It is a powerful story of racism and abuse, and a hard look back at a shameful period in history.

The setting is a notorious segregated reform school for boys set in the Jim Crow South.

I'm Ann Bocock, and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Tananarive Due is an award-winning author, screenwriter, documentary producer, and university teacher.

Her 16th book is "The Reformatory."

Now, I'm gonna tell you, this book hit me to my core, and I don't have enough good adjectives to let me tell you how much I loved the book, so let me get to it and introduce the author.

Tananarive Due, welcome.

Oh, thank you, I'm so excited to be here, and that you enjoyed the book.

It is a fabulous read.

I wanna start with the dedication, because you dedicate it to your mother, your father, and Robert Stephens, and I'm gonna read what you wrote.

Here's the quote: "For Robert Stephens, my great uncle, who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in 1937.

He was 15 years old.

Now, what we know now is that it was a prison disguised as a school, it was an actual house of horrors, but I wanna step back.

Tell me about Robert, and when did you learn about him?

Yes, this was the one of the reasons I needed to write this novel was because Robert had not only been erased from history in terms of being buried in an unmarked grave at the Dozier School for Boys, but I don't think my mother ever knew about him, I don't think her father ever mentioned that he had lost a brother.

I have met his namesake, actually.

There's a living namesake, who was also named Robert Stephens, in another branch of the family tree, but he also had never heard the story of the person he was named after.

So soon after my mother passed away, in 2012, and I was deep in grief about that, my father, and sisters, and I were all in grief, we learned that she potentially had an uncle named Robert Stephens who had been buried at the site of the Dozier School.

I had never heard of the Dozier School, I didn't know anything about any of it, but my father and I went to a meeting, and I think this was back in 2013, we went to a meeting at the site.

Erin Kimmerle, the forensic anthropologist from the University of South Florida, was there.

She was being brought in to use the equipment that she uses for war-torn sites, like Kosovo, to try to find where they had buried all these children.

Ultimately, they found 55 sets of remains at what they called Boot Hill, which was this makeshift, I won't even call it a cemetery, it was a just a makeshift place in the woods where they buried children, and I was fascinated by, well, horrified, first of all, but also fascinated by this hidden family history, and the amazing thing at that very first meeting was meeting survivors, black and white, who were older men now, who could tell the stories of what had happened to them as children with tears in their eyes, and just unbelievable stories of very casual, almost, cruelty that happened, whippings, lash marks so deep in the skin that you had to have a doctor remove the fabric.

I mean, these are things...

Some of it made its way into the story.

A lot of the horrific things that are based in real life, not everything, but a lot of it is based on actual stories that I heard about or read about, but I did not want to write a memoir, I did not want to try to write a biography, and do a deep genealogical search, and try to figure out the whole story of the historical Robert Stephens.

Because it happened so long ago, so many people were gone who would've known him, his elders, certainly, were gone, I decided to fictionalize it.

I'm a novelist and I'm a horror writer.

What better setting for a ghost story than a reformatory like this?

Absolutely, and the emotions that I felt, that any reader is going to feel, are one thing, but I can't imagine, writing and researching, did it affect you?

Oh, boy, did it?

Yes, it did affect me, and that's why it took me more than seven years to write this novel.

I started the initial research in 2013, so the truer story is that it took about 10 years before it would come out.

But yes, it was difficult, and it was mostly difficult because, as you said, the research.

As I read these newspaper accounts, memoirs, I just had my heart in my throat, and it was just like, "Oh, my gosh, these are children!"

And for a lot of them, they suffered alcoholism.

I just heard from a woman yesterday, who said that her father, an 86-year-old survivor, suffers mood swings to the point that it has affected their relationship, you know, all these years later.

And this was not uncommon.

I mean, they were really struggling, and that's why a lot of them felt that they had to come together to shut the place down, first of all.

It didn't shut down until 2011, and it was opened in 1900, so it was more than 100 years full of abuse allegations from day one, like, constant complaints, but it was too big to fail in Marianna, meaning it supplied a lot of employment, Yeah.

it grew the corn for the county, it had a printing press that ran for the county, it had a football team.

In a lot of ways, on the surface, that just looked like a regular school, except it was a work farm, almost like a, I would call it a concentration camp, also, more so than a work farm, and hearing those stories, and especially because, at the time, I had a younger son.

My son is 19 now, but when we first, as a family, went to the remains of the Dozier School, my husband, Steven Barnes, who's a writer, my father, John Due Jr., who's a civil rights attorney, and my 9-year-old son, all went together, and the fact that my son was the age of some of these children who were locked up there stayed with me the entire time I was writing this novel.

I couldn't separate my emotions, as much as I might try, from the real-life Robert Stephens, who was somewhat of a mystery, still, from 1937.

But I know the spirit of children.

I was raising a young son, and the spirit of children is a beautiful spirit, you know, of play, and of wanting to make friends, and when you subvert that, and when you corrupt that, and when you steal that from them, there are terrible, terrible consequences.

So yes, it was a tough process, because, specifically, of the research.

It is, if I had to put it in a category, I will make that up, I'll go historical horror story, and some of your characters in the book are not alive, they're haints, my favorite.

Yes.

Tell me about combining the living with the spirit world.

Well, I try not to talk about who's a haint and who's not a haint, Okay, in this story, because...

But one of the aspects of "The Reformatory" that was very important to me as a horror writer was to try to separate the true-life horrors of abuse, and, you know, all the terrible stories that I'd been researching from telling a story that's supposed to be, I mean, frankly, entertainment.

A horror novel is supposed to be entertainment, so how do you walk that line?

And I decided that I would use ghosts, because to write a happy-go-lucky story at a reformatory would've been a lie.

I have to honor the violence that took place there over 100 years, but I don't have to subject myself or my readers to scene, after scene, after scene of children being murdered, you know, Right.

and that kind of thing, so the way you do that is with ghosts.

So I had established in my short story collections, "Ghost Summer" and also "The Wishing Pool," which came out in April, that I have a town called Gracetown that is my magical town and children are susceptible to the magic, they're most susceptible, so when you get to be about 13, 14, you lose your sensitivity to ghosts, but Robert is still 12, he's still more a child than a young man, and he's very sensitive to the ghosts.

So I wanted to add that layer to the story not just to honor the fact that so many people did die there, but to really delve into the fantasy element of what would it be like if you could see ghosts, what would it be like to try to have a friendship with a ghost, which is fraught with all kinds of issues, and how might the living and the dead unite in a quest for justice.

In the book, there is the story of two siblings, you said 12-year-old Robert Stephens, and he has a sister Gloria, and this is about the 1950s in this fictitious Gracetown in Florida.

Go back just a little bit.

What is their situation?

Why are they alone?

Yes, you know, when I decided that I was going to fictionalize it, I decided that I would separate myself from whatever the actual story had been in the 1930s, and write about the 1950s, because I knew that era better from the memoir I co-wrote with my mother, my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, "Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights."

She had told me a lot of stories of her childhood, I had heard my grandmother's stories of her childhood.

That era kinda came to life for me.

And there's also some amazing research available "Devil in the Grove," by Gilbert King, was a tremendously helpful book in terms of what the criminal justice system was like in Florida in the 1950s, because I wanted readers to try to understand what it was actually like to have an activist family.

Robert comes from an activist family, like my parents, So his father, who is, on one level, a mill worker, but on another level, he's a union organizer, and he's been run out of town for trying to unionize, and unfortunately had an accusation of rape, which I specifically used, because that was a tool of terrorism in black communities during that era.

It's a complex notion, because in the more modern times, of course, you wanna say, "Well, we believe accusations and give air to accusations," but when you look at the frequency of the accusations against black men, often they led to... Like, Rosewood would be an example of an entire town destroyed over such an accusation.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, a woman making, a black woman making an accusation, not even of rape, but just of inappropriate conduct by a black man, led to air-bombing Black Wall Street, and all these, so there were these intense overreactions to accusations.

Some of them were, in fact, false.

The one that comes most to mind is Emmett Till, whose accuser only recently died, which is mind boggling.

He died in 1955 of a lynching, a 14-year-old boy, but she lived on, and on, and on, and later said that, you know, "Well, I didn't exactly tell the truth about what happened," but Emmett Till is still just as dead.

So I intentionally wanted to use that accusation, because it was a common tactic and of course, in literature, we also know it from "To Kill a Mockingbird," and I'm sure that, for the very same reason, Harper Lee would've used that, because it was just so common a tactic to chase people out of town, to take their property, to burn down their houses, and really, I wanted a modern reader to understand that there was a kind of terrorism that happened.

It's not that you just had "White Only" and "Colored Only" signs, during Jim Crow and that was it.

It took violence to enforce slavery, and it took violence to enforce Jim Crow, to intimidate people against trying to register to vote, to intimidate people out of competing for your jobs.

It took violence , and that violence, unfortunately, often included the sheriff's department, so when you look at contemporary mistrust of policing in the black community, those roots go a long, long way back, and I really wanted to show that roadmap, to create a fictitious family of activists.

The children, to answer your question, are left alone because he's been chased out of town.

He's this little boy, he's now sentenced to a horrible place, and his sister, Gloria, is the one that really, I'm not gonna give much away, but she has to find the courage and the smarts to get to the bottom of it, and hopefully free him.

No surprise that she's named Gloria.

Are there similarities to your mother?

Absolutely.

In deciding to honor my parents, I did very much want to model Gloria after the way my mother seemed to be from her stories when she was in high school.

She had an activist spirit from a young age, she had a very courageous spirit, so at every junction in this story when I asked myself, "What should Gloria do now?"

She's only 16 or 17, she has no means, I mean, she's a black girl in a society where she's considered a second-class citizen.

What can she do?

And I would ask myself, "What would mom have done?"

And that was my guiding light through the entire part of the novel.

She does some outrageous, brave things, and it's like, "What would my mother have done?"

Because the horror story, for Robert, is inside this terrible institution, and its sociopathic warden, and all the haints, but the horror story for Gloria, and I call this book Jim Crow horror , is showing how difficult it was to navigate Jim Crow if you were going to stand up for yourself.

If you were not gonna stand up for yourself, you might not have much money, but you could get by.

If you stood up for yourself, that was when the full power of Jim Crow and white supremacy was going to try to crush you, and even as a teenager, she sees that her efforts to do things that really, anyone who thought of it might do, let's get a lawyer, let's get a , those things create such rancor in this community, and I want people to understand this is how these events from history you've read about, this is how they happened.

I wanna know, we talked briefly, you grew up in an activist family, your father was a civil rights attorney, and your mother was quite the activist.

What was that like as a child growing up in this family?

In a lot of ways, frankly, even though we missed some of, I mean, the core of their '60s activism, by the time the '70s and the '80s rolled around, we got just a whiff of it.

We got first a whiff of the esteem with which they were held in the community, the phone always ringing, people always coming to them for help, that bleeds into the novel, because that was very much my childhood, meetings in the living room .

If my mother put a phone call in to Governor Bob Graham, he'd call back within an hour later, you know, that kind of thing.

So there was that understanding that they held power, and a lot of people had hope in them.

But then the underside of that was not so pleasant.

Integrating a new neighborhood in South Miami-Dade County, being called the N word by children, our parents so worried about death threats that they asked white members of the Unitarian church they attended to sit watch outside of the house.

So my childhood was a balance of sort of caution and fearfulness.

Some of that they tried to hide from us, but some of it they couldn't, you know, but also a great pride in them.

And one undercurrent through it all was that they always had white allies.

I had white godmothers that my mother had worked with in the Civil Rights movement, so for me, white supremacy, or racism, as I would've called it then, was not something about white people, it was something about racists.

Your writing, this is sometimes called black horror, black speculative fiction, tell me about writing through this particular lens, and is this the sweet spot for you now?

You've written, this is number 16?

It's so interesting.

You know, when I first started out trying to figure out who I was as a writer, I think my greatest fear was that I would be expected to be some sort of an expert on rural southern history, like the great writers I had grown up reading, like Toni Morrison and then Alice Walker, the sort of rural southern stories, because I grew up in the suburbs, I grew up with air conditioning, and that was not my experience.

It was only over time, over time, that my mother moved back to her hometown of Quincy, So trip after trip, I got to sort of experience her birthplace, experience rural Florida, and I don't think, without that, I would have been able to write "The Reformatory," and I have to admit, I have become a bit enamored of my small town of Gracetown, even though it's not where I grew up, it wasn't what I knew, but I really do enjoy bringing history to life, and I have so much respect for the people who shouldered so much, so much, and still raised their families, and still went to school, and still had love in their hearts, you know, as a matter of fact, did not become so deeply embittered, they just, and also created jazz, rock and roll, blues, all this joyful art and joyful music in the midst of such horrible times, and I consider a book like "The Reformatory" and when I write history, I wrote "The Black Rose" many years ago about Madam C.J, Walker, I really wanna shine a light on the fact that these were real people.

When we look at these historical photographs of marches, or lynchings, or whatever it is we're looking at, these were real people, not unlike us.

There were progressives back in the 1930s, there were progressives in the 1890s.

How horrible would that have been to be someone who had a more contemporary sensibility but stuck in history?

And that's really who these characters are.

Which makes it even harder when I think about Gloria trying to work through the justice system in 1950, obviously not a level playing field, and then, you know, we are what, almost 75 years later, where are we?

That is also one of the things I wanted to highlight in "The Reformatory."

I wanted it to serve as sort of a validation, but maybe even a roadmap for families today who are encountering the same issues.

Like, there's a scene in "The Reformatory" where Gloria and her old godmother in her 80s, Miss Lottie, are so frightened when the police lights show up in the rear view mirror.

That's a feeling I still have in 2023.

There are parents in 2023 whose children are still sent to juvenile hall for schoolyard fights.

This is the thing that I want people to bear in mind as they're reading "The Reformatory."

Yes, it's set in 1950, and yes, those signs have come down, "White Only" and "Colored Only," and a lot of it has gone underground, although, unfortunately, more of it is bubbling back to the surface in our current era, but I wanted people to understand the lineage of some of the attitudes , the explanations for why do we have this huge prison industrial complex in the United States compared to the rest of the world, what is our unique history that explains that, it's all in there, and also what's called the school to prison pipeline, which is very much alive and well.

My own son was suspended from school at the age of five, on the last day of kindergarten, because he had a temper tantrum and threw over a little chair.

I was a volunteer in that classroom twice a week, I lived within walking distance Why?

of that school.

It was the last day of school.

Why not pick up the phone and call the parent?

Why have a suspension on a child's record that follows them all through the school system.

In my middle school.

they're starting to intervene with policing over tardiness, over all kinds of issues, so issues that should be treated with help for families and social funding get treated with incarceration, starting when our children are young, and when I say our children, it's black and brown children, often, because when they're standing before a judge, they don't remind them of themselves, when they were their age, they don't remind them of their nephew or their child.

Black boys, especially, by the time they're about 13 or 14 years old, start to look like a threat to many people who are fearful of the other, and I wanted to address that in "The Reformatory" too.

When you're writing, is it a consciousness for social justice?

And how has your writing progressed from when you started, to "The Reformatory"?

You know, that is a very interesting question.

Before I published, right out of graduate school, I was writing short stories with white male protagonists who were having small epiphanies, because that was the canon I had been taught.

So despite the civil rights activism at home, despite all the comic books at home about black history, and reading "Roots," by Alex Haley, and all this great information my parents gave me, I had absorbed the notion that a story was something that happened to a white man who was having an emotional crisis , so I had leached out my gender, I had leached out my race, and I had leached out genre, okay, so it took reading Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day."

An interview with Anne Rice, when I was at the "Miami Herald," really opened my eyes to the fact that writing horror could be something respected.

I think that was one fear, was that if I wrote horror, I wouldn't be respected, even though my mother loved horror, she was, like, the one who gave me my first Stephen King novel when I was 16, but I had strayed.

By the time I wrote my first novel, though, my voice was pretty much the same voice you see in "The Reformatory."

The father is a social worker, the mother is a judge, they are activists, they are being chased by a white supremacist , and, you know, it was light, and I thought it was a little too much.

And then we had the Oklahoma City bombing, and I was like, oh, okay, that wasn't too much, that was actually reflecting reality in a weird way.

So there's always been this thread of history and social justice that runs through a lot of my stories, but not all of them.

Let's switch it up.

You love horror, you even teach a course, Black Horror and Afrofuturism, so what scares you?

Well, as a mother, and I'm sure any parent can relate to this, I'm fearful for my children, my son, in particular, who's 19 and 6' 5", and has been getting wary glances, as I said, since he was about 13, and you start to notice that as a parent from the time people are, like, "Aw," and then they're, like, moving away, and you notice that.

So I think I understand better now why my mother, even before her grandchildren were born, was afraid to have grandsons.

So that scares me, the unknown future for your children.

Watching the political tides turning is very frightening, sort of a backlash to having more inclusivity, having more exposure to difference, because there are a lot of people in this country who live in very segregated areas to this day.

They don't really... Their picture of what the United States is , is, like, from a 1940s movie, whereas the reality of the United States is very different, and that clash is causing fear.

I think that same fear has driven our gun culture.

There's fear that there's gonna be payback, there's fear that, you know, the criminals are going to take over, and the kind of thing that politicians like to gen people up with at the polls, all of that is fear of the other, and the desire to erase history, I don't know, I don't know that that's fear of the other.

I guess that's fear of looking in the mirror, fear of having to ask ourselves, all of us, ask ourselves questions about what our privilege stands on.

And I'm gonna turn it upside down and ask you the reverse.

What brings you the most peace?

Really, being at home .

I love being at home, I'm turning into a real homebody as I get older.

I live with my husband, Steven Barnes, who's my collaborator, and we have like a mini writer's room that we collaborate on scripts together.

Our son is still living with us at 19.

I have two cats, that brings me great joy.

Playing music, I play a little keyboard and piano, that brings me joy.

But ultimately, since the time I was four years old, it's always writing.

It brings me so much joy.

The book is "The Reformatory".

Tananarive Due, it has been such an honor to spend this time with you.

I wanna thank you so much.

Thank you so much, and I appreciate your questions.

I'm Ann Bocock.

Please join me on the next "Between the Covers."