In Indelible Ink: A Conversation with Cassandra Lane
During her recent visit to Texas State and the Katherine Anne Porter House Reading Series, Cassandra Lane and I sat down to discuss her debut memoir, We Are Bridges. A project decades in the making, We Are Bridges follows Lane’s personal journey through marriage, migration, and motherhood. These themes are interlaced with her family history, a harrowing genesis that begins with the lynching of her great-grandfather, Burt Bridges. Lane writes, “Not knowing one’s story is like being buried alive,” then spends the greater part of her memoir making sense of the muzzling of a family history that was both externally and internally inflicted.
This was Lane’s first venture into the Texas Hill Country–though her paternal roots in Houston tied her to the Lone Star State–and she reveled in the characteristic heat of a southern autumn, at one point mentioning that it reminded her of her Louisiana home. Lane spent her trip immersing herself in the city of San Marcos and its surrounding areas: perusing coffee shops and other local businesses near the Crystal River Inn, sharing meals with MFA students, and taking an exclusive tour of Falls Ranch with longtime donor, William T. Johnson.
Inside the historic home of Katherine Anne Porter, a phone as a recording device between us, Cassandra Lane and I readied ourselves for what was meant to be a quick ten-minute interview, a follow-up to an interview conducted by PHR in March of this year. I had a list of quotes, my carefully crafted questions, and We Are Bridges fresh on my mind. Lane quickly made it known that our conversation would be as singular as reading her memoir had been, a cathartic experience teeming with reverence for both the living and the dead. As we spoke, Lane nodded earnestly, always taking a moment to collect her thoughts, eyes closed, before responding.
The only diversion from the interview was the moment in which MFA Director, Debra Monroe, walked into the KAP house. In praise of We Are Bridges, Monroe wrote: “Cassandra Lane writes like a dream.” Monroe has been a champion for We Are Bridges since before its publication. Lane and Monroe built their camaraderie around craft and a shared love of nature, food, and family, the friendship mostly blooming during the height of the pandemic. They excitedly gushed over one another, love palpable as they confessed that this would be their first time spending quality in-person time with each other.
Lane carried her reverential demeanor straight through the end of our interview and into her reading later that evening. Having confided in me that she was unsure what sections of the memoir she would read, I sat eager to know what she had in store for the audience. She let herself be led into section after section of We Are Bridges, and reverted a crowded, bustling room into a memorial service for her ancestors, long overdue.
Georgina Figueroa: Back in March when you were interviewed by PHR, you broadly outlined the current book project you were working on. It was about music and subtly influenced by your mother. How has that project evolved since then?
Cassandra Lane: I have a son who is a senior in high school and I’m still a magazine editor, so not a whole lot. [She laughs.] The way I was able to finish We Are Bridges was getting up at four in the morning before having to get myself ready for work and my son ready for school. Right now, because I’m not really in the flow of it yet, I don’t get out of bed until it’s time to start getting ready. I’m excited about it though. I have three different journals about this one project. I find myself jotting down ideas, pieces of research on the guitar. I’m really enjoying that.
While it’s inspired by my mother, it’s not necessarily about her. It’s something I love about her. You know, she asked God to teach her how to play the guitar when she was eleven. She was using her brother James’ guitar that was missing a string or two, but he was in Vietnam and she didn’t have anyone to play with. She fasted and prayed to learn how to play and two weeks later, after practicing and practicing, she asked her father to get her a new guitar, because she could play. Her parents hadn’t been paying much attention. She started playing and they were awed. Her father didn’t have the money to get a guitar but he went and put one on layaway at a drugstore in our little town. She started playing for the church down the street and for different traveling gospel concerts, which is how she met my father at sixteen. She was like a rockstar. Now, she’s been prematurely gray since she was late twenties, early thirties, and when she goes to the music store and starts playing, she’ll have her little crowd. She was my first artist. I didn’t know any writers growing up, but to see her and her relationship to practice, her relationship to performing: she was teaching me about craft and the connection between an artist and their audience.
GF: In your memoir, you highlight a few moments of your time in the MFA program at Antioch University (in California). What was your experience like in higher education, especially as a woman of color?
CL: I was so lucky. I have tons of friends who went through MFA programs and not all of them were positive. Antioch is such a liberal, progressive school, and not that those are perfect spaces, but it does have that legacy and that environment. When I was there from 2001 to 2003, it was a supportive environment. There might’ve been a couple of instances in workshops that were tense [as highlighted in We Are Bridges] but it wasn’t the horror stories that I’d already heard from graduates. I felt tremendously lucky and still do because I’m still friends with several people that I graduated with and who were adjacent to my class. The workshop I was in after the program had several members from the program in it. I know my story isn’t every person of color’s story, but I ended up being in a good place at the right time for me.
GF: You’re right. It’s important to highlight the positive experiences, too.
CL: What I hope MFA programs are doing now is incorporating more of the career piece. There are other avenues for writers. I would love to see more MFA programs looking at other avenues of publication, not just a submission here or there, but what are the other career tracks?
GF: I really appreciated the forward thinking of blending fiction and memoir in We Are Bridges. I wanted to know more about what inspired you to use that speculative, imaginative space in order to craft out the stories of Burt Bridges and your Grandmother Mary?
CL: At first, I thought it was fiction, a novel about Burt–or at least inspired by Burt, since we didn’t have much information on him. It was just so frustrating, coming up with nothing. I felt almost forced into writing it as fiction.
It was the early 2000s and I was obsessed with Burt as a figure, who he was and these little bitty things that Grandma Mary had shared about him. He was this lonely figure in my imagination and I kept finding myself at these roadblocks. I started doing internal work, therapy and a lot of journaling. I asked myself why I was so obsessed with this story, which is a love story, but also a death story–a tragedy.
Initially, I thought these were two separate projects. I was writing personal essays about my journey with marriage and moving from Louisiana to California. Eventually, I just started playing. It really was a lot of play. I would weave a chapter on Burt with a personal story, but how could I get away with these fictionalized pieces? This was twenty plus years ago. At the time, people were talking about what you can’t do in the genre and I was a journalist, so sticking to facts had been drilled into me. At some point I decided that I was going to drop genre altogether and just follow the story. I would write and follow it. Eventually, it was like glue: I could not separate my personal story and that ancestral story. It was the story. It became even more obvious to me when I got pregnant and saw my son as part of this line. My attention turned from Burt and what had happened to him to all the survivors: the women. I hadn’t seen them that way. I maybe saw them as victims. Being pregnant myself, I started keying into their strength. I thought: how do you go on after something like that? But Mary did. She raised a son and that son had nine children and now there’s a whole army of us–a nation of us.
GF: You touch on the burden of generational trauma, writing, “I’m no better than my blood,” before explaining that you absorb family history as a means to do away with what hurts and hold onto what allows for prosperity and growth. Could you share more about that revelation and how it has impacted how you understand your own family?
CL: It was liberating to come to that understanding. Looking back at the history, you can get so caught up in the negativity and the trauma. That does a number on your self value and your confidence. I found that as I kept digging at the truth, even within myself, that there is nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t have to stay stuck in this mud, in this trauma, but the way out is to recognize that is what it is.
In writing what happens to Burt and Mary, I began to imagine the sensuality and beauty and love—the sound of his laughter. I started balancing all the hard stuff with the beauty that they must have experienced. I would be walking around cemeteries thinking about them, looking at tombstones of people who died around the same time. Morbid, I know, but the contrast was so stark. Here are these people who have tombstones with their names on them and my ancestors didn’t even have birth certificates. No one knows where Burt was buried, some unmarked grave in the backwoods of Mississippi, I’m sure. For Mary, there was a death certificate I was finally able to get my hands on. I knew they were worth more than that. My dedication to the story became the love song and the love story; that gave me a sense of purpose and value. It encouraged me. Despite it not being the kind of family legacy that anyone wants, I’m still proud of who they were outside of what America did to them.
GF: You added a very critical voice towards the knowledge and history of lynching. Even to this day, there are people who don’t believe that lynching was a widespread issue, or an issue at all. How does it feel to know that you’re adding to this conversation, not just for your descendants, but for all Americans?
CL: I feel privileged to see their names in indelible ink. That’s something that will never go away. Even though my story is just one small part of this much larger story, I’m honored to have contributed to this legacy of storytelling and searching for the truth even when we don’t have all the answers. It’s absolutely an honor to be part of this search. I think when you don’t have access to the truth, that doesn’t mean you should stop searching, and that becomes the story. The story was the erasure. Just because you didn’t see it happen, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
