What inspired you to write this story?

The seed of the novel first sprouted when I was thinking about the life of my grandmother, who became pregnant with my mother at age fourteen and gave birth to her at fifteen. This was the 1950s, when having a child out of wedlock was the ultimate sin. My mother did not know her mother was her mother until she was in the third grade. Until that moment, she had been raised by her grandmother, and it had never been openly discussed. The idea for The House of Eve started with a what if? What if my grandma had money and opportunity, and when she found herself pregnant and in trouble she was sent away to have my mother in a home for unwed women? What if she’d been able to erase the humiliation of bearing a child out of wedlock, and had been  able to return to her life in North Philadelphia and start over like it never happened?

When Eleanor first appeared to me, she was full of rage and desperate to have a child. I had recently watched Toni Morrison’s “The Pieces I Am” documentary where she says that she didn’t know that Black folks separated themselves by color until she stepped foot on Howard University’s campus in 1949 from Lorain, OH. From these nuggets the idea of Eleanor was born. I started wondering what would a woman like Eleanor do if she found herself married to the son of one of the wealthiest Black families in town, but could not give him a child. What would her desperation to fit into a new world where cause her to do? 

When I first start writing a novel, I often feel like I have all of these beautiful Christmas ornaments, but I need a tree to hang them on. After a drive to Washington D.C., to see the site of the Florence Crittendon Home for Girls (the center of my research), I got those goosebumps that tells me that I’m making a connection with voices that want their story told. Marginalized voices that have been silenced. I learned that these homes were started for prostitutes, fallen women and wayward girls, but when I looked closer, I learned that in reality, the houses were filled with girls who merely had sex and ended up pregnant. Sometimes they were in love, sometimes they were the victim of rape, but no matter what: they were all shamed. I had found my tree.

Your author’s note mentioned that you did an extensive amount of research. Was there anything that you found during your research that surprised you?

An astonishing fact that I uncovered was that between 1945-1973, 1.5 million women in the U.S. lost children to forced adoption in homes for unwed mothers. I say lost because they were forced to give their babies up. Shame, coerced, made to believe they would land in prison if they resisted, often told they had no other choice. Until 1969, abortion was illegal and punishable by imprisonment for the both the mother and the doctor. Unmarried women were pressed to give up their babies because there were no IVF treatment and the only way for married couples who suffered from infertility was through adoption. 

Another one of the gems of my research  came through my discovery of Dorothy Porter Wesley, a librarian, biographer and curator who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection and who serves as inspiration for Eleanor’s boss at Howard University’s library. When Wesley realized that the Dewey Decimal System had only two numbers, one for slavery and one for colonization, she created space, in the Dewey Decimal System, for African American productivity.

And was there anything you discovered that didn’t make it into the book?

When I research a story, I often fall down the rabbit holes of history and learn many interesting facts that do not make it into the novel. Often times I know parts of the character’s backstory that doesn’t need to be mentioned, but it helps in the way the character moves and informs the choices they make. For the character Leap, for example, I knew that he had been abused as a child and that is why it was easy for him to prey on Ruby. 

 What was the process of writing two distinct, yet parallel, storylines for Ruby and Eleanor?

Each time I begin a new book I try to challenge myself with a new technique. I honestly had not intended to write two distinct storylines. When I began The House of Eve it was Ruby’s story alone. Eleanor’s voice came much later, and her voice was so strong that I was afraid that she would try to take over the story. My process for writing Ruby and Eleanor was essentially to write out their stories separately. I wrote the novel in four parts, and I would spend weeks with one character at a time. This helped me to get to know each voice and focus on what each girl wanted more than anything in the world and what obstacles were in her way. Once I reached the end of that section, I’d take the weekend off to get her voice out of my head. On Monday morning, I’d start the same process with the opposite character. Then, I’d find the best entry points to braid the two stories together. Oftentimes the parallel lines happened naturally. 

Despite the hardships that the characters undergo in this story, there remains themes of second chances and hope. Was it difficult to balance those elements while maintaining the realism of the time period?

I have found that every novel I write has themes of love, forgiveness, family, classism, colorism, racism and motherhood threaded throughout. These universal themes work in every time period and it was quite easy for me to weave through the hardship that the characters face while always offering a glimpse of light and hope. 

Tell us about what you’re writing next!

I have just begun sketching out a new story. I can’t share much about it just yet because it is still in the infancy stages in my head, but I will say that it is another historical fiction novel set between two worlds.

SPONSORED BY