“Fiction was a way to locate the personal story in that.”īlack Cloud Rising focuses on Etheridge’s time as a soldier in the Union Army’s so-called African Brigade, an outfit composed largely of recently freed enslaved men who fought under Gen.
“I had all this history, all these documents, for the context,” he says. The question of Etheridge’s complex loyalties and motivations-of his interior life-was one that Faladé felt was answerable only in fiction.
In his research, Faladé determined that Etheridge’s biological father had likely been his enslaver and that, even after the end of the Civil War, Etheridge had remained close to his former enslaver’s family. Louis Post-Dispatch as one of the best books of the year, and was made into a documentary-but Faladé hadn’t come to the end of his interest in Etheridge. The book was a critical success-it was named a New Yorker Notable Selection, ranked by the St. He and Zoby published a nonfiction book about the Pea Island station, Fire on the Beach, in 2001. Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library, as well as a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was all these interesting pieces that, to me, resonated.”įaladé, 57, is currently a Dorothy and Lewis B. “It was all about family,” he says from his apartment in New York City. The story of Pea Island immediately captured Faladé’s attention, both as an accidental historian and aspiring fiction writer. Born into slavery on Roanoke Island in 1842, Etheridge was the first Black person to hold that position in the service. The Pea Island station, commissioned in 1878 and located on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, was notable for being all Black, with Etheridge, a Union Army veteran, as its captain from 1880 until his death in 1900. Life-Saving Service, a precursor to the Coast Guard. He first learned about him in the early 1990s, when he was enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program, as he and a fellow student, David Zoby, began researching the Pea Island station of the U.S.
David Wright Faladé has been thinking about Richard Etheridge, the protagonist of his debut adult novel, Black Cloud Rising (Atlantic Monthly, Feb.), for the better part of his life.
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