Interview with Ellen Barker, author of East of Troost

Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Ellen Barker, whose novel East of Troost has its debut on September 6.

Would you call East of Troost both a memoir and a work of fiction? What does that signify?

I think of it as a novel wrapped around a memoir. The main story is set in a real place but the plot and characters are entirely fictional. The narrator’s memories, however, are bits and pieces of my own childhood. It’s not a full memoir by any means, though.

The main character is an unnamed white woman who returns to the area where she grew up, in a neighbourhood now predominantly Black. What can you tell us about the part of Kansas City known as East of Troost?

Troost Avenue, also called the Troost Wall, is just an ordinary commercial street in Kansas City, Missouri. But it was designated as a barrier between Black and white residents as Black families were finally able to start buying houses. To white locals, “East of Troost” implies danger, crime, and an overwhelmingly Black population, as in “I don’t go east of Troost.” These barriers are common in American cities, and although racial restrictions have been illegal for decades, they are mostly still there. Porous, but visible.

What moves the narrator to return there, and what does she encounter?

She goes back because her comfortable middle-class life in California has evaporated: her husband is dead, her home equity lost in the subprime mortgage crisis, her possessions burned in a fire. Rebuilding a life in California is way out of reach financially, so she turns to the only place that feels like home. When she gets there, she finds a very different neighbourhood. Many houses are gone and others, like hers, are derelict. The neighbours eye her with scepticism. An expressway has appeared just a block away.

Talk to us about some of East of Troost’s important themes: racism past and present, and the significance of white privilege.

The memoir pieces that punctuate the story line remind the reader of how bad things were for Black families then, before the Fair Housing Act passed. They also point to how things that happened then—both the public policy that segregated based on race and personal actions like burning down Black family’s homes—just exacerbated the fear and hate that result in violence and carry forward to today. 

How does the novel talk about the physical racism that created the neighbourhood in the past and the changes the narrator finds there today?

One big change is the expressway, which took out thousands of houses and created a massive construction zone through the entire east of Troost neighbourhood. It doesn’t run along Troost, it’s well to the east, through the middle of the area where Black families were allowed to buy houses. So many of the remaining houses are now close to the expressway, which of course keeps property values low.

In the flashbacks, the reader learns about the red-lining that supported segregation and the blockbusting that real estate firms used to instil fear and get white families to move away en masse. It made integration impossible. Each block would be “integrated” only in a brief period between being all-white and mostly Black.

In the main story line, it becomes clear that more than race has changed. Houses often sit empty between residents. Many houses have fallen into ruin and been torn down. When the narrator looks up property records, wondering if any familiar names remain, she finds that a large percentage of houses are owned by corporations or by individuals who live elsewhere. So all that grief did not increase home ownership all that much for Black families, even in this neighbourhood of small, inexpensive houses.  

Tell us about the importance of crime narratives in the novel. How does the narrator deal with this, not to mention home repair and scepticism about her motives?

The crime rate in the neighbourhood was something she knew about, and crime is one of the statistics that kept property values within her price range. She knows from her high-school years the basics of staying safe. And yet, she’s only there a week before a break-in occurs that colours much of the rest of the story, reaching a conclusion at the very end. It makes her fears less academic and more real. I don’t think she would have stayed at all if she didn’t have a large German Shepherd dog with a serious bark. The break-in has an upside, though. The police response brings the neighbours out to meet her, and their kindness also gives her a sense of community. If they can make their homes here, so can she. She also gets to know Officer Carl, and he becomes a recurring character.

To what extent is this a crime novel or something harder to categorise? How far does East of Troost traverse genres in pursuit of its themes and memories?

It was conceived as a literary novel, not a crime novel or a memoir. But unexpected things happen during the writing process, at least when I’m the one doing the writing.  The characters and the plot take over reality and go where they will. Only when it was finished did I think about the genre. I actually love that it reaches out into other realms. I like to read books that cross genre boundaries. The crime aspect gives the story drama and also a theme that starts on page 72 and reappears off and on until the very end.

Humour too is important throughout the novel - talk to us about that.

Yes, it’s very important. Without humour, the narrator wouldn’t be able to get past the plaster and plumbing problems, never mind the neighbourhood issues. Having Josie next door gives her perspective and brings both humour and pathos. And then there’s Boris the dog. Dogs can always make us laugh, not the least at ourselves. I like to run into humour in books I read, especially books with a serious undertone. Laughter draws us in and charms us and makes us able to absorb serious ideas.

How far did your own early years growing up in Kansas City influence the creation of East of Troost?

Quite a bit. They provided the pretext for the narrator moving back, and they provide the context in terms of the house, the blocks around it, the expressway, and a few of the places she visits. They drove me as the author to save the house from demolition, even if it only lives on in fiction. But most of all, my grounding in social justice issues in grades seven through twelve influenced my need to tell the racial injustice story that weaves through the starting-over story. Crime was a constant worry and topic of discussion in my last years living east of Troost, which is why crime shows up in both past and present in the novel.

In what way does East of Troost reflect the changes in America since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s?

One thing I hope readers take away from the book is the realization that the Civil Rights Movement, for all it achieved, did not launch long-term change and did not in any way eliminate racism. It felt like it was doing that, but now it seems like we glanced away for a moment, and then fifty years passed and look: it’s all still there. Now more than ever, perhaps.

Beth Lisick, author of Edie on the Green Screen and New York Times bestseller Everyone into the Pool said in her review: “Ellen Barker has written a book that should give women of a certain age and privilege a lot to think about. What happens when you try to go home again, and what can you learn in the process?” What do her words mean to you?

Taking stock is something that happens to all of us when we come up against a challenge—in my case, getting laid off from a corporate job resulted in writing this novel, because I had to figure out what the next chapter in my life would be. I came home to my old, old dream of writing books.

What I hope Beth’s words don’t mean to anyone is that the government policies that created America’s east of Troost areas are issues limited to middle-aged white women in the suburbs and everyone else can say “well, that’s not me.” 

Incidentally, Beth’s Edie on the Green Screen is about a slightly younger woman taking stock at a crucial stage in her life. She too goes home, if briefly, to figure things out.

The blurb calls East of Troost “a regional story with universal themes”. How important is the sense of place in the novel and how does it resonate with wider themes of racism and white privilege today?

Sense of place is everything to the narrator, it’s why she took the risk to move there, and it’s what she worries about when she wonders if it can really be home for her again. Everyone wants a sense of place, of home. The neighbours talk about this at the very end of the book. But a sense of home can be a driver of racist policy too. The now-illegal (but not really gone) restrictive covenants  blocking Jews and Blacks and Catholics and others are a result of white fear and people’s desire to insulate themselves from those who seem threatening because they are different. World history is full of this kind of circling of the wagons. Brexit had a component of exclusion. Hitler’s Germany. Ireland. The Middle East. It’s everywhere. We can only get past it if we can stop seeing different as dangerous. Ideally, we wouldn’t even say “different” because it immediately draws a line. It’s not easy.

You worked for many years in urban planning. How has your own experience informed your ideas and how has it translated into a work of fiction? 

Here is one example. My first urban planning job was in Saint Louis, where I went to college. “East of Troost” there would be called “North of Delmar” —it’s used in conversation with exactly the same meaning: Black, dangerous, I don’t go there. A big issue at the time was the city’s desire to close one of its two public hospitals because of budget issues. The question was whether to close the newer, better equipped, air-conditioned one in North St. Louis, or the original, older, not-air-conditioned one in South St. Louis. If you’ve ever been to St. Louis in August, you know that air conditioning is not a luxury. They closed the one in the Black neighbourhood, and during the next heat wave the National Guard had to set up a crazy cooling system to pipe chilled air into the old South St. Louis hospital.  That was just the absurd result. The truly chilling result was the loss of health care for the Black community and the wrecking of the neighbourhood, the community, that had grown up around the hospital and disintegrated when its heart was shuttered and left vacant. That’s a long story, but it brought home everything I had learned in college. Eventually, it gave me the confidence to write fiction that could bring it home to my readers.

What can the history of East of Troost and Kansas City tell us about America today?

This is an important question. It’s easy to think of East of Troost as a Kansas City phenomenon, maybe some relic of the Maine-Missouri compromise of 1820, which Thomas Jefferson predicted would tear the union apart. But again, it’s just the barrier I know best, the one that breaks my heart. 

The problem exists all over America, and it is not just about physical barriers to home ownership. So many shootings and hate crimes stem from this fear of others. And the worst thing politicians can do is make hate okay again.

What do you enjoy reading and what novels or writers have influenced you?

 I can’t remember not being able to read. In my teen years, when I was learning to write, I loved the usual fare: Emma, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, Catch-22. I still remember all of those as great works.  In college I spent a summer reading French existentialists and also Studs Terkel’s Working, an eye-opener. Assigned books like Streetcar Suburbs and The Forest People and Black like Me fascinated me. As did How to Lie with Statistics.

 I’ll read almost anything that’s well written and has something to say, something enlightening—preferably in story form. So while I lean toward fiction, I also love readable nonfiction like Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime or Tyler Merritt’s I Take my Coffee Black or Thad Snow’s From Missouri, a book published in 1954 that is as relevant today as it was then. I just finished The Kudzu Kid, an indie novel by Darrell Laurant that features a small-town reporter solving a murder.

The writers that influence my writing style, my voice, include Anthony Trollope, Angela Thirkell (I love how she used Trollope’s 19th century fictional locale for her 20th century stories), and Alexander McCall Smith. From them I learned how the subtle turn of phrase delights the reader, how getting inside a character’s head provides insight, how humour gives a necessary lightness to the most serious topic, and how human themes carry on, generation after generation. And that is somehow terrifying at the same time that it is reassuring.

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About Ellen Barker:

Ellen Barker grew up in Kansas City, where she had a front-row seat to the demographic shifts, the hope, and the turmoil of the civil rights era of the 1960s. She has a bachelor’s degree in urban studies from Washington University in Saint Louis, where she developed a passion

for how cities work, and don’t. She began her career as an urban planner in Saint Louis and then spent many years working for large consulting firms specializing in urban infrastructure, first as a tech writer-editor and later managing large data systems. She now lives in Northern California with her husband and their dog, Boris, who is the inspiration for the German shepherd in East of Troost. This is Ellen’s first novel.

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