Romance author Sandra Kitt has been taking risks in her writing and pushing the limits of what can be done with romance fiction since she picked up her first pen. She was one of the first to write romance stories with African American men and women, and in her words, these books "threw the publishing world into a panic." The publisher wasn't "sure there was an audience for love stories with people of color. They were afraid of offending their white readership (seriously!) and that the books would not sell."
Sandra was inspired to prove them wrong and part of what inspired her were the books she read growing up. Here she shares the tales that stayed with her the most.
By the time I was eight years old, I was practically living at my local library, escaping by reading into other worlds. Reading soothed me, released me from my day-to-day routines, and saved me. Like any voracious reader, I read anything I could get my hands on. I passed from one magical setting to another, but along the way I found myself absorbed in stories that stayed with me for a long time, sometimes for years.
The very first of these stories, and it still haunts me, is a poem Babes In The Woods. It was about two very young children who’d, apparently, gotten lost in the woods. All day they held hands, wandering through the deep forest until, as it got dark, they fell to sleep under a tree where they were covered with leaves by birds. That was all I remembered until many years later I found the poem and realized there was far more to the story.
The children had been stolen and left in the woods, never getting out of the forest and dying there, tenderly seen to by the forest creatures. To say I was devastated doesn’t nearly cover the range of emotions I felt as a young reader, where so many other children stories, at that time, had happy endings. But what ripped my heart open were the children being left all alone in an unknown place by grownups who should have protected them.
Then, along came Toni Morrison with The Bluest Eye. Set in the south in the middle of the last century, it tells the story of a poor Black girl being sexually abused by her own father, and with whom she has a child. As the reader I wanted the young teen to be rescued in some way or have her father die a cruel and lingering death as punishment for his utter indifference to his own daughter.
But the young girl had her own means of endurance. She imagined that one day she would suddenly and miraculously have blue eyes. She knew that in her universe little white girls with blond hair and blue eyes were loved and protected, lived beautiful lives and could have anything they wanted. Having blue eyes would surely save her life, make her special. Since that was never to be, her life became an intolerable existence without hope, and an ultimate tragedy.
I had already begun writing my own stories by the time I found Esther Sager’s Chasing Rainbows, a contemporary novel with a romance, but not the kind of love story that follows usual conventions. While the developing romance was important, it was not the book’s main focus. The romance was soaked in deeper issues of alienation, loss, puberty, sacrifice, illness, and, yes, love. I was so engrossed in the story that, despite everything the author had prepared the reader for, when I got to the last page and did not get the ending I wanted, I began to cry uncontrollably.
When I began writing I had no particular plan other than to write the kind of stories I wanted to read and the kind I wasn’t seeing in bookstores. Besides being romances, my stories were complex, emotional, and incorporated social issues as well as issues of race and being Black in America. I took daring risks and tried things that had never been done before in novels. Mostly no one noticed, but those who did assured me that I was writing what needed to be written. I was way ahead of the curve.
Most of all what my books did was to make my readers feel, believe, think, and sympathize. My novels made them want to have more of the story. They were moved, they couldn’t forget, as I couldn’t, the stories that opened their hearts, made them remember, tore them up inside, left them sleepless, made them cry.
I wanted to feel deeply about my own characters, just as I had reading as a child. The characters I wanted to root for are the ones I most want to read . . . and write. These are the ones that will stay with me forever.