I AM A. DESHA

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"I'd been reading James W. Lowen's Sundown Towns, a history of whites-only communities in America, and it was from Lowen that I learned about Hugo Green's Negro Motorist Green Book, the real-life Safe Negro Travel Guide. I decided to make my lead character a field researcher for a Jim Crow-era guidebook, someone whose job was to drive around the country, looking for hotels and restaurants that would serve him. I also decided to make him a pulp-fiction fan —someone who, if he saw a flying saucer setting down in a field, would be intrigued rather than frightened. But the real reason he'd keep running into monsters was because he was black, and when you're black in America, there's always a monster. Sometimes it's Lovecraftian Elder Gods; sometimes it's the police or the Klan, or the Registrar of Voters."