Tananarive Due, author of the Chautauqua Prize-winning The Reformatory: A Novel, discusses her work Monday in the Hall of Philosophy.
On Monday, Tananarive Due was officially fêted as the author of the 2024 Chautauqua Prize-winning book, The Reformatory: A Novel with a reading and ceremony in the Hall of Philosophy. Chosen from more than 330 nominations in this Prize cycle, The Reformatory is a historical fiction/horror novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows the story of Robbie Stephens Jr. as he is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys, a segregated reformatory.
Since its inception in 2012, The Chautauqua Prize has celebrated a book of fiction or narrative nonfiction that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and looks to honor an author’s significant contribution to the literary arts. The Reformatory was selected by the Prize jury because its members considered it a work that “demands absorption and investment, a story that is both haunted and haunting, a force of its own, and masterfully done,” said Kwame Alexander, Michael I. Rudell, Artistic Director of Literary Arts. During Monday’s presentation, Alexander went into more detail about the jury and their decision in choosing The Reformatory as this year’s winner.
“This year, we had the pleasure to introduce guest judges into this process of selecting the Chautauqua Prize-winning work and to name and celebrate our finalists jury publicly for the first time in the Prize’s 13 year history,” said Alexander.
The jury of readers was composed of members of Chautauqua staff, including Alexander; Stephine Hunt, manager of literary arts; Jordan Steves, the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education; Sara Toth, lecture associate and editor of The Chautauquan Daily; and Emily Carpenter, the Prize administrator and coordinator of the Department of Education. This year’s jury also included two award-winning writers as guest jurors: Victoria Christopher Murray, who was also a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle author this year for First Ladies, and Phil Klay, the 2015 Chautauqua Prize winner for his collection Redeployment.
“It was an honor to read and discuss the book selected for the long list by our volunteer readers,” said Alexander. “With this jury together, we unanimously selected The Reformatory as the 2024 winner of The Chautauqua Prize.”
Alexander described The Reformatory as an engrossing and heart-stopping work, that with its rich and defined characters has the power to “refuse to be stupefied by the cruelty it addresses.”
Each year, a unique, physical prize that aims to represent a true gift to the author to recognize their significant contribution to the literary arts both at Chautauqua and nationally is commissioned by an artist who is part of the Chautauqua community. This year’s prize was crafted by Chautauqua Visual Arts visiting artist Luka Carter.
“The piece is meant to be an urn of sorts, dedicated to the lives of both the victims and the survivors of the Dozier School for Boys. Inside are small clay pieces meant to represent the numerous boys who were subject to unjust and inhumane treatment,” said Carter. “I hope this piece can be part of the many ways we honor, mourn and remember their stories in order to fight for justice and build a future where these prisons do not exist. It was an honor to make this prize for such an important piece of literature.”
Due opened her speech on Monday by expressing her disbelief and appreciation in being recognized with such an honor.
“If I could go back in time and reveal to the aspiring writer I was in my late teens and early 20s, that I would one day win a major literary prize for writing a novel set in the rural Jim Crow South, I never would have believed it,” she said, “and I’m certain that every history teacher I ever had would not believe it either.”
Due reflected on her experience as someone from Generation X, and how her experiences compared to those of her mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due.
“My struggles against racism were not the flagrant ‘white only’ and ‘colored’ signs and exclusion of every African American generation before mine, but the more ambiguous eyes of store clerks following me as I shopped, neighborhood kids calling me the N word when we integrated a neighborhood in the 1970s,” she said. “There was racism, but I was also sheltered from it, especially when I compared it to my mother’s stories of 1960s civil rights activism.”
Despite her generation’s “rose-colored glasses,” she said, Due didn’t just hear stories. She grew up experiencing death threats from neighbors, and calls from the FBI warning her father that he might be the target of a racist serial bomber.
“As I look back on it, no wonder I wanted to write horror,” said Due, who teaches Afrofuturism and Black horror at UCLA, and is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award-winning author.
The idea for The Reformatory first came to Due when she got a call from the Florida State Attorney’s Office. For the first time, she learned that her mother had an uncle named Robert Stephens, who in 1937, at age 15, was stabbed to death by another inmate at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.
“I had never known that my mother had lost an uncle there. I actually don’t think she ever knew that story of her father’s brother. … It was as if after the tragedy and trauma of losing a child to incarceration, Robert Stephens had been erased from the world,” Due said. “I decided I wanted to create a novel where I could say his name and everyone would learn it, but he deserved a much better ending.”
For Due, horror was a key element of the story, and with the use of metaphors of ghosts trapped in the facility, she played homage to the real violence at the Dozier School.
“The spirits of the dead boys trapped at this facility can be scary, but they’re not the true monsters of the story,” she said. “History is one of the monsters. Bureaucracy is one of the monsters. And in The Reformatory, as in the true life Dozier School for Boys, the monsters are human.”
As her remarks came to a close, Due hoped to remind everyone about the importance of civil rights movements, both in the past and moving forward, as she shared some stories from Dozier School survivors.
“To honor the true spirit of The Reformatory, I ask all of us to look beyond our own fears and assumptions and what we think we understand, to listen to young people. They have led the way in the past, and they will continue to do so today,” she said. “We have seen the impact of what our young people can do when they are energized and when they feel heard. But please also note the impact of potential state violence on our nation’s young people. … That was the lesson for me in speaking to the survivors from the Dozier School, the scars have not healed. … We need our young people to stand up for our nation. … But let us not forget we also have a responsibility to stand up for them.”
