Shape-shifters appear in nearly every folklore, and the “transformer” has always been something fascinating to me-if for no other reason than there are times I kind of wish I was somebody else. When I first used to come to New York, I would leave the Bronx in my normal clothes, and go to the Barnes & Noble in Union Square and change into my fabulous gay clothes-and then rush back to Barnes & Noble before 10 p.m., like Cinderella, to put on my normal clothes again and head back to the Bronx. Of the holy trinity of monsters-Dracula, Frankenstein, and Wolfman-I was always for the Wolfman.īut also, there’s a connection between the idea of shape-shifting and code-switching. I’ve always loved shape-shifters in comics.

The simple answer is that shape-shifters are flippin’ cool.

Sogolon spends quite a big chunk of his book in the presence of daughters, relatives, queens, would-be queens, princesses, and would-be princesses. I’m very interested in those relationships.

And then Beloved, because I’m constantly rereading Morrison, one thing she does so well is write about women among women. A lot of that is the influence of Wolf Hall. My character navigates through a royal court that she doesn’t belong to, and there’s the threat of violence at every turn amid all this pomp, ceremony and finery-her biggest struggle is just to stay alive. When I was writing this, two books were on my desk the whole time: Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Besides Rashomon, any essential texts that you draw from? Their views on people and on each other are different, and the relationships are different. I love the idea of two, three people telling supposedly the same story, but they don’t add up at all. And-it’s funny, because I have yet to watch the show-the idea of the trilogy moving in a nonlinear and more associative instead of sequential logic came from somebody telling me about the TV show The Affair. Rashomon, which was three movies about one event, was a model for me. I don’t know if I’ve experienced that rejection of the notion of an objective, quantifiable truth in the same way with any other sort of serial fiction telling. At the same time, I couldn’t write Black Leopard if I didn’t believe Tracker. I will say that I couldn’t write Moon Witch if I didn’t believe Sogolon. The idea is that just because you told a story, it doesn’t have a stamp of authenticity. In Jamaican storytelling, there’s a thing that the storyteller says at the end of the story, which I don’t think has a direct translation in English: “Jack Mandora mi nu choose none.” It’s basically meant as a verbal agreement that no blame for inaccuracy should be attributed to either the listener or storyteller.

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