The year is 1921, the start of Prohibition. Mafia runaway Alice âNobodyâ James has escaped trouble in Harlem by traveling cross-country by train while bleeding from a bullet wound. Max, a black porter, intervenes and checks the white Alice into the Paragon Hotel in Portland, Oregon. The hotel is an exclusively African-American sanctuary in a segregated city under siege by the Ku Klux Klan. There, Alice meets a host of compatriots who soon become like family as they bond together to search for one of their own, a biracial boy they fear may have fallen into the hands of the Klan.
With her sixth novel, stage actress-turned-novelist Faye, known for her Edgar-nominated Jane Eyre spoof Jane Steele, offers a surprising historical mystery that addresses Americaâs sexism, racism and anti-immigrant white power movements.
âI always write about something thatâs pissing me off right now,â Faye says by phone from her New York home. âI find parallels to what was happening a very long time ago, because I donât think anybody would be particularly interested if I just stood on a soapbox and said, âRacism is bad.â But if I can set stories in other time periods, itâs sort of like Shakespeare setting Macbeth out of town: âDonât get confused, this is not about youâthis is those Scottish guys!ââ
Aliceâs escape to Portland allows Faye to write about a piece of history that she has long hoped to ponder in fiction. Born in San Jose, California, Faye moved with her family to Longview, Washington, a small town close to Portland, when she was 6 and remained there for 12 years. The move from her racially diverse San Jose birthplace to the predominantly white Longview revealed to Faye a dark section of American historyâthe Pacific Northwestâs deeply racist roots. The original Oregon settlers envisioned a utopia free from crime, povertyâand any nonwhite persons. Prior to statehood, any blacks who refused to leave the territory were sentenced to flogging every six months. In 1870, Oregon refused to ratify the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights to people of color, and didnât correct this error until 1959. For black people, Oregon was hell with only a few havens. One of these was Portlandâs Golden West Hotel, upon which the Paragon Hotel is based.
Along with exploring present-day social and cultural upheavals through a historical lens, The Paragon Hotel also allowed Faye to re-create the spoken language of 1921, both in Harlem and Portland. Faye proudly admits to having a passion for historical accuracy.
âThatâs why this is a love letter. Itâs very much not just a quest for identity but a quest to actually love that identity.â
âSlang is very, very much a part of my research process,â she says. âIf youâre just looking through the boilerplate slang of the 1920s, youâre going to be finding a lot of words that didnât really come into vogue until 1925, -6, -7. That was really the height of the flapper era, and I was not interested in those words; I was only interested in how you spoke in 1921.â
Lacking a lexicon embedded in the arts and music of the pre-flapper era, Faye struggled until she stumbled upon an unlikely helping hand from someone who also knew how to sling the slang. âI was at a loss for quite some time,â she says, âuntil I attended a writerâs residency for a month down in Key West, Florida. There is tons of stuff from Hemingway down there for obvious reasons, and I found a huge volume with all of his [World War I] war correspondence.â She explains that a large percentage of the slang in The Paragon Hotel comes straight out of Hemingwayâs 1918 letters.
Faye also credits her own years on stage with giving her the ear to recognize slang and use it effectively in her fiction. âIâve never taken a creative writing class,â she says. âI was trained as an actor and worked as a professional stage actor for 10 years, and I was also trained as a singer, and thereâs a real lilt in the â20s stuff. I think that the rhythm of it is almost as important as some of the words. Even where theyâre talking about very serious things, thereâs this glib overtone to where theyâre even replacing words with almost nonsense words. Itâs fascinating.â
To voice the Portland perspective, Faye created Blossom Fontaine, the Paragonâs residential club chanteuse, whose sultry, outgoing stage personality belies the inner turmoil and discomfort she and many of her friends feel about Americaâs history of racism and sexism.
âIn the case of Blossom, whose life has been defined by what society says, the question of who she is has been so important her whole life that when she meets Nobody, who has been taking advantage of hiding in plain sight, itâs such an asset to her,â Faye says. âNobody lived in such a dangerous environment that she didnât spend a lot of time really sitting down and defining herself. Blossom, on the other hand, has been so assertive and determined about who she is and so locked into a system. Youâve got two women who are coming at it from completely different directions. Thatâs why this is a love letter. Itâs very much not just a quest for identity but a quest to actually love that identity.â
Will we see a sequel to The Paragon Hotel?
âI would love to say yes, but I never really know. So far, this is a standalone, but I wouldnât rule it out,â Faye replies. âHowever, at the moment, what Iâm working on is turning Hamlet into a modern-day crime novel. The working title? The King of Infinite Space. Iâm very excited about it.â
This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Author photo by Anna Ty.