by Carolyn Marie Wilkins
Historical fiction brings the past to life in a way that helps us understand ourselves and others. As an African American growing up in the 1950s, I learned more about the antebellum South from Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee than I ever learned at school. Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage taught me about the transatlantic slave trade. Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved forever changed the way I thought of life in America after the Civil War.
The power of well-researched historical fiction to teach us about the past is undeniable. Its ability to help us understand our present-day world is less clearly understood. The English philosopher Edmund Burke tells us that “In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.” As we study history, we identify the patterns that underlie our present-day realities. Or, as Winston Churchill famously said, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” In historical fiction, the events of the past serve as a looking glass through which we can see our present-day challenges from a fresh perspective.
My book Murder at the Wham Bam Club is set in the roaring twenties, almost exactly a hundred years ago. It was a lively and colorful era, chock-full of opportunities for murder and mayhem to unfold at breakneck speed.
Hot jazz was in. So was dancing the Charleston. Gangsters and bootleggers operated in flagrant disregard of the law. Flappers with short skirts, short hair, and loose morals swigged bootleg gin in speakeasies.
There was no Internet. There were no televisions and no computers. Most Americans did not even have a telephone. This bygone era feels quaint in its distance from our modern-day world. As I dug deeper into the history of the period, however, I discovered profound similarities between the roaring twenties and life in America today.
In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, a major anti-immigration bill that set quotas on who could enter the US based on the perceived racial characteristics of immigrants. This bill was actively supported by a broad coalition of right-wing groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, who believed the only true Americans were white, Protestant, and native-born. Then as now, minorities and immigrants were harassed, attacked, forcibly deported, and occasionally murdered. In the 1920s, the use of excessive force by police in minority communities was commonplace. The murder of George Floyd in broad daylight by a policeman in Minneapolis in 2020 is a clear indication this issue remains a problem today.
In 1924, separation of races, either by custom or law, was the norm throughout much of the country. One hundred years later, the corrective measures put in place to redress our country’s long history of racial discrimination are being dismantled. Cultural institutions attempting to study and preserve African American history find themselves under attack.
The response by African Americans and many others to the recent attempts to roll back the tide of racial progress has been immediate. Demonstrations of protest are taking place across the country. One hundred years ago, embattled minorities also took to the streets. Ten thousand protesters marched silently down Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest the lynching of African Americans in 1917. In 1926, Dr. Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week to foster wider awareness regarding the contributions made to American history by African Americans.
Minstrel shows in which white performers in blackface depicted African Americans as shuffling morons were all the rage in the roaring twenties. In 1925, philosopher Alain Locke wrote his groundbreaking book The New Negro, in which he sought to define a new identity for African Americans, one not determined by the racial stereotypes. Sparked at least in part by Locke’s philosophy, the 1920s produced some of the best-known creative work by Negro artists: the poet Langston Hughes, novelist Zora Neal Hurston, jazz musician Duke Ellington, and public intellectual W.E.B. DuBois, to name a few.
What does any of this have to do with mystery writing? In my opinion, everything. Fictional characters do not act in a vacuum. They exist within the framework of their culture and environment. The African American characters in my book Murder at the Wham Bam Club live in a world in which their choices are limited. Nevertheless, I believe you will feel a sense of connection and empathy with their struggles. At the end of the day, they are people just like you and me. Ordinary people confronting ordinary problems until a series of murders disrupt their lives.
As you read, you may notice the challenges they face have an eerie similarity to our modern era. If so, I hope you will find joy, laughter, and inspiration in the resilient spirit with which they face these challenges.
Carolyn Marie Wilkins is the author of Murder at the Wham Bam Club, the first in the Psychics and Soul Food Mystery Series. Her other books include Death at a Séance, Melody for Murder, and Mojo for Murder. Her stories have appeared in Festive Mayhem and Wolfsbane: Best New England Short Stories of 2023.
She is a professor at Berklee College of Music Online and has represented her country as a Jazz Ambassador for the US State Department. An initiated priestess of Yemaya, the African goddess of motherhood, Carolyn is also a psychic medium and Reiki Master. For more about Carolyn, visit her web page: www.carolynwilkins.com.
