Transcripts

SPEAKER 1: One of the sub-lines I have about this story is, when is a Black man in a room, with a dead body and a cop, not guilty? It's a story about five artists who are eligible for a Twin Cities Genius Grant. It's also about the death of the guy who was supposed to give the money to these five people. And it's about the political, and social, and racial issues that relate when people of color are all competing for the same pot of money.

SPEAKER 2: And it is a very large pot of money too, half a million.

SPEAKER 1: It's a half million dollars, which, for an artist, is actually their whole life. The story itself gave me an opportunity to look at the Twin Cities funding situation, funding in the arts in general all over the country. I think it's set in Minneapolis. But the location, I think, is really not that important as it relates to the kind of issues that artists are struggling under all over the country.

But underneath that, I think is also a discussion, a story about an African-American male sense of guilt and the questions of guilt and innocence that are just simply inherited in this country as a person of color.

SPEAKER 2: You'd cover a lot of philosophical and political ground in here. And everyone has a moment of looking really good, and everyone has a moment looking really bad. And everyone's looking for solutions. And really, there aren't any.

SPEAKER 1: Right. Well, I think that this book is a kind of solution. I mean, one of the things that I did was, as I thought about race issues in this country and as I thought about it as an African-American man, the question is, where do I want to go? What am I really searching for? And what I'm searching for is, and what I think the book attempts to deliver is a kind of statement about my innocence and how innocence that sometimes a person might have to actually go far out on a limb to get other people to accept their innocence.

I mean, at some point in the book, Ichabod says, I want you in the face of my apparent guilt to think first of me as innocent. And this is the way I go out into the world. I want to be seen fresh and new. Every time, I want people to not meet me with the gaze of like, why are you here, or who are you, or where did-- what kind of a Black man are you, but rather, what kind of a human being are you?

SPEAKER 2: In reading the book, obviously these are fictional settings within the Twin Cities. There's a couple of real people are mentioned. But I found myself reading through, thinking, well, you know, that looks really like so-and-so or maybe an amalgam of a couple of people.

SPEAKER 1: All the way through the book and certainly after I wrote it, I thought, OK, can I really say this? I know that there was a certain kind of vulnerability that I have here in terms of my-- particularly my friends. Because I think it is close. And this community is so small in a way. We all have our sense of who people are. But I think to make the point about this, I had to. The point is bigger than individuals and relationships.

And so I wanted to use a world that was really familiar to get at some issues. And in the process of doing that, of course, there will be people who say, well, you were talking about me here. I actually had someone say, I heard you're writing about me. And it's like, well, no, not really. The people I actually wrote about, I actually named. Everybody else is a convolution or an amalgamation.

SPEAKER 2: I find myself wondering too, what if you go through and find that you're not there? Is that almost worse?

SPEAKER 1: That'll be interesting as well. Because the other thing is people say, well, you should have wrote about this person, or you should have wrote about that. It's like this community is so rich with opportunities for satire and discussion. I mean, I think what I really tried to do also was to create a story that carried this story. I tried to write this book so that no matter who you were, no matter how uncomfortable you might feel at any given moment, you were still smiling about what was going on.

SPEAKER 2: There are tensions all the way throughout the book. The tension between the police officer and Ichabod, but then also the tensions between the other artists. There is an Asian-American, There's a Native American, an African-American woman.

SPEAKER 1: And a White woman.

SPEAKER 2: And a White woman and huge and very different tensions for a variety of reasons there. In some ways, I kind of hear you arguing that you hope that those tensions will disappear, but I also found myself thinking, well, but these tensions are really important.

SPEAKER 1: They really are. And they're intractable and perhaps insoluble. And yet, the technology that we have for dealing and addressing these problems is so infantile, so immature. And I really saw a multiculti as a first step. I mean, I really don't know how many books have been written where it attempts to bring all these people together to have a conversation about who they all are in relationship to each other.

And it really felt important to me that I begin, somebody begin to make that next step into this virgin territory, where we are trying to fashion this new language. It's really necessary that we create a new language so that we can move beyond where we are. We keep going around in circles in this country.

One year, it's like, well, there's not enough people of color on television. And then the next year, it's not enough people of color on Wall Street. And it's like, well, we keep marginalizing the discussion itself. We also don't have the knowledge, I think, to do the kind of work between each other that we need to do cross racial, and cultural boundaries, gender boundaries.

So what those discussions, those tensions are all about is, a, to show the intractability and the apparent insolubility, and then to go one step further and say, what about if we forget that for a second and say, this is what we're going to do to be together, can that work, in spite of? And I realize that as a first step, that there are all kinds of missteps likely. But it is an attempt to jump over.

It's really like thinking about what Gene Roddenberry did with Star Trek. It's like, well, he didn't deal with how race was dealt with. He just, when you see Star Trek Next Generation, whatever, there's a way in which race has been dealt with, to a certain degree of reasonableness. And so I don't really know how we get there. But I think we have to begin that process of trying to make that step.

One of the sub-lines I have about this story is, when is a Black man in a room, with a dead body and a cop, not guilty?