SUMMARY:
Steve Suitts was seventy-two years old when he tracked down his grandfather’s birth certificate and discovered his grandfather had died eighteen months before his father was born. What follows, in his new memoir, What’s In A Family Name: A Southern Family History Becomes a Gothic Mystery, is a detective story as Suitts traces his maternal side of the family, and unravels the string of lies he was told growing up in Winston County, Alabama.
INTERVIEW:
Ben Guest: This book has been called a “Southern Gothic Mystery.” What does “Southern Gothic” mean to you as a writer?
Steve Suitts: It usually involves some combination of sex, violence, cruelty, pleasure, and greed in a social order where the character struggles or interacts around issues of race, class, poverty, and gender and where, as Mr. Faulkner famously said, everyone knows—or comes to know—that the past is not really past.
BG: In writing this book, what did you learn about the South that you didn’t understand before?
SS: My findings about my own family brought to light how matters of gender, class, and literacy have shaped in very personal ways the history of the South. In other words, when we get away from studying “the great man of history,” we realize the pivotal role sex, poverty, and illiteracy have played in the lives of ordinary as much as grand families, and in turn the societies those families comprise.
BG: What was the question that started this journey?
SS: I wanted to document the story I had pieced together over the years from my relatives about how I got the extra “t” in my family name. From there, after years of research, I discovered my grandfather’s death certificate and realized he could not have fathered my father.
BG: The evidence strongly suggests your biological grandfather was actually B. H. Drake, a prominent, wealthy merchant in Winston County. Why do you think the Drake family, and the community, worked so hard to erase Anna, your grandmother, and her son, your father, from the official record?
Steve Suitts
SS: This is speculation, but I think there were probably two reasons. First, embarrassment. Here was a man who was a representative of the local Baptist church at the state Baptist convention. He gave the land on which the local Baptist church was built. His family was deeply involved in the Baptist church. And I think the evidence suggests he likely began his affair with my grandmother before he was divorced from his first wife. In a small-town community, that would have been deeply embarrassing.
Second, money. He died a wealthy man, and by law my father should have been one of the heirs of his estate, because at the time of Drake’s death, all evidence points to the fact that he and my grandmother were still married, though by then he may have returned to his first wife. So there was a financial interest in keeping it quiet.
I don’t think there was broad complicity across the whole community. I think, like most small towns, these things happened, most people knew, and they let it play out on its own terms.
BG: You devote part of the book to your great-great-grandfather, James Monroe Blackwell, a “scalawag,” a Southerner loyal to the Union. You mention he was threatened with hanging for supporting Lincoln. Indeed, he named his son Abraham Lincoln, while living in Alabama, during the Civil War. Why does his story resonate so much with you?
SS: When I was in high school in Florence, Alabama, on the Tennessee River, I was a member of the student council and was asked at times to give speeches at school assemblies. One of the speeches I gave, in 1964 or 1965, was essentially an attack on the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t remember the entire speech, but I do remember saying that the Klan had to understand Halloween came only once a year. The Klan, I said, was a group that masqueraded without the courage to show themselves to the public. I also remember that my teachers kept me late at school that day. For reasons I didn’t understand until later in life, one of them drove me home rather than letting me walk by myself.
So, I came to those views for a variety of reasons. But when I discovered I had an ancestor who not only supported the Union in the war over slavery, and who also supported Reconstruction on the terms Congress established after the Civil War, I realized I wasn’t the first in my family to believe in equal treatment under the law.
Later, when I worked with the ACLU affiliate in Alabama, we did more litigation related to equal treatment under the law than we did on the First Amendment or other constitutional issues, so it was a moment when I realized that whatever bloodlines do for families, I wasn’t the first in my family to fight for equal treatment for all.
Ben Guest
BG: When you were young, did you hear stories about James Monroe Blackwell, or did you only discover this history later?
SS: I discovered it later. No one talked about it.
BG: How much did the memoir change from first draft to final draft?
SS: The story is largely chronological and did not require much revision after I started writing beyond copy editing, although concluding the story where my great-grandmother is the protagonist required the most vision and revision. I did add an introduction, which is an aftermath of my family story. It was not originally a part of my outline and emerged after my oldest son prompted me to include it.
BG: How did you handle uncertainty in your writing if something wasn’t documented?
SS: All of historical writing involves interpretation of the facts as they are available. Sometimes an event may be documented by old newspapers, oral histories, or family writings, but it also may be incorrect or false. So, uncertainty doesn’t arise only from a lack of documentation. More often, whether there’s full documentation or not, a writer must assess the reliability of the source within a given context or circumstances. In this case, I discovered that my grandmother was not a reliable source, and I had to assess under each set of circumstances she recounted how much she said to me in oral interviews could be taken as factual and what were flights of fancy.
BG: When you’re writing about relatives, where’s the ethical line between truth telling and harm? How did you decide what to include?
SS: I used the same standards I have applied in my other works of history. If there is something embarrassing or controversial about a discovery, I double check the sources to verify the finding. If it poses some type of harm to the living, I give that person a chance to respond to my finding. If it applies to someone who is deceased, I try to talk with their surviving family members, if possible. In this book, I shared the manuscript with my only surviving Suitts cousin and my own children before deciding to publish it. I tried to contact others without success.
BG: What was the hardest scene or chapter to write? What made it difficult?
SS: The hardest was the introduction in which I discuss my relationship with my father in order to explain why I did the research and authored the book. At my age it was not deeply painful to remember or to write, but it was not easy identifying exactly how I had truly felt over time and continue to feel now about him and our relationship.
BG: At the end of the book, you write about reclaiming history, both with Blackwell and with your grandmother and the Drake family. Can you talk about what reclaiming history means to you?
SS: Reclaiming history is a very Southern notion, but it’s a universal one as well. Reclaiming history means trying to understand where we came from, and by that measure where we’re going. For me, reclaiming history isn’t about reconstructing it or hiding it. It’s about saying: this is where my family has been; this is who we have been. It doesn’t predict who I’m going to be, but it gives me a way to frame who I am and how I’m going to go forward.
And for those who read the book, you’ll see that I’ve tried very hard in my life not to be the person my father was. I’ve made a deliberate effort. Whether I’ve succeeded, only my sons and descendants can say, but that’s part of reclaiming your history. Look at the word “history”: his story. That’s what history is. And part of that history is you, in your moment. You can either continue that history or you can break with it.
BG: What other memoirs influenced you?
SS: I was influenced mostly by the memoirs of friends. Silent Calvary by Howell Raines prompted me to think about how to merge my unique home place, Winston County, into a story about my family heritage. My old friend Jack Drake’s upcoming memoir, Be Not Afraid: A Southern Journey Through Law, Liberty, and Civil Rights, was an influence, especially its focus and style. And my first boss, Rev. Francis Walter, in his memoir, From Preaching to Meddling: A White Minister in the Civil rights Movement, provided me with a lovely example of story-telling.
BG: What is your advice to writers interested working in memoir? And, in particular, a memoir based on family history and genealogy?
SS: Remember that much of what interests you in your family history probably won’t interest others. There needs to be a good, clear storyline which someone who doesn’t know you or your family will want to read page after page after page.
BG: Are you working on another book?
SS: I am. The next book is also set in Winston County, Alabama, the Free State, and it’s about the history of the county and race relations, centered especially on the single Black school that operated for more than forty years in Haleyville, in a one-room church chapel. I look forward to finishing it, and then moving on to the second volume of my trilogy on Justice Hugo Black of Alabama.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Suitts
Steve Suitts is an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University. He has written four books, including A War of Sections: How Deep South Political Suppression Shaped Voting Rights in America. Steve grew up in Winston County, Alabama, and, after graduating from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, began his career as a staff member at the Selma Project. He was the founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union for five years; the executive director of the Southern Regional Council for eighteen years; and program coordinator, vice president, and senior fellow of the Southern Education Foundation for nineteen years. He was the executive producer and one of the writers of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award. Most recently, he served as chief strategist for Better Schools Better Jobs, a Mississippi-based project of the New Venture Fund. Steve lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
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