Linda Busby Parker: Seven Laurels
Book Club Books

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

How did the story of Brewster's life come to be?

I always knew I wanted to write—that is I knew since I was about twelve years old and discovered books like The Secret Garden and the Nancy Drew mysteries in my school library. I simply didn't know how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. I went to college and to graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in media studies. I taught at several universities for about twenty years, then, I made a major life altering decision. I decided to resign my full professorship. I was tenured and a member of the graduate faculty. If I resigned, I would never, NEVER gain that status back. You simply DON'T give up tenure in the university system and expect to get back to that position a second time. So, this decision was major! But after considerable angst and some counseling, I decided to go back to school where I earned my MFA in creative writing at Spalding University. That was my entry into my new career, my entry to the writing life. I made that giant leap at considerable costs—financial and emotional.

I was working on my first novel in 2001. It was to be the story of a young, southern, white woman in the 1950s who acquired a large parcel of land. She struggled to maintain that land at all costs. I thought of it as a "land story" and as a "personal struggle" story. The novel would be something like Willa Cather's My Antonia in terms of theme. After writing on that novel for about six months, I realized the novel was going nowhere—zip, zero! I read in one of my writing magazines that if you hit the proverbial brick wall, change your central character to someone totally unlike yourself. Write in that new character for several days and then go back to your original character. The experiment was supposed to open "the box" and free the creative spirit. I switched to a young, black, male protagonist and continued writing my story. Two hundred pages later I was still writing, three hundred pages later I was still writing, and I closed the novel out at four-hundred-fifty manuscript pages. By that time Brewster McAtee owned Seven Laurels. It was his story and I couldn't take it away from him.

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

It's usually hard for an author to write from the perspective of the opposite gender. But you do it with grace, and not only are you writing a male narrator, but a black male living in the Deep South during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. How did you get into character and/or learn the needed facts to write as Brewster?

As writers, we are always told to write what we know. In the opening of the book, Brewster is in his twenties—so, what do I as a white woman know about a young African American man living in the 1950s? In truth, much of Seven Laurels I knew and didn't realize I knew until I started writing from Brewster's perspective. From the time I was born until I was nearly six-years-old, we lived in a neighborhood (Mobile, Alabama) that was almost totally African American. My mother had my brother and me when she was nineteen—I mean both of us at the age of nineteen and we aren't twins. My brother was born a few days after she turned nineteen and I was born a month before she turned twenty. My father was extremely hard-of-hearing (the diagnosis in later life was "profoundly deaf") and worked in a blue-collar job. There was a little Mom-Pop grocery store on the corner operated by an elderly white couple. That grocery store was Bernard's Grocery—and Bernard's Grocery appears in Seven Laurels. A wonderful black woman, who lived next door, helped my mother care for my brother and me when we were hurt or sick. She did this out of the goodness of her heart—there was no other reason for this kindness. She also occasionally babysat for us children and told my mother to take the bus to town for an hour or two just to get away and do a little window shopping. I remember this woman as kind, good, and gracious.

From this neighborhood, we moved to a mixed neighborhood—one street black, the next white, the next black. The schools were segregated and white kids walked through the black streets to get to the white school and black kids walked through the white streets to get to the black school—the schools were approximately equidistant. Thus, as a child, I knew the place I created in Seven Laurels—it was the only place I ever knew while growing up. In fact, that's where we continued to live even when I went to college at the University of South Alabama. I lived at home. The Civil Rights Movement had exploded across the country and everyone in the neighborhood (blacks and whites) were a little anxious as to what would happen next—Detroit and Los Angeles had burned! But, that level of violence never came to Mobile. I was there the first day our high school was integrated and I remember so well the scene.

When I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, I steeped myself in sociological studies of the African American experience in America, and of the history and significance of the Black Press in America. For some unknown reason, I also began reading African American literature and discovered James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and some of the early African American poets. I later studied, in some depth, the history of the Civil Rights Movement. All of this played into the writing of Seven Laurels. When I began to write Brewster’s story, I had no idea I knew this story, but actually I was raised in the neighborhoods and I had done research for over twenty years without ever realizing I was researching for a novel. This was the kind of slow, steady research that seeps into your mind, your heart, your entire body—it all came back to me for Seven Laurels.

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

I'm going to be honest, I feel like Brewster's story does not represent the norm for a black man beginning his life as an adult during this time. Is it believable that he would be able to hold his own in a racist community, building a successful business and owning so much land?

Your question is highly insightful. I realized exactly the same thing when I began writing Seven Laurels. This is why I knew the person who hired Brewster had to be someone not from the local area—not from a small town in middle Alabama. Deak Armbrecht hires Brewster. Deak is from Holland and neither fully understands nor cares about the attitudes of the locals. This point is made early on—Deak is his own person! Also, Brewster works in the back of the building (in the shed) not in the showroom of Three Brothers Furniture Store, but in the workshop where he isn't seen by the local community. He works as Deak's assistant and that would have been perfectly okay for a black man to work, assisting a white man. Also, remember that ultimately Deak experiences a very major loss when he sells his shop to Brewster. In fact, it is this loss that sends Deak into an emotional downfall that ultimately weakens him physically. Also, Brewster suffers when he opens his shop on Main Street. Ultimately, Brewster pays the worst cost anyone can pay for the ownership of his land on Ole Summit Highway. I debated and debated and debated some more with myself about whether Brewster should have ever bought that land out on Ole Summit Highway because it cost him so very much in the end. You might recall that in the final pages of Seven Laurels Brewster talks with Matthew James about this very fact. So, none of this would have been possible if Deak Armbrecht had been from the local community and had internalized the local prejudices. Deak's character, by the way, is a composite—based on my grandfather, whose family had come from Holland, and on some other men I'd known while growing up.

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Seems that TeeBoy came to Brewster whenever he needed guidance through a tough situation. Was this his way of working through his thoughts and finding the right path to take?

TeeBoy's character was a gift. The scene with TeeBoy being killed in DuBose Tavern was the very first scene that came to me when I began writing Seven Laurels from Brewster's perspective. I wrote it, but thought I'd never use it—after all TeeBoy was dead from the very beginning of the novel. But, I wrote the scene because it came to me in its totality. Then, guess what? TeeBoy plays a major role in the novel. He's there from the very beginning when Brewster ponders buying the land. He's there the night Brewster moves to the land. He's there throughout the story and he's there in the very last pages of Seven Laurels. Yes, somehow TeeBoy seems to come when Brewster needs him. I believe that is the way of life—answers come to us in unusual ways. For whatever reasons, TeeBoy came to Brewster when Brewster needed him.

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

One of Brewster and Marlenna's closest friends is Matthew James. I found the scene where Brewster confronts Matthew about the absence of God during a crucial time in his life exceptionally powerful. Matthew says "if I did not know the comforter is standing beside you ready to embrace you, I could not give the days of my life for anything less." What is the role of God in Brewster's life?

Brewster is a quiet Christian. He is surrounded by strong and vocal Christians, namely Mama Tee, Matthew James, and later Tee and her new husband, who is a young minister. After I had finished writing an early draft of Seven Laurels, I had a Nun read the book. I'm not Catholic, but I particularly liked this Nun. I'm proud to say that she loved the book, but wanted Brewster to be more active in the Civil Rights Movement and in his church. But, this is never the way Brewster came to me. He was surrounded by those who were very active in both the Movement and in the church, but, in his own way, Brewster made perhaps one of the biggest contributions to Civil Rights—he was the first black man to own/operate a business on Main Street in downtown Low Ridge, Alabama. He also supported his church, but in his own way. Matthew never upbraided Brewster for this. In some ways Brewster reminds me of my own father, who was a lifelong member of a fundamentalist church. My Dad never spoke in church and never harangued anyone about his religion, but he never missed a Sunday church service. At his funeral, the minister said that in his old age (and after several strokes) Dad stumbled into church and sat in his usual pew. Dad was so deaf that the minister was certain he couldn't hear the sermon, but my Dad wanted to be in God's house on Sunday. My Dad sometimes reminded me of Brewster. One of the most interesting questions I've ever been asked about Seven Laurels was at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I had been invited there to meet with students and talk about Seven Laurels and about the Civil Rights Movement. One student asked me if I thought Brewster went to Heaven. The question threw me for a moment. Then I answered that I had no way of being certain, but I believe he did! In Seven Laurels, God is always present, even though some terrible things happen.

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker

Do you have plans to write another novel? Can you tell us anything about your future plans as a writer?

My agent has two new books that I've written. She's currently shopping them. One is titled The Fifth Season and is about a young man—eighteen years old—who lives in middle Alabama. He's about to graduate from high school and go off to college where he will study geology at the University of Wyoming. On weekends, Lowell Crockett works at this father's bar and grill cooking French fries. Lowell accidentally sets the kitchen on fire and his father dies. The question I wanted to explore in this book is how do we forgive ourselves when we make terrible mistakes. How do we put one foot in front of the other and move forward? In The Fifth Season, I explore this question via the character, Lowell Crockett, and secondarily through his young neighbor, Estella Bodet.

My second book is a more commercial book titled Oliver's Song. I wrote this book with two other writers as collaborators—Jim Robertson and Patsy Dow. We write under the pseudonym Frances Lowell Cooper. The book is set in Mobile and the protagonist is Della Boudreaux, a forty-something woman who had a drinking problem that estranged her from her family. She sobers-up, goes off to Tulane University over in New Orleans and returns with a brand-new law degree in hand. She sets up her office at the foot of Government Street at the entrance to the old Bankhead Tunnel and she waits for clients to walk in—they do begin to walk in with an assortment of legal entanglements! This book does a little globe hopping—China and places in South and Central America.

Book Club Books: Interview with Linda Busby Parker