Women of the Post & Recovering Black Women's Histories
A love letter to Black women who have always labored
My debut novel, Women of the Post, is scheduled to be published July 18th by Park Row Books, and the expanding group of dedicated readers in my Black Book Stacks universe, like you, were some of the first people I wanted to share this news with.
It features and focuses on the heroic and brave women of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion of the Women’s Army Corps, a section of the U.S. Army championed by the great activist, organizer and influencer Mary McLeod Bethune and many others. While there has been an uptick in visibility of the Six Triple Eight since the widespread increased attention to a fuller range of Black history and Black humanity during the summer of 2020, for several decades and too long, they have been lost to history. Women of the Post is an act of recovery and restoration, in conversation with a number of other endeavors that are long overdue — and which I hope will produce even more interest and education about their fascinating contributions to winning World War II.
Women of the Post follows a character I first met about a decade ago, named Judy Washington. Before I knew her name, before I was able to understand what kind of journey we would embark on together, I had insomnia. I remember the moment so clearly because I was grieving the news my mother had late-stage cervical cancer. Doctors gave her six months to live. My father had died suddenly, by suicide, the year before.
I would wake up in the middle of the night and try to escape my emotional pain the way I always had: writing longhand in some kind of notebook. It feels like a generation ago, but I can still clearly remember waking up with this woman sitting at a kitchen table in a tiny house she once shared with her husband. But I felt like he was gone, and I didn’t know where. She was wearing one of his shirts, because it smelled like him. And she was ready to go elsewhere.
I did not think, then, that she would go to the Women’s Army Corps because I did not know they existed. I learned that at a Hedgebrook residency in 2017, just as we were all starting to familiarize ourselves with throwback terms that would have resonated back then in the 1940s, like fascism.
While I was at Hedgebrook, I wrote like I was never going to have a writing vacation again. bell hooks wrote something, once, about productive Black women writers, and the importance of writing like we are running out of time, because, the life expectancy for being in a Black body in this world is not great, to put it mildly. I had that rumbling around in the back of my head.
I found sanctuary in the wild, frigid beauty of the Pacific Northwest. I was not yet sure what I could make, what kind of writer it was possible to be, when I let myself go. It was exhilarating and healing, to just write write write.
I did that for a few days, until I needed a break to marginally reconnect with the world. I let myself peek at the news and stumbled upon an obituary for a veteran of the Six Triple Eight that led me to learn more about them. I suddenly knew where Judy was going to be headed. Herbert, her husband, was going to war. She would follow, leaving behind the demeaning work of the Bronx Slave Market — several sites in the Bronx where Black women domestics were exploited, doing grueling chores for white women for pennies an hour — trying to find him but also work that offered her purpose and dignity.
Pictured above are some of the women who made up the unit. The determination and focus on their faces, the more I learned of their stories from both Lt. Col. Adams’ memoir, One Woman’s Army to a few other books dedicated solely to women who served in the unit, the more the composite characters of Judy, another main character, Mary Alyce, and what I imagined to be some of the more personal experiences of Lt. Col. Adams came into view. In front are Capt. Abbie Noel Campbell and Maj. Charity Adams. When Maj. Adams completed her service to the Women’s Army Corps and the U.S. Army was the highest ranking Black woman serving during World War II as a Lt. Colonel.
I have been writing about books and writing for a long time, but thinking about my own novel in the traditions that I’ve been writing in has offered me a special renewal in how I consider the way we frame narratives of significance — both historically and in the present. Women of the Post is about a lot of the intimate friendship that carries Black women through, that restores us when the interlocking pains and pressures of racism and sexism and lack threaten to reduce us and make us small. It is, too, about Black women's unvalued labor in the workforce that enabled us to overcome fascism and build morale in order to win one of the most significant wars in American history. It is about how Black women's love for one another and for our country has been both sanctuary and salvation. It is my love letter to the courage it takes to be unique and also be in sisterhood as you evolve.
I will have much more to say about the book and the process of writing it in the months and years to come. in the meantime, I hope that you'll pre-order the book -- pre-orders are really important for the success of a book! -- which is available everywhere books are sold, including Bookshop or directly from your favorite independent bookstore. I also have early galleys for this dedicated group, and if you have read all the way to the bottom of this note, please share your best mailing address with me and I’ll send you a signed one.