The Between Quotes

“Old folks like me shouldn’t be burying our children every day like we are. But our fellowship grows. When the old have buried all the young, that’s when the world dies.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“One thing marriage counseling instilled in Hilton was a compulsion for open communication. Whether at home or at work, he knew that anything left unsaid was far more dangerous than spoken words could be, no matter how hurtful.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between: A Novel

“Unlike Dede, Auntie was a pack rat who crammed every space in her house with some object or another, and she was constantly rearranging. She had a large collection of mammy dolls and darkie memorabilia from the 1930s and 1940s, watermelon-eating and big-lipped reminders of the times she’d grown up in. Better for me to collect it than those other folks, she always said.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“He was probably educated. Hilton didn’t know which was harder for him to accept, homeless children or the homeless aged.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“In some ways, Hilton had felt that earlier incident was a good lesson for Kaya and Jamil—and maybe they could learn from this new crisis. Racism was out there, and Hilton figured it was better for his kids to grow up knowing it rather than fooling themselves into thinking everything was wonderful because they could drink from any water fountain or sit in classrooms next to little white kids. Maybe, in the end, this son of a bitch after them was doing his family a big favor. He’d make them stronger.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too “old fashioned.” I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted. Like”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“Although I loved horror, I wasn’t writing horror then. And sometime between elementary school and graduate school, my characters had transformed from young Black characters on fantastic and futuristic adventures to white characters having quiet epiphanies. I had wonderful writing teachers in college, but somehow with all of that exposure to “canon,” I had lost track of my own voice and was imitating writers whose stories were nothing like the ones hidden in my heart. I was a young Black woman raised by two civil rights activists—attorney John Due and Patricia Stephens Due—and I had grown up in the newly integrated suburbs of Miami-Dade County. I had never seen my life reflected in fiction; I felt like an imposter when I tried to write Black rural or city characters. I often wish I had discovered the writing of Octavia E. Butler sooner, but I had not. Representation matters. Without the work of other authors writing in a similar vein, I had lost sight of myself entirely. Then I discovered Mama Day by Gloria Naylor—finally, a book by a highly respected Black woman writer with metaphysical themes! Mama Day helped nudge me past my fear that I could not be a respected writer, especially as a Black writer, if I wrote about the supernatural. During this time, I also interviewed Anne Rice for my newspaper, since she was scheduled to appear at the Miami Book Fair International. I read one of the novels in her Vampire Chronicles series to prepare, and I also found an article about her in a highly respected magazine suggesting that she was wasting her talents writing about vampires. My worst fear realized! During that telephone interview, I asked Rice how she responded to criticism like this and then listened carefully for her answer—not for my readers, but for me. Rice actually laughed. “That used to bother me,” she said, “but my books are taught in universities.” Then she explained that by writing about the supernatural, she was liberated to discuss big themes like life, death, and love. Touché. Between Hurricane Andrew, Mama Day, and Anne Rice’s (unwitting) advice, I wrote The Between in nine months, looking past my own fears as a writer to follow my true passions. My protagonist, Hilton James, is a Black man who lives in the suburbs. His family reminded me of my own.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“How many black boys Jamil’s age would one day end up staring down the barrel of a police officer’s gun because of a quick assumption, or fear?”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“Representation matters. Without the work of other authors writing in a similar vein, I had lost sight of myself entirely”
― Tananarive Due, The Between

“One thing marriage counseling instilled in Hilton was a compulsion for open communication. Whether at home or at work, he knew that anything left unsaid was far more dangerous than spoken words could be, no matter how hurtful. His”
― Tananarive Due, The Between: A Novel

“He'd forgotten what it felt like to surrender to the comfort of tranquility.”
― Tananarive Due, The Between