Tananarive Due’s books scare me before I’ve even read the first page. 

She’s a horror writer, so of course creepy, supernatural things are going to happen to these characters. But Due’s writing is so evocative and ruthless that you can’t help but admire even the most brutal moments in the story. It hurts so good. 

So when I picked up her latest novel, “The Reformatory,” I knew that it would mess me up, I just didn’t yet know how. 

This week’s Uncomfortable Book Club selection is particularly scary because it’s based on a real “school” where children were systematically abused, and many were killed. Due did a lot of research in order to draw out what it was like for her characters to live in 1950s Florida. She captures how race, class, gender, sexuality and religion give these characters opportunities and limitations, but it never feels like a history lesson.

Check out this short story Due published before the novel’s publication to get a feel for her style.

Due doesn’t shy away from the brutality of this story, but it never feels gratuitous, and there’s also a real sense of hope. Not because she wants the reader to feel better, I think, but because her protagonists are resourceful and resilient. For all the horror it contains, “The Reformatory” is a life-affirming novel.

I called Due last month to talk about all of this. Here are some edited excerpts of that conversation:

This Is Uncomfortable: I’m wondering if you could just talk over the premise of the book for people who haven’t read it.

Tananarive Due: “The Reformatory” is loosely inspired by my real-life family history. I had a great uncle who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. He died in the ‘30s, but my novel is set in 1950, and it’s basically the story of two young people, 12-year-old Robert Stevens and his older sister, Gloria, who’s 17, as they grapple with his unjust imprisonment in this segregated reformatory. 

Robert, on the inside, is dealing with ghosts and human monsters. And on the outside, Gloria is navigating the other monster, which is bureaucracy.

TIU: The knowledge that it is based on real events really adds to the horror of the novel.

Due: It was the toughest thing I’ve ever written. It took me seven years to write it. Although, of course, it’s fictionalized, and I have limited knowledge of the true-life Robert Stevens, because he died in 1937. I don’t think my mother ever knew she had an uncle. I don’t think her father ever told her. So it was like a hole in our family. And delving into that, I took pieces of his story … I wanted to preserve his name.

TIU: Can you talk a little bit about how money corrupts people in this book?

Due: The reformatory itself is what today we would call “too big to fail” in terms of its impact in this tiny town. It’s a fictitious town, Gracetown in my novel, but again, it’s very loosely inspired by the real-life Marianna, Florida. And generationally, a whole bunch of people worked at [Dozier]. Even one of the former mayors, first Black mayor of Marianna, worked there. There were teachers, there were groundskeepers.

These kids grew corn for the county. They had a printing press. It was one of the major economic drivers in the town. If you reported a runaway, you got a $50 reward. So the farmers were always on the lookout for runaway children. And at a certain point, it basically became a for-profit prison where you were paid money in exchange for sending a child to the reformatory. So money was all over this thing. And that’s, as far as I can see, the main reason it stayed open until 2011, even though it had been absolutely besieged with reports of cruelties inflicted upon those children. 

It’s also a microcosm for our national criminal justice system today. Because when you think about it, it’s not just that we literally have for-profit prisons, but you have an entire economy based around incarceration, from bail bondsmen to attorneys. 

TIU: I was actually about to quote the speech that Mr. Loehmann, a social worker, gave to 12-year-old Robert on the way to the reformatory: “That place pays the county a good sum for every boy sent there, so you’ve just been sold.  … They don’t want to send you home. They want any excuse to keep you.” 

Due: Absolutely.

TIU: The line of narration after that was: “They were the scariest words anyone had ever spoken to Robert.” 

Due: I mean, imagine you’re now a commodity. It is a form of enslavement and abduction in a lot of cases. It is scary. And just to bring it back to the present day, for a lot of Black and brown parents, their children are overly targeted with suspension and expulsion, which is a direct line to the police coming in and intervening. And I know a couple people whose kids were in what I would call “schoolyard altercations” that ended up arrested and having to go through the system. And it’s a very isolating experience. I’m very close to both of those people, but they do not discuss it. Their lawyers tell them, “Don’t discuss the case.” So you’re literally going through it alone. And there’s no difference today if the police knock on your door and they decide they’re arresting your child. They will put them in chains and take them away and put them in a cage,c and you were just as helpless to stop that from happening as Robert’s sister Gloria was in this novel.

TIU: There’s a music teacher, Ms. Hamilton, who volunteers at the reformatory, and her brother [Mr. Crutcher] works there. She has questions for him like, “How can you have this job? How do you justify this to yourself?” How did you work through that complexity of not making him a villain, but someone who is faced with difficult choices?

Due: This is the quandary a lot of people find themselves in when they’re a part of harmful systems. In this community, there are few job options. That’s a choice job, to work at this place. And the music teacher, Marian Hamilton, she’s a volunteer because she has this idea that she can change the system from within. But I think she also has a pretty rude awakening that some systems are so evil, that you’re really not changing it from within. Maybe at the very most you can do is comfort someone at a time of loss, which is something she does in defiance of the powers that be. But her brother is more of a company guy. He believes in the mission, that they are saving these young men, and it’s tough love, but it will make them all the better. 

And unfortunately, because he’s Black — they’re both Black, actually — this is something that I think has been passed through the generations, since slavery. A lot of Black parents felt that they had to overdiscipline their kids, because it was better coming from them than you look the wrong way at a white stranger on the street and end up like Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955.

And generations of Black people grew up with those kinds of warnings. So back to Mr. Crutcher, I mean, of that sort of socially conservative generation of Black people who kind of feel like, “You know, we better get you in line or worse things will happen later,” enable him to ignore a lot of wrongdoing that’s going on right under his nose.

TIU: For some of the Black characters in the book, being middle class or upper class does not insulate them from racism. It just changes the form of it, and I wonder if you could talk about that.

Due: I would consider Robert’s family to be working class. Robert’s father, he reminds me of the kind of person who probably could have more, but he gives so much of his time to the community that he doesn’t think about personal well-being. So when the story opens, they’re basically living in almost a wooden shack that his grandfather built not long after slavery.

When he did start to build a house, that would have been a nicer house, locals burned it down. They frowned upon his rising up in some cases above them. There’s this idea that no Black person should have anything more than any white person.

And also the reason he was run out of town was he was a union organizer. That’s all about fair wages, and nobody’s looking for that. No growers were interested in their workers unionizing, much as today, corporations like Walmart are not interested in seeing their employees unionize.

So yes, there are outside forces enacting class differences upon these characters and contrasting that. Going back to the music teacher, Marian Hamilton, she’s more working toward a middle-class lifestyle. That’s why she could afford to volunteer at this school, because she was in the army, she was in World War II. She got a grant, she was able to buy a house in a much nicer neighborhood. 

And among the white characters, the one we get to know the most is Miss Anne [Gloria’s employer], because her father was a councilman and he had some political sway and a little money. And he had an insurance policy, and she’s able to share money with Gloria.

Although there are limitations to allyship among the white characters. She has a little money to spend, and she’s queer, so she’s also marginalized. She offers advice from her law school lover and a little bit of money, but there’s only so far you can go.

TIU: And Mr. Loehmann has this internal monologue of, like, “I want to stand up for this child. And also I’m Jewish in the American South, and what about my kids? What about my wife? How much can I advocate without putting my family at risk?”

Due: He’s someone who definitely is considered an ally. His heart is in the right place. I mean, from the moment he shows up and he calls Ms. Lottie “ma’am,” you can tell he’s not from around these parts. Because that kind of respect was not given on a casual basis to Black people.

I based his character after reading a fantastic book by Gilbert King called “Devil in the Grove,” and it is about a real-life case that was happening in the early 1950s that was a real showcase for the terror inflicted on Black people and their allies when it came to manhunts and Jim Crow and false accusations. And that book makes note of the difficulty of Jews who moved to the South and Jews living in Florida. If you had curly hair, your hair looks a little too curly, always looking out for signs that you might have a little Black blood in you. This character is already dealing with the fact that his kids are getting teased. It’s an uneasy entry for him into Florida. 

TIU: It feels like there’s a lot of money in horror right now. What is it like to be a horror writer right now? 

Due: I have been very lucky to be able to maintain a career in fiction, although there was a 10-year gap between “The Reformatory” and my previous novel. It was a little bit up and down. And then Jordan Peele in 2017 was a big bump in cinema. I think not just Black horror creators, but all kinds of marginalized horror creators, we’re getting a chance.

We’re now seeing more Indigenous horror, more queer horror. Then that starts to recede again — George Floyd, after his murder, Hollywood’s hand-wringing and the call for diversity, and then that recedes. So it’s very cyclical, and I think although opportunities are much, much, much better now than they were 20 years ago, it’s still a slog. 

I’m just a firm believer that, for instance, the horror genre has been really invigorated by the introduction of new voices. And I think most horror readers would agree that they’re loving it. There’s just so much of the same mythology and the same imagery you can watch over and over again and get a response.But if I’m watching a Japanese horror movie like “The Grudge,” where the camera angles are different, the mythologies are different, the way of thinking is different, it’s going to get under my skin in a different way than the same jumpscare I’ve seen 500 times.

The Comfort Zone

As promised in this week’s episode, here are our team’s favorite rom-coms!

• Alice loves the modern classic “Music and Lyrics” and “Creep 2,” which is a little rom-com-meets-horror
• Zoë goes for the classic classics: “It Happened One Night,” “His Girl Friday” and “The Philadelphia Story.”
• Tony loves “Enough Said,” “Down With Love” and “While You Were Sleeping”
• “Parent Trap” has a special place in Reema’s heart
• And if you prefer to read your rom-coms, check out “A Princess in Theory”

What our team is watching, reading and listening to this week.

• Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” also drew inspiration from the infamous Dozier school. We’re looking forward to the film adaptation.
• Get your old digital camera out.
• A fantastic story from a former Marketplace intern and frequent guest: “Want to understand the U.S. economy? Watch ‘Shark Tank.’”
• Don’t park your money in payment apps!
• We love what artist Liz Harris says about burnout in this interview with The Creative Independent.
• They key to a good job interview is “humorbragging”
• Our team is split on the WNBA finals, but we can all agree Ellie the Elephant is dripped out.
• Here’s an Uncomfortable conversation between friends about making it work when they’re in different places financially.
• Your song of the week: “Pop! Goes My Heart”

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