Bleeding Kansas
by Sara Paretsky
List Price: $9.99
Pages: 624
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780451224484
Publisher: Putnam
When Sara Paretsky introduced her detective V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only in 1982, she revolutionized the mystery world. By creating a female investigator who uses her wits as well as her fists, Paretsky challenged a genre in which women typically were either vamps or victims. Hailed by critics and readers, Indemnity Only was followed by eleven more best-selling Warshawski novels. The Los Angeles Times claims, “Paretsky is unique among women writing about women,” while Publishers Weekly says, “Among today’s P.I.’s, nobody comes close to Warshawski.”
Paretsky has written two novels outside her series, the magical-realist Ghost Country (1998) and her new Bleeding Kansas (2008), set in the part of rural Kansas where she grew up. She details her personal history, as well as the history of her writing, in Writing in an Age of Silence, Verso, 2007.
Paretsky’s deep concern for social justice, the hallmark of her novels, has carried her voice beyond the world of crime fiction. As a contributor to the New York Times and The Guardian, and as a speaker at the Library of Congress and Oxford University, she is an impassioned advocate for those on society’s margins.
Not only has Paretsky’s own work broken barriers, she has also helped open doors for other women. Her creation of Sisters in Crime, which supports women writers, earned her Ms. Magazine’s 1987 Woman of the Year award. In 2002, the British Crime Writers awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Paretsky’s work is celebrated in Pamela Beere Briggs’s documentary, Women of Mystery. Blacklist won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers for best novel of 2004. Her books are published in 30 countries; Kathleen Turner played V I Warshawski in the movie of that name.
To give back to the community, Paretsky established the Sara and Two C-Dogs Foundation, which supports girls and women in the arts, letters, and sciences. She has endowed scholarships at the University of Kansas, and mentored students in Chicago’s inner city schools. She serves on the advisory board of Literature for All of Us, a literacy group for teen moms, and she works closely with Planned Parenthood.
Paretsky and her brothers attended a two-room school, where she gained a love of baseball and underdogs: Paretsky played third base for a team that always finished at the bottom of its rural league. Her first published writing, a story about surviving a tornado, appeared in the American Girl magazine when she was eleven. In 1966, Paretsky came to Chicago to do community service in the neighborhood where Martin Luther King was organizing. Staying on to make Chicago her home, she received a PhD in history and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She lives in the city with her husband, a physics professor at the University of Chicago, and their wonder dog Callie, near their adored granddaughter.
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Q&A with Sara Paretsky about Bleeding Kansas
Kansas? What’s that about? You’re so identified with Chicago
SP: My family moved to Kansas when I was four; I lived there until I moved permanently to Chicago in 1968. When I left Kansas, I was trying to leave behind my whole past, but of course that has a way of sneaking up on you, and the time came when I had to write about it.
A History of Segregation
SP: My father was the first Jew hired in a tenure position by the University of Kansas. In the fifties, the town of Lawrence suffered from de facto segregation, which affected Jews as well as African Americans and American Indians. My parents side-stepped the problem by buying an old farm house out in the country. The house was quite wonderful, with three fireplaces, a silver-backed drinking fountain on the second floor, a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room, and beautiful wood molding along the high ceilings. It had been built by a family called Gilmore in the decades after the Civil War; even though my family lived there for 45 years, people still call it the Gilmore House, never the Paretsky house.
Unfortunately my parents’ marriage imploded. During three decades of bitter fighting, they neglected the house, which began to look like the House of Usher. I use the Gilmore house as the model for the Fremantle house in Bleeding Kansas (you can see the outside in the photo on the left).
A Connection to Helen Keller
SP: A few years ago, when CBS filmed a dramatic version of the life of Helen Keller’s teacher Anne Sullivan, they chose my childhood home as the setting. They put on fresh paint and wallpaper, and even built a gazebo in the garden. On the down side, they took out all the wall sockets to keep the house “in period,” then tried to avoid re-installing them, claiming the house didn’t have electricity when they started filming.
Naive Wiccans—Were They Naked or Clothed?
SP: When they became old and frail, my parents had to move back to town to be close to medical care. The young couple who bought the house turned out to be Wiccans—followers of a religion based on pre-Christian European beliefs—who were hoping to practice Wicca ceremonies in the Kansas countryside.
Poor things—they were city women! They didn’t realize one has far more privacy in the middle of New York city than in rural America. After they performed a full-moon ceremony—and reports differ whether they were naked or clothed—a neighbor objected. He lived over a quarter mile away, but he was both a Sheriff’s deputy and a born-again Christian and began harassing them in a frightening way.
My brother Jonathan, a lawyer who still lives in Kansas, helped the women get an injunction against the neighbor, but it was all very unsettling. This happened when my father was dying eight years ago, but it sat in the back of my mind all these years as a story I wanted to tell.
Bleeding Kansas
SP: In the 1850’s some of America’s bloodiest battles were fought in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery settlers. Over a thousand anti-slavery pioneers were murdered by slave forces, but in the end, in 1861 Kansas came into the Union as a free state. My home town of Lawrence was at the center of the anti-slavery action.
A century later some of the bloodiest battles over civil rights were fought in Lawrence, Kansas. For fifteen months in 1970-71, there was at least one bomb a day exploded on the University of Kansas campus or in the surrounding county. Women’s rights, African American rights, American Indian rights, and protests against the Vietnam War divided the community and the state.
You have a PhD in American History?
SP: My dissertation discussed Calvinists and education in the 1820’s through the 1850’s. I loved having a chance to go back to that period. I read a lot of diaries and memoirs of anti-slavery emigrants to Kansas, and even created diaries for the members of the Grellier and Schapen families who came to Kansas during that period.
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
SP: Tommy Franks’ book asked why Kansans vote against their own interests. A big part of the answer lies in the history of Bleeding Kansas. The riots and bombs of the ‘70’s convinced conservatives that Godless Communism had taken over. They vowed to undo this situation by gaining control of all important institutions at the grassroots level. This was the start of the so-called Republican Revolution, in which social conservatives took over library and school boards along with local government and local political party leadership.
So Kansas—is it a state of freaks? In Cold Blood and no evolution in the public schools?
SP: Maybe because it’s the geographic center of the lower forty-eight, Kansas is kind of a bellwether of the nation—first in the fight over slavery in the 1850’s, then in the confrontations over civil rights in the 1970’s, and, more recently, in the fierce debates over religion and public policy of the last ten years. In 2006, the state began turning its back on conservative extremism. Moderate Republicans bolted the party to defeat an extremist attorney general, who ignored the law to pursue his own religious agenda, and the state as a whole banded together to support proper science standards. This change should serve as a harbinger of hope for the rest of the nation.
Bleeding Kansas: The Novel
SP: The political and social history of the state provides the backdrop for a story set in the Kaw River Valley where I grew up. Three families who have been farming in the Valley since their ancestors came as anti-slavery pioneers in the 1850’s have a long history of feuds and friendship. Two of the families, the Schapens and the Grelliers, are divided on almost every important issue, from the brand of Christianity they practice to the war in Iraq.
When Gina Haring, a young woman who is a lesbian and a Wiccan, rents an abandoned farmhouse close by, she serves as the catalyst for upheaval in all their lives. The Grelliers’ son Chip enlists in the army and goes to Iraq. His death there devastates the Grellier family.
The fundamentalist Schapens find themselves with what looks like a perfect red heifer in their dairy herd. Their belief that the heifer will speed Jesus’ return in glory adds to the turmoil in the valley. Gina’s bonfires, Chip Grellier’s death, the Schapens’ heifer and an exorcism at the Schapens church, combine in an explosive climax on Halloween.
A Perfect Red Heifer? Is this for real?
SP: I first heard about this in a New Yorker article. Apparently fundamentalist Jews and Christians are united in wanting to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The Christians think prophecies in Revelation mean Christ can’t return until there’s a Temple for him to destroy; Jews want a Temple for worship. Both groups interpret a passage in Numbers to mean that the High Priest can’t perform Temple sacrifices until he’s purified with ashes made from a perfect red heifer.
No one knows what perfect means—can she have three white hairs? Five? Meanwhile, fundamentalist Christian farmers in Mississippi, Texas and elsewhere are working like mad to genetically engineer such a calf.
The Israeli government worries about the heifer in a serious way. They know that any effort to rebuild the Temple will make the Middle East explode, and one of their anti-terrorism institutes closely monitors efforts to breed such a calf.
An entertaining footnote: one of the contracts between Christian and Jewish fanatics on the subject says that in the event of the Rapture—in which the Christians will be whisked directly to heaven—the Jews get all rights to the perfect heifer.
No V I in Bleeding Kansas?
SP: V I took such a beating in Fire Sale that she’s recuperating in a spa near her mother’s childhood home in Umbria. She’ll be back next year in an adventure that takes her back to the riot-filled summer of 1966, when her father Tony was a beat cop helping protect Martin Luther King.
Was it hard to write a book without V I?
Bleeding Kansas was a book I’d wanted to write for eight years. Besides, I needed to take a break from V I, so I could think about her stories in a fresh way. It is always challenging to write a book in the third person, told in multiple voices, but it’s the challenges that help me grow in my craft.
© Copyright 2009 by Sara Paretsky. Reprinted with permission by Putnam. All rights reserved.
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