Kay Mills

Unless you are writing a book ripped from the headlines or about an issue that just won’t wait, remember that you have time—far more time than you ever had as a journalist. Use it to interview every person recommended to you, even if some of them turn out to be duds, and use that time to go back to the archives more than once. Fannie Lou Hamer’s papers were at Tulane University’s Amistad Research Center and also available on microfilm. The second time I went through them, references that had meant nothing to me the first time popped out at me. “Oh, that’s what that was all about,” I realized because I had done more interviewing and research in the meantime.

Time also works in your favor when you are moving into a different world. This was especially true for the Hamer book. I am a white woman who was writing about a black woman and interviewing many black people in Mississippi who weren’t necessarily trusting that I’d get the story and its times right. I had to keep going back to them and back to them and back to them so they would see that I wasn’t in it just for a quick look and then on to something else.

For example, each time I went to Mississippi, I went to Greenville and interviewed Owen Brooks, who had known Fannie Lou Hamer well and had helped arrange her funeral. And each time I did, he told me something I hadn’t known, something he hadn’t told me the earlier times we had talked. Sometimes it was because I hadn’t known then what to ask, sometimes because he may not have been sure about me. When you are going into a different culture, a different part of the country, you have to learn its style. You cannot come onto the scene like a fast-moving, right-to-the-point northern reporter, ask your questions, and expect to get all the answers. Sometimes you have to sit on the front porch and drink sweet tea for awhile, or at least do the journalistic equivalent of that, before you can earn people’s trust.

To be continued