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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We've announced our May Get Lit With All Of It Book Club selection. We're reading Lone Women by Victor LaValle. The New York Times Review called it enthralling, and we agree. Guys, this book is so good. The story takes place in 1915. A young Black woman named Adelaide is fleeing her family farm in California. Something terrible has happened there, and she needs to leave it behind. She brings very little with her, except for an exceptionally heavy steamer trunk, which she keeps locked at all times.

Adelaide buys a plot of land in Montana as part of a new program designed to promote agriculture in the area. All she has to do is turn land into a viable farm, and it is hers. Adelaide is very isolated on the homestead as a Black woman alone in a majority white, big Sandy Montana. If the powers within her steamer trunk are unleashed, Adelaide's new start and her very life could be threatened.

In a starred review, Kirkus says the novel is a winning blend of brains and occasionally violent thrills. New Yorkers, to borrow your e-copy of Lone Women, thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, you can make that happen. All you have to do is head to wnyc.org/getlit. You can also find the link to reserve your free tickets to our May 22nd event with Victor LaValle and musical guest, Kaia Kater.

To get you all excited for this event, here is a bit of my conversation with Victor. It begins with him reading from the first page of Lone Women.

Victor LaValle: There are two kinds of people in this world, those who live with shame and those who die from it. On Tuesday, Adelaide Henry would've called herself the former, but by Wednesday she wasn't as sure. If she was trying to live, then why would she be walking through her family's farmhouse, carrying an atlas jar of gasoline, pouring that gasoline on the kitchen floor, the dining table dousing the sati in the den? After she emptied the first atlas jar, why go back to the kitchen for the other jar, then climb the stairs to the second floor, listening to the splash of gasoline on every step? Was she planning to live or trying to die?

There were 27 Black farming families in California's Lucerne Valley in 1915. Adelaide and her parents had been one of them. After today, they would be only 26. Adelaide reached the second-floor landing. She hardly smelled the gasoline anymore. Her hands were covered in fresh wounds, but she felt no pain. There were two bedrooms on the second floor. Her bedroom and her parents.

Adelaide's parents were lured West by the promise of land in this valley. The federal government encouraged Americans to homestead California. The native population had been decimated, cleared off the property. Now it was time to give it all away. This invitation was one of the few that the United States extended to even its Negro citizens.

After 1866, the African Society put out a call to colonize Southern California. The Henry's were among the hundreds who came. They weren't going to get a fair shot in Arkansas. That was for sure. The federal government called this homesteading. Glenville and Eleanor Henry fled to California and grew alfalfa and wild grass, sold it to cattle owners for feed. Glenville studied the work of Luther Burbank, and in 1908 they began growing the botanist's Santa Rosa plums.

To Adelaide, the fruit tasted of sugar and self-determination. Adelaide had worked the orchards and fields alongside her daddy since she was 12, labored in the kitchen and the barn with her mother for even longer. 31 years of life on this farm, 31, and now she would burn it all down.

Alison Stewart: That was Victor LaValle Reading from Lone Women, our Get Lit with All Of It Book Club pick. That first page, that's a big swing. [laughter] Burn it all down.

Victor LaValle: I figured we got to start big and go from there.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious about starting big. What went into the thought process of starting with such a big swing? Burn down the family, the house, the family, everybody,

Victor LaValle: Everything. Well, I thought, it's a story that's very much about the idea of trying to leave one's family secrets behind, and so I thought I would make that literal. Right at the start, you see her literally destroying, in a sense, the family and the family secrets and her history. Of course, as all of us know, making such a trip means you carry your family history with you. I just thought right from the start, you see her trying to do the thing that any person knows with time, you can't.

Alison Stewart: Want to let everybody know that part of the story is based in reality, a program in Montana. Tell us a little bit about how you first learned about the program.

Victor LaValle: Sure. I came across this amazing book. I did a school visit at the University of Montana. I went to their bookstore. Whenever I go to a place that I think I might not return to, I try to buy a book on local history. I learn a little something about the place I was. I came across this book called Montana Women Homesteaders: A Field of One's Own, by a woman named Dr. Sarah Carter. It was essentially just about these lone women homesteaders that I had never heard of, I didn't know existed. As I asked people there who were native Montanans, they didn't know about them either.

Then it only got more interesting when I found out that there were Black women homesteaders, at least a few. Then I found out that at this time in Montana, there was a reasonably big Chinese population, that there were Japanese folks there, not just for the railroad, but for other businesses. Suddenly my picture of Montana in this time period became so much more complicated.

Alison Stewart: Also so much more interesting.

Victor LaValle: Because it was complicated, it was more interesting. It made me think about this idea of like, why did I think I knew this place? I realized I only knew it from popular entertainment and the history books that tell me a very simple clean, "Idea," of what the past was. The more I dug into it, the more I realized the past is so much more complicated and diverse. Then I would say the general movement of culture likes to portray, and so I thought, "Hey, maybe this is a book that people will find interesting." Even more interesting when they say like, "Oh, well this never could have happened." I get to say, "All of this happened except for literally one thing." That one thing is pretty big.

Alison Stewart: We're not going to give anything away. Victor LaValle is my guest. We're talking about Lone Women. It is our choice for Get Lit. We learned that Adelaide is from a farming community in Lucerne Valley, California, a place that actually had a fair amount of Black farmers and families during this period. What was something that you learned about this particular community that was useful for you in helping create your story?

Victor LaValle: Well, again, this may be an admission of my own ignorance, but I just didn't even know that this community existed, these Black farming families that they had come to Southern California in relatively speaking large numbers, 20 families, 50 families, 100 families, and that they were making the best that they could with the the land they were given and the promise that America, in theory, was making to them, that they could in some way enjoy the fruits of their labor and enjoy what America was supposed to give to all its citizens.

Alison Stewart: Let's get back to the characters you've created. Adelaide and her parents, even within this community, are known as, "Queer folk." How does this feeling of judgment and separation impact Adelaide?

Victor LaValle: Well, she's a person who's been raised in a family that is keeping what they feel is a very, very profoundly shameful secret. I grew up in a family that kept some secrets, as maybe many people did. One of the things that's so powerful about growing up in such a family is you find a way to isolate yourself from other people because you think we're keeping this secret, no one has to know.

In fact, one of the revelations of growing up and coming out of that kind of structure, is you realize everybody knew something was going on. Everybody knew you had a secret. They might not have known what it was, but the work that you and your family did to keep it actually isolated you even more than perhaps sharing that secret, asking for help with that secret might have done.

Adelaide is stuck in a family that has walled itself off, even from its own Black community. As a result, when things go bad, she can't rely on anybody nearby. She feels like the only choice she has is to run to Montana.

Alison Stewart: She brings this mysterious steamer trunk that we've been talking about, and it's incredibly heavy and she keeps it locked. We're not going to reveal anything about the trunk, because obviously it's important, but I'm curious about your pacing about what you want to reveal when. How did you think about pacing in this book?

Victor LaValle: Well, I really wanted to make you feel how Adelaide felt that every moment that she leaves the farm, essentially her heart is beating whatever would be fast. A hundred beats a minute, 500 beats minute, whatever it would be because as far as she's concerned, she has now left the cocoon of secrecy and, on some level, it has brought her secret with her. I think that's not revealing too much.

I didn't want to reveal that secret too quickly because if you are a person who has lived with a family secret a long time, it can feel like everywhere you go is like dragging that secret 1,000-pound secret behind you everywhere. I wanted the reader to feel the weight of it, but also to just be sitting there, clawing at the page saying, "What's in there? What's in there? What's in there?" Also, because it would be more fun to build it up.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Victor LaValle about his novel Lone Women, which is our May Get Lit with All Of It Book Club selection. We'll be getting more in-depth with Victor and with special musical guest Kaia Kater at our May 22nd event. Head to wnyc.org to grab your free tickets now.

There's more All Of It on the way. Quick note, Ben Platt was supposed to be our guest today. We're working on rescheduling that. We'll let you know when that is going to happen. What is going to happen next hour, a documentary about Yogi Berra. That's after the news.

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