In We Refuse to Forget (Riverhead, June), Gayle examines how Black Creeks lost their tribal citizenship in 1979.
When did you realize that the story of the Black Creeks had broader implications?
When I first came upon this journey in 2018 it became clear that if one was going to make the claim that you could be more than the one thing society had dictated you to be, then we were talking about something that could have broader implications for anyone who’s ever been put into a box they didn’t feel they belonged in. It became clear that not only was this something that didn’t just speak to the present moment, but perhaps was something we’ve been trying to get after—the question of belonging—for as long as we’ve been human and definitely for as long as we’ve been trying to construct this thing called America, as complicated as that might be.
Why was it important to include your own personal history as the son Jamaican immigrants?
A good chunk of the book is me admitting how much I didn’t know about the Black Creeks. I wanted to make sure people understood that not only is it okay to not know, but it’s in fact encouraged to be in a continuous state of worrying about who we have been and who we can become.
How do debates over reparations factor into this story?
I think that not just at this moment but perhaps for far too long, we’ve been talking very abstractly about reparations. Oftentimes we allow the abstractness of it all to stymie any sort of real progress. In the case of Black Creeks, we can draw a very linear and straight path, and we can do the same for the victims and the descendants of those who were either killed or survived the Tulsa Race Massacre. We can really draw this very straight line of the opportunity lost by not having that history understood. Perhaps if we speak really concretely and not abstractly, we can rescue ourselves from the tongue-twisting exercises that we normally do when we’re trying to avoid having a direct conversation about reparations.
You focus on the descendants of a Black Creek tribal leader named Cow Tom. Did other families have similarly compelling histories?
Oh, there are tons and there are others who’ve written about those families. Random people will reach out to me to let me know that “I, too, have a similar history,” or “I know that my grandmother once told me a story about X, Y, and Z.” It’s been interesting to realize just how much more extensive the stories are and just how much more intricate a tapestry we can create for questions of identity if we just give ourselves permission to explore and understand histories that are relatively obscure or hidden from view, intentionally or unintentionally.
