Black Cherokee: An Interview with Antonio Michael Downing

In Black Cherokee, Antonio Michael Downing tells the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers, a young girl growing up between worlds—Black and Cherokee, past and present, belonging and exile. Raised by her formidable grandmother along the banks of the Etsi River, Ophelia learns early that identity is not simply inherited but negotiated, often painfully, within the shifting boundaries of community, history, and power. Moving through Cherokee homelands, Black church spaces, and elite white institutions, she encounters the quiet and overt ways race, class, and ancestry shape who is allowed to belong. Lyrical, searching, and deeply attentive to voice, Black Cherokee continues Downing’s exploration of identity and memory that began in his acclaimed memoir Saga Boy. In this conversation with Su Chang, Downing reflects on the landscapes, histories, and creative mysteries that gave rise to the novel. The interview was conducted on Zoom and edited for clarity and flow. 

Su Chang: It’s great to see you, Antonio. Thanks for taking the time. I really enjoyed reading your debut novel, Black Cherokee. I understand you drew on your childhood experience of living in a northern Ontario community, being one of the very few Black children in a small town with Indigenous folks and white settlers, and encountering a lot of racism. You wrote about some of that in Saga Boy, your memoir, and you also mention parts of the history in the preface of this novel. How did you weave that very unique personal history into crafting this story about a Black Cherokee community?

Antonio Michael Downing: Growing up in Trinidad, my first encounters with Indigenous people were Afro-Indigenous people. The Caribbean is, of course, named after the Carib people, and in Trinidad there were the Taino and the Arawaks. Even to this day, a quarter of the names of towns and villages in Trinidad still come from Indigenous languages. So that was a real part of my childhood, though it’s not something I write about in Saga Boy. I think it had a lot to do with writing Black Cherokee, because indigeneity first showed up for me as Afro-Indigeneity. That had a lot to do with why the story grabbed me.

But also, growing up in Trinidad, I went to this Anglican school, and the first white person I ever saw was in that schoolhouse, a one-room schoolhouse, in the form of a picture of Queen Elizabeth II looking down on us in a very maternal way. Then my grandmother dies, and I go to Sioux Lookout. I started high school in Dryden, then quickly moved to Sioux Lookout, which is nearby. And of course the school there is called Queen Elizabeth District High School. When you walk into the foyer, there she is again, the same picture, looking down. So there was this moment for me where I thought: my God, everything in my life has changed, but the one thing that has held true is the presence of the Crown, and of colonialism.

That mystery was then put right next to another mystery: Indigenous people. Sioux Lookout is probably one of very few towns in Canada that are about fifty percent Indigenous and fifty percent settler, and it’s a sizable town, maybe five or six thousand people. Normally, there is the town where the settlers live and a reserve nearby, but Sioux Lookout was one of those rare places where there was a real mix. So my introduction to Canada was: what is going on with this queen, why is she following me around, and also, wow, look, there are all these Indigenous people, and they’re alive. Cowboy movies had told me they weren’t here anymore. But here they were. I was fascinated by the Ojibwe alphabet, by the drawings, by the street signs that carried Ojibwe as well as English. I went to powwows.

My Aunt Joan was working on northern reserves, and she also helped billet students. As Tanya Talaga writes about in Seven Fallen Feathers, many young people from northern reserves don’t have local high schools, so they come to larger towns like Thunder Bay or Sioux Lookout and live with other families during the school year. It’s a terrible system, because they’re cut off from everything – their culture, their family, their language – and bad things can happen to them. I was literally thrust into the middle of that world. We had Indigenous students living with us in the basement. My Aunt Joan was travelling with an Ojibwe child and family agency to northern reserves. The town all around me was full of Indigenous people. That was my first view of Canada, and it left a mark on me.

Then, later on, I had friends – one family in particular – who were Black and Métis. We were very close through high school, and I watched them struggle with questions like: am I Black, am I Métis, am I white? They were navigating all three identities at once. I was fascinated by that too, partly because where I landed in Canada was such a unique place, but also such a perfect place for understanding the history of Canada.

I think Sioux Lookout is really a fault line in Canada, a place where traditions collide. A lot of my writing comes from trying to understand the mysteries of that childhood, because it shaped how I see myself. Later on, when I was travelling through North Carolina and the American South, and getting deeply attached to the landscape there, Black Cherokee began to emerge. People always ask where an idea comes from, or what your exact intention was, but I think writers often don’t work that way. Sometimes you have a plan and execute it, but more often, as Martin Amis put it, you get a throb. You get a calling. The idea arrives like a visitation, mysterious and insistent, and writing the book becomes the process of solving the mystery of that visitation.

For me, the visitation behind Black Cherokee was the landscape: that rural southern landscape, the bend in the river. And Ophelia came to me, but so did Grandma Blue. Really, it wasn’t that one appeared and then the other followed. They both came to me together, and what gripped me was their relationship. What is their relationship to one another, and what is their relationship to this place? I knew from the beginning that they were Afro-Indigenous. There was no ambiguity there. That is how they showed up. The rest was just me figuring it out.

SC: One of the things I was most fascinated by was the language, especially the lyrical voice of Grandma Blue. Every scene of dialogue with her felt utterly authentic to my ear. As a writer, I know how difficult it is to get local speech patterns right. I didn’t know you had such a close connection to South Carolina, where the story is set. What did your research process look like in understanding the language and speech patterns of that region?

AMD: Voice is always paramount for me. If you understand not just what someone says but how they speak, you get so much else along with it: age, class, what kind of work they do, how much money they have, whether they are introverted or extroverted. So much of personality comes through speech. If I don’t have the voice of a character, or the voice of the narrator, then I don’t really have anything. If I do have it, then I at least have a shot at getting to everything else.

In terms of research, I’m kind of a connoisseur of dialects in general, but especially African American, Caribbean, and African dialects, partly because many of the people I love are my friends. I’m always fascinated by the music and syntax of how people speak, because so much history is coded there.

At the time I was working for BlackBerry, and my territory was the South. I was travelling constantly – Atlanta, Miami, Mississippi, New Orleans, Charlotte, Greenville, all over. I spent a lot of time in the South and made friendships that have lasted to this day.

A lot of what stayed with me was the way people spoke, and how much history was embedded in that speech. I also had this interesting view of the South because much of it felt very segregated. Since I was there on business, I met a lot of white people in business settings. But then I was also going to see music, making friends, going to churches, and taking every opportunity to soak up as much of the culture as I could, so I was spending a lot of time with Black folks too. These characters and this situation sprang out of all those mysteries I encountered then.

The book almost came to me as one big mystery to rule them all, if I can borrow from Tolkien. And part of that was untangling very specific things I saw. The town in the novel where Ophelia and Bell live, and where she goes to school when she leaves the reservation, is based on Rock Hill, South Carolina. There is literally a white house on top of a hill on White Street. It’s one of the highest points in town, and there is a plaque commemorating that the White House on White Street, owned by the White family – which just happens to be their name – was a place where Confederate soldiers would come to convalesce and rest before going back to fight for slavery.

And right up into the 2000s there was effectively a Black high school and a white high school there. Segregation was still very much alive. I remember thinking: how can you have a monument celebrating people who fought to enslave people whose descendants are still living in this same town? That’s when I started to feel very strongly that history is alive. The past is not gone.

While writing the book, I was also reading Derrida, especially his idea of hauntology – that we are haunted by the past that was, by the past that never came to be, and by futures we imagine but may never inhabit. The past, the present, and the future are all hanging around each other all the time. That was the feeling I got in the South, and it’s very much the feeling I wanted in Black Cherokee. Ophelia is born into a family history, a local history, a regional history, a national history. We all are. Whether or not we understand that history, make peace with it, or fight against it, it is shaping our daily lives.

The river in the novel becomes a symbol of that. It is simultaneously coming from somewhere, sitting right in front of us, and already going around the bend. It exists in multiple dimensions at once. That was the feeling I had in the South: that I was living in history, in possible futures, and in denied futures all at the same time. History kept talking to you there, even through signs and plaques. The plaque I describe in the book is very close to the actual wording on the real plaque. 

SC: That is a teachable moment for all writers: get yourself a good corporate job with a travel budget and let it fund your research!

AMD: It really was! At the time I wanted to be a musician, and I realized very quickly that art costs money. Studio time costs money. Publicists cost money. So I made a decision: if I wanted to be an artist, I needed a job that could support the art. BlackBerry happened to be booming at that moment. I got a corporate job and, essentially, Corporate Canada bankrolled my art for years. Sales turned out to be perfect training for a writer. It’s storytelling. You’re performing. You’re communicating. Once I realized that, the corporate world became a tool rather than a distraction.

SC: That makes so much sense, and it also explains why the voice in the novel is so alive. Let’s talk a bit more about your protagonist Ophelia. On a second reading, I found myself paying attention to her voice above all else. It shifts as she moves through different spaces – with her grandmother, in the town Etsi, in the Black church, and later in an elite white school. How did you calibrate her changing voice? It felt very intentional, as though she becomes a somewhat different person in each community.

AMD: I think part of it is simply that we’re catching her between the ages of seven and nineteen. Over that stretch of life, we really do become different people. But I also think there are things that stay consistent in her. Her desire to fit in. Her desire to feel a sense of belonging somewhere. Her sense of wonder. She has that synesthetic way of experiencing the world, which she mostly keeps private, and within that there is a beauty that belongs only to her. Those things function as anchoring points for everything else that changes.

Part of her core, though, is this intense desire to belong, and if you want to belong somewhere, you change the way you speak. That was certainly my experience. I went to six high schools after coming to Canada at eleven. Everything kept changing. And what I learned was that fitting in wasn’t so much about what people said, but how they said it. If you could get the rhythm and the manner of speech right, that’s how people signalled belonging. He may not say what we say, but he says it how we say it.

So Ophelia is always listening. She’s trying to absorb the language of each world she enters – everyone being “brother” and “sister” in church, what the deacons wear, how people phrase things. She is decoding the world around her because she thinks, if I can speak like them, maybe they’ll accept me.

And I wanted the world, through her eyes, to feel at once familiar and unfamiliar. Because she comes to things without any settled assumptions, she notices contradictions that other people glide past. Children do that naturally. They keep asking why. It’s one of the most annoying questions a child can ask, because so often we don’t actually know why we do the things we do. We just rely on habit because it makes life more efficient. But I wanted the novel to interrogate ideas of belonging, identity, and home, and to do that you have to keep asking why. That’s why her voice shifts: she’s older, yes, but she’s also surrounded by very different people and trying, desperately, to belong in each of those spaces.

SC: That part of her felt deeply relatable to me. Anyone who has gone through some sort of metamorphosis – immigration, a change of schools, a shift of communities – can relate to having to change one’s voice across contexts. When you portray belonging in this book, it feels like something constantly being negotiated. Do you think belonging is something Ophelia claims for herself, or something a community grants, or some mix of the two?

AMD: That is really the central drama of the book. What happens to a community when it kicks out someone who belongs to it, someone who is part of it, and excludes them? What happens to that person, but also what happens to the community? And even more importantly, how do we heal from that?

That’s what Ophelia is struggling with all the time, and in a broader sense it’s what society is always trying to define. We are constantly deciding who is in and who is out. Are Black Americans real Americans? Are Black-Indigenous people really Indigenous? Do trans people deserve the same rights as everyone else? Are immigrants real Canadians? We are always drawing those lines.

I often think of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. In it she argues that we often think of caste as something specific to India, but in fact Nazi Germany, Jim Crow America, apartheid South Africa – these are all caste systems too. Modern societies constantly assign value and belonging on the basis of arbitrary things, often something as visible as skin colour.

Ophelia keeps running up against those structures. On the reserve she is too Black. Among Black people she is too Indigenous. In church it turns out there is also a hierarchy of wealth and family, so she is not rich enough or established enough there either. And then, in the end, with Christopher, she crashes up against the caste system of the whole town, where the wealthy white families who probably owned everyone back in the day still, in effect, own everyone now.

That’s one of the things I saw in the South. The old dynamic is still the dynamic. It still governs how many of these places work, and there is a terrible cost to that. So Ophelia’s struggle is very much about our society now and the ways we keep doing this to one another.

SC: I could relate to that too, even thinking about Chinese society, which can feel very caste-like in its own way. It’s often based on arbitrary things – where you were born, whether you have urban registration, that sort of thing. There is always some mechanism for placing people into hierarchies.

AMD: Yes, it’s almost as though the human condition keeps requiring us to come up with reasons to make other people less than us. It puffs us up. It secures us. It can be race, gender, class, wealth, accent – anything.

England is famous for this. A Liverpool accent, a northern accent – there are people whom certain institutions simply won’t let on television because the accent marks them. You hear people go off to Oxford or Cambridge and come back speaking in a completely different way, because that is the sound of privilege. Zadie Smith talks about this too: she comes from northwest London, from a heavily Jamaican part of the city, and then Cambridge teaches you to sound like the ruling class. They basically beat the localness out of you.

At some point, when you see this same pattern in so many forms, you realize people are just finding something – anything – to justify feeling inherently better.

Racism was strange for me at first because I grew up in a place where most people were Black and brown. The first time I encountered racism, I was almost excited in a writerly way because suddenly I had a word for something, and now I had experiences to go with it. Even now, when somebody behaves that way, I often find myself puzzled. You really believe that just because I look like this, I am stupid? Which part of your brain has failed to overwrite that absurd tribal instinct?

And the logic of caste is self-reinforcing. If one Black person commits a crime, the conclusion becomes: Black people are criminals. Meanwhile, white people kidnapped millions of Africans, raped them, maimed them, and forced them to labour for centuries, and somehow that says nothing essential about white people. The in-group gets individuality. If someone in the in-group does something bad, it’s an exception. The out-group gets generalization. If someone in the out-group does something bad, it becomes evidence about all of them. If someone in the out-group does something good, it’s an outlier. Obama is “a good one.” But when a white person does something good, suddenly it proves superiority.

It is such a seductive logic, especially for anyone who wants power. It is seductive to tell people: you are superior by birth; you don’t have to earn it, you don’t have to prove it, you were simply born better than them. And the flip side is that everyone else is born inferior and can never escape it. I find that psychology fascinating.

An English professor who is also a psychotherapist once told me, “Your writing is so psychological.” I think some of that comes from my Aunt Joan, who was a therapist for forty-five years and who raised me. The psychology behind caste systems and exclusion is one of the things that fascinates me most.

SC: That really resonates with me. Even though I didn’t go through the same journey as Ophelia, I could follow the psychology of her journey beat by beat, and I think that is what makes the book so powerful. I also wanted to ask about your movement between memoir and fiction. You wrote a very successful memoir Saga Boy before this novel, and I can clearly see connections between the two books. Writers are often obsessed with certain themes – belonging, identity, family – and keep returning to them. Did fiction allow you to explore emotional territory that memoir, as a genre, could not?

AMD: When I wrote Saga Boy, I had not published much for a long time. That summer I actually started by trying to write a novel. Then work got busier in September, and I thought, you know what, I need to write something easier. So I’ll write a memoir. The joke, of course, was on me, because memoir is hard too – just hard in different ways.

With memoir, you don’t have to make up the world. The reality is already there. But you do have to deal with very intense emotions about what happened, and the challenge becomes sorting through those emotions without letting them take over, while also not flattening them. With fiction, I think the emotion can come first and then you can create the reality that allows that emotion to come fully to the surface. That’s one of the reasons I feel more at home in fiction. Whether I’m better at it or not is another question, but I feel more at home there.

At the same time, fiction is hard because every choice belongs to you. In memoir it can actually be nice to be limited by what happened. Once you move into fiction, if a reader turns over a rock in a scene, you are responsible for what is under that rock. You are the god of that universe, and that is hard work.

So the difficulty of memoir was processing the emotions of what I had already lived through. The difficulty of fiction was making all those choices intentionally and making them meaningful.

For example, in memoir, I don’t have to invent how my mother speaks. I have to remember how she speaks and find the right words to capture it. But with Grandma Blue, I had to ask: how does she speak? At first that seems like invention, but increasingly I think of it as listening. Writers often talk as though they consciously decide everything, but I’ve come to feel that the book already exists, the characters already exist, and your job is to become quiet enough to capture them. I don’t think, I need to choose Grandma Blue’s voice. I think, I need to listen for Grandma Blue’s voice and catch it.

That shift in thinking became really important to me after Saga Boy. Saga Boy was praised by all these extraordinary writers, and then I sat down to write Black Cherokee with their glowing words ringing in my ears. I felt responsible for not making them look foolish for believing in me. So I started trying to prove I was a good writer in every sentence, every paragraph. That is a terrible way to write.

Eventually I had to tell myself: this is gardening. Your job is not to pull on the stem to make the plant grow. The plant knows how to grow. Your job is to create the conditions in which it can grow. That took my ego out of the process. It let me treat the book as something organic, something alive, something that required care, not domination. It made me more of a listener than a decider.

I often think of Thich Nhat Hanh, who said that when he thinks he knows, he digs in, defends his ideas, and fights for them; but when he thinks he does not know, he becomes a better listener, asks better questions, and is more open to being changed. That second posture feels much closer to the creative process.

And there’s another part of it too: writers are often incredibly hard on themselves in ways that would make no sense in any other context. If you planted eggplant in a garden last week, and there were no eggplants a week later, you wouldn’t stand there shouting at yourself for being a terrible gardener. You would understand that there is a gestation period. It takes time. But with writing, we behave as though the fruit should appear immediately, and if it doesn’t, we are failures. A lot of the pressure we put on ourselves makes no sense. If you don’t give the deeper reasons for the book time to unfold, you may finish faster, but you will have written a lesser book. Sometimes the shortcut is actually the long way.

SC: That is such a lesson. I’m at the end of my own second book now, and I feel exactly that process of trying to relinquish control and become a channel. Let me ask one last writerly question, because Miramichi readers will be curious about your process. This is a cliché, but are you a plotter or a pantser? And related to that, you have a huge job as the host of CBC’s The Next Chapter. How on earth do you find time to write your own books?

AMD: I probably started out more as a pantser, but I had to acquire the ability to plan in order to finish Black Cherokee, because that book required a great deal of planning. Now I see plotting and pantsing simply as tools in the toolkit. If the book needs planning, I plan. If it needs me to fly by the seat of my pants, I do that. What matters is listening to what the book is asking of you. 

I also use very visual tools. I have an architectural drafting table with big sheets of blank paper, and I use that for geography. At the end of Black Cherokee, when they go to the Beauregard mansion, I mapped the whole approach: the drive through the oak trees, the foyer, the room where the characters are seated, who is sitting where, what all the sight lines are. I really don’t feel that I know the book until I can play it in my head like a movie. I want to know what the characters look like, what the landscape looks like, how the physical space works. Then I feel I know what I’m doing. David Mamet once did a masterclass about plotting plays, and he was big on the use of foolscap and an architectural table. I loved that.

As for CBC, honestly, it empowers me to write. The show is about books. I am reading all the time, talking with colleagues about books all the time, talking with authors all the time. The Next Chapter is really about reading itself – how we do it and how it shapes us. Every time I talk to an author, they recommend five other books. So I am constantly immersed in literature.

The practical answer is that writing becomes seasonal. I took the second half of December off and went to a farm, literally out in a field, and for fourteen days the only beings I spoke to in person were cows. I finished a draft of my novel there, then I put it away for six weeks. During those six weeks I can do all the public-facing work, and then when I pick the novel up again, I dial some of that back.

SC: So the cows will definitely have to appear in the acknowledgments of your next book.

AMD: Absolutely. They’ll get a shout-out. 

SC: One encore question: were there any really good scenes you loved in earlier drafts but ultimately had to leave on the cutting-room floor?

AMD: I’m sure there were lots, but once I confirm that something doesn’t need to be in the book, I almost forget it entirely. It becomes as though it never existed. I actually love cutting. There are two ways to make a book better: you can write something new, or you can cut what’s already there. Often it’s far easier to click a button and think, yes, that is so much better. A lot of my cutting is internal to scenes – just making a passage tighter so it flows better.

But there was one scene that moved in the opposite direction. The opening scene now, where they’re cooking succotash, originally appeared in the middle of the book. I loved it, but in that position it was interrupting the flow and slowing the pace, so I cut it. The test for me is this: if you cut something and never think about it again, then it probably didn’t need to be there. But I kept thinking about that scene. And eventually I realized: this is actually where the book begins. All the ideas I’m trying to get across are already in it – the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, the synesthesia, the Cherokee and Black inheritances, the sense of history being present. So I took that scene from the middle and made it the beginning.

There is another cut scene I do remember. Ophelia spends time with those twins, the weird kids in high school who really get her, and there was a scene where they hung out at a plane that had sunk into a marsh. They called it the orphanage, even though they weren’t literally orphans; it was more that their wealthy parents had emotionally abandoned them. They would go there, dance, and play music, and it was also where we first saw Ophelia begin to dance. I liked that scene a lot. But eventually I had to cut back the twins because, much as I liked them, they were becoming a distraction.

Still, nothing is ever really wasted. Just as Black Cherokee carries some of the aroma of Saga Boy, I think my writing has a certain vibe that keeps returning. In the new book there are things readers will recognize, but there are also a lot of new things. In fact, I think the direction I’m going next will surprise people. It’s surprising me too. But that, to me, is one of the best feelings – when your own work surprises you. And it reinforces my whole gardening doctrine. It’s not really me in the grand, controlling sense. I’m just lucky enough to be present for these bold, bright visitations as they unfold.

SC: This has been marvelous. Thank you for sharing so generously about your process and the world behind Black Cherokee. It was a real pleasure speaking with you.

AMD: Thank you for having me.

Su Chang

Su Chang is a Shanghai-born Chinese-Canadian writer. She is the author of a debut novel, The Immortal Woman (House of Anansi, March 2025), which is a CBC Best Fiction of 2025, a Toronto Book Award nominee, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist, a Rakuten Kobo Best Fiction of the Month, and won the 2025 Independent Publisher Book Award, among other accolades. CBC named her a "Writer to Watch" in 2025. Her fiction stories have been nominated for the Journey Prize and the National Magazine Award, won awards or been shortlisted by the Montreal Fiction Prize, Tennessee Williams/SASFest Fiction Contest, Prairie Fire Fiction Contest, Canadian Authors' Association National Contest, ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, Disquiet International Fiction Prize, among others. She lives with her partner and two young children. More at https://www.suchangauthor.com/