Guest Post: Experience Into Mystery Novels by Judy Hogan

Please welcome Judy Hogan back to the blog today … 

Back in the fall of 2004, I realized I wasn’t getting in enough students for my independent creative writing courses to pay my bills, so I searched frantically for a job, and heard of a possible one teaching at an historically black college in Raleigh. I applied and was accepted. I had taught black students before through a library program, but never in a black college. I wasn’t prepared for the reaction of the students as soon as the chairman walked out of this Reading class.

I put into the book Killer Frost which I wrote later exactly what happened that morning:

But when Oscar slipped out the door, everything changed. It was the turn of a girl sitting in the back row. “My name is Sheila Green. I’m a Drama major from Petersburg.” She paused, glanced around. “I hate St. Francis so far. The dorms have roaches, the bathrooms are nasty, the food makes me puke.”

            Penny saw the smirks on the faces of the girls around her. The football boys, as she would come to think of them, laughed but stopped when Penny looked at them.

Sheila had more to say. She looked very happy as she said, I have to go to the restroom. May I be excused now?”

            Then Lashandra, who had already introduced herself, raised her hand.

            “Yes?”

            “Can we leave now? The class ends at 9:00, and Miz Avery always let us go early.”

            Penny glanced at her watch. It was 8:30. “No, Lashandra. This class ends at 9:15.”

            “No, it don’t.” Lashandra had a mulish look.

            “Miz Avery allus left us time to get us our breakfast. She never kept us till 9,” chimed in Sheila.

            Penny reacted blindly before she took time to think. “Sheila and Lashandra, I’m not Ms. Avery. We have only seventy-five minutes together twice a week. I will dismiss class at 9:15. You can use the restroom at 9:15. Now, who’s next?” She nodded to the plump young woman sitting next to Ronny and deliberately didn’t look at Sheila or Lashandra.

            In the book Penny has a good friend Sammie, who also teaches there, and laughs at Penny for not letting her students go to the bathroom, but when I taught that first class, I was on my own. Yet I hit conflict, and conflict is the name of the game in a mystery, so I used it. I added a murder, of the provost, to unravel. I got to know some of the students quite well. Some became serious and studied as I insisted, but others could barely read and write, and one semester of Remedial Reading was not enough. Some of my students I had over and over–three or four times, until they finally flunked out. They tried all kinds of games on me, even suggesting sex for grades. Most of my students did learn to read at college level, but some kept losing, and what kind of future was there for them?

So, in 2012 I published Killer Frost. Later, in 2018, still thinking of those kids, I published The Death of a Hell-Razor. I went back to my fictional college and put in reforms, a new president, a boot camp in the summer to work on reading, writing, and arithmetic.  They also had the opportunity to be interns to various college employees, cooks, plumbers, electricians, and a new drama coach put on the play Fences by August Wilson using students both those doing well and those still failing. Yet the college did better by most of the students. Here was a section of The Death of a Hell-Razor, pretty close to what actually happened in a teacher conference;

She was reviewing her notes when Tony Stone knocked on the open door and looked around the corner to see if she was in.

            “Miz Weaver, can I ast you somethin’?”

            With another month of classes to go, Tony was averaging a low D.  He’d had a C until the mid-term exam, which he’d flunked.  “Come in.  What’s up?”

            He came around her desk and sat down carefully in the chair to her left.  “See, Miz Weaver, I’m in that play we be doin’ with Miz Koval?”

            “I know about it.  Fences.  You play Cory, right?”

            “Yes, ma’am, and Miz Koval–she say I do real good at my part.  I play football–Cory does–and I do, too, here at St. Francis, long as I can keep my grades up.”  He smiled.  He had a lovely smile.

            “But, Miz Weaver, my grades–Prez say I can’t be in no play lessen my grades are C or better.”

            “You don’t have a C in my classes now.  You did until the mid-terms, but you flunked both of them.  Right now you have Ds in both Reading and Pre-Composition.”  She waited.

            He frowned.  “I knows.  Ima do better now.  See, last week we had religion week, and I heard this preacher speak to us yesterday, and it made me think.  I knows I needs to do better.”  His shoulders sagged.

            “What will that take, Tony?  How will you raise your grade?”

            He smiled again.  Here was this big muscular young man.  He’d been at St. Francis two years.  So far, he’d flunked all his English classes and was on academic probation.  If he didn’t do better this spring semester of his sophomore year, he’d be sent home.  Oscar said he thought Tony’s main problem was motivation.  The new president of St. Francis, Jared Marlowe, agreed with Oscar, and had said to let him be in August Wilson’s play Fences, when Tony did well at the try-outs.  But Penny wondered if that had been wise.  Tony was explaining how he’d bring his grades up.  “See, the preacher man said some of us be like the little pig that built his house of straw.  We be like that when we don’t listen in class.  I know you bees a real good teacher, Miz Weaver, and tries to help me, but sometimes I don’t listen.  So Ima listen now.”  He smiled again.  He was quite handsome when he smiled, if only his ears didn’t stick straight out.  She knew he got teased about his ears.

            “That’s a start, Tony, but it takes steady work, too.”

            “Oh, I knows, Miz Weaver.  That preacher said it needed work, yes, ma’am, every day.  See the second little pig, he built his house of sticks.  He listened, okay, but he didn’t do his homework; sometimes he didn’t even come to class.”

            Penny nodded.  This seemed promising.  He even understood the metaphor, which was hard for most of her students.  “Yes?”

            “Okay, then the preacher told us how we could build us a house of bricks, and then we could pass our classes and be a success.”  He grinned.

            Penny waited.  Let him say it in his own words.  She didn’t want to flunk him.  It would be the third time for both his courses with her, but could he change?  She thought he had the intelligence, but, like so many of her students, he had none of the consistent study habits that he needed for college.

But one of the students who had given Penny a hard time in that first class, Sheila, took well to acting. Here she is, talking with Penny. This is imaginary, but in real life some of the those early difficult students made big changes and began coming to me for advice.

“Miz Weaver, I know Rose is sad and angry, but when I read stuff like that, I feel like laughing.  I mean it ain’t funny.  It’s tragic, Miz Koval say.  It be a big scene, and I got to get it right.  She say I do the other part better, but when he talk about when he laugh and it reaches all the way down to the bottom of his shoes, I can’t say my next lines.  I want to cry or laugh, but Rose is angry.  She say, ‘Maybe you ought to go on and stay down there with her ... if she a better woman than me.’  I can’t seem to do it right.

            “Then when he say, ‘I done locked myself into a pattern trying to take care of you all that I forgot about myself,’ I get mad, but maybe too mad?  Rose say, ‘What the hell was I there for?  That was my job, not somebody else’s.’  It make me so mad I want to cry, so mad I can’t say my lines right, you know?  They won’t come out right.”

            Sheila began to cry.  Penny moved over to the big armchair where Sheila was sitting.  “Maybe you needed to be mad, needed to cry?  About something in your life?  Then that jumps into your mind when you try to act it?”

            Sheila cried harder.  Penny found a clean paper towel in her pocket and handed it to her.  Then she waited, patting her back.

            “I don’t know,” Sheila sobbed.  “I want to do Rose perfect.  It be my big chance, and Miz Koval has friends from Yale who might be comin’ down.  It might be my big break.  I always wanted to be an actor.  But it bees so hard sometimes.”

            “I suppose anything worth doing is going to be hard sometimes.”

            “I know.  I ain’t afraid of work.  But my feelings got so tangled up lately.”

            “Acting, like writing, like any art, is more about feelings than anything else.  Okay, let’s try this.  I’ll be the one playing Rose who can’t quite get her lines right.  You be my friend trying to help me.  Now what would you tell me?”

            Sheila looked dismayed, shook her head, tears standing in her eyes.  She didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then she said, “Okay.  What would I say?”  Her tears were forgotten.  “I’d say, ‘This ain’t that hard.  You already mad, and mad is mostly what she’s feeling.  You can use that same feeling, let it get in behind your words.  If you laugh–well, some people do laugh when they real angry–and if you cry, well, anger can make you cry, too.”

            Penny said, “Good, that’s the idea.”

Judy Hogan ©2019

Judy Hogan’s newest book is The Death of a Hell-Razor: The Ninth Penny Weaver Mystery.. In 2015 she decided to set up Hoganvillaea Books, her own publishing imprint, in order to publish more of her mysteries The Sands of Gower: The First Penny Weaver Mystery was her first release under this new imprint. Her Penny Weaver series takes up interracial community issues. Most of the novels take place in the central North Carolina fictional village of Riverdell, but three take place on the Gower Peninsula in Wales where Penny meets and falls in love with Kenneth Morgan, a Welsh Detective Inspector. She has published seven volumes of poetry and three non-fiction works with independent presses. She is also a small farmer, a community activist, currently trying to stop coal ash dumping in her community. She lives in Moncure, N.C., near Jordan Lake.