In 1988 the small magazine Albert French had been publishing folded, and he suddenly found himself with a lot of time on his hands. Over the next three years, he says, he left his apartment only to buy cigarettes and food. “I woke up 46 years old and jobless. My life was completely destroyed. I slept a lot. Jumped every time the phone rang.”
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To escape his depression French started writing, and by 1993 he was getting out more often–promoting his first novel, Billy, in cities as diverse as New York, Amsterdam, and Oxford, Mississippi. The book, which went into six printings, did unusually well for a first novel, but then French had a history of leaping into projects with little or no experience and turning them into great successes. After returning from Vietnam, where he served in the marines, he took an Instamatic camera to Atlanta for Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, initiating a 15-year career in photography–first as a medical photographer and then as a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Set in Banes County, Mississippi, in 1937, Billy tells the story of a ten-year-old black boy, Billy Lee Turner, executed by the state after he accidentally kills a young white girl in a scuffle. Narrated in a dense southern vernacular, the novel has a rhythm that mimics the hypnotizing call and response of an old spiritual. Though French never spent more than a few months below the Mason-Dixon line, he says he developed his ear for southern dialect growing up in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where many of his relatives settled after migrating north. “I feel very comfortable with that language,” he says. “It’s more difficult for me to talk like this than it is to write like that.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Kelly Casey.
