Rita Williams-Garcia Q&A Part 1: Getting to Know Her Characters
Any writer interested in history or diverse representation will find much to ponder in Rita Williams-Garcia’s glorious YA novel, A Sitting in St. James (Quill Tree Books, 2021).
The novel is set on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana in the summer of 1860, right before the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. The characters are compelling and diverse. They weave together in a story that feels immediate. The story speaks to us not only about the past, but also about today.
If you’d like to know more about the story and how Rita came to write it, I suggest you read these two interviews with her:
I’ve known Rita since 2006 when she was my first-semester faculty adviser at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Without that personal history, I’m not sure I’d have been so quick to ask her for an interview.
The woman’s got major writing awards! A Newbery Honor, three Coretta Scott Kings, plus she’s a three-time National Book Award finalist.
But she said yes, so here we are. I asked a few questions and Rita gave me detailed, fascinating answers.
I began with characters since they are the key to good writing and good storytelling. But also because Rita’s characters are so fascinating.
In case you haven’t read this novel yet, here’s a quick sketch of the characters Rita discusses:
Pearce is a white West Point cadet who comes to visit his best friend Byron.
Byron is the white grandson of Madame Sylvie, the owner of the plantation where the novel is set.
Jane is a white young woman from a nearby plantation who ends up staying with Byron’s family for the summer.
Lily is an enslaved Black woman who cooks and manages the kitchen, among other things.
Michele: You have such a wonderful cast of characters in this novel. I’m curious about how you put flesh on the bones of these characters. Do you have a particular process for getting to know them?
Rita Williams-Garcia: It depends upon which characters. It was all a discovery for me because Louisiana, Creole is not my background. And so just trying to get the history of Louisiana itself and then Creole, and then the relationship between French, France, French in America, and all of that.
So I had to learn it all. But for each character, I guess I did different things because I had to know different things about them.
For example, with Pearce and Byron, I had to know a lot about West Point culture. West Point culture in the 1860s. And so I read. I read a diary of a young colored—because that’s what he would have been called—cadet.
I believe he was the first to graduate. Henry Ossian Flipper. And his records were so complete. They included everything from what the first day was like, and … what they were expected to bring with them, and what their uniform was like and what classes they had.…
I love the fact that they had ballroom dancing. That was part of their classes. They had to know how to ballroom dance.
One of the criticisms that a young man said to me was, ‘Oh, they would have never been able to dance in front of their families.’ But men dancing together was not unusual. And because this was part of the class, it would have been a point of amusement for the families, as it was in this case. But also with the suspicion, is there something going on?
I really tried to get into their West Point history, that they both have a certain amount of pride, how they got there, what their expectations were. It helped me to paint a particular picture of each one.
Then I began to really feel that Pearce was a jovial fellow, a light-hearted kind of guy, in spite of his early circumstance; whereas Byron was duty-bound and one of the words back then was solemncholy, related to our melancholy. To me, that really described Byron.
I spent a lot of time with who they were and what were the pivotal events in their early lives. If I could understand how they came to be, then I could imagine what their interactions might be like and what they fulfill in one another.
Jane is a different case all together, and I can’t help but smile because she is one of my favorite characters in the story.
I began with an idea of Jane. I called her in my notes, handsome Jane. She was always going to be a horse woman, but she was going to be very staid in a certain way, unlovable, and probably queer and questioning, but duty-bound in the same way that Byron is duty-bound.
There would be no sense of humor associated with that character. It would have been a completely different character that the boys wouldn’t have teased because she didn’t have a sense of humor.
Whereas the Jane that appears in the book is a completely different person who we could also say is queer and questioning.
If you want to hypothesize that she is on the spectrum, you can. And she is definitely a horse woman, but not in the proper sense. Not how a lady would ride a horse.
Jane is her own self. Even though she does not mean to be funny, she can’t help but turn everything else on its ear.
Once I could step away from my first imagining of Jane and really allowed this Jane to come forward, I had a whole lot of fun with her. She became a lot more fun for me to write between her and the boys, and her and Madame.
Lily is yet another one of my favorite characters because I use her so spare, and yet I think there’s such a richness there that I don’t want to exploit in a cheap way, in an obvious way.
To me, when I think of Lily, I think of the birth of the spiritual, the birth of the Blues, even though I would not dare make her a singer. Because that would be the easy and obvious thing to do. But there’s something in her delivery.
The one time that we do hear her cry out, I believe it’s looking for her son. And it was so cold that the dead got up and moved away.
I would much rather the reader feel something and maybe not be able to put a name to it. But to have a feel of it as opposed to me saying, ‘Oh, and by the way, this is her voice.’ …
There is something very, very smart about [Lily].
I can’t help but think that she knows what she’s saying when she says, instead of ‘Madame,’ she says, ‘My damn, my damn self.’
So it’s always little things that really help me to find the spark of each character and what makes them more than just the type that I’m building.
In Part 2 of Rita’s Q&A, we talk about one of her major themes and how she approached the narration and omniscient voice.