what it's like to be out in
the street and see people looting who look like your Uncle
Fred. It's completely disorienting. It made me ask myself,
'What makes people do this? Are there any absolutes here?
Where are the shades of gray?' "
Ms. Woods set about finding answers. She knew someone at
the L.A. Sheriff's Department, but she didn't know any police
officers. She did remember meeting a black LAPD captain
in her neighborhood.
"So I just called him up," she says. "He
introduced me to three black women officers. I learned a
lot from them, notably how they were always having to prove
how tough they were."
Ms. Woods found also a treasure trove in a black woman detective
who did her doctoral dissertation on sexual harassment in
the LAPD. It opened a whole new world in terms of how, for
many women— especially single parents—being a police officer
represented stability, and complaining about harassment
was a threat to that stability. She told of a female police
officer who was asked to strip to the waist and photocopy
her breasts.
"When she complained, she was branded as difficult,"
Ms. Woods says. "So layer that on top of being a black
woman—no, an attractive black woman who really needs her
job—and you have some idea of what it's like to have to
work in an environment where the traditional value systems
are changing in a male-dominated structure that is unable
or unwilling to change with it."
The reason situations seem so real stems in part from Ms.
Woods' access to actual crime scenes and homicide investigations.
Charlotte Justice's character emerged as a woman determined
to protect and to serve, but who must also resolve inner
conflicts related to her family, race, sex and, perhaps
most critically, issues surrounding an extremely traumatic
experience.
"I gave Charlotte a certain kind of background and
history because I think it is important for blacks and whites
to confront some basic truths, and they are the kinds of
truths that blacks tend to want to deny and that whites
don't even know about."
One of them is class and color-consciousness among blacks.
"We have a saying, and every black person knows it:
'If you're black, get back; if you're brown, stick around;
if you're yella, you're mellow. If you're white, you're
all right.' This kind of thinking is a problem for me. It's
a problem for Charlotte, who is fair-skinned with green
eyes."
Ms. Woods also incorporated bigotry against homosexuals
into her novel.
"In creating my gay characters, I wanted to call attention
to how homophobic the black community can be at times. I
also wanted to show characters living their lives as best
they could, just like everyone else."
Then, to give readers some sense of what it's like to deal
with the residual effects of bigotry, Ms. Woods drew from
family experiences.
Her late father migrated to California as a youth, banished
from Arkansas for beating up a white kid.
"As the story goes, they were both teenagers,"
she says. "The white boy called my father a nigger,
and later that evening, some good old boys from the Klan
came to my grandfather and told him because they liked him
they wanted him to know it was in his best interest to leave
town. And he did. That night. Drove to L.A. in their 1925
Model A Ford."
Five generations of Ms. Woods' family swapped stories about
themselves last year at her grandmother's 100th birthday
party.
"We were there in every color, shape and size,"
she says. "Just like they are in Charlotte's family.
I even used my husband's cooking skills as the prototype
for those of Charlotte's love interest. I tried to make
situations as real as possible."
She does. Ms. Woods' portrayal of salty cop talk, ethnic
banter and weird cop humor rang true for several publications,
including Kirkus Reviews, which compared "Inner City Blues"
favorably to the work of an established writer.
"Woods puts an African-American spin on Sara Paretsky's
trademarks (the broad canvas filled with big events, the
tough-as-the-boys heroine, the gimlet eye for urban corruption)
in this important debut."
It is an assessment that pleases the soft-spoken author.
"You know you've done something right when you're compared
to the best of the mystery writers," she says.
"I want to be as good as Hymes and Mosley, but being
compared to Paretsky doesn't hurt. Not at all." |
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