To this day, the deadliest hurricane in modern U.S. history is not Katrina, Harvey or Sandy. That dubious distinction belongs to an unnamed hurricane that struck the coastal city of Galveston, Texas, in 1900, killing approximately 8,000 people in a single day.
This disaster is the starting point of Oxford author Matt Bondurant’s fourth novel “Oleander City,” a haunting chronicle of the storm and its aftermath.
Notably, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton traveled to Galveston to spearhead recovery efforts in the twilight of her career at the age of nearly 80. Meanwhile, Galveston native Jack Johnson was only beginning to make a name for himself as a prizewinning fighter breaking the color barrier. Both are major figures in “Oleander City.”
Bondurant had a breakout hit with his sophomore novel “The Wettest County in the World,” which was based on his own family’s history of bootlegging in Franklin County, Virginia, during Prohibition. It became the 2012 movie “Lawless” starring Shia LaBoeuf in the role of the author’s grandfather Jack Bondurant.
Bondurant currently serves as the director of the Master in Fine Arts program in the Department of English at the University of Mississippi.
“What I enjoy most is working with the students on their work and seeing them grow and succeed as writers,” Bondurant told The Dispatch.
Bondurant will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Aug. 20 on a panel alongside several authors of historical fiction.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to write “Oleander City”?
“Oleander City” came to me in the form of several historical footnotes, small incidents and figures that were part of a much larger catastrophe.
In the aftermath of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, veteran Jewish boxer Joe Choynski, an enigmatic, theater-loving man from an intellectual family, traveled to Galveston to take on the young Jack Johnson, a Black man who would go on to be the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time, a fight that ended with both men arrested.
There was the tragic story of the Sisters of the Incarnate Word orphanage, where 93 girls and nuns perished, bound together by a rope that they hoped would keep them from being swept away.
Then a peculiar photo, taken the day Johnson and Choynski were released from the Galveston jail: a group of men on the jailhouse steps, Joe shaking hands with the sheriff and Jack looking on — and in the corner a mysterious figure, a little girl sitting on the steps, wearing a rumpled dress and a sour look on her face. That’s when I knew there was a novel.
In “Oleander City” three main characters take turns in focus: the aforementioned Choynski, the orphan Hester and Clara Barton’s assistant Diana. How did you land on structuring their stories in this way?
I’m fond of using multiple perspectives in the third person point of view. I like the simple arrangement of alternating chapters by character perspective, each clearly labeled, so the reader always knows who we are currently with and who we will stay with until the end of the chapter. I want to be complex in terms of style, the sentence, the themes, the characters, but simple in terms of organization. This tendency also comes from the influence of some of my favorite books, certainly including “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers and also “Winesburg, Ohio” by Sherwood Anderson.
What is your approach to writing about real and well-known historical figures versus fictional characters?
With historical figures I begin with plenty of background research. I generally try to read everything I can find about a character, and then I usually fixate on a couple key elements and build from there. I’m not doing a biography, and I’m ultimately not beholden to whatever facts of history exist. I enjoy the wide-ranging creative license that is implicit in any novel.
Because my depiction is much “smaller” in many ways, I can hone in on a couple things that help me ground the character. You can’t cover everything when it comes to a real person. We are simply too complex. Joe Choynski loved the theater, nice clothes, wearing his hair long (he hated hats) and beating the ever-loving s*** out of people in the boxing ring. That’s a lot to work with right there.
There’s a debate going on about whether historical fiction is a distinct genre or if all fiction is historical fiction. What is your opinion?
Genre distinctions are helpful ways to organize and select things to read and to talk about what we like/dislike, and it’s good for marketing and other business-related matters, but ultimately the distinctions mean very little in terms of relative value. I get that all fiction could be seen as historical fiction in that after you put it down on paper you are talking about the past, but that seems more of a semantic game than a real argument.
I think that books that deliberately set out to say something about real people, events and things that happened in the past have distinctive qualities that we can enumerate and discuss, deepening our experience with those books. I don’t think that practice does any disservice to this genre or to any other.
What does it mean to you to be a Mississippian? What’s surprised you?
Not much about Mississippi or its people has surprised me. It is very much as advertised: the people are generally kind and generous; it is rich with music, literature, and food culture. There is also terrible poverty, underfunded schools, a state government full of ignorant bigots. Mississippi remains at the very bottom of nearly any socio-economic metric data you can find. Meanwhile a very select minority of rich white people flog their religion and vague notions of “freedom” to maintain the status quo. It infuriates me and I love it. It is a place of massive contradictions, which has something to do with why it creates such great art.
Emily Liner is the owner and founder of Friendly City Books, an independent bookstore and press in Columbus, Mississippi.
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