INTERVIEW
Tammye Huf: Inspiration comes from close to home
Debut novelist and winner of 2021’s Diverse Book Award for adult fiction Tammye Huf talks to Information Professional Editor Rob Green about the power of family histories, and how libraries and archives helped her put flesh on the bones of a tale from own ancestors.
RAISED in the US state of Virginia, but now living in the UK, Tammye Huf is an author who has drawn inspiration from her family’s own history. Her debut novel, A More Perfect Union, won the 2021 Diverse Book Award’s Adult fiction category, as it told a tale based on the marriage of her great, great grandpar- ents. Tammye says she first heard about the couple at a family reunion around 15 years ago, and the story stuck with her until she felt she just had to share it. She says: “[A more Perfect Union] is about an Irish Man who leaves Ireland during the fam- ine and ends up meeting an enslaved woman on a plantation in Virginia. They fall in love, and then have very obvious difficulties because of the place and time that it is happening. “It is inspired by the story of my great, great grandparents. He was Irish and he met my great, great grandmother when she was enslaved. In real life, he bought her freedom so that he could marry her. I heard that and thought it was such an unusual thing to hap- pen. It’s a powerful story and runs contrary to how you’d imagine black/white relationships at that time.”
Tammye goes on to explain that “I had known about these people from my mother’s side of the family, but I did not know the origin story until I was at a family event with a distant relative of mine – someone I had never met before. Up until that event, I didn’t know she existed. But from her, I heard this story of how they came to be – he from Ireland, she enslaved. It was shocking to hear. “We had grown up with stories about him
38 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Rob Green (
rob.green@
cilip.org.uk) is Editor, Information Professional.
‘being so pale he looked like a white man’, and then it transpires that it was because he was actually a white man. Some of the stories I had heard about them fell into place once I knew this.“
Tammye says that she kept thinking about the story, and eventually decided she wanted to share it. She says: “It brought home the importance of passing down these family stories which would otherwise just get lost. We can spend so much time focusing on the here and now, or planning for the future that we forget about where we’ve come from. “I realised that it was something for a wider audience when it wouldn’t leave me alone. It resonated with me, and just kept resonating with me. As the years went on and it didn’t leave me, I realised it had impact beyond the family.”
The story Tammye knew, was just one line long – so she knew she had to find out more. She says: “Libraries were hugely
April-May 2022
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