DEBORAH JOHNSON: Transcending Race

Today's guest blogger, Deborah Johnson, shares some insight into her novel The Air Between Us. In Revere, Mississippi, in the 1960s, blacks and whites rarely mix. Or so everyone believes. But when an unexpected incident occurs, the connections between townspeople of both races are revealed to be deeper than anyone expects --- making Revere's struggle with integration that much more complicated.


I've always been fascinated by the idea of a parallel universe; that somehow there's something right beside me that's so different from me that we cannot connect. I've never really believed this, and I think that's why I write the characters I write. Black or white, they have a lot in common. You look at one, you see parts of the other and there's always some little thing binding them together. Even if it's a secret little something --- it's always there.

In one of the earliest pre-pub pieces on The Air Between Us, the reviewer wrote that you couldn't tell if I was black or white by the way I had written my characters. He thought I was even-handed with them, that I could empathize with each of them, no matter which race they were. I loved that. I think this comes from having integrated every (or almost every) school I ever attended. If you're a talker like I am, and if you're in a situation like I was in, you've got to learn to find something in common with everybody else in that same situation and you've got to learn to do this real quick. I discovered, early on, that I had a lot to say to Irish Catholics and that they had a lot to say to me. I was still black and they were still white --- but, hey, we had Sister Mary Jean in common.

Reading group members often ask me about my characters. They want to know if Melba Louise Obrenski is black or if she's white (Melba alone knows this and she's not telling). They want to know more about white Ned Hampton and his singing in the choir of the black Missionary Union Baptist Church. They want to know what parts of the book are real and what parts aren't. They want to know if I based Reese Jackson's life on my father's life.

Certainly Reese and Daddy have a lot in common: they're both surgeons, they both became accomplished and successful in a time and in a place when it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a black man to accomplish much of anything. To do this, both daddy and Reese had to be smart, cunning and determined. They had to be devoted healers but not saints --- at least not in the way that we generally think of sainthood. And they were all these things --- but that's not all they were.

Both of them have a lot in common with Cooper Connelly, the white doctor in The Air Between Us, who is himself another son of the South. My father's family was so poor that he was born on a dirt floor --- but so was Cooper Connelly. My father had a mother who worked all the time because she had to, who was never home, and so did Reese Jackson. Deanie Jackson is the composite of a lot of women, black and white, who I knew in the 1960s but, then, so is Evelyne Elizabeth Connelly. The town of Revere? Well, that's in Mississippi and maybe only in Mississippi.

When I was growing up, during the Civil Rights era, Mississippi was considered a very scary place. Who would want to go there, much less live there? Folks were escaping from all sides. From everything I read, I thought the whole state was filled with people drawling in either black or white dialect. Before I got here, I thought I wouldn't understand a word that anybody was throwing at me. Instead, I understood everything that was said.

Some of the greatest experiences I've had with this novel have come at book club meetings or library signings when someone has come up to me and said, "Hey, it was like that. I knew a white person like Cooper Connelly. I knew a black person like Reese Jackson. This doesn't negate all the bad things that happened, but --- hey, things like this were happening, too." And it doesn't matter if the person saying this to me is black or white. It makes me happy because that's what surprised me about Revere, Mississippi, and continues to surprise me about life itself --- the basic commonality of experience, the fact that there are no parallel universes in it.

---Deborah Johnson