Marjorie Hudson Author of "Indigo Field"

Host Helen Little and autor Marjorie Hudson discuss her debut novel, "Indigo Field," a work of southern fiction set in North Carolina.

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Welcome to the Public Library Podcast.Sorry, here's your host and podcast librarian,
award winning poet, future bestselling author, and host of one of the
most listen to radio shows in America, Helen Little. Hello, book lovers,
and welcome to another episode of thePublic Library Podcast. My guest today
is Marjorie Hudson. She is theauthor of the beautiful book Indigo Field.

(00:26):
Everybody read this book. It's spectacular. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you. It's great to behere. Thanks. Thanks, Helen.
So tell us first what your bookis about. So, it's a
book about a field, but it'sa field in the rural South where many
secrets are hid beneath this abandoned surface. The field means different things to different

(00:52):
people. And there are three familieswho live close by, and only one
person knows all the secrets, allthe secrets that are buried in the field.
And that person is miss Reba Jones. She knows more than anybody else,
and she tells her story as partof this novel. What prompted you

(01:14):
to tell this story, because it'sreally the story of two people whose lives
intersect at some point. You haveMiss Reba and you have Rand what made
you want to tell this story aboutthese two interesting people. There are a
couple things. One is that Iwas new to the South, and after
I was here about ten years,I still was in love with the nature.

(01:41):
And you know, I moved herebecause there was a sign and a
rainbow, and that's the whole story. But I loved the whipperwills and the
rivers and all those things and itmade me thrive. So it was kind
of a love letter in a wayto where I live. But I also
there were things about where I livedthat I was starting to learn things and

(02:02):
things were bothering me. Certain things. One was that I knew there were
Native people who lived on the landand the Carolinas, but I learned that
there were twenty nations of people besidesthe Cherokee. I'm a writer and I
was writing about indigenous history. AndI also learned that in my community work

(02:25):
that Native people lived in my community, and I was meeting them and getting
to know different kinds of people.And so they were. They hadn't all
disappeared. You know a lot ofpeople thought, Okay, well they're arrowheads
in my garden. They're gone,But that's really not right. So it

(02:46):
bothered me that people didn't talk aboutthat, and it was a mystery for
me to find out more about.So I was haunted by that. The
other thing that happened that was thatwas bothering me. I went to my
daughter's middle school and gave a talkabout indigenous people of the Carolinas. And

(03:08):
then I learned that day that mostpeople didn't know who the school was named
for, and neither did I.And so that was a very interesting moment
for me, a moment in mywhite ignorance journey. And it bothered me
because I learned that the school wasnamed for George Moses Horton, and his

(03:31):
story is amazing, first black manto publish a book in this South,
and he sold his bombs to buyhis freedom, and I could go on
and on. In fact, Iended up speaking about him and raising awareness
about his history for many years.So I wanted to say something about that

(03:52):
because it bothered me that that wasrepressed. So I spent a lot of
time as a kind of a communityspeaker, being part of different organizations that
were working to lift up more knowledgeabout black history. And this was back
in the nineties. So the thirdthing that happened that kind of triggered the

(04:14):
actual writing was that I saw himin an older man one day, running
on my road. And in thosedays, you probably remember Helen, in
Chatham County, people just didn't jog, you know. I mean most of
the roads weren't even really paved yetin Chatham County, and people didn't have

(04:36):
the right outfits for that. Youknow. It was this kind of new.
I mean, I'd seen it inDC where I grew up, you
know, but it was this kindof new, and it was an older
man. And so here's this manout of place, right And as he
passed me on my road, heturned and gave me this look of utter

(04:56):
devastation. And I don't think I'veever had anybody look at me like that
before, And it's just it hauntedme, and it stayed with me,
and I wondered what would make aman feel that way, and what would
make him keep running anyway, Sothat's the story I ended up putting to

(05:17):
paper. First, that that storyevolved into an awareness of a broader community
that included these other families. Well, there's a lot going on in this
book. As someone said it calledit a moral reckoning and I thought that
was a great description, because it'sgot a lot of isms in it.
It's got racism and sexism and ableismand classism and agism. It's just brings

(05:43):
life together in the way that sometimeshappens. Plus there's murder and revenge and
spirits and channeling and mystery and romance. What moved you to tackle such a
full and charged list of experiences inone book. Well, partly I was
just so ignorant about what a novelconsists of. But I also really had

(06:09):
begun to read Southern literature, andI hadn't done that before. I had
a job at Algonquin Books where myjob, you know, lucky me,
was to read Southern fiction. Andthen I started educating myself about Southern fiction,
and I realized that the insights Iwas having and the kind of empathy

(06:30):
I was feeling in my community wasa story that I stood at an intersection
where I could tell it. AndI really hadn't seen this kind of story
told much, and it just kepthaunting me. It wasn't a logical decision,
Helen. It was I have todo this, and it dagged me.

(06:53):
I guess it kind of called tome and said you know, you
need to figure out what this communityis all about and imagine nation so you
can understand it in real life.So you know, it wasn't a decision
for my own personal journey. Itwas just at the story that felt like
it needed to be told. Andwhen things bother me, I tried to

(07:15):
stand up for them, and Ithink I was doing something like that in
this book. I wanted to saysomething that really hadn't been said much in
my community, So that's kind ofthat's what pushed me. And then I
fell in love with the characters andI just couldn't let them go. You
know, they woke me up inthe middle of the night and then imagine

(07:35):
me like stumbling to the kitchen andI had post it notes there and a
little pencil and I'd write something thatI would not really be able to understand
in the morning, and you haveto do that. So it was really
an awakening into a creative process thatwas new for me. Well, that
was one of the main things thatkept resonating in my head as I was

(07:58):
reading. Where did these amazing characterscome from? They are definitely memorable,
rich, three D, believable,familiar, and I'm most impressed by Miss
Reeba. I deeply appreciated her,her age, her looks, her gifts,
her personality, her no nonsenseness,her secrets, her determination, everything.

(08:18):
But I actually grew up knowing herintimately many Miss reebas So. One
thing we didn't mention is this booktakes place in North Carolina. I was
born and raised in North Carolina.But where did you find her voice and
come up with her story specifically,because it's it's not just like, oh,
I met somebody on the street,my neighbor. She's very unique.

(08:41):
Yes she is. And you know, I have this kind of built in
thing. I think it's part ofbeing a Methodist minister's daughter, where I
do not Oh my goodness, wellhallelujah. I cannot steal people's stories.
There are some fiction writers who feelcomfortable writing story from life. I don't

(09:01):
do that because I just feel likeI'm in my community and I just have
like a block against that. SoI'm more like a little snail with my
snail track. I spent a lotof time in communities and churches and community
organizations and mentoring work, being theonly white person in the room, and

(09:24):
that was interesting for me. Sothere were many really strong black women in
my community. There were churchwomen inmy church. There were people speaking up
for all kinds of different causes.There were women who were leaders of churches
and grandmothers taking care of children.And I was mentored by some of these

(09:50):
women in the way that they wouldtalk to me and kind of set me
straight on things and kind of callme into the community. And I think
miss Reba's voice comes from that.But she really is her own person.
I've never known exactly anybody like her. You know, your emotional mind gets

(10:11):
going and all of a sudden,this person has all kinds of qualities that
you may not have seen. Now. There was one woman that I knew
years ago who was a grandmother,and she liked to talk and I'd like
to listen to her. So oneday she said to me, kind of

(10:33):
out of the blue, she's ablack woman. She said, you know,
our people were never slaves, Theywere Indians. I thought that was
kind of a new idea for me, even though as a scholar in the
area of indigenous people, I knewthat to survive, people hid away people

(10:54):
under stress of any kind in theSouth, hid away in wherever banks and
swamps, and so on. Sothat was fascinating to me too. In
the course of writing a different booklater on in the early two thousands about
Virginia Dare, I interviewed Lumbye people, and I spoke to people from different

(11:16):
backgrounds and went to conferences and learnedmuch more deeply what the history was and
how people felt about it. Sothat all kind of got folded into But
you know, when you try totalk about this kind of stuff, logically,
it doesn't really work, you know, I just try to understand it.

(11:37):
But I knew that I had strongfeelings about I guess I felt like
I hated it that people were disrespected, Yeah, in their right. I
just hated that. And I wantedher to have a voice. I wanted
this one person to have a voice, and I worked really hard against stereotype.

(12:00):
Um I it kind of reading alot of Southern literature. It kind
of bothered me also that black womenwere often kind of the ones supporting the
white heroes, and I wanted herin a kind of a trickery way.
I made sure she took over thestory. So I'm really I'm glad you

(12:22):
saw that. It was hard forher not to be my favorite character.
I enjoyed so many of the characters, m Lucy and Jolene and Bobo.
Bobo was great. Another voice,Bobo has down syndrome, another voice that
felt so rich and authentic. Oneof the things that I thought that was
really interesting is that Anne, whowas Rand's wife, that the other main

(12:46):
character that kind of feeds this story. She felt more alive than a lot
of the other characters. Did.WHOA, she's haunting you? Yes?
Great, great, She's a lotto me too. So what we what
we talked about a little earlier islike, how you know Place was a

(13:07):
big part of this. You know, you've written the southern novel and Place
was definitely a character in this book. As someone who not only grew up
in the South, but grew upin North Carolina, where your book is
set. I have to admit attimes it made me homesick. And there
were so many referenced throughout the bookthat touched me. The lyrics from the
hymns let Us Break Read Together.That was one of my father's favorite hymns.

(13:28):
My hometown soft Drink was in theircheerwine. He had to give them
a shout out. Well. WilsonLibrary and Chapel Hill, where I spent
a lot of time during college.And I mentioned that my father was a
Methodist member minister, but he wasactually an am Zion minister of African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Church. So I grewup in that church and it's really entrenched

(13:54):
in North Carolina as well. Therewere so many references that made me feel
like in your book, place wassuch a big character. And you even
mentioned the whipper wheel earlier. SoI've left North Carolina years ago when I
was in my twenties, and I'velived in different states and I would talk
to people about whipper wheels and theythought I was crazy, to the point

(14:15):
that I'm like, does this birdexist or was this my imagination? So
that one of the first times indecades that idn't even heard the word whipper
wheel. So thank you, Ohyou're welcome. And you know, sadly
the whipper wheel population is much lower. I mean it's a real problem.
I mean I don't think they're extinct, but where I live, coyotes have

(14:39):
been getting them, you know.So there's a real shift in climate in
wildlife, in BirdLife and all thosethings. And in a way I saw
I saw that shift coming when peoplestarted logging and developing Chatham County, and
you'll you'll feel a kind of asorrow and beauty come, you know in

(15:01):
the story, because I love itso much here and yet I could see
a changing And so that's probably whyI felt it felt that in the book.
It was that North Carolina and theenvironment and the nature. Obviously it's
about a feel was so much ofa character. Even the storm had personality.

(15:22):
Yeah, well, I guess itwould be storm anality since it's not
a person, but you know whatI mean, that's right, Yes,
And that brings me to the characterof Joelene. I liked her stone.
That was very clever and actually brilliantlyapthlete country. I thought that was,
like, that's exactly what she woulddo. She and all the characters in

(15:43):
your book show how delicately we areconnected, even when we don't know how
closely tied that we are. Tellus about writing and creating this web of
different ways that everyone connected. Itreminded me. I don't know if you've
ever seen the movie Crash. Yes, it reminded me about that movie.
Love it, thank you. Yeah, it is people crashing into each other,

(16:06):
just like in that film. Isaw it in California, and I
thought it was kind of a brilliantportrayal of the different kinds of attitudes people
have against each other that are completelyfalse and that must be blown open.
And I think although I wrote mostof this before that came out, I
think I was up to something similar. So we think those stories and wanting

(16:29):
those intersections. Partly, I startedout as a poet, so I would
just kind of describe a place andthen like have an insight. So plotting
is actually a little hard for me, but I knew I needed to have
all these lives intersect, so shiftingfrom one character to the next, having

(16:52):
kind of deep, meaningful, transformationalkinds of connections. You know, I
think each of the characters, Iwanted them to have a deep character shift.
The things that they needed to healtheir lives are there in this story
available to them. And Blossom andFlower. You know, you mentioned Bobo.

(17:15):
He needs to learn to be brave, he needs to grow up,
and really he's the most heroic personin the story in the end, right,
I mean, he has this heroicmoment that's quite dramatic. So yeah,
I wanted everybody to be real inthe sense of really grappling with the
deaths. And so I thought alot about what they needed in order to

(17:38):
shift their lives, because they allstart out in a kind of a hard
place, and then they must haveeach other's help in order to survive this
great challenge that comes to this community. So what made me think of is
that it just the idea that weare all connected. You don't even realize

(18:00):
the connections until you pull the lensback and you're able to see it all.
You have no idea like how atthe end of this storm, both
miss Reebon ran end up in thesame places and people are like, how
did this happen? Yeah, that'show life is. Yes, well,
it's how life is. And it'salso what Reeba needed to do, like

(18:23):
miss Reebon needed to do in orderto face this lifelong fear of white men.
Right to disunity. Yeah, totake over and be the hero,
you know, and and then youknow it's I mean, I don't want
to give too much away. Inthe end, every everybody assumes that he's

(18:45):
the one that saved her life,but yeah, that's not he knows better.
I enjoyed the different ways because Iwas familiar with the area and everything
that you combine the real and imaginein this book like Ambler County imaginary,
Asheville real, yeah, Tuscarora,Lumbie Indians real, Indigo Fields, Googli

(19:08):
Ridge not real, right, that'sthat's right. Although lots of people read
this and they go, I'm gonnalook that up on the internet, you
know, they, Um, Ithink there are new developments called Indigo Fields
now to my horror. Um.But the Googli Ridge, there are actually,
you know, there are some Googliethings out there on the internet.

(19:30):
But I have this little game Iplay with names that you might have noticed
where things are not what they seem. Of course, the title of the
book is well, again, Idon't want to give it away, but
it's a cover. It's a coverfor what is true about that place.
Um. Miss Reba's name is rightshift a shift away from her true name,

(19:56):
her deep name, you know.And so every everybody has a lot
of the places, and people havea kind of a second identity, which
is their identity that's deeper. Sothat was fun to play with words in
terms and places that way as akind of trickery. Um. And you

(20:17):
know, the element of the tricksterin the story was something I did consciously
with that little dog who goes aroundmissing everything up for the archaeologists. So
there's lots of little games played withwhat seems to be in what really is.
So that you got me to goto Google? Oh good, Yeah,

(20:38):
because I was curious about the googliepine. Let me go look it
up. No picturing, that's right. Well, you know, there are
many, many different kinds of pineswhere I live, and I love them
all. Um, they're white pineswhere I live that are a relict in

(21:00):
a tea and special preserve. They'rereally from the north. So I kind
of said, okay, let's thinkabout that now. I considered all of
these different options, and at onepoint I realized that all the qualities and
plot elements of the tree, itsability to spew pollen at certain times and

(21:22):
so forth, we're not reflected.You know, I have a natural history
background, We're not reflected in anyknown tree. So I had to make
this species up and that was reallyfun. That's good. So yeah,
well, I want to take aquick break, but I would love it
if you would do a reading forus, right break, Okay, go

(21:42):
ahead, to turn the page.We'll be right back with more of the
Public Library Podcast. Check out otherepisodes of the Public Library Podcast. A
place to check out books The PublicLibrary Podcast with Helen Little. We are
back on the Public Library Podcast withMarjorie Hudson. She's the author of Indigo

(22:04):
Field. We're having a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being on
the show, Marjorie. And you'regonna do a reading for us. Tell
us about it. Yes, yeah, so I thought i'd read from the
moment when miss Reba actually her lifecollides with the colonel, the retired man
who lives across the highway. SoI'll do a very short reading. But

(22:26):
one thing you need to know isthat she's coming home from a feed store
in her sort of clunker of acar, and she's thinking a lot about
her murdered niece, Danielle as alittle girl, and really grieving her.
And in the background she's been reallyshe's really had murder on her mind.

(22:48):
The man who murdered her niece gotoff with a light sentence, and she
keeps having these little imaginings of goingand shooting him. So here go up
ahead, there's that white man inthe red ball cap she's seen before,
jogging in place in front of thesunrise gas and grill, skinny white Lake,

(23:11):
sticking out his shorts, talking ona cell phone. Old man should
have more dignity than to run aroundhalf naked like that. She's looking at
him so hard that for the firsttime in her life, she misses her
turn onto Field Road. Now theman goes to cross the highway, not

(23:33):
looking where he's going, still talkingon that phone, and her with bald
tires road went got to jam onbreaks and slide to stop. Man runs
into her car. It hits ithard, goes down, cell phone flying,
and she can't see him. LordJesus, as she killed a white

(23:56):
man in broad daylight, right herein front of the sunrise grill. Wow,
thank you for reading. Oh sodid I read somewhere that this book
didn't start as a book, butit was a story that was first published
as a collection of your stories.Then it became a seven hundred page draft.

(24:18):
That's a big difference. It's abig difference. Well, um,
that is what happened on the surface, but underneath, my intent was always
to write a novel about this man. It just took a while to get
there. So the short story,um that was in my first story collection

(24:38):
was actually a rejiggered chapter that Ihad thought of as the opening to the
novel. So I just kind ofchanged it around and shifted the ending.
And you know, it took thirtyyears to write this, so, um,
yeah, it takes a long time. I mean I did other things
while I was writing this. Umyou know, worked a job, and

(25:00):
I started a business teaching writers,and I did community work. I did
a lot of talking for a speakersbureau, going around the state talking about
George Musus Horton. And I publishedtwo other books. So that's one of
the reasons that took a long time. But the other reason that I'm really

(25:21):
glad it did. And if thebook is taking a long time, you
just might need to learn something.And that's what happened to me. I'm
just really grateful that I It's likemy life shifted and I started to see
what I needed to do and whatwas shifting around me so that it could

(25:42):
all come together. We mentioned earlierabout the storm. Have you ever been
in one of those really severe stormsin North Carolina? Yes, ma'am.
We've had two hurricanes come right overthe farm. And the first one was
Hurricane Frame And were you here,Now, I was in Hurricane I was

(26:03):
in Hurricane Hugo in the nineties.Oh, and I was led to believe,
like Ran the character in the book, they don't those kind of storms
don't come far. And I wasin Charlotte. It devastated. It went
all the way to Asheville. Yeah. Yeah, Well, now a lot
of us remember those storms. Andactually one of the books I edited and

(26:26):
my editing career was Hugo, TheStorm of the Century, which of course
is very funny now, but thereare lots of amazing details about storms,
and I'm just I'm very fascinated aboutthose big storms. You actually were under
the eye. We lost an entireapple orchard except for one tree. Yeah,

(26:47):
just because the wind came in acertain direction and just flattened things.
And a big pecan tree behind ourhouse cracked, lost a major limb that
thrust itself into the ground five feetIt held the tree up against the wind.
So that sacrifice of a tree limbfor survival, I thought that was

(27:11):
really beautiful. And this tree isvery old, but I look at it
every day and she's a survivor.Yeah. As reading that, I'm like
you gave the sense that you hadexperienced some of that. That's right when
you're not writing and reading poet throughthe trees from your favorite pastimes. Well,

(27:33):
for fun, I have a perennialgarden, mostly flowers, and it's
really doing well with large spur rightnow, says goal is like beautiful indigo
blue large spur a kind of afreak fur blue. But it's always in
disarray because I ignore it for longperiods of time, and so at any

(27:55):
given moment, if I need to, I can get out there and start
digging around it and get kind ofrecentered that way. I also do yoga.
It's very centering for a writer andalso healing for the back that needs
to be sitting all the time.And I've just gotten back to zoomba.
Oh nice. Yeah, so that'sreally fun. Not too long about three

(28:22):
four years ago, I joined mylocal NAACP chapter and just became aware,
more aware, and more connected tothe community that I had than I had
been for a while because I've beenout and about with books and hiding away
writing. So that's been a reallygood thing to do. Well, I

(28:42):
mean, that's what we love doing, hiding away with books and writing.
And what are you reading now?I have a stack next to my next
to my chair, like everybody,and let's see. I am just finished
reading The Three Graces of val Kill, which is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt

(29:06):
and her two besties when they learnedhow to do community organizing and lived in
a house together because living in hermother in law's house was really not so
great. So that was a reallyinteresting time in history. I really recommend
it. It's Emily Wilson as theauthor, one of our great North Carolina

(29:29):
scholars of women's history. I'm startingto read a new book by Laura Scalzo,
American Arcadia, and it's about theeighties in New York City, just
jumping in. She's a Regal Houseauthor and Regal House authors we all kind
of read each other's books and getto know each other and it's a great

(29:53):
support system that we have for eachother. So that's nice. So what's
next for you in the writing world? What are you working on or are
you working on anything? I amworking on. What's calling to me right
now is essays. I just finishedan essay for a book about Paul Green
on which I write about how he'smy imaginary mentor. He actually lived in

(30:18):
Chatham County and he kind of broughtme to the whole subject of Virginia dare.
It's been an amazing journey. I'mstill on that journey. Let's see.
I just finished an essay about buyingthem, which is a little tiny
milltown you probably know in Chatham County, and it was a list of ten
things I love about buying them,and one of them is that when the

(30:45):
river floods, if you live ina how old house near the river,
your chairs will start to kind ofwalk across the across the floor towards the
river. It's like river gravity.I know, isn't that weird? Yeah?
Coolly weird? Yeah, yes,yeah. So, if people want

(31:07):
to find out more about all thethings that you've written and like follow you
on social what's your website social media? How do they find you out there
in the worldwide web? Yeah,let's see. My website is Marjorie Hudson
dot com. Very easy. MyYouTube channel is Marge m r J nineteen
fifty three, and I have aGeorge Moses Horton talk on there, as

(31:32):
well as things interviews and so on. And then I have an Instagram Marjorie
Hudson Writer, and then Facebook isMarjorie Hudson One. You can find me
pretty easily. All of those thingsare available from my website as well.
And again, I want to thankyou so much for this book. You
know, everybody pick up Into GoodFields. It's great. But you know

(31:53):
what, I have to tell yousomething. I want to thank you for
coming on the show, and Iwant to thank you for this book,
but for inspiring a new season ofThe Public Library Podcast. I have not
done this. After experiencing pandemic interruptus. I was not inspired to create
new episodes. I didn't even knowif I was ever going to do another
episode. But it was your bookthat made me say, I have too

(32:16):
many questions. I've got to findout this, I gotta find out I
want to know more. So thankyou for oh man, I'm so honored.
That's that's really wonderful season episode one. Thank you so much. Thank
you, and I would love tohave you come back sometime for sure.
I'd love it. I'd love itanother show in the books. Join us

(32:38):
for the next episode of The PublicLibrary Podcast. A place to check out books,