These Ghosts Are Family: A Conversation with Author Maisy Card

photos courtesy of Maisy Card

written by Shanida Carter

Jamaican-American author Maisy Card has received critical acclaim for her debut novel from the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly since its release in March 2020. Card, an avid book lover is also a librarian in New Jersey’s largest city, Newark. I caught up with Card to talk about the unique structure of her book, “These Ghosts Are Family,” how it’s helping to reveal real-life secrets from the past, and how this fictional story of a family tree stirs up the spirits of inequality that still haunt the world today. 

Congratulations on your critically acclaimed debut. Were there any reactions to the book that surprised you?

“No…I was always nervous about my family’s reaction but part of me didn’t think that my parents would read it, and I don’t think they did, but they were sending it out a lot which I was surprised about. My dad has been sending it to a lot of people. It’s weird because one of my aunts in Jamaica asked if it was based on somebody in town. They live in a really small rural town and I was like, ‘No. There’s no way I could have known this person.’ It was somebody that they grew up with and I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ Interestingly, people see similarities between people I’ve never heard of or met. My sister asked if one of the characters was her which is not true at all. I think the only surprise is the similarities people see or imagine that the stories are based on.”

And that’s a testament to how real your book is even though it’s a novel. With that said, how much is real and how much is fiction? 

“I would say everything that occurs in the book is, more or less, fiction but there might have been some small truth that some of the stories or chapters began with. I might have been working off memories or stories I heard about certain characters. The character of Vera began as me thinking about what I knew about my maternal grandmother, which was not a lot, but then the circumstances around that character are not real. One of the first sections that I completed was the chapter called “Gratitude,” which takes place during a funeral. The beginning of that was a true incident or memory. I was remembering going to my grandmother’s funeral when I was in Jamaica, when I was young, and her Nine Night and all the preparation around that, but the Bernard character and the affair are all fictional. It’s like a mix but I would say it’s 95% fiction and maybe 5% non-fiction. Some characters are composites of real people. I was thinking of my grandfather when I wrote the Abel Paisley character and, even earlier, I was thinking of my father. When we lived in Jamaica before I was born, I think he was a police officer in Jamaica, but he doesn’t really talk about it, so I think the setting for the second chapter began with me thinking about that time.”

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How much research did you have to do? You write with such vividness and detail which is awesome. I was thinking of trailers and movie scenes in my head as I was reading the scenes that were set in the sixties and earlier, especially the plantation narratives. How much work went into nailing the detail down and the dress and the scenery and the nuances of the historical moments in the book?

“I did a lot of research in the beginning, especially with “The Lamb or the Lion” section which was set during the sixties. I spent a long time on that section, and I think that was why it took me so long to finish. Some of the research I did for that was procrastination really, but it was also me having a fear of getting it wrong, especially since I didn’t grow up in Jamaica. I did a lot of research that didn’t make it into the book. It was hard for me to imagine that time, so I tried to find stock footage. Maybe that’s why it’s visual. I tried to find as many documentaries or stock footage from that time but the plantation I did do a lot of research into what they were wearing, what you would call the garments that they wore, but that didn’t take as long. That section didn’t take as long as the sixties section. For some reason, I spent a long time on that and maybe because it’s also because I was struggling with the plot of that story in particular, so I kept researching to help me figure it out. That story I wrote for years and years, and I didn’t even finish it until the very end”.

When and how did you get the idea for the book?

“It didn’t come all at once. Beginning in college, I think my senior year, I took a non-fiction class. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I never tried to write about myself. When I wrote characters, they were always very richly ambiguous. They were never Jamaican. They were just these generic American characters. Then, I took a creative non-fiction class. When I was at Wesleyan, my teacher, her name was Elizabeth Bobrick, really encouraged me to write about myself and my family. That’s when I feel like I got a different response from her about my writing when I did that. It made me want to write more. At first, I thought that I would write short stories based on my father. I was trying to write stories that were based on my father just because he really didn’t talk about his life very much so that’s when I started writing an essay about him being a cop and that turned into a story later. Then, when I went to the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program, I just started writing regular unconnected stories about Jamaican characters. Overtime after I left the MFA program, when I kept writing, it occurred to me that they should just be one family. These were coming from family stories and family memories, so it made sense for me to change it so that all the characters were related. I went back and forth. It started as a short story collection, then linked short stories, then a novel. I like to say a novel in stories is how it ended up”. 

That explains the format because there are different voices and different layers. There are different styles and the climax kind of happens in the beginning. That explains why there are a lot of different stories, but they’re connected as one. I’ll be honest. I read the beginning and I felt like everything was in the beginning, so I was like, ‘Where is it going to go from here?’ 

“That’s funny because that was one of the last sections I wrote, too. I did show it to a friend, and she was like, ‘Hmm, you shouldn’t put it in the beginning.’ At the point that I wrote that I realized that it just wasn’t going to follow a traditional structure. Even though the premise of the novel is based on Abel faking his own death, the main focus is the evolution of the family and the effect that the family experiences, and how all these invisible factors and traumas are affecting their daily lives throughout time. It’s a bird’s eye view of a family if you were able to time travel and dip into somebody’s family tree. What would you see and what connections would you make?”

[Shanida Carter] “Wow. Dipping in time travel. I like that. Your book had so many messages. You’ve woven a lot of food for thought in terms of race, generational trauma, misogyny, classism, the treatment of immigrants, religion, even colorism. And all of those are so relevant right now in the world, but especially in America, with all that we’re dealing with in 2020, so your book is not just entertaining. It’s timely and there’s a lot to take away from it.”

What are you hoping to release to the world through your words about this West Indian family, especially now?

“A lot of people that I’ve talked to have said it’s made them think about their own families. It’s made them ask questions. One woman, I think she’s from Trinidad, she said she was reading it with her family which I thought was interesting. She was reading it with her mother and grandmother. All the things I would have liked to have been able to talk about with my own family, that I still can’t talk about with my own family, went into this book. I just hope that it encourages discussion. People in the Black diaspora and people who are descendants of slavery and have been affected by colonialism, I think we’ve very secretive for good reason, but it makes it hard to know people. I hope that this book can be a conversation starter, a way to ask difficult questions before it’s too late.”

[Shanida Carter] “Absolutely.”

Will the ghosts be back for a sequel?

“I don’t know. I mean, I never thought about that, but some people had mentioned it. I think the characters will pop up again. I’m working on a short story now that has similar themes and similar folklore that’s represented in the book but its different characters. Let’s see how it goes.” 

Tell us about some of the other projects that you’re working on. I read you were working on a project in conjunction with other Newark artists.

“The poet, Jasmine Mans, who has a book coming out in March of next year, is a Newark resident. I’m a librarian. I worked with her through the Newark Public Library. She’s been a teaching artist for the library for years. She curated this digital project called “Symphony of Survival” and it’s processing how COVID and how police brutality and the George Floyd protests have affected the Black diaspora in Newark. I wrote an essay because my grandfather died of COVID early on during the pandemic.” 

[Shanida Carter] “I’m sorry. My condolences.” 

“He died in late March. I just wrote a short essay about that and other poets contributed poems. I think they were able to make them into multimedia projects with both film and music and poetry. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff on there and they’re all local artists.”

I want to jump back for a moment because you said that you hoped that your book was a conversation starter. I’ve also run up against those family secrets and those guarded pockets of the family tree. That’s just how it seems like elder West Indian people are. And you also mentioned that there were relatives who read the book and were like, ‘Is this me?’ Did it help start conversations in your family and are you actively looking into your own family tree? 

“Actually, I am looking into my family tree and that’s something I think has helped. I don’t think it’s helped with our issues as a family but since I finished the book, since it was published and since my grandfather passed away, when I talk to my mother now it’s been this game of telephone where I’m asking explicit questions about my grandfather’s past and she knows that I’m researching whereas when I was writing the book, she didn’t know. Now, she’ll call my aunts, my grandfather’s sisters who are still alive, and ask them questions. It’s also helped with conversations. I guess it’s helped dispel myths in a way.”

“Not my father’s side though. My father is from a small town in Jamaica. It’s very rural and they’ve lived there for generations, so I think they’re really acquainted with their family lineage, but for my mother’s side of the family there were a lot of misconceptions about where they came from. I think colorism has a lot to do with that, too. There was this myth. Sometimes they have a tendency to try to write themselves out of slavery.”

“Just being able to do the research and say, ‘No, look, Goulbournes literally started out as slaves or the colored class because they were so entrenched in slavery very early on. My grandfather was always known to be very quiet and secretive but now I’m realizing in retrospect it’s because he didn’t know a lot about his father and his father didn’t tell him. We’re realizing that it was lack of information, and lack of asking questions has just been something that’s been passed down generations. When we talked to my grandfather’s sisters, some of the stuff they’ve told us about their own parents are wrong. I think it’s because they were afraid to ask their own father questions about his life. They’re from this patriarchal setup where men were allowed to go from family to family without really being questioned. I found out that my grandfather’s father was actually married when he had them and that explains a lot. That explains the secrecy there and the lack of knowledge that he had this whole other family that wasn’t really talked about. My grandfather became a person who had multiple families, too. This kind of behavior got passed down without anybody really critiquing it or even talking about how it made them feel.”

Do you have any advice for future authors?

“With this book, the reason it is the way it is, is because toward the end, I just experimented. I put in everything that was interesting to me in the book. People should feel free to experiment and put all your interests into your writing. Do what you need to do to make it something that you love and something that you enjoy while still being accessible to other people. Also, share your work with other people, too. That really helped me finish in the end when I started sending my work out, when I started joining writing groups and talking to other people about writing. I really got further with the novel after the MFA when I was just with informal writing groups or in non-credit classes. Just sharing my writing with other people really helped me finish and stay motivated.”

To learn more about Card and her work visit her website here.