You tell the story from the perspectives of three people involved: a victim, a perpetrator, and the child/witness.

Answering for race crimes and oppression is still one of the great moral challenges of the American people.Īs you mentioned, a young white child witnesses the horrific lynching of the black couples. The Vain Conversation follows Lonnie Henson, a white witness to the lynchings as he attempts seeks a way to redemption and ultimately salvation. When is history really historical? The past makes the world we live in now, and the legacy of Jim Crow is strong with us. Yet some of our popular novels and movies on issues arising from Jim Crow-so-called race redemption narratives-suggest the ease with which we have reckoned with the violence and deprivation of this recent past. They settle for happy, often self-satisfying, endings and ignore the obvious. Jim Crow oppression was pervasively injurious to black people, and in a different way, to white people, too, and yet there has been no deep and honest reckoning with that nasty bit of American history. There has been no truth and reconciliation, no sincere attempt at repairing the damage of, or ameliorating the resurgence of race and caste oppression. Why did you choose to explore these historical events with this novel? It is inspired by real events that took place that same year in the state. The Vain Conversation deals with an American tragedy-a lynching of two black couples in 1946 Georgia. The length of time between publications was co-incidental and certainly unplanned. In fact, I began The Vain Conversation five years before Bombingham. Though I didn’t work consistently on it, it has taken 27 years from conception to publication. In that time, I have published two other books and written two novels which are now in circulation. I have also written and published many poems and collected them into a manuscript about travels in Africa. The long time it has taken for the publication of The Vain Conversation reflects both my struggle to find a form for the novel and the timidity of the publishing industry to embrace the subject of American race violence from my particular point-of-view.

Did you make a conscious effort to take this amount of time in between books? Bombingham, your last novel, was released 2001. Your new novel, The Vain Conversation was released in March 2018.

Bombingham by Anthony Grooms