Kelly McWilliams is a mixed-race novelist whose work examines white passing, American history, and the uncanny. She is also the author of several acclaimed novels for young adults, including Mirror Girls, a Junior Library Guild Selection. American Nightmare is her adult fiction debut. She lives in Seattle with her family. You can connect with her on Instagram – @kellymmcwilliams.
McWilliams sat down with Cemetery Dance to discuss American Nightmare, hidden figure, Walter F. White, and historical horrors.
(Interview conducted by Haley Newlin)
CEMETERY DANCE: American Nightmare is your adult fiction debut. Did any part of the creative or research process feel different than writing YA fiction like your previous release, Mirror Girls?
Creatively, my work on American Nightmare felt very different. While Mirror Girls focused on one murder and its impact on one town, Nightmare criss-crosses the nation, and I needed to land my beats at key historical moments. I knew I had to get my hero from Atlanta in 1906 to New York ten years later, and to Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919—and finally, to Tulsa in 1921. Creatively, this required scope and scale—as any book with American in the title must. That was the great craft challenge of the book, and Clark White rose to it. The day I believed that he’d seen and understood the whole country—or a vast portion of it, anyhow—was the day I knew my work was complete. This was especially necessary because that’s true of Walter F. White, the man the story is based on. He understood something crucial about this country. I wanted to honor that understanding and transmit his discoveries in my fiction.
For Mirror Girls, I read primarily oral histories, collected by the WPA, so I could better portray what Jim Crow felt like to parents and to children. I’m still haunted by these human stories today. For Nightmare, I carried this powerful research with me into the political world of the 1900s—and this time my question wasn’t just “how does it feel,” but also, “what does it mean” for the nation, for history, for our reality today. I read many issues of The Crisis, the NAACP’s publication at the time. I read correspondence between Walter F. White and James Weldon Johnson. I scoured Ida B. Wells’ work, and I would like to see her on every syllabus everywhere, all the time.
If Mirror Girls were an essay, American Nightmare felt like my dissertation. And then, in addition to the gothic mode I write in naturally, I added a new genre: spy thriller. The historical spy thriller is a wonderful way to take on a nation’s deepest conflicts. When you combine it with horror? Well, then you’re way below the surface of the nation’s crust. You are getting to the heart of things.
American Nightmare is inspired by Walter White, a white-passing Black man of the NAACP who infiltrated violent groups and investigated lynchings in the South. What was it like shaping your protagonist, Clark Wendell White, from this historical figure?
It’s been a lifelong dream, for me, to write a character inspired by Walter’s true history. Personally, I think of Walter F. White as one of history’s hidden figures. The real man has a complex biography, but he truly did investigate 41 lynchings and eight race massacres. He was a mentee of James Weldon Johnson, and subsequently the mentor, himself, of Thurgood Marshall. And yet his name doesn’t ring through history the way one might expect, and this comes down to his complex racial positioning. He saw himself as Black, as a soldier for the Cause. And yet, his obituary called him “A Negro by Choice.” When I set out to write this novel, I knew I wanted to demonstrate that in fact, a man like him—a survivor of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot—had no choice in his identity at all, and nor would he have wanted one. He was proud to be a Black man working against apartheid.
And this feeling, I know quite personally. I’m a very light-skinned, mixed-race woman. Walter F. White didn’t often write about his own emotions surrounding what he called the “enigma” of his presentation. This is where, as a novelist, I began to imaginatively fill in the gaps. Bringing the personal to life inside the political—I see that as my essential work. And because of my own situation in life, as a Black writer who isn’t always seen as Black, I couldn’t wait to run with Walter White’s story. I hope the novel both increases interest in the real man and provides a window into the experience of any person who must keep their true heart alive while they are forced, for whatever reason, to wear a public-facing mask.
I quote from Dunbar’s poem, We Wear the Mask, in the front pages of the novel—and I use the second stanza. But when I wanted to remind myself how the novel ought to feel, I’d re-read the first: “We wear the mask that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,– / This debt we pay to human guile; / With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, / And mouth with myriad subtleties.”
Where the personal and the political meet, that’s American Nightmare.
The Nightmare in American Nightmare is described as a supernatural entity that lurks in the shadows and creeps from place to place. What was the initial inspiration or spark for the idea to write about race issues and violent groups from a supernatural/psychological horror perspective?
When the real Walter F. White defended his home against the Atlanta Race Riot in 1906, when white folks were swarming the streets looking to harm anyone they found outside, burning down homes and businesses and destroying families, Walter was only thirteen. So, too, is my Clark. How, I asked myself, is that child supposed to carry that trauma into the long fight of his life? He’d investigate 41 lynchings and eight race massacres—all different, and yet all threaded together by one awful thing: determined, enduring systemic racism. That, too, seems to creep from place to place, to shape shift and yet never really change. How do we understand that? How do we grapple with it?
I went as deep into the child Clark/Walter as I could, and what I found was the Nightmare. He needed to name the enemy in order to survive it, and I find that so human. Our need for the supernatural…it’s deeply human, too. It often represents our inability to hold onto the banality of evil. And in this case, I also think it was my way of transmitting to all types of readers how systemic racism can feel: like it’s the hunter, and you’re the prey. Clark thinks of himself as a rabbit, always running after, or running away from, a terrifying force. But that force follows him everywhere, even into dreams. It follows us all.
I’ve spoken to a few historical horror authors, including Clay Cane, author of Burn Down Master’s House, and Markus Redmond, author of Blood Slaves, who didn’t initially realize that they were writing horror. Did you always know that you were creating a horror story with books like American Nightmare and Mirror Girls?
I think horror is how I make sense of the world, and novels are, at heart, meaning-making machines, so the horror is always on tap for me. That said, I never know exactly what type of horror story I’m about to tell.
No One Leaves the Manor is Lovecraftian, Mirror Girls is gothic, and American Nightmare is…well, I’ll leave the genre designation up to the experts at Cemetery Dance!
The shape of the Nightmare did surprise me a little. Its physicality, its connection to the color red, the way it would appear to Clark in racist documents from the time. But the history of the Red Summer of 1919 is a horror story to begin with. The question for me was always: how will my character metabolize it? And I do think Cane and Redmond are getting at something real. When the history is the horror, why do we need classic horror conventions, or the supernatural, at all? And I think the answer is in part that so much of our history has been purposefully erased. We are in a moment of reclamation, rediscovery, even exhumation of horrors past. We deal with hidden figures and histories trapped under lock and key. Horror has always brought the invisible forces of the world to light. The work of historical fiction and the work of horror run on parallel underground trains. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that so many of us telling Black stories today are riding the same third rail, though it may lead us to different stops, different stations.
Are you a fan of the horror genre? What are some historical horror books you’d recommend and why?
Am I!
Baby Kelly fell in love with The X-Files. Then Jurassic Park. All of Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Ellison, the great 20th century horror story writers…and I studied Victorian literature in college, which is of course highly haunted.
I’d even describe myself as a horror superfan, and I’m so excited for the Black horror renaissance we’re seeing now, which is dovetailing so beautifully with feminist horror. After I saw the movie Get Out, I knew we were going mainstream. I turned to my husband and said, I’m so glad I get to be the writer I am right now.
Horror is in a very exciting place!
In terms of recommendations, I would love for the whole world to read Conjure Women by Afia Atakora if they haven’t yet. Ring Shout is essential reading, too. Anything by Victor LaValle (like, really, anything). I love The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, too. And for more recent history, with a dash of humor, Grady Hendrix’s books set in the 80s and 90s are a thrill—My Best Friend’s Exorcism captures the vibe of the 80s in such a unique way. Also, I’d love for people to return to Tayari Jones’s first novel, Leaving Atlanta. And Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes. It’s a fantastic mix of historical fiction and gothic psychological horror.
I recommend these books because history and horror intertwine in such a way that the horror is almost like the soundtrack, the mood—and the history is what takes center stage. My favorite reads hit that sweet spot where the horror tones amplify the history, instead of overpowering it—and horror’s conventions allow human truths to ring out, clear as a bell.
American Nightmare is available now.
