Deborah Johnson Transcript

February 23, 2008

Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s a beautiful snowy day here in New York.My next guest is Deborah Johnson. And she is speaking to me from down south about her new novel “The Air Between Us”. Welcome to the show.

Deborah Johnson: Thank you for having me.

Kent: And are you down in Mississippi right now?

Deborah: Yes, I am with much better weather than you all are having in New York, I think.

Kent: I think so. I have to say though my dog loves playing in the snow and eating it and all that. We come in all wet but she’s a happy dog.

Deborah: [laughs] Yes.

Kent: So tell me a little bit about your background. Your new novel “The Air Between Us”, tell me how you came to write this.

Deborah: It was given - the idea, I got the idea many years - a few years ago from my brother, who is a surgeon. And he talked to me just about things that had happened in my father’s life. My father was also a surgeon in the 1950s and the 1960s. So the idea of different things that had happened to him percolated in my thinking for a while. And that became the basis for this book.

Kent: Do you by chance have a section that you could read from it for us?

Deborah: Oh, my goodness. I didn’t have - I’ve got it right here so I guess I’ll just read the very beginning. About how long do you want me to read?

Kent: A few minutes.

Deborah: OK. I’ll read how the book starts.

Kent: Wonderful.

Deborah: OK? “The battered 1952 Ford pickup jolted across - against the curb, bouncing the driver just high enough so you could see the tip of his head, making him look for all the world like a teeny ghost, a low riding specter.”The sight froze the two men, Charlie Simons and Butter Bob Lathan, standing at the ‘coloreds only’ Emergency Room entrance to Doctor’s Hospital, stock still. They watched a cloud of dust cover the truck as it started bumping its way onto the gravel rock parking lot. Amazed, the men continued to stare as the pickup emerged from the gritty fog and honed in on the door right behind them.”The head did not bob into view again and for an instant each man thought he had imagined it. This false comfort did not last long. The truck was there and it was coming straight for them. Their minds and told them to dive for cover, and quickly, but their bodies were locked in place like the gears of a car. Both men thought they were dead for sure.”The truck jerked to a halt “three feet from my kneecap” as Charlie would spend his winter day in Nick Carter’s One-stop Barbershop telling anybody who cared to listen”. “And that truck must have been coming 50 miles an hour if it was coming at all. You can bet I saw them pearly gates.”"Thus this first of many strange events that were to occur that autumn in the town of Revere Mississippi, population 20, 000 and diminishing rapidly, naturally became famous. With each telling, the truck’s speed increased and the distance to Charlie’s kneecap decreased until one was up to 60 and the other down to no more than two inches, one inch if Charlie had spent time in some juke joint the night before.”Within a matter of days most everybody in Revere had heard the tale at least once. No one questioned if that old rattletrap truck could even have reached 60 miles an hour, which it could not have.”Instead, the Reveries all nodded, impressed and sobered by Charlie’s choice of biblical allusion. This was later, after all. And right then he wasn’t thinking about any implications whatsoever rather then those that had to do with protecting his life from destruction.”The truck stopped so close, so thoroughly that a puff of dust following billowed around it, ghostlike. It was seriously dawning on Charlie’s mind that he should be high-tailing it on out of there, and right now. The man remembered that quick glance of bobbing head and he remembered how thoroughly it had disappeared again.”Beside him, Butter Bob had already started a slow turn toward the driveway. Then through the haze, both men heard the driver’s door crank open, heard a thud and the paddle of small, bare feet running toward them along the path dirt stirring up the dust.”The owner of the feet pulled up short, coughed, tried to speak, coughed again. The men couldn’t tell if it was the excitement or the dust. Both black men, strikingly dark in their white emergency-room uniforms rushed forward, one to the truck, the other to the child.”Charlie Simons, the older of the two, bent down eye to eye with the youngster. The child looked to him to be about 10. No wonder they hadn’t seen him over the wheel.”Charlie shook his head”. “Boy, what you doing driving that?” Before he could finish he heard Butter Bob’s whistle and then his carefully articulated, “Shit”.”Charlie Simons was an elder deacon at the Mount Union Missionary Baptist Church and did not normally feel at liberty to use such language. But in the context of telling a real story, like being in court, you felt called upon to present only the unvarnished truth. And the unvarnished truth was that he took a certain naughty pleasure in shocking an eliciting gasp from whatever womenfolk happened to be hearing him.”"Pardon me, ladies”, he would say as an aside, when he retold his tale again and again, “But you all know what kind of man Butter Bob Lathan is as well as I do. One of those Lathan men from over in Brooksville and you know he really is capable of using such language.”"Everybody could agree with him on that. Now however, in this rundown driveway, Charlie stared at the boy jiggling around in front of him then glanced over at Butter sidling away from the truck.”Charlie got up very, very slowly. He sure did not like the sound of that one word, “Shit.” This part of course would be left out at the eventual tale telling at Carter’s. But this was 1966. And this was Mississippi. And no god fearing, right-thinking, Tomlinson’s having black man wanted to be dealing with any kind of shit after sundown.”Do you want me to go on or should I stop?

Kent: That’s wonderful.

Deborah: Thank you.

Kent: Your storytelling is so vivid and I can see, you know the patter of bare feet on the dirt and the voices. Do you see these scenes in your head? Do you hear these voices?

Deborah: I don’t really see - did I see this scene in my head? Yes, I do because when you - I like figure out the scene. Sort of, this is how I want this to work. And then, by working it so much, it becomes its own character. So yes, you do. I do see the child running and I see the people and I see the lights and I still see it.

Kent: Huh, wonderful.

Deborah: Every time I read it.

Kent: And this is your first novel. Have you written a novel before? Have you done other short stories?

Deborah: I’ve written historical romances about Italy in the time of the Hundred Years War. I lived there for quite awhile. And I’ve written those. This is my first book in Mississippi, my first book for HarperCollins.

Kent: And how does it feel to write about where you are from?

Deborah: This felt really good to write about this. I had the idea for the book before I moved here. But when I moved here it placed the book and it gave it power that it didn’t have before when I was thinking about it. It was an entirely different book. The anecdotes were the same. The basis and the core, but when I brought it here, it like took on this place sort of.

Kent: Now, did I mistakenly say you are from there? Where are you from?

Deborah: I’m actually - I grew up in Nebraska and Missouri.

Kent: Oh, wow.

Deborah: So I know snow too. [laughs]

Kent: So in moving to Mississippi, you really experienced the smells and the feel and the sounds?

Deborah: Hmm. It’s very easy to do that down here because they are so characteristic.

Kent: And so, let’s talk about race a little bit. It’s so fascinating right now. We were just talking about politics with my former, my first guest. And you know I probably shouldn’t say whom I support, but I support a very young African-American candidate. It’s fascinating to me to see that a black man and a white woman can be so popular. It gives me hope for our political system. It gives a lot of us hope for where the country’s going. Talk a little bit about politics, if you would.

Deborah: Well, I think I support the same candidate you do and for the same reasons. I think that for me, I grew up in the Civil Rights era. We always…Growing up back then was a very hopeful time too. No matter the difficulties we were facing it was still a hopeful time that change could be made. But no matter then even though we could talk about the fact, “well you know one day we’ll have a black president”! That that was a possibility, still seeing the wish it’s just marvelous. It’s just marvelous to be here.I lived in Italy for 18 years and it was really marvelous to see that democrats abroad have given him a primary too. So it’s just a message for the whole world that we as a country have come a long way that we could even be considering a black or a woman for president.

Kent: Now, I was a bit of an ex-patriot myself for a little while. I lived in Europe and the Middle East. Why did you end up in Italy?

Deborah: I went there actually to study Latin. I was brought up as a good Catholic girl and I ended up staying.

Kent: Wonderful. And did you start writing there? Is that…?

Deborah: Yes, I did, actually yes.

Kent: And how did you make these connections to…? Now you’re with HarperCollins writing a novel. Is this where you thought you’d be?

Deborah: You know, I always wanted to be a writer and to write for Amstead, which is my imprint at HarperCollins, which is like a dream come true.One of my own favorite books is “To Kill a Mockingbird”. When we went in to discuss changes on the book when I was in New York and it had just been sold, I was under a- what is it?- a poster of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the conference room that we were in. It was just “Wow! This is it!”[laughter]

Deborah: I can say I’m really happy and pleased about what has happened. I don’t know that I exactly dreamed this. Mostly when I’m working on a book I’m just into the book. I don’t know where it’s going to take me but I’m very happy where this one took me.

Kent: I imagine you probably finished this book a good while ago. Are you at work on another project?

Deborah: Yes I am. It’s called “The Secret of Magic” and it takes place in the same small town of Revere, Mississippi in 1946 just after the Second World War.

Kent: Wow. Now have you had some connections…? This is a beautifully written book that…

Deborah: Thank you.

Kent: It has the ultimate charm of a Mark Twain, a Tom Sawyer, a Huck Finn. Do you have an audience in high school children as well as adults?

Deborah: You know, I don’t know. It’s only been out a month but I know that people have recommended it to high school students.

Kent: I think it would be a wonderful book for them to pick up and to bring up the race relations. They still exist. How far have we come since the 60s?

Deborah: Yeah. With Barack Obama of course it’s obvious that we’ve come a long way. They’re a still a lot of things that need to be done in a lot of ways that we can improve. But to say that we haven’t come any distance would, I think, be incorrect; we’ve come a great distance.I think that many people, not just with blacks and whites, but all races there is this sort of hunger and yearning for people to work together, among a great many people. And we see it right now in our process to elect-choose- our next president.

Kent: I find it nice to listen to Barack Obama. I think just about every political group does. They are all amazed by his oration ability. And I’ve never heard anyone speak like that except for when I was a child in school listening to Dr. King…

Deborah: Right.

Kent: …and listening to JFK. It’s a wonderful time I think.

Deborah: It’s a wonderful time, right. It’s a wonderful time.

Kent: Now you grew up in the Midwest?

Deborah: Yeah.

Kent: How did that come to play in your book?

Deborah: My growing up there?

Kent: Yeah. Did you come through your characters at all?

Deborah: I don’t know. Friends tell me, I can’t guess myself. The character I think as being most like me friend, different friends think other characters are most like me. But in every book you write or every book I’ve written friends have said, “This sounds just like you.” And so I think you do come through in your characters.Growing up in the Midwest I think people are pretty much the same no matter where they are and so I think that just getting a grip on character is the most important thing. Just understanding what motivates people and why people act? Trying to understand what motivates them and why they act in the way they do is what powers the book.

Kent: In one of the key hooks of the book is there are physicians in it. Is it your father was a physician? Are you related…?

Deborah: Yes, he was.

Kent: Yep.

Deborah: My dad graduated…well, this is what my brother tells me and this is what became the basis of the book. My father graduated in 1955 from medical school and at that time, which was more than 50 years ago, not many people would want a black physician to operate on them. He was a surgeon and he was a good one.So what would happen would be that the attending physician would be there when the patient went to sleep and then my father would come and do the surgery. Now he was a real surgeon but he would just actually do the real surgery and the patient would wake up and not know this. And so the concept of this fascinated me for a long time and became the basis of this book.

Kent: Now was your father ever worried? What if the patient woke up and saw that it was a black man operating on him?

Deborah: [laughs] I don’t know if a patient would wake up in the middle of surgery but I think it was a different practice of medicine back then and smaller hospitals without the I litigation that goes on right now.I don’t think it…and I’ve been asked this, I don’t think that people did this in a way to like be, how can I say, to deputize. They really actually wanted to do what was the best for the patient. And in many instances this was best for the patient. But what occurred to me as I was working on the book was not that the patient work up, but what if the patient died.

Kent: Right.

Deborah: So that became the basis of this book.

Kent: And there’s the connection to “To Kill a Mockingbird” also. It’s that really painful divide between the races. Now, it’s been a wonderful conversation. We had a chance to listen to the first little bit of the book. That was beautiful. The book is called “The Air Between Us”. It was just released by an imprint of HarperCollins. We’ve had Deborah Johnson on the show. Thank you so much.

Deborah: Thank you so much for having me.

Kent: Good luck!

Deborah: Thank you, bye-bye.

Kent: My next guest is Marsha Genensky from the Anonymous 4, an incredible singing group that blends the sounds of Baroque, folk, and much more. Come on back for that.

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