Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, DeMisty D. Bellinger writes about New to Liberty from Unnamed Press.
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I never planned to write this book. It serendipitously grew from the reading for my comprehensive exams in grad school, where I focused on working-class literature. Of course, much of what I read was set during the Dust Bowl, a period famous for reducing much of the population to paupers, even in the American Great Plains, a location seemingly full of milk and honey (or wheat and corn) before that devastating environmental phenomenon.
Though arguably on the Easternmost edge of the geographic region, Lincoln, Nebraska embraced all things Great Plains and my graduate program gave good peer pressure to buy into that environmental celebration. I read writers with roots in prairie grass country, but especially writers from Nebraska, Kansas, and Montana.
Timothy Eagan’s extremely readable The Worst Hard Time was one of the books on my comp exams reading list. I first learned about the jackrabbit roundups in that book. During the Dust Bowl, millions of rabbits ravaged the lands, pilfering what little crops that survived during the depletion of topsoil. Before I get too academic (something that I always skirt on when not writing fiction, but never quite get there), let’s just say there began an obsession with the plague of jackrabbits and the people who killed them.
After reading Eagan, I watched documentaries and read different towns’ accounts of the period, keeping my eyes open and my ears alert for evidence of the jackrabbit roundups. They were there, replete with photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts. And through all this, I kept returning to a couple of hypothetical questions: What kind of person clubs a rabbit to death? How does that person age? I understand the necessity of protecting crops and family, but beating marauding rodents to death had to have some kind of effect on someone, right? Maybe. And from these questions, came Ezzy, one of my leading men.
New to Liberty is not just about killing jackrabbits. It’s not about killing jackrabbits at all, but that historic detail evoked the setting and situation for the book. PBS documentaries, visits to the Kansas Historical Society, and quick jaunts to museums and libraries helped fill knowledge gaps. So did calls to my parents, both of whom are antique dealers and are well-versed in period furniture and decorating trends.
I also talked to my dad about cars. Internet searches for whether a ’66 Caddy would have plush carpeting or not yielded no results, and since I was too much in the writing moment and didn’t feel like going to the library, I called my father. Besides being an antique dealer, he is a Baby Boomer who knows his cars. He and his brothers often talked cars or worked on them in the alleyways and their backyard garages in Milwaukee. Also, every story from my father’s teenage years would include the type of car he drove at the time. Talking to my dad on the phone is a rarity for me — he is not a phone person — and it was always nice to have an excuse to call.
I didn’t think of New to Liberty as a historical novel until I was in the third or fourth draft of it, even though everything happens before 1966. Though while writing and revising I was often looking up clothing, tools, appliances, and language, I also took my own liberties — such as what to call Black folks back then. I made Nella prefer the term Black because I prefer it myself. And the parts I left out, like Milwaukee, my hometown’s Bronzeville in the 1930s and 40s, took a lot of work to research only to make it to the cutting floor.
Having read other historical novels, I don’t know if this one counts in that genre, but the setting is older than ten years, and each character’s world is well before my own. Beyond historical fiction, the book is very much a book of place. The Great Plains informs the lives that comprise New to Liberty as much as time period. When I first moved to Nebraska, I immediately understood the moniker of big sky, though we hadn’t made it as far as Montana yet. I could feel it in the city of Lincoln, but the experience of big skies happened most when I took to the road and ventured into farmland.
The cowboy denim skies stretched higher than any I ever imagined, and the expanse of fields stretched wider than I believed possible. The acres of grain surged similarly to sea waves; the flowering tops of grasses serve as the prairie’s whitecapped waters. The expanse of nothing but grains and skies made me feel finite, tiny, and hidden in the wide open. I wanted to capture that. I wanted to show what it was to exist in the Plains, and I wanted to dial into what this world was like before ultra-modernity, and during the Dust Bowl.
Wandering around Nebraska, South Dakota, western Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado was an integral part of my research for this book. The harsh summer days, the dusty dry winds, and the smell of wheat and corn baking in the sun made their way into Sissily’s story, the first character we follow in the book. The lack of people of color and the overwhelming sense of loneliness I felt found their way into Nella’s story, the second character we get really close to. And the strong women I met who could withstand adversity, disagreeable nature, and poverty gave Greta, the third main character, her strength and ingenuity. Existing in Nebraska and the Great Plains inspired New to Liberty. The landscape and customs helped define the characters that populate the stories.
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