She can't draw. She can't sing or dance. But she's always been able to sit in a corner and listen. And she has loved to read since she was 3 years old.
"When you read all the time, language comes naturally to you," Susan Straight said by phone from her Riverside, Calif., home. Her most recent novel, "A Million Nightingales," traces the amazing life of a young slave girl growing up in Louisiana in the early 1800s.
Straight, who lives with her three daughters, teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She does most of her writing by hand in little notebooks while sitting in the car waiting for one of her daughters. Then she does the rest in the evenings after her daughters are in bed.
"Being a good listener is essential," Straight tells her students. In fact, she believes most writers are natural eavesdroppers. They work hard to learn "the natural rhythms of people's speech. You have to get the dialogue right."
As a lover of language, Straight also speaks French, Spanish and Swiss-German. She found it difficult, though, during her research trips, to be fluent in "Louisiana French," which has its own dialect.
"Nightingales" is Straight's first historical novel, although she has written four previous books.
She got the idea for the resilient character of Moinette from her own daughters, all of whom "look like Moinette" — and then she read 100 books about Louisiana, French trappers and explorers, the brutal treatment of slaves and any document that would help her understand the culture of the early 1800s.
"You have to be careful with historical novels," said Straight. "I can read 100 pages of a historical novel and then lose interest because the research becomes overwhelming. I want the history to be accurate, but I don't want to overwhelm the reader with historical facts."
The image of Straight's 14-year-old mixed-race daughter is on the jacket of the book. As the author worked on the story, several teenage girls "came" to her. "I was reading court documents about a woman who was freed when she was 30 but she had to leave her son behind. Four years later, she traded a female slave for her son. Then my imagination started kicking in."
Straight is not bothered by many of the little things of life, because "There is this other world going on in my head most of the time. Resilience. I love characters who endure things that are unimaginable or heroic."
She remembers discussing Moinette with her 16-year-old daughter. "I told her that regardless of her slave status, Moinette's brain was still free. She was physically attacked, but she was determined that no one would defeat her — she still had her brain."
She added, "Today a lot of slavery is portrayed from the 1850s. People haven't realized how well-established it was back in 1778, right after the revolution. In Colonial Louisiana, a slave couldn't be freed. With this book I tried to answer the question, 'How would it feel to own your children and not be able to free them?' "
When Straight read Louisiana's first slave code, written in 1724, she was stunned at the first sentence: "All Jews will be expelled from the colony." This, even though the rest of the document was about slavery. "It is a bloodless document," Straight said. "It's so strange to read this kind of thing about human beings."
It took her almost five years to write this novel. "It was a hard story to write, and when I do a reading from the book now, I get very emotional. While writing it I was so immersed in the characters. Most people forget how many kids came from forced relationships. Life was so random and arbitrary then. It was mysterious."
Straight plans two more volumes about Moinette's descendants, making the book into a trilogy. But she will never give up her pleasure-reading. She loves the mystery genre, especially Walter Mosley and James Lee Burke, and there's a book she re-reads at least once a year, "Ceremony," by Leslie Marmon Silko, a Native American writer from New Mexico.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com