"I was definitely thinking about all of the invisible things that we inherit from ancestors that we don’t even know that we had. On the male side of things, I think about the character H, who has this superhuman strength almost and this very ignitable rage. We know, but he doesn’t know that his grandfather Sam was the same way. These people couldn’t be contained by their circumstances, and the sad thing is that H will never know his people. He kind of walks around with this invisible inheritance. I was thinking a lot about that: the things that link us from one generation to the next, that we might not be able to see, the traumas as well as the gifts."One of the things that I couldn’t escape in a book like this, just because of the nature of slavery, was how fractured the families become. You have people being literally stolen away in the middle of the night from their beds in the early stages of the slave trade in the 18th century. But then, once they get to America, there are things like the Fugitive Slave Act , which made it possible just to rip people away from their families. Even beyond that, things like the convict leasing system after slavery ended made it possible to take men off the street and put them in mines, away from their families. I think one of the stories of the African-American family is the story of fracturing — of stealing. Even when it’s voluntary, like the great migration, when people moved from the South to the North, it still splits a family in a way that a lot of other families never had. An inescapable truth of writing this book is that Black families are really fractured.”"That story kind of started with just research about Harlem in the 1920s, and learning about things like the brown paper bag test : Someone would hold a paper bag up to a woman’s skin if she wanted to work in a club. If she was darker than the paper bag, then she couldn’t work there. I started thinking about color, and the delineations within Black communities themselves. This gradient of color that speaks to whether or not you have white in your family — that kind of sneaking toward the privileges of being white afforded people in this country."I think that chapter really was, for me, just to kind of look at the absurdity of racism. The fact that simply because people couldn’t tell that Robert was Black, he was treated differently, and that had they known he was Black, he would have been treated the way that Willie was. Which kind of just speaks to how mutable all of this is, how unnecessary and ridiculous this all is.""Back when I first conceived this novel, I thought that it would take place mostly in the present, [from the perspective of the] last two people in the book, the last generation, with moments where it flashed back to the 18th century so that you could kind of see the beginnings and the endings, or the aftermath of the slave trade. But as I worked on it over the years, I realized I was more interested in actually being able to look at something very closely over a very long period of time — in this case slavery, colonialism, and institutionalized racism. I wanted it to be very clear how we got to the end so that you couldn’t just read the last two characters and think, ‘Oh, wow, what does that have to do with slavery?’ After I realized that, I decided it might be worthwhile to see if I could make pit stops in each generation between the beginning and the end. I threw out about 50-100 and started fresh."