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Permalink Reply by Zetta Brown on February 27, 2012 at 4:08am

I'll take those three cents and put them in the bank. :) Research is key, but like you said, you've got to see your characters as just people living life.  And you're also right in that one of the greatest compliments you can get is someone telling you that your characters sound genuine if they are different from who YOU are as a person. Writing the opposite gender is just as hard as writing another race or culture.

Permalink Reply by sara selznick on February 27, 2012 at 4:59am

I would agree with this. For me, the scariest character to write in this novel has been a Guy named Alprentice Carter c. 1968. Alprentice was murdered i think the following year in a shoot out with a rival black militant group, US, at the UCLA black student union. He was 26. He'd been the head of the Slausin area gang before that, the "Mayor of the Ghetto."

The FBI did a real number on the Panthers. We will never know what they would have been without the interference of COINTELPRO, which did all Hoover could to incite violence among and between the then-burgeoning militant groups.

Now, obviously, Alprentice, as an ex-gang member, was no angel. But it is largely because of him that Los Angeles was one of the few cities that did not go up in flames after Martin Luther King was murdered. Bunchy, (his nickname) drove the city all night calming things down. He died at very young. He's not here to speak for himself. Very little has been written about him. I could find only a little bit, some photos, a snip of video. About the only reference I've found to him from an eye-witness was a teenaged Panther who emulated his sense of style, which the kid described as very pimp-chic. I have felt a tremendous sense of responsibility to this man, knowing i might be his only representation in fiction, a responsibility to let his voice through, (though I am not a man, an ex-gang member, pimp chic, a militant, a child of the 60's revolutions, or Black.) I think he was all of these things, even at the mercy of all of these things at times, but clearly from his actions the night MLK died, he was a whole lot more, and might have become a whole lot more and I've tried to write him that way.

I have not been able to vet his section with any ex-panthers, but I have heaved a sigh of relief that my readers so far have expressed amazement that I could find his voice. This may be the only memorium he gets. I want it honest, and I want it to honor what he did and what he was and what he might have been.

Which reminds me, speaking of keeping stories within the Black community, who is going to write of the Black Panthers in light of what's come out about J. Edgar's machinations behind the scenes? The closest I've seen are autobiographies and Hardball, a novel by another white, Jewish lady, Sara Paretsky, writing about Chicago's South Side gangs during MLK's summer there.(based on her experiences working on the South Side that summer.) If ever there was a story that needs to be told, its the Panthers. Now. while some of the participants are still alive. For example, That shootout was complicated, but was at least marginally over who would receive a faculty position in African-American studies at UCLA. This stuff needs to be looked at and untangled. Somebody run with it.

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