MODERATOR: When you say a Charlotte Justice novel, it's almost like this character has been going around for like 29 years, ah--but this is the first time I've heard of Charlotte Justice.

PAULA WOODS: And it is the first, but there are going to be more. And my grand plan is that Charlotte, who is an LAPD homicide detective, will live to fight again. Whether it's in the LAPD or not I don't know. But in this book she is the only Black female homicide detective in a very elite division of the LAPD called robbery homicide.

MODERATOR: Well, whether she will stay with the department or not because there are a lot of inside things I guess that goes on in the minds of police for one--

PAULA WOODS: --uh-huh--

MODERATOR: Did you want to pack all this into your first novel, what inspired you to--

PAULA WOODS: I talked to a lot of female homicide detectives in researching the book and wanting to create a woman who faced some real problems. And oddly enough for as much as there is in the book, the harassment by her boss and the kind of callousness, and the racial comments of some of her coworkers, I have talked to women who had it much worse. Who, because they would protest the jokes or protest the slurs, would have little presents left in their desk drawers or messages scribbled in pen, in the paint of their car. I mean, they faced things that Charlotte doesn't even have to deal with in here. And there is something about the people who protest and the people who stand up and say, "I'm not going to take this kind of abuse." They really do catch hell.

MODERATOR: Let's talk a little bit about the novel as a form of, say, protest or change. Do you think this novel has, in fact, done anything to help that kind of situation?

PAULA WOODS: You know, it's interesting. It's early. It's a little early to know yet, but I will tell you that I've had a number of women come up to me and say that the experiences have mirrored what they have seen. And I think that when women make things visible, when we stop treating issues like sexual harassment, for example, as something secretive or shameful, then we are able to talk about it and deal with it. But so many of these women are so ashamed, they feel so guilty as if they somehow have done something, that they walk around with these secrets, and they don't tell anyone. And that's when you find it being acted out in terms of substance abuse, in terms of carelessness on the job that can get you killed in the case of a police officer.

MODERATOR: Now, again, I'm looking at the novel as a force of social change I guess. You've purposely chosen the novel form. You've written some other books. What other forms have you dealt in?

PAULA WOODS: Um, my first book was a Black history book of days called "I, Too Sing America." That had entries for everyday of the year in Black history, and it was illustrated with African-American fine art.

That was done with my husband. We did two other books. One was an anthology on Black love called "I Hear A Symphony." And that was like poetry and love letters and short stories, and, again, illustrated with fine art. And the third was a Christmas in Kwanzaa collection that traced the holiday celebrations of African-Americans from pre-slavery all the way through Kwanzaa and the modern time.

So, in many respects this appears to be a departure and appears to be very different than the kinds of things we've done before. But it isn't in a way, because the things I care about are still in this book.

One of the things I make very sure that I do is talk about L.A. history. L.A. is one of those places that everybody thinks people that live in L.A. are crazy. You know, you tilt it, and all the nuts and the flakes kind of like drift to that end of the coast. And, yet, there is a history. There is a black history. The city was settled by 40 people, most of who were non-white. There are famous architects who worked in Los Angeles, Paul Williams being a notable one.

Those are all people who, as she moves through the city, she goes past a building, she sees something, she connects with her history, and that's very consistent for me with the kinds of historical things I've done in "I, Too Sing America." Or her family collects art. We don't see images of ourselves as art collectors. You know, we see images of ourselves as crack heads, crack dealers, prostitutes, et cetera. But you don't see that kind of everyday experience. Or you walk into someone's house, and they have a beautiful painting on the wall that, you know, has been in the family for years. So those are the kinds of (positive images) I try to do weave into the book that provide a different prospective on Black life.

MODERATOR: And I have to say I do appreciate that. There is one particular passage that I came across, and I go, "Oh, this is interesting. I'm a radio person. I didn't know about this." I think it had to do with, um, with a DJ, and his sign-off line was--the DJ--KJLH--I think it would be something like--let me just read something from the book:

"I was struggling along Crenshaw Blvd. toward my parent's house past the offices of KJLH, the FM station owned by Stevie Wonder, which had switched from his regular urban contemporary format to let the community vent their feelings about the past, the last few days. It reminds me of the sixties when soul-station KGFJ and its most popular disc jockey, magnificent Montague, his tag line, "Burn, Baby, Burn," took on the ominous meaning when Watts went up in flame. The station was never the same after it either."

Now, that kind of history is brief, but it's certainly interesting to me. Magnificent Montague.

PAULA WOODS: Yeah. The magnificent Montague.

MODERATOR: Was he a real person?

PAULA WOODS: Oh, yeah.

MODERATOR: And that whole situation--

PAULA WOODS: Oh, yeah. Really was. And you know what--and, again, I think we have to have a sense of connectedness in our culture. And so often things get forgotten. In L.A. during‹before the Watts riots in '65, that was his sign-off line. Burn Baby Burn. And in essence it was like, rage on, you know, do your thing, whatever.

And, yet, when your city went up in flames, it was like you were responsible, and a lot of people try to come back to this man and blame him for the fires and for the riots in Watts, which was totally ridiculous.

MODERATOR: At the same time, you did acknowledge I guess we have to say Walter Mosley because he weaves a social commentary with history--

PAULA WOODS: --uh-huh--

MODERATOR: --with very poignant kinds of things. And your novel is in the same vain. I mean, I don't want to characterize you, but African-American writers that really want to write about relationships--

PAULA WOODS: --uh-huh--

MODERATOR: --and dealing with that. Christianity being--

PAULA WOODS: --well, in some ways, yes. In the mystery genre sometimes the detective sees a crime or comes to investigate a crime. They drink, they have sex, they solve the crime, end of book. And there isn't a whole lot in between. There's just all action and plot. I try in this book to push that envelope to make it a mystery and more so there is the social commentary. There are the issues of class and color consciousness among African-Americans that Charlotte, as a fair-skinned black woman, has to deal with. There is the historical aspect, and you see the bits of history that are sprinkled through the book. There are the issues of racial and sexual discrimination on the LAPD.

I had all kind of Post-it notes on my computer as I was working, and, you know, there were things like-- does it advance the plot? You know, put more and more and more in the game. And it was interesting because in doing that, you realize you still have to tell a story, and if the story doesn't move along, all those tidbits just become digression. So you're always focused on the story you're telling. But at the same time, I think especially in a genre like mystery, people aren't reading it just to find out who done it. People read mysteries to be transported to a different world, to learn something about people they don't know or a situation they don't know. And mysteries become a vicarious way of doing that. So for me, I really don't try to pack a lot of that into the book. And while it isn't--it isn't as long as a lot of other writers that I know, it's very dense because there are all of those issues that are floating around.

MODERATOR: Now, one of the issues you mentioned right before we sat down was about the color issue. Do you have that passage that--

PAULA WOODS: --yeah. I do.

MODERATOR: I think it an interesting passage. But not just interesting, but the way you present it is so very--

PAULA WOODS: --uh-huh--

MODERATOR: --real. Let me put it that way.

PAULA WOODS: Okay.

MODERATOR: Can you read just a little bit from that.

PAULA WOODS: Yeah.

MODERATOR: You can set us up just a little bit here too.

PAULA WOODS: She's a--it's after the riots, and she's driving to her parent's house.

MODERATOR: The current riot, right.

PAULA WOODS: Yes, the 1992.

MODERATOR: Okay--

PAULA WOODS: --yes. The 1992. And she's driving home to see her parents, and she says,

"As I crept through block after block of charred buildings and rubble of what used to be a thriving business district, I knew how I'd respond to the commercial that ran after big sporting events.

'Charlotte Justice, you've just lived through 72 hours of pure hell. What are you going to do next? I'm going to the nuthouse.'"

And the nuthouse is her family. It's the name that they called the place, because they are kind of wacky people. But there is also this theme running through their family about their mother being so fair skinned that when her father meets her, he says to her, "I'm just a nutty Negro, but would you be my Almond Joy?" 'Cause she has that very pale, pale skin. And he found her attractive. The father on the other hand was darker; walnut skinned or walnut toned. And she goes on to describe,

"And into the house on the hill came the inhabitants of Justice's nut house. Although my parents named all four of us after our family's ancestral homes, Daddy believed it was a way of honoring the Negro's place in the world. Until I was ten and Paris of fourteen, there was just us, and we were the nutty buddies. Paris, a walnut-tone facsimile of my father was named not after ritzy Paris, France, but rural Paris, California. Paris was doted on by my mother who saw in him the color she could only obtain with my father's foundation number six, or a summer sweating her hair back to its not quite straight roots and L.A.'s unforgiving desert sun.

Then there was me. A half-shade darker than Joy Marie I felt simultaneously adored by my father and envied by my mother. My mother's color-struck relatives on the other hand exhaled a collective sigh of relief that Charlotte, not even North Carolina but Arkansas Negro's blood wouldn't prevent another member of the Curry clan from joining their cherished blue-vein societies. An unofficial Negro social register of formal clubs and informal social connections where admittance and upward mobility were dependent on having skin pale enough to see the venous blood course and vein."

MODERATOR: Now, what strikes me about that is that we have this class thing always happening, but there is also a caste thing happening--

PAULA WOODS: --uh-huh. Uh-huh--

MODERATOR: --in Black America. And a lot of people miss that.

PAULA WOODS: Well, and you know--miss it in the sense that they don't realize that it's in operation.

MODERATOR: That's right.

PAULA WOODS: There's a line in the book where she says something that my father used to say all the time about America and it's obsession with color. You know, if you're black, get back. If you're brown, stick around. If you're yellow, you¹re mellow. And if you're white, you're all right. And if you think about it--I mean, this about the models that we see walking down runways with the exception of the African woman who is very new on the scene. There was a certain tone, a certain skin tone. If you look at television commercials, and you see the cute little kids and the--you know, the commercial for the soap or the cereal or whatever, they're typically Anglo-looking kids. You don't see wide noses, full lips, very much. Typically a kind of medium grade curly hair. You know, you don't really see a kink in the hair like so many of us have. And for people with that kind of skin tone, then it's like you look at them one way they're African-American, maybe you look at them again. Maybe they're Latino or maybe they¹re this or maybe they're that.

So, skin color becomes a very useful tool for a lot of people in America. And unfortunately the connotations of skin color that some African-Americans walk around with like somehow lighter is better, is a sad legacy of racism that was perpetrated, you know, hundreds of years ago.

MODERATOR: Well, this also serves Charlotte Justice because she can weave through many worlds. Did you purposely pick a character that could do that?

PAULA WOODS: Yeah, I did, and I did that on a couple of levels. One, it causes her some problems because she actually has fellow officers who say, "Well, you don't look black so why do you walk around telling everybody that you're black"? And, yet, there are instances where she just kind of blends in to the background and walks around a room observing and isn't particularly noticeable. So there is that sense of invisibility that works for her. She also has that duality in terms of her background. I mean, she comes from this very upper middle class background. Daddy is a cosmetic chemist. Mom is an aging debutante. She's got a brother who is a lawyer. And she's the one in that family whose is like the blue-collar worker. She's a detective. So she has both sides of that too. She works the streets. She knows the streets. But she also knows that other side of Black culture.

MODERATOR: I remember she wasn't always a blue-collar worker--a detective, but we won't get into that because they have to read the book to find out where she actually came from and the motivation to this particular story--

PAULA WOODS: --right--

MODERATOR: Let's just move on just a bit. What is the audience for this? I mean, we were talking to our program director* a little earlier. He has a 13-year old daughter. He asked if this book was appropriate for a 13-year old, and you gave a rather interesting answer.

PAULA WOODS: Yeah, um, there is some violence in the book. Not a lot, by standards of most mystery fiction. There is some sex in the book, and there's some bad words in the book. But I was very careful about the sex scenes that they were responsible sex scenes. I had a big discussion with an editor one time about this who said, "But, you know, you've got the scene with her kind of like making out on the sofa, and they don't do anything. I mean, they should do something." And I'm like, "Well, no, they shouldn't." And we back and forth a lot, and it finally came down to she's not that kind of girl.

MODERATOR: Uh-huh.

PAULA WOODS: And so there is a sense, even though she's a grown woman and certainly in charge of her own body and desires, of responsibility, of image in terms of how she feels about herself. And it was most challenging for me to try to write for example, a love scene where in the love scene I make it very clear that protection is used, okay? And I did that intentionally because I still today will read novels where, you know, there is--this torrid affair is going on, or people who just met have sex for the first time and never seem to have a discussion about HIV or about protection or about where you stand, where I stand, what our expectations are, et cetera. And so it was--to me it was just part and parcel of doing something I think that's responsible as a writer. You hope people begin to emulate. So for a 13-year old while, yeah, the sex is in there it's real clear that it's responsible.

MODERATOR: Well, there is a part in the book I'd like you to read right now. In fact, it's a part that you suggested because another author liked it. Would you--can you just read that part there?

PAULA WOODS: --yeah, I did a panel last week with Michael Connelly who has written seven or eight novels now. He writes of a character named Harry Bosch on the LAPD also. And he was saying--it was kind of gratifying and like embarrassing almost how much he liked the social message in this book about race. And he recommended to the audience page 148 and 149. And what it is, it's a scene where she goes to the funeral of a gang banger, and she's, you know, she's at the funeral. There are a lot of cops there. They are all the mourners there, et cetera, and she describes what's going on at the ceremony. But then she notices a slight-built young man of not more than 14 listed in the program at Too Smooth Sanders shyly approach the microphone. "As he took his place at the front of the chapel, I could read the word Royals and Big Dog artfully cut in his head; a personal tribute to the deceased. And while Grandma MaCele might have hoped for something more traditional, even 'Rock of Ages' though in bad taste considering the dead man's profession, would have sufficed. No one was prepared for Too Smooth's musical, 'Homage To Big Dog' by way Of Marvin Gaye, another brother brought low by drugs. Too Smooth's solo selection, 'Inner City Blues,' delivered a cappella with an icy-veined plaintiveness reflected Marvelous Marvin at the height of his genius when he captured the pain of my youth and evidently that of this congregation as well. By the recessional when Too Smooth cried out the refrain of the song I had played in my car just a few days ago, you were forced to acknowledge the connection between me and these young men and women. Eastside or WestSide, South Central, or South Bay there were things that bound black folks together beyond the superficialities of skin color or hair texture. It was memory and culture resonating from within, from the way we grieved to the music that had everyone bobbing their heads and the chapel's late often gloom. But in the chapel that day I came to believe there is something more, something so universal it could blow you away from the hilltops of View Park or the blacktops of Watts before you knew it. Could take your breath away to the ninth green of the Brentwood Country Club or crush you in a county jail cell. Whether it was a driveway or behind a taco stand in a hospital bed or hanging from the magnolia trees of history, death was the same for everyone catching us all unawares or unprepared but catching us all just the same."

MODERATOR: Thank you so much, Paula L. Woods the Charlotte Justice mystery novel you've just written is "Inner City Blues" put out by W.W. Norton, and we appreciate it. We appreciate your writing, and we wish you much success in the future.

PAULA WOODS: Thank you.

* Since this interview, program director of Pacifica Radio, WBAI, Samori Marksman died. If you wish to contribute to a memorial fund, send monies in his name c/o WBAI, 120 Wall Street, NY,NY 10005. You can find out more about his life and work at http://www.samori.net/