Four Spirits

In Memoriam

Addie Mae Collins

Denise McNair

Carole Robertson

Cynthia Wesley

Killed Sunday, September 15, 1963, in the racist bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, as they prepared to participate in a Youth Worship Service.

The past isn't dead; it's not even past.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

We were spirit people, seed people;
no matter how bleak the terrain looked out there,
we were planted for a rich harvest.

VICTORIA GRAY

Harper Audio's
Rick Harris
talks to author Sena Jeter Naslund.
Rick Harris:
Ms. Naslund, at the beginning of
Four Spirits
, you quote William Faulkner and Victoria Gray. Can you tell us why you chose these particular quotations?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: Yes. The quotation from Faulkner—“The past isn't dead; it's not even past”—speaks to the relevance of historical events in our past. It's a surprising and quirky sentence in itself: “The past isn't dead” isn't such an unusual statement, but when you add “It's not even past”, I think the reader perks up and becomes more aware of how issues that might have seemed resolved in the past are still with us, and I very much believe that is relevant to the racial situation in the United States today.

The Victoria Grey quote—“We were spirit people, seed people, no matter how bleak the terrain looked out there, we were planted for a rich harvest”—I chose because of its optimism. Victoria Grey was a Civil Rights activist in Mississippi and I think that the sentence shows a great deal of courage. It also suggests the sort of triumph that
Four Spirits
represents about the Civil Rights movement—that for all of the tragedy and pain of it, important changes were made, and while the transformation isn't complete, we're in a much better situation than we were in the beginning of the 1960's.

 

Rick Harris
: How did you reconcile historical facts with the fictive imagination while writing
Four Spirits
?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: I really like interweaving fact and fiction in my work. In
Sherlock in Love
, I have a historical character named Ludwig the 2nd of Bavaria, and in
Ahab's Wife
I have historical figures Mariah Mitchell, the great woman scientist, and Margaret Fuller, the great woman of letters, interact with my main character.

Four Spirits
is based on the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and therefore characters such as Martin Luther King, and historical events like assassinations must be included. While writing the historical events, I recreated them through the eyes of fictive characters…my intention is to be true to the character as much as to the event, because we all have different perceptions of things. When I handle the characters, I try to make my depiction of them as accurate as possible. I do a great deal of research, which includes reading interviews and, in this case, letters as well. I don't really find that there's a conflict between imagination and fact, or between memory and imagination. Overall, I'm trying to create a certain artistic vision.

It's perhaps comparable to what Robert Penn Warren tried to do with the novel
All the King's Men
, which is based loosely on the assassination of Huey P. Long, the governor of Louisiana. Another good example is Tolstoy's
War and Peace
: when we read
War and Peace
, we're really seeing Tolstoy's vision of events, rather than a presentation that purports to be objective truth. These two different strands weave together and enrich each other, I believe, in our own thinking and certainly, I hope, in the pages of my novels.

 

Rick Harris
: A surprising number of the characters in
Four Spirits
have single or surrogate parents. Was this intentional on your part?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: I think that the orphan child is an emblem of the existential human, meaning it's up to us to create our own values and our own sense of self. Some of my favorite novels deal with orphan or half-orphan characters.
David Copperfield
,
Jane Eyre
,
Anne of Green Gables
, and
Heidi
were all orphans, and it seems to me that presenting children in this sort of naked, unprotected, vulnerable situation is a philosophical choice. I think that human
beings become adults by becoming their own parents, so to speak. So this particular choice emphasizes our isolation, alienation, aloneness, and our necessity to make of ourselves what we can.

 

Rick Harris
:
Four Spirits
embodies a wide range of characters, philosophies, and events. Can you tell us how you feel about the scope of this novel?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: There are so many stories to be told…so I set out to write an inclusive novel, not just a portrait of one person going through a huge social change. I have tried to include people who drew strength from their religious beliefs, because I think the Civil Rights movement in the South depended on the black church and on Christian faith to a large extent. Of course Martin Luther King was also influenced by Gandhi and the Hindu faith, so I didn't want the Christian perspective to be the only one presented. Some of my characters are agnostics, or atheists, some of them are humanists, and some of them have a liberal rather than a traditional view of Christianity.

It seemed to me that the movement came together from many different sources, so I see this book as a kind of mosaic; if you took any one of the separate and individual pieces out, the picture would be less complete, and therefore less true. I also present a variety of viewpoints because I try to promote tolerance and understanding among people as much as possible, and I want the book, in a sense, to be a model of inclusiveness. For example, one of my characters is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He was particularly hard for me to deal with because as an artist I want to treat all of my characters with a certain amount of respect and fullness. So instead of a one-dimensional demon, of sorts, I tried to create a man that everyone could identify with.
Rick Harris
: How would you compare Stella in
Four Spirits
to Una in
Ahab's Wife
?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: Those two characters have a number of things in common, and they have particular differences as well. They are both bright and questioning human beings, but they have different starting points: Una leaves home at age twelve because she's in conflict with her father about his fundamentalist religious beliefs; Stella loses her father when she's five years old in an accident and is, I think, the more confused and uncertain character. Stella also doesn't mature through the course of the book as much as Una does; at the
end of
Four Spirits
, Stella is just beginning to understand her sexual nature, whereas at the end of
Ahab's Wife
, Una has had three husbands and two children. Stella's story is interwoven with the social problems of the time, and Una's story is more personal. But both of these young women are successful in moving forward, and in their effort to mature as full human beings.

 

Rick Harris
: Beyond that, what is the relationship you see between the two books?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: I think both of the books make a statement about the need for religious and spiritual tolerance by trying to embrace a wide variety of people. The social concerns are much more prominent in
Four Spirits
than in
Ahab's Wife
, but
Ahab's Wife
does start off in the world of slavery, and one of the characters in
Four Spirits
is even a descendent of Susan, the slave in
Ahab's Wife
…so there's a kind of wormhole connection between the universes of the two books.

 

Rick Harris
: How did the process of writing
Four Spirits
differ from the process of writing
Ahab's Wife
?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: It was really quite different. The idea for
Ahab's Wife
came to me all in a flash, with a voice and a vision of a woman on a roof-walk, hoping her husband was coming home, looking out to see if he was, realizing he probably wasn't coming home, and beginning her own spiritual quest as she looked at the starry sky and beheld something of its glory. So all in a moment I thought this, and then a voice said, “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last” and I knew I had a novel. And that turned out to be the first sentence of the book.

The roots of
Four Spirits
go much deeper…they're from my own childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. During that time, of course, I didn't know what would become of me any more than Stella knows what will become of her, but I promised myself that if I ever did become a writer, I would write about those times, and try to catch some of the fullness and complexity of it—not just the pain and tragedy, but also the love and faith, the sense of community and family
that was present at that time. So in writing
Four Spirits
, I'm keeping a promise to myself that I made almost forty years ago, which means this book has a special kind of fulfillment for me.

It took me a long time to build up the confidence and the technical ability to feel like I could write this book—after all, it is my sixth. Using multiple perspectives was a particularly challenging move for me, because I like to imagine myself inside a character's skin. I prefer the intensity of that style, but it sometimes means I don't have a lot of distance from my characters. In
Four Spirits
, I had to attach and detach, and attach and detach with different characters many times during the writing process. It was a painful experience because I was relying on my own memories and experiences, as well as a great deal of research, and in the process I had discovered things that I didn't know had happened, even though I was there at the time.

For example, in 1957 after the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth tried to integrate Phillip's High School, where I was a student, the Ku Klux Klan caught an African American man and castrated him, saying “Tell Shuttlesworth this is what will happen to him.” Well, I didn't know that had happened, and when I read about it in Louisville, Kentucky as I was writing the book, I had a great sense of pain and guilt. Incidents like that made me feel like an ordinary German citizen saying, “yes, but we didn't know where that smoke was coming from,” that is to say, there is a kind of defensive posture in saying “I didn't know.” I found that I couldn't do the research after about four o'clock in the afternoon, or I couldn't sleep at night.

So it quite a challenge to my nerves to revisit the time period, but it was something I very much wanted to do. I felt there was a need for it; there's been a lot of wonderful documentary treatment of the Civil Rights movement, but I didn't feel that there was a comprehensive novel on the subject, so it seemed to me something that was needed in the American literary landscape, and besides, I had promised myself to try to do this. It was hard to find the form for the novel in
Four Spirits
—the multiple perspectives—and sometimes I got courage by reading Virginia Woolf's diaries about the writing of
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse
. I discovered that when she was experimenting with form she often felt that she was missing the boat, and having a hard time with it, and of course it turned out gloriously for her, so that was encouraging to me. Writing
Ahab's Wife
was like entering a wonderful dream-world. I can't say that I loved being back in this other world.

 

Rick Harris
: Though an enormous amount was accomplished by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, discrimination and violence remain a big part of this country. What advice would you offer to lawmakers and community leaders in trying to put an end to hate crimes and to further integrate society?

 

Sena Jeter Naslund
: Well, I know that some cities are asking all of their citizens to read a particular book. Two of the books that have been chosen are Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and Ernest J. Gaines'
A Lesson Before Dying
, both of which deal with racial injustice. It seems to me that when civic leaders take the responsibility of promoting a common experience, they're doing something to combat prejudice, and the possible violence that results from prejudice. So I would hope that this practice of bringing a community together by having a common reading experience, and particularly a well chosen one such as those two books represent, could do something for raising the consciousness of people. I tend to think about the problem in terms of, my own bailiwick, which is that of writing fiction, and the hope that when people read imaginative literature, and get inside characters who might otherwise seem strange or different to them, that they become more compassionate.

I think the imagination can be a great moral and spiritual force—that it can expand people's consciousnesses. I believe that if civic leaders can promote communication by having a common object to study and talk about, it would increase the sense of community, not only in combating prejudice, but in a sense of civic pride of place. Some places have everyone wear a button who has read the book, so if you see someone waiting for the bus, and you are both wearing buttons, you have something to talk about. It's a kind of bridge. I hope that all of the arts can help to break down the prejudice, and inclination toward violence that is still very evident in this country.