Attica Locke on the Rise of the Aryan Brotherhood, and Never Quite Leaving East Texas

Attica Locke knows that her new book, Bluebird, Bluebird, is going to take on a life of its own. That’s what happens your novel about a black Texas Ranger investigating a pair of murders in a small town run by white nationalists comes out after a summer when neo Nazis marched on Charlottesville and Confederate statues across the country were either removed or very pointedly not removed, when tensions came to a boil and the President made it clear, once again, whose side he was on. For Locke, dark as the summer of 2017 was, the pivotal moment came much earlier. “The second Trump was elected, my book changed,” she says. “I hadn’t changed a word, but I knew immediately it was different. I’m not scared of what I wrote. But it’s uncomfortable, how relevant it is. You don’t expect your work to be so… timely.”

Timely conversations about race and society have never been something Locke shies away from. Her novels, penetrating mysteries with a literary sensibility, are set in locales from Texas to Louisiana and take on tough topics, from the region’s bareknuckle politics to big oil corruption, from biased judicial systems to ghosts of the antebellum South. She’s also served on the writing staff of Fox’s hit show, Empire, an experience she says has influenced the way she sees herself and her art.

In Bluebird, Bluebird, Locke trains her focus on a remote area shaped by a history of slavery, migration, and what Locke calls “generations of secrets.” We spoke a few weeks prior to the book’s release, just before Hurricane Harvey slammed into the region, one more trauma in an area of the country that’s seen more than its share.

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Dwyer Murphy: Can we start by talking about East Texas? The terrain and the culture are so important to the story you’re telling. Where does it fit with the rest of the state?

Attica Locke: I’m from an area that kisses the border of Louisiana. It’s infinitely more Southern than it is Southwestern. Is there still that Lonestar spirit? Yes, but it’s not big sky country, it’s the piney woods. They call a portion of it Big Thicket. It’s lumber country, woods and trees everywhere, creeks and bayous.

To me one of the great contradictions about East Texas is the sense of familiarity among black and white folks. Folks have been living up under each other for hundreds of years. There’s a familial quality to it. That doesn’t mean we’re all holding hands and singing cumbaya. But the people there are fundamentally intermixed—culturally and genetically. So there really is a sense of family.

DM: You’re living in LA now. In Bluebird, Bluebird, there’s a lot of soul searching by characters who left small towns for the city, whether Houston or cities up north, like Chicago. I was wondering how your relationship to Texas has changed, living on the coast.

AL: I went through a phase, the same as some of my characters, where I just wanted to get out. But now I realize that I never really got Texas out of my system. Whenever I go home, there’s a profound sense of peace that comes over me, a sense of being connected. Over the years I’ve come to embrace certain things about that, too—the music, for example, or cowboy boots. I wear cowboy boots almost every day. Something happened to me around the time I was working on Empire. That felt like it was a world away, and I found myself wanting to wear boots. I wanted to feel like a Texan still. I wanted to feel in my body that I was rooted in that ground.

DM: There was a line in the book that jumped out at me: “He’d practically taught Greg, the art of code-switching…To Darren it was balletic sport in which every black man should be schooled.” Code-switching is something that comes up often in your novels. I’m curious how it factors into your own life, as well as your fiction.

AL: I believe everything about that sentence for that character. For me, the older I get the less I code-switch. Letting that go has been the greatest feeling. I’m happy now sounding extra black in any situation, extra Texan in any situation. I want to say the change came when I was working on Empire. There were so many people of color and gay folks working on the show, and there was just a sense that everybody could be themselves in that writers’ room, and nobody was code-switching. But if I’m being honest, it also came from writing a book, Black Water Rising, which was more political and more culturally specific than I really intended. Actually bearing yourself like that to the world makes it easier to go into every situation—to the doctor’s office, the bank, board meeting—and to be more honest about who you are.

But I’m saying all that as a person who lives in California. For my character, Darren, a Texas Ranger, code-switching still matters a great deal. I don’t know if he could start sounding like a rapper. Not on his job. Part of the Texas Ranger culture is that you’re gonna listen to some country music at social events, even if you don’t want to.

DM: The murder of James Byrd, Jr. (an African-American man dragged behind a truck for several miles, killed in 1998, in Jasper, Texas) was a formative moment for many of your characters, Darren included. It changed the way he saw his home state and its racial politics. Was there a formative moment like that for you?

AL: All I can say is that I had a very similar reaction to Jasper, Texas. Let’s not forget this was way pre-Trayvon, pre-Ferguson, pre-Freddie Gray, before so many things I can’t list them all. It was way before our current culture, where all this is visualized thanks to video phones and cameras. It doesn’t mean this shit wasn’t going on. But we weren’t inundated. And there was something about 1998—it felt like we were on the cusp of a new millennium and there were things we were going to leave behind. Jasper snapped us right back to 1952. It was so ugly. It just reminded us that this fundamental sickness of racism was still there, that it’s ever present and dangerous.

DM: White nationalism plays a major role in the novel—specifically the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT). With the election of Trump, and now the marches, that hate is front-and-center again. I know you started this story a while back, but I’m wondering where you think it fits into the national conversation happening now?

AL: It’s up to the reader to decide where this fits and how it lands for them. For me, since Trump was elected, not a single thing that’s happened has been a surprise. The only surprise is, where the fuck are the people coming in to save us from this shit? There’s just a dearth of Republicans willing to put their country before their love of power. That, I wasn’t prepared for. But Charlottesville and all the hate crime jumping off since the election, none of that surprises me. The Texas Rangers doing battle with groups like the ABT? That’s not new.

Still, the country has changed. It hasn’t changed in the sense that suddenly there are racists—they’ve been there—but the change is in their audacity, the permission they feel to publicly hate. That’s profound, and I haven’t seen it in my lifetime. Surely it existed in my parents’ lifetime, in their childhood, but I’ve never seen this, where people are walking down the street talking about Jews and black people. That’s crazy talk.

DM: What is the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas? I understand they grew out of the Texas prison system in the 80s, around the time the prisons were desegregated, and now they’re heavily involved in the drug trade, and are considered highly violent. Where do they fit in the East Texas landscape? Are they a prominent force?

AL: When I go to East Texas, it’s to two small towns: one, where my family has had land for over a hundred years, and another called Jefferson. When I’m there, it’s not like I’m seeing a bunch of guys with ABT tattoos. Now mind you, I’m not looking for them. I will say this, though, and I hate to disparage poor Jefferson, Texas, but there’s something about that place that makes me feel so afraid. It’s just a feeling I get. You see some crazy shit out there, like black lawn jockeys holding Confederate flags. I haven’t seen it everywhere, though, and I don’t think ABT is so prominent, in part because their life is steeped in drugs and illegal activity, so they’re not just walking around Wal-Mart with their tats out. A lot of them are in jail. But you do see a lot sympathizers and hangers-on. You see women—they call them “featherwoods,” derived from peckerwood—with less obvious tattoos, but they’re out in the world, doing the bidding of or supporting ABT men who may or may not be incarcerated.

What’s interesting in this area is how careful you need to be about judging folks. Doing research, I was staying out at a cabin on a lake, and I had my Dad staying with me because I was terrified. When we saw folks who looked on the surface like “rednecks” I would get really tense. But my Dad’s reaction was always to just say, “Hey how you doing?” He would start a conversation. Nine times out of ten, the other person was warm, engaged and relieved, the same as us, that there was no tension. Everything was chill. That was really interesting to see. You know, my Dad, he was armed, but also, he’s always been about refusing to pre-judge people. It sounds saccharine. Unless somebody’s done something that lets him know they’re not on his side, he feels no reason to come at them otherwise. I will say, though, one night we got lost on the lake and came on some kind of bar with a bunch of Harleys out front, and he was like, “Oh hell no, let’s get the fuck out of here.” Me, if I see something looks wrong, I’m not getting any closer to find out.

DM: With your family, and with your characters’ families, it seems like there’s an idea about refusing to be “run off”—refusing to cede Texas to people who want you gone.

AL: That’s a part of my family’s makeup on both sides. It’s a quintessentially Texas thing, this idea about not getting run off. Now, I never want to suggest that the millions of people who fled the South were doing anything wrong. The situation was different. We were fortunate enough to have land. Why would we go anywhere? My great-grandfather sent six kids to college off that farm. We were having a good life. Why would we go some place new and cold when we have this that matters to us?

DM: Can we talk about the music? Blues is part of the cultural fabric down there. Your title comes from the Bluebird Blues—“My bluebird, bluebird, please take this letter down south for me”—and the soundtrack, lets call it, runs throughout the novel. It’s also part of the story of race relations in the region—blues and country.

AL: As an artist, I have a love for blues that is outsized. I consider Lightnin’ Hopkins my muse. That’s who I want to be on paper. In the book, there’s a theme of twinning: a pair of identical twin brothers, the twin poles of the town, the white icehouse and the black café. Blues and country are fraternal twins. That’s something that I’m more interested in these days. When I was growing up, guys in pickup trucks with Confederate flags wanted to go two-stepping on the weekends, and I was like, “fuck that.” The older I get, the more I appreciate how these two sounds are connected.

If you want to go deep on this, Dr. King said in many a speech that part of the purpose of Jim Crow was to prevent poor black and poor white folks from congregating in facilities together lest they figure out they have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the powers that be.

With the music, all I can say is that if you look at the surface and think country belongs to white people and blues belongs to black people, you’re missing it. The truth is they’re fundamentally connected, and rural and agrarian black and white folks have always had more in common than they realize.

DM: Why is crime fiction right for this story? Through all your books, you’re working with some complex social and historical issues, but you keep coming back to crime fiction, so I’m wondering what it is about the genre that calls to you?

AL: I’m drawn to crime. I’m drawn to why in the world people do the things they do, and why do they think they’re gonna get away with it. The poetry of it for me is that every novel is a crime novel, whether it’s a crime of the heart or a moral crime.

Crime for me is where we as human beings navigate the concept of scarcity, and navigate the belief, or the reality, there are only so many resources on the planet. Crime is an acting-out that comes when people feel there’s not enough for them, whether it’s the literal stuff they want, or it’s something figurative like love in a family or in a marriage. There’s so much about humanity wrapped up in crime and crime fiction. That’s why I come back to it over and over.

Originally published in Literary Hub.