[piano music] - Wiley Cash may be North Carolina's most promising and popular young fiction writer.

His first three novels, A Land More Kind Than Home and The Dark Road to Mercy and his third one, The Last Ballad, were all highly praised bestsellers.

And we'll talk to him about his latest book, When Ghosts Come Home, on North Carolina Bookwatch next.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[soft jazz music] - Welcome to North Carolina Bookwatch.

I'm DG Martin and my guest is Wiley Cash, author of When Ghosts Come Home.

Wiley Cash, welcome again to North Carolina Bookwatch.

- Thank you so much for having me, DG.

It's great to be back on the show.

- Well since you first appeared a few years ago, you now have three books under your belt, all New York Times best sellers.

And you're also doing so many things.

You're a writer in residence, or have been, at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and you got a low residency MFA program and you have a wife and two children.

Living on the coast near Wilmington, North Carolina.

- Yeah.

Yeah, it's a lot going on.

It's a constant balance to kind of fit all the pieces together.

But I think we're so busy in America with careers and hobbies and families and all of those things that everybody does it.

- So you decided to double up and do more and better than anybody else.

- Hopefully so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Well, there's so much I want to talk to you about, about your career and what you're doing and how you approach it.

But let's talk about the book first.

And will you sort of give us your elevator speech about this wonderful new book?

- Well, this book is set on the coast of North Carolina in South Port around the Oak Island area in the fall of 1984.

And it begins one evening late at night, well after midnight, when a local sheriff is awakened by the sound of a huge aircraft flying low over his house.

And he knows there was no good reason for an aircraft to be coming in that late to the little municipal landing strip there in Brunswick County.

And so he gets out of bed and drives out to the airport and there at the end of the runway, he finds a crash landed DC3.

It's too large for the runway, it's tried to turn around, it's broken off some of the landing gear, the plane is completely empty, it's abandoned, and on the runway or by the runway, he finds the body of a local man who's been shot dead and left behind.

So this mystery springs up that shakes loose all of these long simmering, racial tensions and class tensions and all these questions about outsiders and insiders and all these things.

- What's in the airplane?

- Well, they don't know.

You got to read the book to find out.

But that's part of the mystery.

And for a long time- - What did the sheriff find when he looked in?

- Well, he finds nothing.

He goes inside of the aircraft and he's got one of his deputies with him and at first glance, the plane is completely empty and they can't find any fingerprints.

And they say it's as if a ghost flew this plane in and left it behind and whoever did fly the plane in has left no trace.

And so there begins this mystery of was this local man involved?

It's a local African-American man- - This is the guy who's shot and dead?

- Shot and left behind on the runway.

So of course, all of these rumors spring up about the drug trade and drugs being flown in and this is the height of the war on drugs as well.

So we got to go back to the mid 1980s.

- Well tell us a little bit about the situation on Oak Island and in South Port at this time.

This is 1984 and it's a particular time in our history when race is, well, I guess race is always a salient point in the south, but particularly, how does race fit into your book?

- Well locally, we have the school desegregation and integration in places like Wilmington, we have the Wilmington 10, we're still coming off the violence of the 1898 race massacre, we have the violence in the imprisonment of the Wilmington 10, which was a celebrity cause around the world after school integration resulted in white on black violence in a town like Wilmington, and of course that bled south into Brunswick County.

But also in 1984 in the mid 1980s on a national level, this is the height of the war on drugs.

We have the rise of the D.A.R.E.

program.

We have say no to drugs.

We have all of these taglines.

And of course at this time, we're talking about the political effects of these conversations.

These were things that were easily associated with people who did not look like white conservative, middle-class Christians, like the folks that I was raised with.

I'm from Gastonia, North Carolina.

And so drugs were things that belonged to people who did not look like you, which is to say me.

And we see that born out on the campaigns in the 1980s with Willie Horton and the idea of the myth of the welfare queen.

And so all of these racial identities and all of this racialized language comes to bear on this moment in the novel in 1984.

- There are two different families who have a strong role to play in your book.

Would you tell us about both of those families?

- Sure.

The family that is first presented in the novel is the Sheriff's family.

They're outsiders.

They've only lived in this county for maybe two decades.

They're from the western part of the state.

- Yeah.

Where are they from?

- They're from Gastonia.

They're outsiders.

I don't know where I got that idea from.

- You just decided Gastonia's got to make it's way in my book.

- Sure.

Well also, my parents moved down to Oak Island in 1998 from Gastonia and it was such a culture shock to me to move from a place like Gastonia to a very small, sleepy coastal town where they roll up the sidewalks at 5:00 PM every night and of course, Oak Island is different, it's much busier, it's kind of been discovered.

But the sheriff's family, his wife's suffering from cancer.

He is well past middle-age.

He's entering a tough re-election.

- He's not entering, he's at the conclusion.

- Yeah.

The election's a week away.

- Sorry.

- No, the election's a week away and he's got a tough challenger.

This kind of local good old boy who's got some development money behind him.

His dad's a real estate developer.

And then out of nowhere, the day after this plane lands and the sheriffs in the thick of this mystery, his daughter arrives home nursing and suffering this tragedy that she can't quite articulate.

She's left her husband back in Texas and she's come home.

She's in her mid 20s, she's hurting, she's there to heal her wounds and kind of reconnect with maybe the person she was and find out who she wants to be.

And so apart from the central mystery, the sheriff has swept up in a lot of familial responsibilities and he's constantly asking himself, am I the right person I need to be as a father?

Am I the right person I need to be as a husband?

Am I the right person for the job as sheriff?

Am I cut out for any of this?

And what is the right thing?

And what is the legal thing?

And what is the ethical thing?

And what is the love filled thing?

And running alongside that family is the family of the local man, the black man who's found dead on the runway.

And his name was Rodney Bellamy and his father, Ed Bellamy, is a local high school history teacher.

He's also a civil rights leader.

And he insists that his son had no part in this aircraft's arrival, no part in the drug trade.

And he is hell bent on disproving all of these racially tinged rumors that are being used for political purposes by the sheriffs challenger.

And he's got a daughter-in-law, a woman named Janell who's had a baby- - This is the wife of the person who got killed.

- The wife of the deceased man.

Yeah.

The wife of the deceased man is from Atlanta.

And she has her younger brother who's moved up from Atlanta because he got into some trouble in Atlanta.

And he's moved up to spend his final years of high school with his sister and his now deceased brother-in-law.

And he finds himself in the thick of this racial violence.

- All these characters interested me.

But Ed Bellamy, the high school principal, our coach and principal, who was the father of the guy who was shot and on the runway.

For me, looking back to those times, this was the black guy who helped all of us get through the desegregation of the schools, because he was such a tough, good person who could relate to both blacks and whites.

I don't know whether you had characters like that, but I did even in my growing up time.

To watch these guys who guided us through.

That's how I viewed him.

Where did you come up with this character?

- I don't really know where he came from.

There were a number of really outspoken and powerful's not quite the right word, but just effective black leaders in Gastonia.

And of course, where I spent a lot of time in Asheville on the local school level, local government, at the university.

And I think that Ed Bellamy could possibly be an amalgam of them.

But as much as Ed Bellamy is poised to be kind of a mediating factor, he's a truth seeker, he's a history keeper, he also has inside of him this untapped rage because of his time spent in Vietnam, where he was mistreated as a black soldier.

His time spent in Eastern North Carolina growing up where he was mistreated as a black youth.

And so he's haunted by these ghosts as well.

That just because he's well-educated powerful, outspoken black man in his community, it doesn't quite allow him to exercise the pain of his past.

And so he brings all of that to bear on the situation.

- What did he do in Vietnam?

What was his- - He was a sniper in Vietnam.

- Which is what?

What do you do?

- You sit for a long time and the jungle or in another setting and you wait for the enemy to appear and you take the enemy out.

And he tells our sheriff, Winston, I've spent a lot of time waiting for that perfect shot.

I've crawled through the jungle, I've sold myself.

I've been out there alone and I'm tired of being alone and I need somebody with me.

- He made an analogy to Vietnam where he needed a spotter.

How did that work?

- Well normally, if you were a sniper and in Vietnam, or in any other situation, you would have somebody with you who would spot, who would be on the lookout, who would help you find the target, locate the target.

You would also have maybe perhaps a gunner in the back of you who would provide cover, who would be looking behind, who would be kind of tracking enemy movement while you were on the lookout for the target.

But sniper is also a very lonely venture.

And Ed Bellamy certainly feels like a man alone.

And he goes to Winston and he says, "Look, I will do this alone.

I'd rather not do this alone.

I need you to be with me."

- Be my spotter maybe.

- Be my spotter.

Tell me what's out there.

- You have a thing for sheriffs.

Do you remember your first book?

- Oh sure.

I remember pretty well, yeah.

- Winston is a character who's moved from a different location.

You think of sheriffs really as being growing up in the network, knowing all the people.

But he came to Brunswick County and became sheriff after living in Gastonia for a long time.

And your sheriff in your first book was kind of a semi outside.

- Sure.

Yeah.

- Where is all this sheriff stuff coming from?

- That's a great question.

I don't know.

I think that I'm drawn to rural lives.

I'm drawn to writing about rural lives.

I come from a rural background.

My family's from rural spaces and I'm drawn to rural lives.

I grew up in the suburbs in Gastonia and so I'm also kind of an outsider in those rural spaces.

And so, I don't feel unlike my characters, whether A Land More Kind or in When Ghosts Come Home, to be the outsider who comes into the inside and tries to bring some semblance of order or understanding or compassion or empathy or the structure of some kind of understanding.

And that's what the sheriffs in both of my novels try to do.

At their core, they're good people who really want to do the right thing.

But sometimes you don't.

When you come to the inside from the outside, you don't understand the intricacies of the inside.

- I wish I'd written this down, but there's a great quote in your book about the struggle between, particularly the law enforcement people about the right thing.

That is what is right for everybody, and then what is the thing that I'm required to do because I'm in law enforcement that I have to?

And so we read about law enforcement people who, in low level crimes, will let people go.

But it's a tough thing.

How does this sheriff wrestle with that question?

- Well he's got that question popping up all over the place.

He's running for reelection, he doesn't want to have any appearances of conflict of interest where he's going to try to be the hero and solve this crime in the waning hours before the election.

Of course, because drugs are believed to be involved and you have an aircraft that probably flew in from out of the country or across state lines, the FBI gets involved.

And he knows what the legal parameters of his position are.

What his legal responsibilities are.

But he also sees spaces in this case and in the lives around him we're doing the legal thing will upset lives and shake the community apart in ways that the law can't heal.

And so he's stuck in that liminal space between legal and ethical.

And he has an affinity for his deputy sheriff.

And he says, eventually, if he becomes sheriff, he's going to learn that being a good officer and a good man are not always the same thing.

- This is Glenn?

- Yes.

His chief deputy sheriff.

And at some point, there is a conflict because Glenn sees this question of the responsibility a little bit differently.

That is, that the sheriff, in some cases, should not exercise his ability to let people off.

How does your sheriff respond to that challenge?

- He just kind of swallows it.

He just kind of eats it.

And he just hopes that there will be some kind of balm over this relationship.

But he does since the moment where he and Glenn kind of go their separate ways.

And it's kind of an unspoken, that difference that I mentioned a moment ago about doing the legal thing and doing the ethical thing, and he knows that if this young guy ever become sheriff, hopefully he will never face this.

But he can't imagine him not ever having to face it.

- Well, the sheriff has some other interesting deputies and people who work for him.

Can you tell us a little bit about them?

- There's a couple of unseemly people on his force.

There are several good hearted people on the force.

I think that law enforcement officers, no matter where they're from, are people first.

And we, as people, can speak to our highest values, or we can give ourselves over to our lowest urges.

And there are a couple of deputies on his force that do both of those things.

And so he is aware at different points in the novel that our sheriff is slowly losing the support of many of- - Partly as a result of the election coming up, that maybe some of his people are saying, oh my gosh, he's not going to win.

- He's not going to win.

- So I got to protect.

But the other thing is race was a part of this too.

The sheriff, I don't think he's any big liberal, but he is at least open.

In 1984, there were people who just couldn't go along with it.

- Sure.

- How did the sheriff deal with the people in his office who weren't ready to be fair to African-Americans?

- Sure.

Yeah.

There's a moment in the novel where Ed Bellamy, the father of the deceased man, comes in to the sheriff's office, kind of barges into Winston's office and says, "Why haven't I heard from you?

I've been calling the office, I've left all these messages.

And the sheriff says, "What are you talking about?"

And he said, "Your challenger, this guy, Bradley Fry, went on a night ride in my community last night, flying the Confederate flag, shooting off guns, driving big trucks with spotlights, him and a bunch of other guys.

And I've been calling here all day trying to get ahold of you and you haven't returned my call."

And the sheriff said, "Well, who did you talk to?"

He said, "I talked to your secretary.

Why didn't you get?"

And so Winston goes and pays a quick visit to the secretary and he says, "Why don't you give me these messages?"

And she says, "Because there's no law against driving around."

And the sheriff realizes in that moment, she has sided with my challenger.

She has sided with these people who are terrorizing black citizens in advance of the selection to score political points, to intimidate this community, to silence, to not vote, to not do whatever it is that they feels will get the most power and effect for their community.

And the sheriff understands that he and his secretary, who he's known for decades, they've worked side-by-side for decades, have reached an unbridgeable divide.

- All because of race, is that right?

- All because of race.

And when I was writing this, I was thinking about the way many Americans have felt in the past five, six, seven years.

And in the 1980s, that default position, white, conservative, Christian, Baptist, Reagan supporter, in my community, it was just kind of implied.

You went to to my church, here's who you voted for.

Here's what you believed.

And now, those things aren't implied, they're explicit.

You wear a mask or you don't wear a mask.

You get vaccinated or you don't get vaccinated.

You wear red hat or you don't wear red hat.

But there was a time in the 80s where these things were unspoken.

And the sheriff confronts the fact that these unspoken things can cause real violence in communities.

- Well, you got all these wonderful characters and we hadn't even started really about it.

But how did you weave all of these characters together to make a plot?

Where did this plot come from?

Don't give anything away.

- Well, the plot came from, I was at East Carolina University for a literary homecoming weekend several years ago, in 2013, I was working on The Last Ballad, the Dark Road to Mercy hadn't even come out yet.

And I told somebody that I had just moved back to Wilmington and that my parents lived down in Oak Island.

And this person said, "Well did you hear about that plane that showed up there back in the 70s or 80s?"

And I said, "No."

And he told me this wild story.

And I don't know if it's true.

I never looked into it.

Cause I didn't want to look into it, I wanted to make up my own.

But I couldn't get rid of this idea of a plane just showing up.

And nobody knowing where it came from.

Nobody knowing what was in it.

No one knew who flew it in.

And I just thought, what a great jumping off point for a story.

Who were the characters that would inhabit this world?

And when I create a character, the plane shows up, somebody has got to investigate it.

So I knew I had a law enforcement officer.

Well, how do I trouble this person's life?

Because troubling somebody's life is where good stories come from, good tensions come from.

And then I've got to have another kind of oppositional force to that sheriff.

So I've got to have some kind of villain.

Then I've got to have kind of a secondary player.

So I had the Bellamy family.

And all of these characters just kind of came alive.

And for the longest time, these characters were so real and so vital, it was easy to write about them.

But it was hard to figure out what was going to happen to the plot.

- I'm really curious about that.

The characters are so strong and I think if you said, is this a character driven or a plot driven book?

You got a hard question to answer.

But I'd come down, and says character driven.

But I'm real interested, can you weave some more about the plot and how you took these characters and began to have a plot and what the elements of the plot had to be?

- Sure.

So the Sheriff's daughter, Colleen, she comes back home from Texas, she's in her mid 20s, she was a classmate of Rodney Bellamy and she knows him.

And so she accompanies her dad to go interview his widow because the sheriff Winston thinks this is a young woman who's lost her husband.

My daughter knew her husband, I'll take her and console.

And so the daughter, Colleen, who went to law school, never sat for the Bar, got pregnant, got married, she begins to kind of piece some things together that her dad is not willing to take a close look at.

And she understands things about this community that her father doesn't.

She's also in some ways more tapped into the community because she grew up there from childhood and her father didn't.

And so she has kind of an insider knowledge that he doesn't.

By the end of the book, I think readers are going to wish that her father had listened to her a little more.

And I wanted to write a character driven novel because those are the novels that I like to read and that's the easiest way for me to spend the requisite time writing a book if the people interest me.

And I hope that readers will be reading a character driven novel and then at the end, close it and say, "Oh my gosh, that was a plot driven novel and I didn't know it until the last couple of pages."

- Well, I think the startling thing about your plot is that you're reading along about all of these characters and their interrelationships and all this then all of a sudden it's over.

The plot comes up and is over in a few pages.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- How do you feel about that?

- That was something, I always knew I was going to do that.

I didn't know exactly what the ending was going to be.

I didn't know that I was really writing a mystery.

I didn't know that I had these twists and turns coming.

Cause I don't really know how to do that.

That's not my strength as a writer.

That is something that I kind of stumbled my way into after trying several endings.

And one day I just realized, oh my gosh, this is a mystery.

There are twists here at the end.

There are things the reader's not going to see coming.

Oh my gosh, how did I do this?

And I have no idea.

I'll never do it again I don't think.

But I wanted that sudden ending because that's what happens in life.

We don't get epilogues in life.

We don't get explanations.

At the end of something we didn't see coming the narrator of our lives doesn't step in and unpack it for us.

We just sit with it and it's over.

- Thank you.

That's great.

And I think that we understand.

It's a great plot.

It's a great ending.

Now as we can say, as usual, because after your fourth book, you've showed us that you can really write.

I think the only risk is that you're going to be labeled a mystery writer now.

- Well, we'll see.

- But we're already looking forward to your fifth book.

Wiley Cash, thank you for sharing it with us at North Carolina Bookwatch.

- Thank you, DG, for having me.

- Our guest on North Carolina Bookwatch has been Wiley Cash, author of When Ghosts Come Home.

Thanks to you for watching.

Check our webpage for more information about our guests and upcoming programs.

And I'll be back here next week to introduce you to the work of another, one of North Carolina's great writers.

See you then.

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