RITA GARCIA PARENTS FULL

You learn to become political and when there are more than two siblings, than there is always the possibility of forming allegiances to gang up on the one who needs to be put in her place.

When you’re the youngest, for instance, you have no power, but you may be cute so you use what you have. But it’s just about observing the dynamics. I do have a sister but only one, and I am the youngest. Do you have siblings? Daughters?Įverybody asks if I just turned on a tape recorder. I thought the Greyhound bus trip had to be made up, whereas I was sure the dialogue among the sisters was completely authentic. Her mother had some Hollywood dreams and her children were in the way. Maya Angelou has a story about her mother putting Maya and her brother on a train in California to go to live with their grandmother in Arkansas and Maya and her brother were three and four years old at the time. That’s one of the most startling things about Gone Crazy in Alabama – that their father put three young girls on a bus to go from New Jersey to Alabama by themselves!

RITA GARCIA PARENTS FULL

He was full of stories about those trips. My grandmother was from North Carolina and my father would tell us how she would put him on the Greyhound by himself at age eight or nine with a stack of comic books and a huge chicken to see his father, because they were separated. We did not spend a lot of time home-going, but that didn’t stop me from imagining what it would be like. My grandmother, my mother, and my father all came north from the south. There’s not much closeness as regards the plot, although I am a product of the Great Migration. So then I had notes for book three.Ĭan you talk about the intersection of your biography and the Gaither sisters? Did you spend summers with family in Alabama? The more Delphine worried, the more I knew there was story left to tell. Family members were leaving, and Delphine was getting worried about her family falling apart, something that echoed what was going on in the wider African-American community, particularly in the aftermath of the Vietnam War when communities and families were just ravished by all the upheaval. I began to project out about what might happen next so as soon as that started I thought, ‘I believe there will be a book two.’ But then when I started to put together book two, the same thing started happening. While I was writing the first book, I got ideas for things that might happen in a second book because my understanding of the characters, who they were both on and off stage, kept growing.

When did you realize you were writing a trilogy?

Rita Williams-Garcia concludes her award-winning trilogy about the Gaither Sisters with Gone Crazy in Alabama, which finds Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern visiting Big Ma during the summer of 1969, when a moon landing is only the second most dramatic event.

Rita garcia parents