connect it directly to my own lineage, even if it is not my ancestor’s story direct- ly, it is the type of thing she would have experienced.
“There is a quote that I really love from William Faulkner – ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ It is so true, that the things that happened in the past do influence the here and now, and the future. So when researching for the book, I wanted to look at the mindset at that time and how it has carried through in so many ways. You can see echoes of where we are now by looking at the past. To understand yourself, to understand why we are where we are, we do have to look at the past and the things that have transpired. Those events shape and mould us – it’s impor- tant to know what has come before.” For her next novel, Tammye has again gone back to a family story. She says: “This time it is my grandmother and her brother. They were very pale, in fact he was so pale that he was quite often mistaken as being white. When World War Two broke out he wanted to join the military, but when he did the person in charge made him join as a white man because he didn’t want to be accused of de-segregating the barracks. It was just easier for them to put him in the white’s barracks. The story is about her and him, and the people close to them navigating that time during the war and just afterwards – the post-war prosperity with the GI Bill and the move to create a bigger middle class. So it’s through his lens, now as a white man, and hers, still as a black woman.”
Tammye Huf.
important in researching this book. For historical fiction, you need those resources and books, and libraries are the places that hold them. You can’t get these things elsewhere.
“Because it is set in America I relied
very heavily on the Library of Congress, which has a huge collection of slave narratives that was useful, including this amazing audio collection of former slaves who in their childhood had been slaves. After the Civil War at the turn of the century, the government made these folk recordings, they realised they had amassed a record of stories from former slaves, so these were bundled together. They were lost for a long time, but have now been digitally remastered and are available through the Library of Con- gress – things like that would not be there without libraries.
“The Library of Congress has a huge budget and can do these amazing projects, but every library is important and makes a huge contribution to society.” A More Perfect Union, is set in Virginia where Tammye grew up and there is a clear connection to the realities of slavery – just four generations back. Tammye says that the personal connection to the story “made it feel very immediate. Often- times when you read history, and find out what people went through it can feel quite removed from you – it happened in the distant past and it doesn’t connect with you personally. However, here I could
April-May 2022
On her win in the Diverse Book Awards, she says: “It was an absolute thrill to be longlisted, shortlisted and then to win it. It’s a thrill to be recognised because you put so much effort into it. First of all you hope someone will read it, then you hope people will enjoy it – but to be picked out as an example of something that is to be celebrated is wonderful.”
Returning to the value of libraries, she says: “There is a huge place in my heart for libraries – we have always used them. It always breaks my heart when you hear about funds being taken from libraries because the whole community loses from that.
“I have grown up with libraries, my children have grown up with libraries and we still use libraries. They are such a bedrock part of being young, but also as an adult. I associate going to the library really strongly with childhood, but they are there throughout life.” IP
l CILIP’s Pen&inc. magazine sponsors The Diverse Book Awards and this inter- view is part of that support for the awards and the winners. You can read an inter- view with Young Adult winner, Manjeet Mann in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of Pen&inc.
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 39
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