What Came Before is a remarkable achievement-a smart, fast-paced mystery that asks important questions about identity, family, and race. "What Came Before" springs from a desire to show that people are more alike than different, and it is our differences that enrich us. It's something I learned as I grew into myself, through reading, through the experiences of the growing up in the fifties and sixties, through knowing people of many races - the different ways human beings exist in a real world. I wish I could say I knew instinctively at that young age the whole wrongness of it, but I didn't. I don't remember, but I think it was my father who to me this kind of fear and hatred existed in the world. He explained that one was for white people, the other for black.
I ran back to my grandpa and told him what happened.
The two sprays of water were exactly the same. When no rainbow showed up, I was disappointed. I chose "colored," of course, because to my mind that meant the water would come out red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. The left one was labeled "white" and the other labeled "colored." I studied them, wondering which one I wanted. Two drinking fountains stood against the cluttered back wall of the market. Then when I was four or five - I don't really remember exactly - I wandered off to get a drink of water.
I liked to ride on the front of the cart while he pushed down the aisles. He was a sunburned Santa Claus smelling of figs and cigars who liked to load up on rolls and rolls of toilet paper, paper towels, cans of tomato sauce and bottles of soda pop. I loved going to the grocery store with my grandpa. That's where I ran smack dab into Jim Crow laws. Since he was a teacher, we used to climb into our old Pontiac as soon as school was out and head east to corn country, then head south to Terrebonne parish. I grew up in California, but my mom came from a little town in Louisiana and my dad from Iowa. In the beginning, Abbie's missing half-sister was white, like Abbie and like me, and I kept coming up with the question, "so what?" "Where's the tension?" I reached into my own life, my own experiences, my own childhood for clues. Stories-good stories-had to be about something that mattered to me and to others. What Came Before was conceived as a comedy with lots of broad humor and exaggerated characters, but as I began to work, I realized I needed to write something I cared about, that there had to be a reason beyond car chases and Twinkies for a piece of work to exist.
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