Why Attica Locke chose to write a mystery series about a Black Texas Ranger

The Next Chapter19:58Guide Me Home tells the story of a Black Texas Ranger in the American South

In the final installment of the Highway 59 mystery series, Houston native Attica Locke takes readers to Texas during the Donald Trump presidency, where her protagonist Darren is forced to balance his job and identity.

Named after the 1971 prison uprising in upstate New York, writer Attica Locke was raised with the constant reminder of the importance in fighting for our shared humanity. When Locke decided she was going to write a mystery series about a Black Texas Ranger, shaping his conscience and moral centre became an evolving and engrossing process.

Locke is an American author, screenwriter and producer from Texas. She is known for producing and writing for the show Empire, When They See Us and Little Fires Everywhere. She is also the author of six books including, Pleasantville, Black Water Rising and the Highway 59 trilogy.

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In the cumulative final book of the Highway 59 trilogy, Guide Me Home, Texas Ranger Darren Matthews is once again drawn into a missing persons case in a small town college. Avoiding his own indictment, Darren is at odds with the fellow detectives and the all-white sorority members who insist the Black college student, Sera, isn't missing at all.

As Darren contends with his mother's interference and being a Black cop under a Donald Trump presidency, he grappling with his conscience and how to go about seeking truth and justice.

Locke spoke to The Next Chapter's guest host Antonio Michael Downing about growing up in rural Texas and how it led to writing Guide Me Home. 

I would be remiss if we didn't start by talking about the landscape that this book is set in — rural East Texas. Why is this place so important to you?

I actually grew up in Houston, but all of my family, all of my ancestors going back to slavery are from rural East Texas and they're from little towns along Highway 59. As a child, I spent a big part of my childhood riding up and down this highway visiting people in these little towns.

I would sit in the back seat of cars and look out at the forest of pine trees or the bayous or the person out there selling armadillos sausage or boiled peanuts and I just saw all of this speeding by me and I think it kind of got in my blood. 

I just want to take a minute and go back to the beginning. Tell us a bit about [Darren, the protagonist] and especially why did you choose to make him a Texas Ranger? 

So this whole book series started with just the idea of the highway — the idea of each book would be a different crime in a different little town. But it was said to me by people who know better than me that the trope of the genre asks for a character that we're going to follow and because Highway 59 in Texas goes all the way from Laredo at the Mexico border to Arkansas I was like, "what character goes all over the place? Is it a lawyer, is it a P.I.?"

And then I thought well it's a Texas Ranger, that's literally what they do. They're assigned by region and they've jurisdiction all over their region and so that's where the idea of a Texas Ranger came about. The next thing for me to deal with or think about was how I, Attica Locke, a person named after a prison uprising, was going to write a cop.

It just never occurred to me in my life that I would be writing a protagonist through the lens of that point of view of the establishment. 

How [was] I...a person named after a prison uprising, was going to write a cop.- Attica Locke

I read a book called Ghettoside by Jill Leovy which posited this idea that as much as we talk about the over policing of Black life, the other story of America is the under policing of crimes against Black life and that there are Black police officers who believe that their job is to make sure that crimes against Black people get — someone gets caught and someone gets prosecuted.

That gave me a door that let me, my heart, open up to the idea of seeing the world through Darren's point of view. I gave him some of my ticks, some of the fact that I love Texas, even though Texas does not always love me back. 

I want to believe and be a patriot, I want to believe in the laws and the ideals of my country and yet I also question those ideals and question the Constitution and question whether or not America has ever really lived up to what it is purported itself to be.

Once I allowed Darren to be this man of contradiction, this man who was ambivalent about the power that he wields, then I could write him. 

There's a line in the book where he makes an observation. He goes to the sorority, he says, "Texans he knew could be vicious, but they were rarely rude. It was a truth and a lie at the same time. The state's storied friendliness." What's under the surface of that courtesy?

It's so true that nobody in Texas would ever be caught being rude. They might knife you in the back when you turn around, but they will smile in your face, it's just the contradiction of that place.

I've been to a lot of places in the world and Texas still stands as one of the warmest places I've ever been with some of the warmest people I've ever been around and it is also one of the places where I've been most afraid for my life. Both of these things are true.

Texas still stands as one of the warmest places I've ever been.- Attica Locke

I like to write about contradictions. I think the world is full of contradictions and I think we are better as a people for flexing the muscle that allows us to hold contradictions.

I'm always looking for places to paint people's contradictions in places and cultures, always in a way that I hope is honest.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.