Could you share with us how this story idea came into being? What were some things on your mind while writing it?

It’s hard to say exactly, because I finished the first draft of this story back in September of 2016 and a lot has changed since then. I’m sure that the continued inequities and injustices in U.S. law enforcement and policing practices were on my mind. The Philando Castile murder happened that summer, and he worked in public schools. I’m sure some of the social media memorials from his young students and their parents were in the back of mind, as were conversations I’d had with my younger brothers and my friends with teenage sons. A lot of my age-mates were either actively looking for places and spaces that were safer for their young sons, or having very serious talks with them about how they were perceived and the best ways for them to move through the world. I was in kind of a protected space at the time—I lived overseas—and was probably trying to reckon with my own horror and fear and grief as well as the survivor’s guilt of being far away and very physically and carcerally safe as well. The repeated line about “I been to jail!” does actually come from a friend’s kid, who got caught telling his little friends that to try and be . . . impressive, I guess? He a) hadn’t been to jail, only taken to the police station by an officer to “scare” him, leading to legal action from the family b) had the nerve to say that to people even though his parents had taught him that is not a lifestyle goal and c) is probably still on punishment for it now, despite having just turned twenty-one.

I do know for a fact that two retellings of Raw Head, Bloody Bones, originally found in English folklore, directly inspired this story. One was the story “Little Eight John,” from Virginia Hamilton’s collection of Black folklore retellings The People Could Fly. It scared the daylights out of me as a child and I immediately retold it to every other kid in the neighborhood. The other was Laurell K. Hamilton’s take on the creature in her Anita Blake novel Bloody Bones. That’s the first time I realized that Raw Head, Bloody Bones wasn’t a uniquely Black American monster—I grew up only hearing the story in our context and was surprised to find that it had European origins.

The narrative voice is so playful and energetic. The humor in the story came across from the very beginning even while discussing things about racial history, police violence, and the supernatural from the get-go. I also love the recurrent mention of laughter in the text. How important (or not) do you think humor is in a text interweaving these kinds of themes?

I think that’s partly just Black American culture—we collectively have a dark, absurdist sense of humor and very few idols. Culturally we place a lot of weight on irony, wordplay, and storytelling—look at any artist in our community, any MC, comedian, poet, playwright. There are very few things we won’t tell jokes about, starting with ourselves. That’s partly because you have to laugh to keep from crying—policing injustice, ghosts, family estrangement, adultification, systemic racism—none of that is funny. But hard things are made more bearable by sprouting a little seed of joy in your heart and watering it with laughter at the absurdity of every unfair thing. It’s also because it feels good to laugh and have a shared language of jokes. It makes telling a story like this easier, because I can gloss over darker details and lean into the jokes and the supernatural. I also think that the main character here is kind of an homage to all the awkward, self-conscious Black boys I’ve worked with as an educator and youth worker over the years. So many of the boys I’ve met walk this hilarious, precious line between taking themselves very seriously and not taking themselves seriously at all, and I wanted to capture a little of that.

Why the choice of a white ghost?

There’s a simple reason and a complex one. The simple reason is that I’ve never really thought of Raw Head as a “white ghost.” I grew up with his presence in Black American folklore like many did and I think a lot of us don’t realize he has European origins. It wasn’t until I came across him again as an adult that I knew, and once I knew, I had to acknowledge it. The complex reason is that Black Americans are haunted by white ghosts in reality, aren’t we? We have this complicated existence in our own country, not by choice but by imposition, and the ghosts of all of the horrors of our racialized marginalization haunt us to this day. New ghosts are constantly being added to our cultural bestiary, and old ghosts pop up wearing new uniforms all the time. Then, to add insult to injury, we have tangible social, cultural, and sometimes even blood connections to these ghosts that are very difficult to reconcile. Sometimes we have to choose to accept those connections or even build them up just to survive. And while this is a very specifically Black American story, I think this kind of choice is part of every marginalized community’s story. Somewhere in the process of liberating ourselves, we have to stop and shed the rage implanted in us by our histories. I guess what I’m saying is that for me, this version of Raw Head Bloody Bones isn’t a white ghost so much as he is a manifestation of unwelcome, implanted rage.

I love that this story endorses a kind of intergenerational harmony despite the horror that certain kinds of histories can bring. What do you feel about the ending you presented here?

I don’t really like this ending or feel good about it, but Ol’ Big Head got to chuckling in my dreams and I had to let him do what he wanted on the page, in the end.

I feel really unsettled by it, honestly. I personally have a hard time feeling good about anything that could happen next. I mean, there’s no way things get easier at the rec center if law enforcement nearby starts supernaturally disappearing, right? This is a very short-lived vengeance with possible consequences the main character can’t really understand. Also, every character in this, except perhaps Valerie, is actually very isolated. They’re all engineering connections to each other (or being forced to), but none of those connections are deep or satisfying, just consequential.

I’ve written or started writing a few stories in this community, all bringing ancestral manifestations of the supernatural into the present day and I think I’m often trying to reconcile within myself the truth of what I know about my culture ancestrally and in present reality with how little that seems to matter sometimes, in the grand scheme of things. There’s something in being marginalized that makes you feel powerless even when you have power, something that makes you feel like your power must be wrong or evil, something that isolates you from others, something that makes you go sit with elders who really don’t want to relive the past but feel obligated to help you try and build a strengthening connection to the past. All of that is deeply uncomfortable for me.

Can we have a spinoff with Valerie’s story?

Ha! Nope, but also yes. It’s funny that she came up here, because I have a story slowly simmering on the back burner about Valerie’s niece. She goes to school with the main character from Ol’ Big Head, who makes a brief appearance (and finally gets a name). Valerie plays a big part in that story, but to say how would be an enormous spoiler if it all comes together the way I think it will. Watch this space?

Is there a project you are currently working on? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

Like any writer, most of what I put on the page is trash but there are some gems in there that I’m slowly digging out and polishing. I’m currently working on what feels like the five millionth edit of a fantasy novel I’ve been working on since 2019, about two siblings who leave their village to go on a quest to find their missing father in the Big Wide World. Seems simple enough, but they’re from a deaf village and don’t realize that nearly everyone they encounter on their quest will be hearing, or the challenges that will bring. It’s a sweet and wondrous story (in my very biased opinion, anyway) but editing is hard work so when I get tired I whittle away at various short stories. A few, like the one belonging to Valerie’s niece, are set in the same neighborhood as Ol’ Big Head. Some are set in a fantasy world that I’ve been idly building, stone by tree by magic bean, since I was in high school. (I was trying to teach myself how global sociopolitics work and it’s gotten really out of hand.) Most are one-offs started because I’m always trying to be a better writer and learn how to craft better stories by challenging myself to try lots of different things. Way too many are horror-tinged, which I am honestly never trying to write but I think the great Nisi Shawl said it best once back when they were still on Twitter—to paraphrase, inadvertently writing horror happens when, “in the eyes of the dominant paradigm, I AM THE MONSTER.”