In The Season of Styx Malone I really wanted to set it in a small town in Indiana because you don’t see a lot of stories set in small towns in Indiana that star Black boys. And to me that was an important narrative to offer. It was going to be a fun story. A summer adventure between these boys. But I think part of it, at least part of it is that I wanted to upend the expectation that a narrative about young Black boys has to take place in a city.
The idea that young Black boys would only feel safe in a city. Part of the construct of The Season of Styx Malone is that their father, a Black man, feels safest in this small town with his Black family where people know them and people recognize them and there is, in his mind, less of a chance that they’re going to encounter someone who is scared of them based on the color of their skin, because everybody knows who they are personally.
And that’s something that I definitely experienced a lot as a young person, the idea that you can be in a community — I grew up in Indiana myself — you can be in a community where a lot of people have really strong biases against Black people, really strong biases against people who look different than themselves, who come from a different place or have different experiences and yet those people will find you individually and befriend you and sort of lift you out of that group. Right?
I may feel xenophobia towards Black people, but you, you are my friend and so therefore I sort of don’t see you as Black. And I find that phenomenon really, really interesting in general, but I also find that an interesting sort of thing that one could use as a form of comfort, as a shield to say, okay, these are people who know me, I know that they have some racism in them, but they’re not using that against me and so that makes me safe.
And so that’s something that’s not explicitly on the page for most of the novel, but it’s something that underpins the setting, and it underpins the family and it is something that I think adult readers definitely pick up on and a lot of young readers are picking up on as well, that sense that Caleb and Bobby Jean’s father has a particular idea about where they should be and why.