Elizabeth H. Winthrop Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Elizabeth H. Winthrop, author of The Mercy Seat, discusses race, racism, and injustice in the Jim Crow era South.

What drew you to write about the Jim Crow South? How and why did you choose this specific time and region of the country?

I lived in Savannah, Georgia for ten years before moving to Massachusetts, and during that time I took a lot of roadtrips through the south, which became familiar and close to my heart. There's something timeless and frank about the landscape that haunts me, and I knew, when I moved back north, that I wanted to set a novel in that world, if only to spend time there in my imagination since I was no longer there in person.

I didn't know exactly what sort of novel I wanted to write, nor when or where it would take place, until I heard a Radio Diaries podcast about Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair. I started researching and came across the photograph of a crowd gathered outside a jail where an execution was set to take place. I was struck not only by the fact of the gathering, which disturbed me, but by the faces of the people who had gathered, and I began to wonder who they all were. I started thinking of the particular event the photograph captured in human rather than abstract terms, as individuals with families and history and memories. I still wasn't thinking about "story," yet,...