Integration and Invention

I remember, when I was very small, my father driving into what was essentially a black slum in Naples. I am fairly sure it was in connection with hiring construction workers; Dad had always been comfortable with working with blacks, both in Naples and Ohio. He’d basically grown up with them, men who worked for his own father’s construction company up north.

Where exactly was it located? I could not tell you now. It was not the later River Park neighborhood. Or I don’t think so! I do remember the shabby little houses, the dirt roads. Mostly I remember the puppy we came home with. That made a much bigger impression on me.

I relied on both memory and research in locating the black neighborhoods as they existed in the time of segregation and shortly thereafter. They do play a part in “One Christmas in the Sun.” If I were uncertain of some detail—having conscientiously researched—I made up something plausible. A best guess. It is ultimately fiction, after all.

The timeline for the integration of schools in Naples may not be completely right, though I do know when the ‘black’ high school finally shut down and the last of its students went to Naples High. But integration had already been going on for a decade and more, and I reflected this in Will Booth showing up at Lake Park Elementary in the fourth grade.

The fact is, there was never a particularly large black population in Naples. Out of over two hundred graduates, only four black seniors were part of the class of 1968—and none of them had the least resemblance to Will.

At one point, before starting the first Women in the Sun novel (“One Summer in the Sun”), I did consider not using the name Naples for my setting, but creating a fictional analog. But there were so many details of the real town I wanted to use that I decided it was best to call it Naples. I am okay with that decision—and with whatever fiction I have mixed with reality.

That includes the characters themselves, of course. They are fictitious and ‘any resemblances to actual persons are coincidental,’ as the stock disclaimer has it. But real persons inspired me. Real places and real events inspired me to create the Naples of my stories.