I’m a journalist, which is why, at first, I was shy to admit that I was writing a novel.
After all, fiction is a funny thing. Part art, part science — it’s the kernel of truth, the real moment of an experience lived — distorted, reframed and made to matter.
Isn’t fact — undistorted and unfettered — what matters most? Isn’t that why I have dedicated my life to the telling of truth, listening to thousands of stories shared with me at kitchen tables, polling stations and small businesses across the country?
In fact, it was on one of those journeys to a town often forgotten, buried deep in America’s heartland, that I was reminded of something I’ve told myself time and again, specifically during my hardest assignments: Truth is always the most interesting story.
Whether based in fact or fiction, stories help us see ourselves — and understand our neighbors — especially when the categories that currently exist don’t capture the freedom and nuance of the human spirit. These narratives are often the vehicles by which we learn history, teach history and — if we’re lucky — find connection.
This is why I wanted to unpack my own story — untangling elements lost through time and rescuing pieces of my past.
Specifically, I wanted to learn about where I came from — about where, and how, my own family found "home."
My father’s family emigrated from Jamaica and Cuba generations ago. My great-grandmother Lilian was a mixed-race Black woman born in St. Ann Parish, Jamaica, home to the first Spanish settlement and several early sugar mills on the island.
My great-grandmother made the bold and complicated decision to migrate to Cuba looking for a better life, and in doing so, left her family behind. I reflect often on what it took for a Black woman in the early twentieth century to decide that the life given to her wasn’t the only life she could have; to know early and with profound wisdom that one doesn’t receive a life, one must make it.
In Camagüey, Cuba, she met my great-grandfather, who worked as a boilerman (or fogonero) on the Cuban railroad, Ferrocarriles Consolidados de Cuba. His father was formerly enslaved and had bought property in the eastern part of the island, which is where, together, my great-parents built their family in Camagüey, still asking the question: Where can we go to become whole?
That answer eventually brought them to America’s shores — where now, generations later, I continue to explore those same motivations — the courage and the desperation — that can make people risk everything to find "home" and become whole.
That spirit of searching is what I write about in my debut novel, "Now Then," which follows Lily, an 18-year-old freshman who arrives at Harvard University from the humble Appalachian home of her Cuban immigrant mother and Black American father. Lily feels out of place in this new world of privilege, but her roommate Hana and a budding romance with Vikram — a charming Indian British postdoctoral student — stir a new sense of belonging.
Just as Lily begins to explore her own questions of identity, her mother’s past comes back to haunt her. Through a series of heartfelt letters, her mother, Marisol, finally reveals the secrets she has kept hidden for years about the devastating night that forced her to flee Cuba, challenging Lily’s understanding of who her mother really is — and by extension, herself.
"Now Then" is a story of migration, searching and belonging, one that pulls from elements of my personal story — and search for love — and the perennial question that drove my family to these shores: Where can any of us go, to become whole?
As I unpack that question, the journey to its discovery is as important as the answer — if one exists.
As a journalist, I revel in the boundaries that truth provides, the shared, agreed-upon facts that shape the basis of common understanding.
But my ability to rely on the full range of my reporting to uncover the complete scale of my family’s history may not be something I will ever be able to do. My ancestors have passed on, property has been lost, and the complicated racial history of this country has made some of those truths — and the categories that contained them — even more difficult to uncover.
That is why fiction has given me such a gift, an unexpected invitation to create an entire world with the glimmering facts I do have, given to me in birth certificates, documents and oral histories.
It has been the joy of a lifetime to spend hours in history books — getting to know a country and a moment in time — trying to piece together the narrative behind the facts.
It is a gift, more importantly, to imagine a world where we can ask these questions in search of freedom, and ultimately, belonging.
