By J. Schuberth 

Attica Locke has been busy. The award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and TV producer behind such shows as Empire, When They See Us, From Scratch, and Little Fires Everywhere is currently in a multi-year development deal with Universal Television, working on an adaptation of her Edgar-Award-winning Highway 59 trilogy, among other shows.

The Coachella Review caught up with Locke to talk about her writing process; her love of TikTok; the aesthetic and political value of land; going to museums in a bathing suit; and the final book in her Highway 59 trilogy, Guide Me Home. The novel opens with recently divorced Darren Matthews turning in his Texas Ranger badge after being painted as a vigilante. Then his mother, Bell, who is responsible for his legal troubles, shows up sober, asking for his help in finding a missing Black college student whose father and white sorority sisters say she isn’t missing at all. Without a badge and facing potential prison time, Darren investigates what happened to the missing woman while struggling to accept his mother’s love despite their history.

 

The Coachella Review: I wanted to start by asking about your writing process for the trilogy. The emotional arc and the legal troubles of the main character, Darren Matthews, develop over the course of the trilogy, and then each book is its own case. Did you always know where you were going with Darren? Or did his path unfold as you watched him interact with these cases?

Attica Locke: The second. I had no idea where it was going. In fact, after the first two books, which each ended on a cliffhanger, I was like, Oh, how are we gonna wrap this up? I thought that this book series would be longer. I only decided during 2020 during the Covid lockdown that it would become a trilogy, and it was because we all were just like, are we ever leaving home? I had always wanted to write a Darren Matthews novel because Highway 59 goes from Laredo all the way to Arkansas. It goes all the way up the east side of the state, and I always wanted to do a story in Laredo.

I was thinking about that in 2020, and I [thought], But I can’t, because I can’t go anywhere, and I don’t know if our lives are ever going to be the same. So I started changing my thinking and beginning to realize between that fact and the fact that I had this life in television, which was taking up more time, I didn’t necessarily want the book series to go on for fifteen or twenty years. Also, the series was an inadvertent look at the Trump era, and I was changing my mind about how much I wanted to be immersed in that, especially through the lens of law enforcement and guns. So no, it wasn’t until I started Guide Me Home that I was like, Oh, I’m actually wrapping this up, and I don’t know how to do it. I’ve never wrapped up a trilogy before, and I’m frightened.

TCR: You did a very good job. It reads as a trilogy, and when I finished, I was hoping, Maybe she’ll write a second trilogy.

AL: Maybe I will, but for now I have so many feelings about saying goodbye to Darren, and of course, it’s saying goodbye to him in these books. There’s this other part of my life where we’re talking about trying to make him exist on television. So that’s a whole other thing to discover him in a new way. So I don’t know what will happen. But no, the answer to the question is, I just kind of felt my way through.

TCR: As someone who writes, that makes me feel better, as right now, I can’t figure out how to end my book.

AL: That’s exciting because then it becomes like reading. It becomes like, Let me take a walk and just think. You surprise yourself.

TCR: When asked why many of your novels have male protagonists, you said, “When you’re going through life as a Black woman and some weird shit goes down, I don’t go to gender first, I go right to race … I am Black before I’m a woman.” That said, Bell, Darren’s mother, is one of the most fascinating female characters I’ve read in a long time, and I felt like Guide Me Home was as much her story as it was Darren’s. Without giving anything away, can you talk about the intersection of race and gender, and also socioeconomics, in the character of Bell?

AL: Well, I’ll start by saying this, I am so Gen X. I couldn’t be more Gen X. So part of my binariness and thinking is very much [influenced by] how I was raised. And then also it has been my experience that mostly when I’ve run into trouble it’s because I’m Black. I will say, and I hate to get people in trouble, but it wasn’t until I worked on Empire, where it was predominantly a room of color, that I went: This is sexist. It was like when [the situation] removed race as an issue, I could see the sexism popping around in the room. But normally, when I go through life in mostly white spaces, [and] I have trouble, it is mostly because I’m Black first and a woman second.

But anyway, Bell, my sweet baby Bell, I love her to pieces. She’s— I don’t even know how to explain where she came from, other than I do like writing complicated mothers. I do like writing ambivalent mothers. She almost came fully formed for me in the very first scene I wrote of her in Bluebird, Bluebird. When I wrote her, she was sitting on the steps of her trailer, picking toenail polish off of her toe and had a can of beer at her feet. I was like, I know her. Now I know her. And she told her son that she had food on the stove—she didn’t have food on the stove. Just something about discovering in the moment. I’m learning more and more to accept and respect this about myself and give myself free rein.

Jane Smiley says in her book, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel: “Writing is writing. It’s not planning.” So for me, I really discover things in the act itself. I can sit outside of a book and go: I think it’s about this, or I think it’s gonna happen. But really it is only in the actual writing where people actually come alive and I become clear about what I’m trying to say. So I discovered Bell in the writing. And then my heart kind of felt for her. Even before all of the details that come out in this latest book, I had a sense that somehow she got dealt something wrong. And there was class in there. There was just a lot of stuff in there where her life didn’t turn out the way that she wanted it to. Her reaction to it was ugly sometimes, but I also had compassion. She’s really fun to write, because she’s just at the extremes of everything. And I was very tickled and interested in the idea that Darren’s mother would bring him a case, and that the two of them would somehow be working a case together. I thought that was just rich, and I couldn’t resist.

TCR: In the first two novels of the trilogy, Darren’s cases are located where people have been connected to the places for generations, and so the land is central to the idea of home for those characters. In Guide Me Home, the case centers around Thornhill, which is described as a modern-day mill town that provides housing, medical care, and education for the people working at the Thornhill meat processing plant. Can you talk about why you wanted to write about such an artificial place like Thornhill after you had written about such deeply rooted places?

AL: It started because I thought I was gonna write this story about Laredo and I wanted to write about a factory on the border. So I started reading books about factories and meat processing. It actually started from a book that never existed, where I was going to be writing a border town story in a factory. Then it went from there. I was purposely doing the artifice of the pastoral—that they name all the streets after trees, but it’s a completely plastic kind of place. I don’t really know. All I can say is, it came from wanting to look at factories and labor. And it grew then into researching that there were these mill towns around lumber and around cutting wood in this exact part of East Texas. I could somehow use that to move into a modern-day way of living.

I find it interesting that while I was writing this book— I’m a big lover of TikTok, just love it— I saw several TikToks of people saying, and they were being hyperbolic but they weren’t, that we’re not far off from living at Target or living at Walmart. We live where we work, where we eat, where we get our glasses. You know, one day it feels like workers are just gonna be consumed inside of the corporate animal. And I’m just interested by all of that and certainly, on the other side of Covid, having watched the ways companies put their employees at risk for profit had a really big effect on me.So yeah, that’s where it kind of all came from. And it made me nervous, I think. And no one’s ever said it to me like you just said it about the artifice versus the pastoral. I didn’t think of that consciously, but unconsciously you can add that to the list of things I was scared about with this book. That I was doing something different and I was afraid. I have a tendency to think that different is bad. Even though I talked to Jami Attenberg about this once. I interviewed her, and she’s like, “Oh, my God! If everybody was the same, why would you even bother?” I think about that a lot to remind myself, to give permission, even within a book series, to make each book different.

TCR: Darren is torn between the different ways in which his uncles have confronted injustice. On the one hand, he has an uncle who’s a lawyer, and on the other, a Texas Ranger. Darren eventually decides to go the Texas Ranger route, and in your Black Water Rising series—do you call it a series?

AL: No, you know what’s funny is, I don’t think of it as a series. [My book] Pleasantville is like a weird sequel in the way that Scott Turow’s book Innocent is, like, thirty-years later [to Presumed Innocent]—it’s clearly a sequel, but I don’t think of it as a series. And I don’t know that I’ll ever return to it. But I wouldn’t argue with anybody who calls it that because it is connected, clearly.

TCR: In those two books—which may or may not be a series—Black Water Rising and Pleasantville, your main character is an attorney. In the Highway 59 trilogy, your main character is a Texas Ranger. Were there issues you felt like you couldn’t get at, writing from an attorney’s perspective, that you could get at, writing from the vantage point of someone with a badge and a gun?

AL: No. Darren was, not [quite] an accident, but my first idea about this book series was just Highway 59. Each book is a different town, a different crime. It was an agent and an editor who were like, Well, if you’re doing a real series, Attica, where’s the character that we’re going to see every book? And then I was like: Well, who? Wait, what? I knew I wanted to write about East Texas, and I wanted the swath of Highway 59, which, I said before, is Laredo to Arkansas. And who goes all over the place? I asked myself, is it an attorney? Is it a PI? Who would it be? And then the answer became obvious, that it was a Texas Ranger, because they literally range. That’s what they do. They’re stationed by region.

So that’s where Darren came from. And then I had to develop who he was. But no, he was an accident but became a wonderful gift to me to explore a lot of my ambivalence about being a Black Texan—a lot of my ambivalence about my own love for my home state, my love for my country. He became a real gift.

TCR: In an article in the Guardian, you wrote that your family stayed in Texas because, “they had land and that land meant economic power, a way to become self-sustaining citizens again. Land is a political tool.” Political and economic power around land is central to all of Darren’s cases. But also for Darren, it seems that the land has an aesthetic pleasure and even a sense of, I’m going to say, a spiritual home. When he’s sitting on his porch in Camilla, Darren says, “The sun was starting to set, and the light was a holy gold, the breeze tinkling the wind chimes in a way that brought to mind church bells and angels.” Is the sense of beauty of the land independent of its political and economic value? Or do you feel that the aesthetic is wrapped up with its history?

AL: I think I have a brain that always holds it all. One of my books, The Cutting Season, is about a plantation. I remember having to wrestle with myself and just admit in writing this, it had to own its beauty. It’s stunning. I have to own it and hold all the other complications.

My husband and I once went to Hawaii, and we went to a lūʻau, because I’m in Hawaii. I’m going to sign up for these little pamphlets they have. And I get there, and I’m like, This is a plantation. What? So then I was like, Oh no. The rest of my trip, I was in museums in a swimsuit. I’m like, Now I need to know everything about how this all came together. How you have so many different cultures that ended up…? I need to know all of it. So I’m somebody who’s just nosy, curious. So wherever I go, I am frequently holding both the aesthetic pleasure of it and what it all means. I think it just naturally comes to me that way.

And I think that I want to make clear that when I’m writing about East Texas, part of the conundrum of my feelings for my home state is that it makes me feel all of these spiritual feelings, because from that dirt came my whole life. Came doctors, politicians, educators, colonels in the army. All of that came out of cotton farming and corn farming, and it is very pretty. It is very, very beautiful, so I think you have to hold both.

I had a passage in this book that I cut out because it just didn’t fit, about Darren’s discomfort that even though he talks about his family’s land, it’s also not really his. It was taken from Native folk to white folks, and then it went to him. But whose is it? Really? So that in the very end of the book, he calls himself a steward of it, so that he disrupts the idea of ownership. And just says, For whatever reason in this lifetime, me and my family were stewards of this land for a hundred-plus years, and just leave it at that. Because I’m now becoming uncomfortable. As much as I understand that land for Black people was such clearly a leg up in the rural South after slavery, it’s also weird, because it just went from Native people [living on it], then the white people took it, and then we tried to homestead some stuff to jump-start our lives, but it doesn’t change the fact that Native people were pushed off. So it’s all very complicated and uncomfortable, and I found that I couldn’t write just openly about ours, ours, ours—it’s all very complicated.

TCR: Do you consider yourself a crime novelist?

AL: [I’m] whatever anybody wants to call me. Crime novelist, Black writer, short writer, woman writer, mom writer. I’m kind of all of these things, and I don’t have a problem with any of them. Nor do I think that crime writing is a pejorative. My affection and love for the power of crime writing is a big through-line in my life, not only as a reader but as a writer. The beauty of it is that it makes these big philosophical ideas tactile and at hand and on the ground and really right here. So even when you want to pontificate for paragraphs about some big idea, well, you left a dead body on page two, so you gotta kind of get back to that. So it’s given me structure. But really, I think I come back to these themes.

There’s the prurient. What I mean by prurient, isn’t even just that. I also mean, there’s a prurience to staring at ugly things. Because as a woman, as a person of color, there’s this fascination with danger, and how can I get around, maybe see how they did it, and there’s all of that. But there’s also the part of me that finds that crime and crime fiction lay bare the fallacy of scarcity thinking, in my opinion. Every novel to me is a crime novel, because either you’re talking about literally violent crime or a crime of passion or a moral crime or the crime of not-enoughness. There’s not enough money, there’s not enough love, there’s not enough land, when actually there kind of is. And thinking that there isn’t enough betrays people and ends up leading frequently to violent, unhinged behavior. And so I feel like exploring where people make a terrible mistake because they thought there wasn’t enough ends up showing you that there maybe is enough. That there’s a way.

There is a theme that runs through Guide Me Home about resource sharing and the idea of the fallacy of the American way of doing everything by yourself. The whole point of governments and societies is to resource share—that’s the whole thing. There is no moral high ground to “I don’t need anybody else in my life.” It’s a fallacy. And you will end up doing stupid things if you hold on to that way of thinking. That was a very long way to say I proudly wear the moniker of crime writer, and probably any other moniker that somebody would give to me.

TCR: Were there books that particularly influenced the writing of this trilogy?

AL: It feels weird to say no, but I would say no. I probably avoided reading Joe Lansdale while I was writing. Or James Lee Burke. But Highway 59 is literally stamped in my DNA; my entire family going back on my mother’s side, and my dad’s side going back to slavery, come from towns along this highway. I spent my childhood riding up and down this highway. I wrote a script that I took to the Sundance Labs in 1999 when I wanted to be a movie director. That was about Highway 59. It is so entrenched in my bones that it just flowed. It just really kind of flowed out. So no, that feels weird, but no.

TCR: What are you reading that’s got you excited?

AL: I’ve had a doozy. I’ve had a good, good run. So speaking of the majesty of place and the story behind it, The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan. Loved. I just read Long Island Compromise [by Taffy Brodesser-Akner]. Loved. I am presently reading a book called The Silence of the Choir [by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr]. It’s about migrants arriving in a little Sicilian town. I love it. The book that has had a powerful impact on me—it’s nonfiction—is Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying. That had a really powerful impact on me. So those are the kind of juicy great ones I’ve had in the last couple of months.

TCR: Do we get any hint of what you’re working on next?

AL: Right now, immediately in front of me is a lot of TV work. There are books that are coming, but they are not fully formed. They’re just stars way out in the galaxy. There’s like a twinkle kind of out there somewhere that I have a feeling about, but not even really a story. So it’s TV work right now and then a book, when I can do a book again.

---

J. Schuberth holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of religion from the University of Chicago and was a Tin House 2020 novel workshop recipient. She has worked in academics and finance, and recently graduated from UC Riverside’s low-residency MFA.