Civil Rights and Hurricane Katrina Histories Converge in “Behind the Waterline” https://ift.tt/N1OhSol
When I began reading new and upcoming books earlier this spring for The Southern Summer Book Club here at Southern Review of Books, the first title on my stack was Kionna Walker LeMalle’s Behind the Waterline, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize. Within reading the first chapter, I knew this was the novel that would be the inaugural selection of our Book Club.
LeMalle’s accomplished debut, which follows a young teenager named Eric and his eccentric grandmother, Ruth, is set in and around New Orleans during the time of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a book that explores survival, history, and our responsibility to one another. Behind the Waterline is the kind of novel you read and immediately want to share with someone else. It’s powerful, and it’s special.
Kionna Walker LeMalle crafts stories and poetry from the distinct culture and history of the American South. Her work has appeared in table//FEAST, The Southern Quarterly, The First Line, and The Bayou Review. She earned her MFA at Houston Christian University, where she now teaches in the Department of Narrative Arts. Behind the Waterline is her debut novel.
It was a pleasure to be able to talk with Kionna about her characters, how the past inspired her novel, and chicken salad.
Kionna, it’s great to chat with you. Thank you for taking the time!
I have to tell you, this book feels so real and so personal in many ways, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this especially during the sections focused directly on Hurricane Katrina. If you don’t mind me asking, did you have an experience with the storm?
Yes, Bradley, I did. I was born and raised in New Orleans. I never imagined leaving, and I had ridden out many hurricanes previously. With Hurricane Katrina, my husband insisted that we evacuate. I had gone to a meeting with a group of writers that Saturday morning. The day seemed normal; in fact, the sky was beautiful. However, the cell reception was unusually spotty. We couldn’t get any calls through.
When I returned home, my husband immediately said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. We have to go. Now!” Honestly, I hardly knew what was going on. I had no idea there was a major hurricane brewing in the Gulf. Eric’s confusion in the novel is akin to my own. I was completely uninformed, unprepared.
We evacuated with two toddlers, an infant, my mother, and our dog. We hardly packed. Each of us had two outfits, and the babies had each chosen one toy to bring. We hadn’t tried to safeguard our photos, important documents, or anything. We expected to simply have an extended weekend. We were leaving for fear of a power outage with young children, but we really did not predict that level of flooding.
We were on the road for hours before I realized the seriousness of the situation. That was when I tried to call others to tell them to leave the city. I couldn’t reach most people, but I did reach my friend Rayna, and her mother refused to leave. So, Rayna stayed put with her. Then it was too late; the contraflow started. It was devastating knowing people were trapped there.
Evacuating took nearly a full day though we only went to Houston. I watched the disaster unfold in New Orleans from Houston, through The Houston Chronicle and the daily news. I remember preparing to return home, believing the storm was over and the city had fared well, when the floodwaters began to rise. It was surreal. I still remember that moment. I was in my great-grandmother’s kitchen watching the news and preparing something to eat. All of a sudden, the water started rising. The reporter was in shock.
Some of the novel’s scenes in Houston are re-creations of our experiences: searching for people in the AstroDome, shopping in resale stores with vouchers from the North American Mission Board, seeking housing, and so on. The scenes in New Orleans were re-created from the stories of family, friends, and co-workers who’d stayed behind, as well as news articles and documentaries. We lost neighbors in that storm. Eric’s neighbors are a lot like ours were, and like Eric’s neighbors, some of ours didn’t survive. It’s still hard to think of that; writing that simple declaration brings tears to my eyes even now, 20 years later.
I’m always curious about where stories begin. For Behind the Waterline, do you remember the moment when the idea came to you?
Yes, the novel didn’t start as a Hurricane Katrina story at all. It was Ruth’s story; it was a Civil Rights story and an interracial love story. When I first saw Ruth, she was sitting at the kitchen table pouring over that map. Eric was upstairs planning to drive himself to college, and Ruth had concerns. She wanted to tell him which roads to avoid. So, it was a completely different story at the onset. For one thing, Eric was much older. At some point, about 80 pages into the draft, I started mapping characters’ lives on a timeline, and Hurricane Katrina showed up for everyone. I had been working on another novel — the working title was White Storm, Black Rain, and that one was about Hurricane Katrina. The moment the storm showed up on every characters’ timeline in Behind the Waterline (it was called Grey Matters then), the two novels began to coalesce into one. As I processed some of my own post-Katrina trauma through this writing, I re-envisioned the entire framing of the story. Something I hadn’t imagined when I started drafting the novel began to unfold.
Let’s talk about Eric and Ruth. Both are just such captivating characters. You definitely make it easy to root for both of them. I want to talk about the voice of the book. Eric tells us his and his grandmother’s story. Did you always know it would be him that would be the voice? Or did you ever experiment with Ruth being our guide?
Ruth was the sole narrator for at least 50 pages before I began to experiment with alternating between Ruth and Eric. This experimentation was necessary because Ruth would shut down and stop sharing her story. She was so traumatized; she didn’t want to talk about the past. And Eric was caught in the crossfire of that. Her silence was damaging to him. He was teased and ostracized because of her paranoia, and he had become resentful. So, he wanted to talk. He wanted to vent. He wanted to find out the truth. Eric was actively engaged in processing the madness he had to live with every day. After a while, his voice became so prominent, I removed all of Ruth’s narration, and decided to tell the entire story through Eric’s voice. That was a hard decision. I remember crying. I literally grieved Ruth’s narration, but to be true to her character, I had to lose her narrative voice.
I don’t want to spoil a reveal that happens a bit later on in the book, so I’ll ask this question a little broadly. And this question goes back to author choice, like with the previous question. At what point in writing Behind the Waterline did you know that you were going to add a secondary historical layer — that there would be a bit of magic to take us back to the Civil Rights movement?
So, this is actually two questions.
First: At what point did I know there would be a historical layer? That one is easy. Since this was Ruth’s story from the beginning, the Civil Rights layer was always there. It was initially the primary storyline.
Second: When did I know there would be a bit of magic to take readers back to the Civil Rights movement? Now, that’s a fun question, and I have to reveal a writer’s secret to answer it. This was what I least expected to write. I had been trying to solve problems of spatial clarity that kept coming up during critique sessions with my writing friends. Specifically, as I moved Ruth and Eric around the house, readers kept getting confused about the layout of the house. It made perfect sense in my head, so I decided to create a blueprint of Ruth’s home. If I’m completely honest, I think I created that blueprint just to explain to them how the characters were moving, but I ended up understanding why they were confused. (This is an example of why critique groups are important.) The other thing that happened when I created that blueprint was a discovery of extra space behind Eric’s closet. A lightbulb went off! I suddenly had a way into the past that was more than flashback, dialogue, photography, and reflection. That discovery brought me back to ground zero of writing this novel — which happened so many times throughout the drafting process — but it was worth it. I quite like the magical element.
When I read this novel for the first time, one thing I kept appreciating is how you balance the tone of the book. There is such pain here. The storm. The racism. The impacts of both, of course. The scene with Leonard and Linnie. That one got me. But there is also great beauty and humor — and an immense feeling of hope. I don’t even know that I have a question, but I just have to tell you how much I appreciated the way you told this story. This balance made it all feel real and true.
Thank you, Bradley. Writing Behind the Waterline was difficult for sure. There’s a writerly version of method acting. We have to become what and who we are writing for the sake of authentically capturing it. I often talk about the cross of empathy that fiction writers bear. To write this novel, I had to allow myself to feel all the feels so-to-speak, over and over again. I am glad to know that hard work paid off. I appreciate your thoughts here, and yeah . . . Leonard and Linnie, that one still gets me, as does the final image of Old Man Jake, whose spirit embodies the hopefulness of New Orleans, its resiliency and unique character.
It looks like we are at the end of our chat. Thanks again, Kionna! Before I let you go, though, I have to ask you this one — and I think everyone who’s read Behind the Waterline will appreciate it: What’s the best chicken salad you’ve ever eaten?
My mama makes a great chicken salad, which I didn’t appreciate until I was grown. My daughter fell in love with it at a young age though. She would ask for it, and that’s kind of how the motif appeared in the novel. It’s a simple Southern recipe: finely chopped chicken, minced celery, egg, sweet pickle relish, mayonnaise, and a hint of Creole seasoning. It’s a wonder something so simple can taste so good.
FICTION Behind the Waterline By Kionna Walker LeMalle
Blair
Published March 25, 2025
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