Interview with Breena Clarke

Grief, and a Great Migration
The book is primarily about loss, the loss of a child, the grief that follows. It's also about the great migration of African Americans from the rural culture and the rural towns to the urban environment. I feel that those migrants not only left their towns and came to the city and then benefited by the cities, but I think they brought also some of their rural culture to the cities and enriched the cities as well. So that's much of what I like to talk about in the novel.

It was a very important development, certainly, in our country, the migration that happened between the two wars. They changed the landscape of our cities. The cities that the migrants left behind and the ones they came to. And much of what we know about our cities started there. It was a very important development.

It certainly was important in the development of Washington, D.C., which has seen an influx of African American migrants since the Civil War. So I think it was pretty important to the development of Washington.

And I wanted to write a novel about Washington, D.C., because I think that Washington has been underserved by novelists. There haven't been enough novels about Washington. It's a pretty interesting city. And I just wanted to add to that.


The Treacherous Potomac
I believe it to be kind of a treacherous river. There are times when it looks pretty calm on the surface, but you know it's not calm. It's got a lot of undercurrent. It's a real river. You know, it's really bold. We used to take car trips. We'd drive down to Haynes Point and through Rock Creek Park and spots along the river. And you'd look out at it and sometimes it would look very calm and sweet. Then other times it would be roiling.

So it's a river, I think, that has a lot of character. And that's one of the reasons that I felt it, too, was a character in the novel. That it had an identity.

I describe it as being as duplicitous as a $2 whore, and I kind of like that. I think that works. Sometimes it seems very placid. And at other times, you know, very turbulent.

And, of course, the City of Washington itself was built around the banks of the Potomac for obvious reasons. At one time it was used for transportation. Then it was — well, I think it lost out to train travel and other things because it doesn't have the port that, say, Baltimore has. But it was at one time a viable port for transportation, tobacco, and that sort of thing.

I decided to have the girls swimming in the Potomac because my mother had talked about the Potomac and swimming in it, and we knew that it was dangerous. We knew that you were really taking your life in your hands if you got into the Potomac.

One of the things I wanted to do with Johnnie Mae, the protagonist, was to show that she was adventurous. That she had — the word I like to use is moxie. She had a lot of moxie. I
think that's important in terms of her development throughout the novel because I believe that in order to survive this life, and to do well in life, you've got to have moxie. And unfortunately, Clara Bynum, her younger sister, didn't have as much moxie. She was kind of going along —Ãâ€Ã...¡ÃÆ’‚ now, she was young, it's true, and the accident that happened to her was purely that, an accident. But she didn't have as much boldness and moxie as Johnnie Mae. The comment that I'm making is that it's harder for someone to survive if they don't have that — that intestinal fortitude.


The Dead, as Well as the Living
One of the things that I wanted to accomplish was to include the dead in the story as well as the living.

Now, I didn't want to make a ghost story, although ghost stories are very effective. But I did want to feel that those who had died were included in the story as well as those who were continuing to live. And Clara Bynum, Johnnie Mae's younger sister, of course, has died and is buried at Mount Zion.

So I was thinking of trying to think of a way to include the dead in the story. And I thought of including sort of Halloween thing and then they're running around in the cemetery.

And I must say, I'm not sure that that has any basis in historical fact. I don't know that people ever did that. But it seemed like, you know, a likely thing. I know that Halloween was celebrated in Georgetown and that people, even adults, did dress up for Halloween. So I just decided to invent that.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish was not just to preserve those dead individuals but the whole community. Until you have some loved one who's buried in a cemetery people don't as a rule visit — but there's a lot of interesting historical information in cemeteries. People's names and dates are there and you can get a sense of who they were and how they lived from looking at a cemetery.

Cemeteries have a sense of permanence that a lot of other buildings don't have. I mean, you got to go a ways before you can destroy a cemetery.

Now, Mount Zion Cemetery actually came very close to being bulldozed and a development built on top of it. The cemetery had fallen into disrepair. They had stopped burials. They haven't buried anyone there since the 1950s. And it did fall into disrepair because the church did not have adequate funds to maintain it. So the city was going to allow development on top of it.

But the church was able to convince the city government not to do that. I think the African American Bicentennial Corporation, which was formed in 1976, became instrumental in getting the cemetery declared on a National Register of Historic Places. This, of course, brought in federal funds to do some renovation and at least restoration work and preservation work in that area which I think is very important. Many of the gravestones go back a good ways there.


Get more resources on River, Cross My Heart, an Oprah's Book Club selection.

View the Complete Oprah's Book Club List.