Q & A

An Interview with Anne Booker James

The Marsh Bird, your debut novel, will be published on your 90th birthday. How do you feel about your late-in-life success as a writer?  Tell us how and when you began writing it? 

I don’t give much thought to my age.  If I did, I would be spending all my time sitting in the garden facing the sun!
I started the book about thirty years ago …. I thought I would write a very short tale just for practice.  I never thought of it as a novel.  But then things started coming to me, and the story developed on its own.  When I was thinking of the characters, I would need to move the story forward, Aunt Letty appeared, a feisty and resilient Gullah woman who was a force in her community. She spoke her mind.  And along with her appeared Bones, an ageless root man who brought a magical realism element into my story.  The two orphaned children came later, one white boy, and a mixed-race young girl.

But then I married.  Bob was a bit older than I and he wanted to travel so I put the story aside, but never forgot it.  In fact, I continued to attend the occasional fiction writing workshop. It was after he died, ten years ago, that I started to focus on my writing in earnest.

You create a lot of tension around unrequited love, one of many themes in your novel. Is it a theme of particular interest to you?

Unrequited love is not autobiographical; most of my loves loved me back.  It was The Phantom of the Opera that got me thinking about how unrequited love is a theme of a many great stories.  It keeps readers turning pages.

But I am a romantic at heart. I’m in love with a lot of things – with nature, with beauty, with beautiful old and young people, with words and with art.  My characters truly love one another.  That love is what keeps their bond so strong and how they ultimately succeed.  I wanted to show the love between them in the book.

How important is setting to you?

Landscape has always been important to me. I love nature and wanted to capture some of the breathtaking beauty of the Lowcountry sea islands in my story.  Once you see it you never forget it.  I am deeply moved by these marshes, the movement of the tides, the wildlife, the fishermen and their nets, the ancient oak trees draped with moss. There is no sunset that compares to ones I found on those sea islands.

You say you are a romantic. How do you feel about happy endings? Is this something you thought about when writing?

I don’t think I can write a book without a happy ending.

The novel is seasoned with a few words from the Gullah language.   How did you set about your research on the Gullah people and this unique language?  

I’d lived in the South most of my life, but not in the coastal areas, so I didn’t really know anything about the Gullah until many years ago when I visited a friend in the Beaufort, SC Lowcountry area.  We attended the annual Gullah Festival on St Helena’s Island.  It there at the historic Penn Center that I first saw the old Brick Church, where the first school for freed slaves was established.  That was even before the Civil War ended. I had no idea!  I developed a great admiration for these people who have managed to retain their heritage, beautiful culture, and language until this day.  When my husband Bob and I moved to a nearby sea island we heard Gullah spoken nearly every day.

True Gullah is a wonderful language, but if I had written my book in Gullah no one would have been able to understand it.  I asked Victoria Smalls, a respected member of the Gullah community, to read the manuscript for me.  She wrote a wonderful letter that guided me in the use of the language as well as a few customs I was not aware of.  The Gullah language has now been recognized as the first African-American Creole language, one formed by their ancestors.  Most all of those enslaved came from West African tribes.  Once here, they were separated from each other by their masters, to make it more difficult for them to communicate with each other. However, they dared to cross boundaries from plantation to plantation and, in the end, they created a new shared language, one that combined words heard from their American slave owners with words from their own African languages. This is how the Gullah language was born.

Would the Gullah people like reading The Marsh Bird?

I hope to Heaven that they’ll like it, and that they’re going to feel very proud of it as well.  I treated them lovingly and kindly in the book, as they deserved ….

What might others take away from reading The Marsh Bird?

I want and hope that in some ways people can see, in reading the book, that we’re all just one people, that there doesn’t have to be this divide among people. I would love to believe that in some way this book might touch hearts to be a bit kinder.  More caring of all people.

Tell us about the title…

The Marsh Bird is a toy held tight by a traumatized young girl who was brought to the area from New Orleans after her parents died – this toy from her past meant security to her.  It was actually a little sailboat that her father had carved for her…. a little bird sitting on top of the sail.  She’s very protective of it, but she eventually gives it to the character Ben – who like her is another orphaned child – when he goes off to war.

The little marsh bird represented love, hope, and security, something we all desperately need in this life.

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