A pioneer in Black horror fiction resurrects her uncle’s history
In 1937, 15-year-old Robert Stephens died while imprisoned at the notorious Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, likely the victim of a stabbing. Eighty-six years later, a reincarnate Robert Stephens was again imprisoned, only this time he landed in the Gracetown School for Boys, a fictional Florida prison found within the pages of The Reformatory, an award-winning 2023 novel.
Tananarive Due, the novel’s author, is a former Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, a lecturer in the African American studies program at UCLA, and, says the Los Angeles Times, a pioneer in the Black horror genre. She’s also the great-niece of the real-life Robert Stephens and the daughter of two renowned civil rights activists. A self-described “freedom lawyer,” her father, John Dorsey Due Jr., helped innovate the movement of civil rights cases to federal venues to overcome the bias of Southern courts. Rather than pay a $300 fine for attempting to integrate a whites-only lunch counter in Tallahassee, her mother, Patricia Stephens Due, spent 49 days in a Florida jail in 1960; that same year she suffered permanent eye damage when she was tear-gassed during a protest march.
“My parents were basically my first superheroes,” says Due. “Their courage and their commitment to not just Black rights but to human rights left a very strong impression on me. It was a pretty extraordinary household.”
As a Rotary Scholar at the University of Leeds, Tananarive Due discovered Nigerian literature. “It was a whole new world for me.”
Image credit: Frank Ishman
‘Writing wasn’t just a dream I had’
Due began writing at a young age, motivated on one occasion by the death of a man while she was growing up in Miami. In 1979, following a high-speed chase, white police officers used clubs and heavy flashlights to beat Arthur McDuffie, a 33-year-old Black insurance salesman and former Marine. Police tried to hide what happened, saying in a report that McDuffie was injured when he lost control of his motorcycle; the medical examiner’s office, however, said he died from blows to the head. An all-white jury acquitted the men despite other officers’ testimony about the cover-up. Riots broke out across Miami, and 14-year-old Due was devastated.
“I really believed in my heart that that page [of racial injustice] had been turned,” she recalls. “I was sitting in my junior high school cafeteria and they were playing this ridiculous Muzak trying to placate us. I felt like I was losing my mind. Then I wrote this poem, and all of a sudden I felt better. I could breathe again.”
Called “I Want to Live,” the prose poem envisioned a utopian society where racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions had vanished. It concluded, “Maybe that sounds like heaven, but if I lived there right now, I’d call this society hell.”
Her equanimity restored, Due went home and told her mother about the poem. “She said, ‘You’re so lucky that you can express those feelings in writing.’ That was the first time I realized that writing wasn’t just a dream I had.”
Tananarive Due
- Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar, 1987-88
- Master’s in English literature, University of Leeds, England, 1988
- Book awards for The Reformatory: Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Chautauqua, the Los Angeles Times
In 1987, Due graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois. Rotary International has its headquarters in that Chicago suburb, but it wasn’t until she returned home to Florida that Due learned about Rotary. “I thought I was going to try to get a master’s in creative writing,” she remembers. “But a friend from church asked, ‘Have you heard about The Rotary Foundation scholarship?’ It almost seemed too good to be true.”
Due received the scholarship and attended the University of Leeds in England. She earned a master’s in English literature, albeit with an unexpected focus. “I fell down a rabbit hole with Nigerian literature,” she says, describing her first encounters with the works of the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, the Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, and Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. “It was a whole new world for me.”
In 1995, while working as a feature writer and columnist for the Miami Herald, Due published her first book, The Between, which The New York Times called “part horror novel, part detective story and part speculative fiction.” Due leaned into her inclination toward horror in the books that followed, including The Living Blood (2001), which won the American Book Award, and the 2022 graphic novel The Keeper, which she wrote with her husband, Steven Barnes. That trend continues in The Reformatory, a compulsively readable novel that frighteningly melds supernatural horrors (especially “haints,” or ghosts) with the horrors of Black life in the Jim Crow South — a place, Due says, where “it’s actually the human monsters that are scarier than the ghosts.”
Resurrecting family history
“I’m a horror writer at heart,” says Due, and most of her books are fiction, though she briefly considered writing the “true-life horror” story of her great-uncle as a work of nonfiction.
Courtesy of Simon & Schuster, Akashic Books
As with her earlier books, The Reformatory helped alleviate those fears, especially with the opportunity it provided not only to imagine an alternative fate for her great-uncle, but to rescue him from oblivion. Until she received an unexpected call from the office of Florida’s attorney general — explaining that her distant relative might be buried at the Dozier School — Due was unaware that she had a great-uncle named Robert Stephens. Any evidence of his existence had been erased from her family’s history.
As for her preference for the horror genre, Due credits her mother, “a die-hard horror movie fan,” as well as the eye-opening and heart-pounding experience of reading Stephen King’sI when she was 16. In Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights, the book she co-wrote with her mother, Due alludes to her deepest childhood fears: loss and death.
After multiple visits to Marianna with her father, Due resurrected that history. To honor her parents, she also hid a few Easter eggs in her novel. The fictional Robert’s fearless and psychic sister is named Gloria; that was the middle name of Due’s mother, who died in 2012. And the dexterous NAACP lawyer who fights for young Robert’s freedom is named John Dorsey, an homage to Due’s father.
“I believe I may have discovered the remedy for my childhood fears of death and loss at last,” Due writes in her final passage in Freedom in the Family. “Remembering is the one and only thing that can make time stand still.”
This story originally appeared in the February 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.