DéLana R. A. Dameron: Redwood Court | Feb. 8, 5:30 p.m. (free) | Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill

South Carolina poet DéLana R. A. Dameron’s debut novel, Redwood Court, begins with the voice of a grandmother to her youngest granddaughter: “You have all these stories inside you: all the stories everyone in our family knows and all the stories everyone in our family tells. You write ’em in your books and show everyone who we are.”

And so starts the powerful and tender exploration of Mika Tabor’s childhood and her Black, working-class family that parallels, in many ways, Dameron’s own childhood in Columbia, South Carolina, in the 1990s.

Dameron, a 2007 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, is a homegrown storyteller with two acclaimed collections of poetry. Her first novel’s powerful prose is a new gift altogether, crafting unforgettable, complex characters and anchored by a granddaughter intent on remembering and celebrating her family’s life and community.

Redwood Court, released February 6, has already received praise from the likes of Jacqueline Woodson, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Ann Napolitano, among others. Ahead of her mostly Southern tour, which will include a local reading at Chapel Hill’s Flyleaf Books, Dameron spoke with the INDY about what it means to write about family, Blackness, and the South.

INDY: Redwood Court is inspired by your own childhood. Why did you choose to tell your family’s story through fiction rather than memoir?

DÉLANA R. A. Dameron:I watch a lot of narrative dramas, and I don’t see what I’m doing as very different: taking real people, a real timeline, and to quote Tracy Chapman, filling in “the fiction in the space between.”

Yes, the characters are very close to people in my family and my neighborhoods where I grew up, but I also filled in a lot of fiction in the space between what I know and what I imagined. In that way, they become different stories for me. I’m interested in telling a truthful story about ordinary Black Southern folks in a very specific time frame (the ’90s) in a very specific place (Columbia, South Carolina). I didn’t want accuracy to get in the way of that truth telling.

Are there any stories you heard from family members that contradicted your own memories?

Many people who the characters are based off of are no longer living. And since it’s not an accurate accounting of anyone’s life—even my own—but a fiction project, I felt I was given liberties to explore the truths I wanted to tell about growing up Black and Southern and suburban and all of the beautiful loving hardships that come with that territory.

What was your process for crafting this story?

As with all of my writing, I hand-wrote my brainstorms, my drafts, etc., so I have this collection of six Moleskine [notebooks] that make up Redwood Court—even character bios and the overall synopsis, notes from my editor and agent. I wrote anywhere I had a moment to sit and dream and remember and imagine.

I had started writing the project while I was still living in Brooklyn. I moved back to Columbia, South Carolina, at the end of 2019, and part of my reorientation became remembering. And writing. I returned to an almost-empty homeland; by then, my father had passed. Both of my grandparents are long gone. My mother was unable to speak or move as a result of a severe stroke years before that. Writing Redwood Court comforted me. I could no longer physically go to my grandparents’ house, but I could write a world where it—and she, and for a while my grandfather—existed.

Why is now the right time for Redwood Court?

The time for books like Redwood Court is long overdue. I’m talking books by Black (for me, Southern) writers that aren’t necessarily about overcoming trauma or extreme hardship. The characters don’t have to be extraordinary or endowed with special powers. That they exist is enough. There are messages within the pages, sure. Some politics. But those aren’t the drivers of the narrative. They get to speak and live and be full-bodied in their navigation of the America with which they find themselves.

What writers and artists have inspired your own writing and craft?

Zora Neale Hurston’s attention to rural Southern Black folks and being true to how she represents them is a North Star for me. Toni Morrison’s Sula is a book I return to again and again. James Baldwin’s collection of short stories Going to Meet the Man. The artist Kerry James Marshall had a huge exhibit up at the Met at the start of the year I began Redwood Court (2017), and I love this question because it’s all making sense now how it came together. I loved seeing floor-to-ceiling depictions of Black folks in everyday situations depicted by Marshall … in an especially white institution. There was no question about whom he focused his attention on. I took that as the greatest permission I’ve ever been granted to explore as an artist.

You chose to title the book after the location Redwood Court. Tell us about what this setting means to you, and what is it like publishing a story about Black Southerners?

I thought a lot about place while writing this book. Specifically, about how the Black experience in contemporary culture is often a story of dichotomy: urban vs. rural. Resourced vs. underresourced. Known geographical locations vs. fictional locations. It was important to me to locate Redwood Court in a real, existing place. It was also important to acknowledge that while Columbia is (now) known for a few things, the city still doesn’t have a cultural identity in the way that some larger metropolitan areas in its orbit do. This erasure of the city undoubtedly suggests the erasure of its inhabitants—and the utter invisibility of the Black folks who populate it.

But Columbia, South Carolina, is a real place. Within it, a real street: Redwood Court. Growing up in the 1990s, the people who loved me made that street feel like a small town. And because of the ways infrastructure ruled the movement of Black life, the neighborhood in which the court was located did operate like a small town—a collection of safe spaces to gather, do business, etc. 

What are you working on now?

The project I’m hoping will come after Redwood Court is a novel about Black Southern horsemen in South Carolina. I’m currently calling it “Fairfield County,” and I’m so excited that I get to write my lived experience as a Black, Southern horsewoman into a book. We don’t have many stories of Black horsemen written by Black people. 

The project after that I hope is a novel-in-verse about a Black military family in the middle of the 20th century. I believe my project as a writer who is also Black and Southern is to document the experience of Black, Southern folks across multiple generations. As a storyteller with multiple forms in my arsenal, I aspire to explore African American life across generations, and centuries, and genres—world-building for audiences though a Black Southern Centuries Cycle. 

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