The Big Uneasy

Sandrine's Letter to Tomorrow, Johnson's debut (Reviews, Sept. 24), charts a light-skinned black girl's uneasy coming-of-age in 1970s New Orleans.

Sandrine, the young narrator, has trouble fitting in and has a rough childhood. How did the character of Sandrine evolve?

She's certainly based on my own experiences growing up in early 1970s New Orleans, being light skinned and caught in between, as other people saw me. Sandrine learns about the world from reading books—she knows what's ideal and what she learns from Catholic school. But she sees that these ideals are not what people live by.

In her world, men are largely the enemy.

The novel is not a general condemnation of men; there are some good role models, [but] you have to find them. Sandrine's main concern is staying safe from danger. As a girl, you are quite vulnerable, especially at certain times of day, like when Sandrine walks home from school, and there is still this perversion about girls in uniform. Skirts and see-through white shirts were the uniform for Catholic-school girls and it did kind of make you a target.

How did you hook up with the Brooklyn publishing house Ig?

I had finished the novel around 2004 and contacted a few agents and editors, but got no encouragement. They said they could not sell the book. I wondered about that, whether it was because there wasn't an African-American market for the book. But Robert Lasner at Ig found it very moving and loved the experience of reading it. It won second runner-up from the Faulkner Wisdom Society....

Do you consider yourself a New Orleans writer? A Southern writer? A black writer? And what will you be exploring in your next fiction?

I'm a black writer because that's the experience I grew up with, and I see myself as a New Orleans writer because I feel identified with this place. I can't imagine living anywhere else. My heart is here, even when I leave. In my next project I'll be delving into the aftermath of Katrina—not so much about the city as in the deterioration in people's lives. It's had a profound effect on family: it's a city, but a small city, very family-oriented, with people living next to relatives, and cousins everywhere. But after the storm those ties got disrupted, and we're beginning to see the effects of that, especially for the working poor and working-class people who depended on that network.