It’s the type of weather that makes many stay inside, but the rain didn’t stop a small crowd from gathering at Harvard Book Store last Friday night to hear author Martha Southgate read from her new novel “The Taste of Salt.”
The writer, who started out in news and magazine journalism covering film and entertainment for publications like The New York Times, The New York Daily News and O: The Oprah Magazine shifted gears mid-career to focus on writing fiction. The change of pace proved positive. Her debut novel “Another Way to Dance” received the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel, and subsequent releases “The Fall of Rome” and “Third Girl from the Left” were also met with acclaim.
Like many authors, Southgate finds intriguing ways to incorporate her interests and experiences into her books. She says “Third Girl from the Left”was inspired in part by her love of film and movies, while “The Fall of Rome,” which focuses on how race and class impacts the lone black professor and black student at an exclusive educational institution, was influenced by Southgate’s own experience attending a prep school. She says one of the initial inspirations for “The Taste of Salt” however, was discovering a colleague’s husband’s unique occupation.
“I worked at Essence for many years, and one of my colleagues there, her husband is a scientist, an ichthyologist. I thought that was kind of a cool job,” she explained.
But for Southgate, her colleague’s husband was probably just as intriguing as his occupation. What must it be like to be one of the few — if not the only — black men studying fish and ocean life at New York’s Museum of Natural History?
Exploring the experience of “being African American in a profession or environment that’s mostly white” is a thread that weaves itself through most of Southgate’s books.
“The black person isolated in this mostly white community, that’s a theme I keep returning to,” Southgate said. “That’s part of my history, and it does seem to keep popping up in my work.”
“The Taste of Salt” is no exception.
Being a square peg in a round hole is something Josie Henderson, the novel’s narrator and main character, knows much about. She’s the only black female scientist at an oceanographic center in Woods Hole, Mass.; she’s also married to a white man. It would have been easy — expected even — for the story to revolve around how everyday race or gender politics influences Josie’s life, and yet, “The Taste of Salt” focuses on Josie’s family and how far she’s willing to go to keep it from falling apart.
Both Josie’s marriage and her relationship with her family back home in Cleveland is troubled, due in no small part to years of trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to cope with the effects alcoholism has had on two of the most important men in her life — her father and her brother. An examination of the role addiction plays in the dynamics of a modern black family is something Southgate says she doesn’t often see in literature written about or by African Americans.
“I don’t want to say there are no other African Americans who’ve written about it, but I’m not aware of a lot of African American narratives in which this kind of addiction plays a part,” Southgate said. “But I didn’t sit down saying I want to tell people about addiction. I sat down thinking I wanted to tell people about Josie and her family. The book is about her journey in relation to them and in relation to herself.”
