Q&A with Stacia Moffett

 

 

 

Stacia Moffett is the author of the new novels The Missing Girl and Jessa Is Back. She taught at Washington State University, and she lives in the Pacific Northwest.

 

Q: What inspired you to write your Lost and Found in Tennessee series: The Missing Girl and Jessa Is Back?

A: The Missing Girl actually began as a daydream about self-sufficiency – the capacity of a 12-year girl to live off the land, using skills her family had taught her.  I knew the land, from visits to my father’s home place in west Tennessee when I was a child, and I had learned the skills from my own family.

The daydream would have ended there if I had not discovered a compelling reason to get the story down in print. My husband and I were born in the South in the 1940s, but after we completed our formal education, we moved to Washington state, where our three children were born.

 

When we tried to tell our children about growing up under segregation, they were totally disbelieving. They couldn’t make any sense of the stories we told about separate schools and lunch-counter regulations about who could sit down.  

 

They had grown up in a college town with schoolmates from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds, so the idea that there would be different water fountains and restrooms based upon skin color was an idea they rejected as ridiculous. This convinced me that I needed to explain about the South and its mindset.

To this motivation was added the impact of current events, with White Supremacy again being touted, voting again being restricted, and many wrongs of the past being brought out of the closet.

 

This threat convinced me that someone who lived through the 1950s and remembers it all too well should write about what Jim Crow was really like and how the 1950s were not the “good old days” that many white people claim.

Q: How did you create your character Jessa?

A: I have to admit that with all kinds of poetic license, Jessa is me, the me who is determined or downright stubborn. I wanted to show what it was like to be born into the white side of a segregated culture, i.e., to be one of the privileged class. That mindset was reinforced by the near-absolute separation of the races.  

 

I created Jessa as a product of this culture and then gave her an experience that opened her eyes: She moves with relatives to Portland, Oregon, and is befriended by a Black girl who becomes a close friend. The experience convinces her that segregation is wrong, dead wrong.  

 

In the final analysis, Jessa sees the unfair treatment and realizes that it is harming both races.

Q: Did you need to do any research to write the novels, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

A: Although most of the books’ content was drawn from personal experiences, research about the era led me to an appreciation that the blatant segregation I knew in the South was not limited to the former Confederacy but was present as discrimination in hiring, housing, and general attitude through much of the United States.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the books?

A: I want people to recognize the false values of the 1950s and to better appreciate the limited progress we have made in ending discrimination based on skin color. We are experiencing a resurgence in demonizing Black and brown people. 

 

As Jessa’s goal of getting music education in the curriculum of the Black school of her town gradually becomes a reality, she discovers the more important truth, which is that segregation prevents the races from interacting on a level that allows the formation of friendships. 

 

Because Jessa had herself benefitted from such a friendship, she argues forcefully for such friendships. On this basis, we can face and tackle the important goal of righting the wrongs of the past.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have in mind a sequel to these two books that will involve Jessa and her Black friend reuniting after five years, when the Civil Rights Era is finally in the process of transforming Jessa’s town. This is a tumultuous time, and represents quite a challenge, as important changes are being resisted by the unreconstructed people in the South.  

I am currently writing a book about my paternal grandparents, their courtship, and their experiences farming in rural western Tennessee, where they raised a family of eight children.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Lost and Found in Tennessee is intended at one level to be subversive. Although the main character is a 12-year-old girl, these are not children’s books.  

 

The small town in Tennessee where Jessa lives is itself the opposing character, and the adults provide the range of opinions about segregation that make these books appropriate for adult consumption. This is a critique of the times, and Jessa is like the child who dares to point out that the emperor has no clothes!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb