"Write what you know" is the age-old advice for fiction writers. But as I embarked on the novel that would become Brother, How Long?, I decided to challenge myself.  I would create young, working-class characters with little power, education, or opportunity for self-expression. And so I began by creating Danny Gallagher: a twenty-two year-old rookie cop in Philadelphia. It's just after World War II, and he's furious at all the Blacks moving into his Irish Catholic neighborhood.  

     But when Danny befriends Althea Walker, a young Black woman newly arrived from the South, I got to wondering: what's her background? Where did she come from? So I started to develop a back story for Althea that I supposed might fill one chapter. Then, as I reseached some possibilities, I discovered the astonishing history of legalized debt slavery that had trapped thousands of Southern Black men -- immigrants, too -- in soul-crushing labor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  

     Well, guess what? I ended up ditching Danny and Philadelphia for Althea -- she's tall, dark-skinned, exceptionally bright -- and sending her on an astonishing journey into a brutal Florida turpentine prison camp. And when I say "astonishing," I mean I was astonished by her journey. She and the story took on lives of their own, unfolding in ways I never expected. Seven dead bodies, a ghost, a cryptic prophecy and much more would appear as I tapped away, each delivering their own surprises. 

                                                                                                        --David O'Reilly