You Know Better
by Tina McElroy Ansa

List Price: $24.95
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 006019779X
Publisher: William Morrow

Tina McElroy Ansa is the author of the novels Baby of the Family, Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With, and You Know Better. She has contributed the essays "Postcards From Georgia" to CBS News Sunday Morning. An avid gardener, birder, and amateur naturalist, she is married to Jonée Ansa, a filmmaker. They reside on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. She and her husband are currently producing the film adaptation of her first novel Baby of the Family.

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This is an interview with Tina McElroy Ansa conducted by Georgene Bess Montgomery, professor of African-American Literature at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia.

Q: Why did you writeYou Know Better?

TMA: I wanted to deal with a young girl who has lost her way and examine how she came to be in that place. I wanted to explore how our children got in the situation that they're in. And if indeed they are lost, I wanted to look at ways to snatch them back. I discovered in doing research forYou Know Better -- in talking with people just at dinner parties and over coffee and when I went around on book tour -- that so many of us, the folks who are parents and grandparents of these young people, just don't want to talk about it. We don't want to face the fact that maybe we've dropped the ball -- that maybe we aren't giving our children what our mothers and fathers gave us. Through the novel I hope to offer readers a safe place to discuss our children, young people who we ourselves call "little hoochie-mamas" and "thugs" and "players" and "lost causes." They are still our children.

Q: What do you want folks to come away with after readingYou Know Better?

TMA: I hope that we can just get together and talk about the issues and situations presented. That's why I think that reading groups and reading group guides and book clubs are so important. We need a discussion about this -- about our children -- and where we are at the beginning of the 21st century. I think what we need is a national discussion about it.. One of the things that society shies away from is having that national discussion about sensitive, important, uncomfortable issues. In the same way that our country has never had a national discussion about race, and I think that's why we keep finding ourselves decade after decade dealing with the same problems. And the reason we continue to have so much discord about it and so much pain and such a lack of progress around it is that I don't think we've had that national discussion where we talk about things that are uncomfortable. In some ways, I'm certainly guilty of it. You know, you just get sick of talking about it, but it's got to be talked about, it's got to be dealt with. And the same applies to our children. We don't want to have that national discussion about them and the condition their lives are in.

And I think that's another problem. We haven't fully involved our young people in a discussion about their own lives. I certainly hope that this book becomes a safe place where people can talk without being so defensive saying, "That's not my daughter who's a little hootchie, that's your daughter." We don't need to talk about whose daughter it is, whose son it is. Let's just say it's all of our children and go from there.

Q: With the entire world from which to choose, why do you continue to write fiction set in the small middle Georgia town of Mulberry?

TMA: Mulberry is such a wonderful gift to me. When I began writing fiction, I don't think I realized what a gift Mulberry was. I don't know if I thought that I would spend my entire writing career in Mulberry, which is what I plan to do. Mulberry is certainly very much like William Faulkner's Yoknapatapha County. Or John Edgar Wideman's Sweet Home. It is a world unto itself. And I have found that it is as broad as I want it to be, or as narrow in its focus as I need it to be. It's a wonderful little town, a microcosm of the world. The world that I envisioned and my readers saw in my first novel,Baby of the Family, was the world of middle Georgia 1940s 1950s 1960s. And the world that we see inYou Know Better is the end of the 1990s, fin de siecle. Mulberry has changed in just the way the world outside has changed. In my earlier novels, Mulberry was safer, it was more insulated. In some ways while readingBaby of the Family, you didn't even think about white people. They weren't even really a part of it. Many people thought that Mulberry was a completely black town, except for the nuns and the priest and the some store clerks. And it was a safe place. The neighborhood of Pleasant Hill was a community where black people could move around unharrassed (except by ghosts!), where folks didn't have to worry about their children playing outside after dark under the streetlight. And there are no more towns like that now. We'd like to think that there is some safe place, but there is no safe place any longer. The events of the last few years have taught us that. The town of Mulberry has the many of the same problems that Detroit and Los Angeles and Knoxville, Tennessee has. All these towns are the same. There's homelessness in Mulberry now, and young people wandering the streets at night and side streets where you can buy a dime bag of weed. There's nothing in the world that's not in Mulberry. And I think that's why Mulberry has been such a blessing for me. It's changed along with the world.

Q: What's new in Mulberry?

TMA: InYou Know Better, we meet the Pines family, which I think is just a wonderful Georgia name, don't you? P-I-N-E-S. I love it so much. I think of Georgia pine trees, of strength, of the countryside, of the soil. In my mind, the Pines family is rooted in Georgia.

Q: You've been compared to another Southern writer who was rooted in this part of the country. What has Zora Neale Hurston meant to you and your writing?

TMA: Zora Neale Hurston has been such a beacon for me, and continues to be a beacon for me. I was introduced to her by a college professor Gloria Wade Gayles in 1970-71 when I was a senior at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. It was such an awakening for me. I was from Macon Georgia, and the people I saw in my father's juke joint growing up -- I thought they were poetic. I thought they were wonderful. I thought they were deep and passionate and fascinating. I saw fights over women who didn't look like Dorothy Dandridge, you know, who were just ordinary looking women, but there was passion and love, joy and tragedy there in their lives. The great stories I heard from my grandfather and my grandmother and my great-grandmother and my great aunt and just the people down at the juke joint. They were just extraordinary, you know. There were pickpockets and paper mill workers and garbage men and school teachers and folks who rode on the back of the Miller High Life beer truck and it was just so rich for me. Those people I knew growing up, that's what it always wanted to write about, but I think in my mind I thought literature had to be more formal or stilted or high-flown. And Zora Neale Hurston taught me that these small town, Southern folks' lives were the stuff of literature.

Q: Besides the South and women, what in your writing interests you?

TMA: My goodness, my interest is the family. I think the family unit -- however it is shaped -- is complicated and complex and crazy enough for me and any other writer to write about forever and not even scratch the surface about what's really going on with those interrelationships. People are always telling me their family stories because that is what interests them, too. That's what I find so fascinating about writing about family. In one way, you have a pattern of family: what the mother's like, what the mother's daughter's like, and what the grandmother's like, and what you think should follow. If the mother was like this, the daughter should probably be like this, and she reacts to the mother in some way or the other. But what I find so interesting about family is that you just can never tell. NO, you just can never tell. NO, you just can never tell. Look at Sandra inYou Know Better. She had loving parents, all the advantages, all the right words spoken to her and yet because of a failed relationship in her teens and disappointment and betrayal from one man, she is so wounded that she can't offer true love and acceptance to her own child.

Q: Are your stories autobiographical?

TMA: You know, I think a writer's relationship with everybody influences everything. I'm beginning to think that there's nothing that I don't use in my fiction -- what I see, think, hear, smell, feel, touch, remember, sense. I use all of it and in that sense my fiction is infused with my life. My work is not, I don't think autobiographical. But like many writers, my work is informed by where I come from and who I am.

Q: You have a facility with dialogue, with your characters' voices, with how they sound. Where do you think that springs from?

TMA: I've always loved to listen to people talk, especially in the South where people LOVE to talk. I'm an outrageous eavesdropper. I overhear conversations in plane terminals, in restaurants, in stores, at public phone booth. It's something I've always done and enjoyed. As a child, I loved sitting on the floor at my mother's feet as she gossiped on the phone -- fascinating! I wanted Lily, Sandra and LaShawndra to be examples of their generations, but also, here we come back again to the organic nature of my writing: one idea naturally following another. When I create a character and I give her a name and a place, in my mind, and even though I may not write about it, I know where she went to high school, where she lost her virginity, her sexual orientation, and where she came from. Once I have that firmly in my mind, her voice speaks to me from her history. That character becomes real and has his or her own life. And I feel that way about my characters: that their voices come from who they are. Lily is a former schoolteacher and a board of education administrator, so she speaks more formally than her daughter who is well educated, but who is out in the world as a realtor who has talk very easily and convincingly with people. LaShawndra, Lily's granddaughter, of course, speaks in a completely different way because she certainly does not speak formally and uses a great deal of slang. In addition, she uses words that many folks would NEVER use in polite conversation. She doesn't care or see the power in her words.

Q: How do you think your readers view your work?

TMA: African-American writers write on so many levels because our readers read on so many levels. I find that my readers bring a level of sophistication that allows me to do just all kinds of things in my writing. I very seldom think, well, I wonder if my readers will get this. I think sometimes I need to work a little harder for my readers to get this -- I need to make this a little clearer for them. But I never think they're not going to understand what I'm saying or that this is going to be above their heads or anything -- I NEVER think that. I always know that they're going to get what I'm trying to do if I do my work. So one of the things that I do know is that my characters are very much like many of my readers. My readers are like me many of whom are educated, but who speak differently in different situations. I know I have a voice and a language for when I'm on the road, I have a voice and a language for when I'm doing interviews, one for when I'm talking with my husband, and one for when I'm speaking with my women friends. In conversation, I think this comes naturally for people of color in this country -- not just African American people but especially marginalized people which includes women -- who have to move from any number of different worlds and fit in. I hope I've created a language for my characters to reflect their lives. The whole point of literature, I think, is to show where people come from.

Q: Why is Crystal important in the novel? Why is she in the novel, she's not a Pines woman?

TMA: For LaShawndra to stand out, you need to show that not every young woman is like LaShawndra. The character was a tribute to many young women like Crystal. Just because you've got the "first baby daddy" and the "second baby daddy" and even the "third baby daddy" doesn't mean that you are just a little throwaway ho. It doesn't. There are many wonderful young mothers with all kinds of histories. I mean you see them all the time standing there at the bus stop in their little minimum wage uniforms with their three children all cleaned and pressed and ready to go to school, trying to give them violin lessons and take them to Girl Scouts. And they have no car or outside support. And they get no or little recognition for what they're doing. And you see some young men trying to do the same thing. That needs to be documented in our fiction as well as in the media.

Q: Just as LaShawndra needs to be documented in fiction?

TMA: Bless her little heart, She's such a little freak and doesn't even know the implications of being a freak. But she's also funny and talented and quirky and confused. She's a complicated little character. When we meet her, ostensibly, she's trying to get to Freaknik in Atlanta. But really what she's trying to do is get the hell out of Mulberry. You know, she's messed up again, and she's not one of those big women who can stay around and face the music, and she just wants to get away. She wants to get as far away as she can. She's never had that many friends -- Crystal is a true friend who's there for her, who's taken her into her own house, who cares about her, who puts little crackers in her bag and makes sure she calls when she stays out all night, and really is friend and a mother figure for her. And she's done the one thing that she didn't want to do -- she's disrespected her house -- put her children and her in danger by giving the key to somebody who she doesn't even know, that she doesn't even care about. And she can't bear the idea of staying around and facing up to what she's done. I know my readers are going to recognize her and I hope empathize with her as much as her spirit guide Miss Liza Jane does.

Q: The spirit world is always pivotal in your writing. What's the source of the all those spirits?

TMA: When I was growing up in the '50s and '60s, it was still a time when we black folks were so unselfconscious, that we talked about haunts and spirits and ghosts and dreams just about anywhere. We named our children after cravings that the mother had. We cut our children's hair by the signs of the moon. We planted our corn by the moon. We played the lottery by what dreams we had. And ghosts were a part of our daily lives. In my household, my great grandmother, who was a sweet, wonderful person, would tell ghost stories to be comforting. You know, "Don't you worry now. Grandma's old and she may die, but if you feel somebody sitting at the foot of her bed one night while you're sleeping, don't be scared because that's just Grandmama. And you're my little puppy and I'll always be watching over you." And my Grandfather always used to tell ghost stories to get us running around and scared and screaming and hollering, and that was just a part of our culture. That was just who we were. When I wroteBaby of the Family, which was about a child born with a caul or a veil over her face, which means she has a connection with the supernatural, to the metaphysical -- able to see ghosts, tell the future, spirits were a natural part of the story. You can't talk about a child born with a caul without talking about ghosts. I immediately recognized what a rich vehicle spirits were for a writer of fiction. Southerners love ghost stories: black Southerners, whites, Native Americans. So I saw what a rich vein that was to mine and it became a natural part of my writing. Spirits are a part of my writing in the same way that the red clay of Middle Georgia is a part of my writing. For me, the spirit world is as organic as the pine trees and the family name Pines and the family ofYou Know Better.

Q: What do you think the future holds for the Pines women?

TMA: I believe in redemption. I believe in the human spirit. If I were to extend the novel on into the next ten years, I think Sandra would at least try to love and bless her child. I mean, sometimes it's too late. Sometimes we try and we fail and we give up. And Sandra may do that. But I think that every time that there is some effort made that that's important, and it should be noted. And we at least see her touching her daughter in the epilogue. LaShawndra says she "don't know what that's about!" I certainly do see hope for all these women and the people they love.. Not that every issue and every problem is solved in a sitcom half-an-hour kind of way, but I think that there is the possibility for redemption in each of us. I think that's part of the human spirit. So if there's the possibility of redemption, there's the chance for hope. There's always hope.
Excerpted from You Know Better © Copyright 2009 by Tina McElroy Ansa. Reprinted with permission by William Morrow. All rights reserved.

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