AN INFORMAL INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR
O.H. (Oscar) Bennett
Q. Where did you go to school and college?
A. Grade school was spent in Georgia, Texas, Alaska, Germany and Kentucky at various Army bases, a typical Army Brat. My high school was Benjamin Bosse High in Evansville, Indiana, where my friends and I started the school's first Writing Club.
My undergraduate degree is a BS in Journalism from the University of Evansville and I received my Master of Fine Arts from George Mason University.Q. What do you do for a living?
A. Currently, I am a technical writer for a software developer. I edit a
range of technical documents that I have no idea what they are trying to say. I write user manuals too. The world indeed has found a way to make even the act of writing boring.Q. How long have you been doing this?
A. Wow. 15 years! My God. Prior to that, I was a Marine for three
years. That was a gas. Everyone who knows me can't believe I did it, but I was one tough defender of the American way. I guess a military strain swam in the blood; my father and sister did twenty years apiece in the Army. There was no time to write while in the service, so I got out. Out of college, I wrote advertising for WCSC radio in Charleston, South Carolina. Best job that paid under 10K a year I ever had!Q. How did you begin writing?
A. My friends and I wrote space adventure stories in high school. We read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Andre Norton.
Q. How long have you been writing?
A. I guess since I was fourteen. I still have notebooks full of really bad short stories to show for it. I kept journals and wrote adventure stories in my spare time. Teachers and professors encouraged me, Mr. Darryl Autry in high school and Dr. Virginia Grabill in college. That was so long ago. I look back at some of the work I was doing in my teens and wonder what they based that encouragement on.
Q. Did you intend to become an author, or do you have a specific reason or reasons for writing The Colored Garden?
A. I've always wanted to be a writer. I've always liked stories, written or oral. I like hearing them and reading them and I wanted to be part of the process. I think that is why the main characters of Garden are storytellers.
Q. What influenced your characters? Do you draw on your own experiences when writing?
A. My father did fight in Vietnam just as Sarge's father, Major, did and my family did spend that time waiting for him living at my grandmother's house. I do have one sister and she was a as big a tattletale as Julie. There aren't many more situational parallels than that, but they did creep in.
Gramma Ruth was constructed from women in my family clearly. She has that strength and common sense and loyalty and frankness of speech. I've observed that in the women in my family all my life. After I put her together though, she became her own person and dictated how the scenes she was in would be resolved. She wouldn't let me play her false! She is stronger than her husband; she looks back at the past, certainly, but she turns it into a garden of color-more a celebration than a haunting.
Sarge may be more like me than I'd care to admit: his love of stories obviously, but also his tendency to play the recluse too. He tends to step back from the circle and observe. Sarge is careful with relationships and somewhat sensitive. He's not me, but he's what I might have been had any of the pivotal, seemingly inconsequential turnings of my own life spun differently.
Q. What do you think your story tells readers about Black Heritage in America?
A. Endurance. I've thought about this a lot. The Colored Garden was the best way I could express it. The future is lost without the past. I remember only a couple of years back a young, black woman told me she didn't like to read stories about American slavery because they only angered her and why bring up such a terrible time? Certainly she misses the point. Our ancestors, black and white and the rest of the rainbow had it harder than we do. The slaves had challenging days that attacked their spirit and their humanity. My ancestors were treated like and were thought of as cattle. They endured without succumbing. What strength! I think that Cakes Huntley and Tommas and Hattie May demonstrate the greatest kind of strength there is because they got up for the next day and the next and the next. How can any African-American, who feels the bite of discrimination or poverty today even think of giving up, even think of losing heart, if she is mindful of her ancestors, if she calls on them, and knows their stories? They will lead by their example. I firmly believe they will rescue us. I believe they want to. Parts of the story of Cakes Huntley are loosely based on a story my grandmother, Katherine Hale, told me about her father, who was born a slave. As she told me about him, I was in awe. A heritage of endurance is a noble thing and a measure to live up to.
Q. How did you develop your plot?
A. I remember this very clearly, the moment the ideas that were to become this novel first hit me. I was getting ready to take the ten-hour drive home for Christmas vacation and I was running around doing all those last minute errands you have to do: have the post office stop your mail, check your car, get some spending money from the bank...the usual checklist. I was driving to my local bank branch on a road I'd driven down many times before, but this time I spotted a set of headstones. And I can't say why, with all the things reoccupying me I would notice these stones on this occasion. But there they were. A little cemetery in the middle of suburbia, flanked by houses on either side. It was the kind of little cemetery that belonged behind one of those tiny, one-room churches that you sometimes see along the highway. But this cemetery was set in a residential section--hidden by it's own incongruity. I drove by it and resolved to stop on my way back, which I did.
There were only a handful of memorials. I visited each of them. There was a family, parents and children, that all had the same death date and I figured a car accident perhaps or something even more grisly. And then I saw the stone of an infant and the words, "Budded on earth to blossom in heaven." Poor baby, I thought, how unfair. And I recall looking at the windows of the nearest house and wondered how strange it would be to have a graveyard for a neighbor. Wouldn't you want to know the stories of the people buried there? How strange to have that reminder of mortality constantly in view. By the time I returned from Christmas vacation most of The Colored Garden was in my head and demanding to get out.
Q. What inspired you to write this story?
A. Conversations with my grandmother at her kitchen table were a huge inspiration. I wanted to bring the truth of them to the ideas that seeing the little cemetery had awakened in my head. It all seemed to tie together.
Q. What authors do you like to read?
A. Ernest J. Gaines, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck are the first three that come to mind. They all have such a strong sense of place in their novels. Gaines has the bayou. Cather her plains. And Steinbeck, his valley. And their writing is accessible and profound and affecting. I read all types though.
Q. What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?
A. Gaines' and Cather's work. My three favorite books are Steinbeck's East of Eden, Richard Wright's Black Boy, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Q. How many hours a day do you devote to writing?
A. Not enough! Here is the source of much inner turmoil! Not enough! Two hours each weekday and four to six hours each weekend day is the regimen to which I try to adhere.
Q. What made you seek out a small publisher?
A. It was the idea of a friend, who, of course, is now even a better friend! A literary agent who read The Colored Garden once said to me that I needed to be writing stories like John Grisham's The Firm. I thought, okay, she's not getting me. She wants big blockbusters that fit a preconceived notion of what makes marketable stories. I think you look for someone who has the time and courage to believe in you. If you're real lucky, you find them.
Q. What are your plans for future novels?
A. My next effort is entitled Creatures Here Below. It is the story of a cynical woman looking for her blessing and finding it. And it is the story of a young man, who is motivated by hate until he crosses paths with someone motivated by love. I think it is a story about and for people who are looking for something, but aren't quite sure what it is. Their courage and their craziness is that they look anyway.