Black Coffee with White Friends blogger Walker charts a post–Jim Crow childhood in Everybody Come Alive (Convergent, May).

Was there one element of this memoir that was hardest to get right?

Everything that I wrote about my mother. She’s one of those people you just had to know to understand. The funny thing is that I could have said anything about my mom; most readers will never have met her. But I wanted to honor her and to give her dignity, and it’s hard to do in light of some of the choices she made. I never wanted to make her a saint, but I also didn’t want to make her a demon—she wasn’t a bad mom, she just wasn’t a very nurturing one. It’s hard to put into words why you love a mother for whom being a mom wasn’t a priority. How do you explain loving this mother who has hurt you and others?

You write about grief both individually and communally. Did you think of these forces in conjunction as you wrote?

They were definitely intertwined. There’s a story that I didn’t tell in the book: I realized when doing research that my older sister’s birthday, April 4, is the same day of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination—it happened on her seventh birthday, before I was born. I went to my family and asked all my siblings what they remembered about that day. No one remembered anything, and they were all shocked to learn that. What was my family doing that day? They would’ve been planning a party or getting a cake. But there was no real memory of the assassination. One of my sisters said, “I don’t know, maybe everyone was really sad but went on with things.” And that’s grief. I think my family’s way of grieving was really fearful—wanting to survive and yet seeing so much death around them. I think my mom’s grief was our grief as well.

Is there anything in particular that you’d like readers to take away from the book?

I’d hope that people are inspired to excavate their family stories, and put words to the emotions they suppress and identities they keep separate. Also, in a spiritual sense, I’d love if people take away that there’s more than one way to look at God—culturally there’s a very myopic view of God that most people can’t relate to and looks nothing like them. So I hope that’s really clear.