You're not a Black man. You're a human being in God's eyes. So when you sit down to talk to someone and you talk to them in really intelligent terms, you ask difficult questions, there's a militancy that's assigned to you without you asking for it, because you are simply judged by what you look like. If you're a white person asking the same questions, you'd be one of these CNN guys and say how brilliant he is. That doesn't work for you, because this is the world we live in.
James McBrideMusic and writing do fold together in the sense that you have to have a certain level of skill in order to execute your ideas and you need a medium. The idea of improvisation is one that many writers fall into, and I improvise a great deal when I'm writing, but there's a structural framework that I'm working around, and that takes more time than the actual writing. Once the characters get to yapping and talking, they'll move from one room to the next, and I just have to make sure that the house is built. That's really hard, that's the kind of thing that sits with you all day long.
James McBrideThe act of choosing what to place in your piece when you're a historian or a non-fiction writer already renders it into fiction for someone else. In some ways fiction comes a lot closer to reality. When you start talking about something as brutal as slavery and life in the American West, it's really important to take a non- judgmental stance. We romanticize a great deal about life in the American West, but I thank God I wasn't living during that time. No matter what color you were, it was rough, crude, tough living.
James McBrideThere are some really great books that have been written about slavery, but I don't think that the discourse about it in society has been very accurate or healthy. I don't think we've come up with ways to tell it that don't insult people or hit them in the wrong way. Part of the problem is that most people don't really understand what slavery was anyway. Most white people didn't own slaves. Slavery was a way of life, just like driving cars is a way of life now. It doesn't mean that it was right.
James McBride