“We use stories to explain ourselves to ourselves,” Watts said, to reinforce our shared humanity. She was particularly interested in exploring women like her mother and grandmother. However, unlike Gatsby, Watts was interested in exploring the collisions of race and class and gender. With this book, as in The Great Gatsby, Watts was interested in exploring the desperation of people longing for the past, people who return home with an irrepressible drive to prove themselves to those who shaped them during their formative years, people who will go to desperate lengths to find their place in the world and not be outsiders. No One Is Coming to Save Us, Watts’ acclaimed novel, is about a desperately poor family in NC who are black. “And it made me think,” Watts said, “of how influential we are on each other throughout our lifetimes.” For the longest time Baldwin thought an idea was a piece of black velvet.
While reading Go Tell It on the Mountain, she came to the section where Baldwin speaks of when he was five and his mother said, “I have an idea,” as she was holding a scrap of black velvet. “This summer my goal was to read all of James Baldwin’s works,” Stephanie Powell Watts told the audience at the Key West Literary Seminar.
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