September 15, 2023
Greetings from SoCal as I continue my guerrilla style boots-on-the ground debut book promotion here in the Los Angeles area. I must say, I’m having way more fun than expected (no offense SoCal🫣 but y’all got some crazy traffic down here). Despite that, I’m thoroughly enjoying hanging with friends and family; meeting readers and booksellers here in this place of such diversity and vibrancy. Wrapping up this tour tomorrow.
Writing this as I relax and enjoy an excellent decaf latté at Black-owned Sip & Sonder Coffee House on Market Street in Inglewood.
This is been quite a six-week journey since the book launch on August 1, watching my book baby learn to walk — and hopefully run very soon.
One question that keeps coming up throughout this tour is: What in the world is this thing called a peach seed monkey, and what does it look like?
I’m happy to finally shed light with these pictures of the original peach seed monkey; the source from which the essence of the story sprang.
I own this precious little charm, it belonged to my late sister, Dr. Bettye Jean Jones. She perished in a plane crash in January 1997.
One summer when Bettye and I were children growing up on Hazard Drive in Albany GA, our elder cousin, Paul Herns, gave us each a little peach seed monkey charm. Paul was our cousin by marriage: his wife, Lois, is the daughter of my mother’s older brother. It was always a big deal when the northern cousins came to visit from Youngstown, Ohio. That summer was especially memorable because Paul gave us the little charms.
Over the years, the tail on mine broke – can’t remember how. Fast forward many decades. In Jan 1997 when we went to Ann Arbor, Michigan to clean out Bettye’s apartment after the plane crash, in her jewelry box on her bedroom chest of drawers, I found her pristine little monkey, still intact even though she was no longer with us in the flesh. As you can see, hers has rhinestone eyes, which came as a big surprise to me, because I hadn’t seen it since we were children, and didn’t remember this stunning detail. Mine did not have such bling! And yes, what’s up with that, Cousin Paul?!😳😆
Fast forward another decade when I began the process of figuring out what the story would be. Bettye’s little monkey just jumped right into the mix. Clearly, he wanted to be in the story — it was up to me to figure out how. And so I invented the tradition for the Dukes family of the men carving peach seed monkeys and passing them down to the boys when they came of age. I planted the origins of this fictional tradition way back in the Dukes family’s ancestral story—also pure invention—beginning in northern Senegal, around Podor in the 1700s.
In the beginning, the title of the story was Peach Seed Monkey, and while it served the project well for many years — being provocative and mysterious — I always knew that I could never have a book about Black people with the word “monkey” in the title for the obvious sick connotations. In a collaboration between Steve Ross, my agent, and Retha Powers, my editor at Henry Holt & Co., we landed on the title, The Peach Seed; most fitting, because that is true essence of this story—the seed itself.
Please leave a comment:
I’d love to know what stories this triggers for any of you, and if you have had experiences with anything carved from seeds.
You can read more about this story in my Lithub essay.