Buffalo Literature: History, storytelling come together in novel

By P.A. Kane

Buffalo-based author Rosanne Higgins is both a scholar and a novelist. In graduate school, she studied the relationship between biology and poverty, with a focus on the institutionalized poor.

An invitation to join the Erie County Poorhouse Cemetery project by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Buffalo led her to fiction writing. Trying to piece together the deaths of poorhouse inmates, she became interested in telling their stories in an accessible way beyond academia. This led to her first novel, Orphans and Inmates, which is a fictional account of poorhouse residents backed by historical facts. This was followed by seven other novels mixing history with spiritualism and a touch of magic.

Today we talk to Higgins about her latest novel, A Time Against Race, which explores the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo in the 1920s.   

PAK—In your bio, I read that as a child you traveled a lot through the U.S., Europe and Ireland. How did you get this opportunity, and was there a specific place or experience that changed how you saw the world and/or made you want to be an anthropologist?

RH—My parents have always loved to travel, and even now, at 88 years old, they still visit family in Italy and Scotland. When I was a child, my family camped across the United States. One particular year, we drove out to the Grand Canyon, camping our way around the country. We had a similar adventure in Canada another year.  My father traveled to Europe a lot for his job when I was younger, and we spent the summer in Luxembourg the year of the Bicentennial.  We visited Holland, Switzerland, Belgium and France that summer. I realized very young that the world was large and diverse, and I wanted to see it all.  My husband and I love Ireland, so that is a frequent destination for us, but I would literally go anywhere!

As far as anthropology, I saw a movie about Louis and Mary Leakey and their studies of human evolution when I was in fourth or fifth grade. After that, I wanted to be an anthropologist. I ended up studying skeletons that were hundreds of years old, rather than millions of years old, but I learned a lot about what it means to be human. I see everything through a biocultural lens, meaning that I understand that changes in culture impact biology and changes in biology impact culture. To me, there is no other way to interpret the human experience.

PAK—The first thing I noticed about A Time Against Race was that the prose seemed so polished and easy to read. I would have never guessed you were an academic. The muscle memory between academic and fiction writing seems very different. How do you go from one to the other, and what prompted you to bring your academic background into fiction writing?

RH—Thanks for the kind words! I am not sure I can answer the first part of your question.  I read a lot of both scholarly literature and fiction, and I guess my brain just switches to the appropriate gear when I am writing.

When I was transcribing the Erie County Poorhouse ledgers for my doctoral dissertation, I was surprised at how little I knew about the origins of the social welfare system in the U.S. I wanted to share what I had learned because it really contradicted many assumptions about social welfare recipients.  So many of the people listed in those records had very compelling stories, many surprisingly uplifting. I thought a work of fiction would reach more people. I never considered a series, but the more I researched, the more stories needed to be told.

PAK—In A Time Against Race, we find your protagonist, Maude Travers, to be a good friend and perhaps an overprotective, frustrated mother. How has she evolved through the series?

RH—Maude came to the series in A Whisper of Bones (book 2). That book was inspired by the salvage excavation of the Erie County Poorhouse Cemetery in 2012. The archaeologists found a few coffins with heavy logs, but no human remains, suggesting the remains had been stolen. Maude enters the story as an anthropologist who has left academia, but is lured back by the excavation.  She finds her psychic/medium abilities while examining the skeletons, and she has difficulty reconciling her inner sensory abilities with her scientific brain. It takes her a long time to accept her gifts, which she only shares with her husband in In The Shadow of the White Oak (book 7). At the risk of revealing too many details, she learns a great deal about who she was in past lives throughout the series, which helps her to understand her gifts and those of her youngest son.

PAK—You and Maude share an anthropology background, and you’re both authors. But she’s also a medium. Are you a practitioner yourself or just an enthusiast?

RH—I likely have some inner sensory gifts in the sense that we all do, but I am not a practitioner. I have taken a few classes at Lily Dale to better understand how psychic/mediums develop and use their gifts, but no one has ever identified me as someone with special abilities (sadly!).

PK—A Time Against Race is the story about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo in the 1920s. It seems strange that they would come this far north. What prompted them to come to Buffalo?

RH—The Klan was pushing north during the 1920s to increase membership.  They even tried to recruit expats in Canada. They had a hard time gaining traction in Buffalo because we were a city of immigrants and, at the time, racial tensions were not volatile. So the Klan focused its criticism on Mayor Schwab’s unwillingness to devote resources to enforcing prohibition. That got the attention of some of the religious groups, so the Klan went after the mayor relentlessly.  Schwab eventually enlisted two men to infiltrate the Klan in Buffalo and keep him informed of their activities. One of them stole their membership list and made it public.  Not long after that, Klan members pursued, shot and killed the man they thought was responsible. Nothing came of the subsequent investigation of the murder because the man responsible was also killed in the shoot-out. Eventually, the Klan was prosecuted under the Walker Law in New York, which required them to file their membership rosters and administrative hierarchy with the Secretary of State (neither of which they had done). They left the state not long after that.

PAK—The novel doesn’t shy away from the lives of sex workers during Buffalo’s notorious industrial era. How did you balance historical authenticity with some of the more stereotypical portrayals of sex workers?

RH—America’s Crossroads: Buffalo’s Canal Street/Dante Place; The Making of a City (Michael N. Vogel, Edward J. Patton, and Paul F. Redding) is an excellent history of the Canal District/Dante Place. The authors discuss how violent life was for sex workers and how violent the district was, even in the 1920s. At that time, it was an odd mix of families during the day and scoundrels at night. My characters are based on historic figures mentioned in this book. For example, Saucy Sadie is based on Pug Nose Cora, one of the toughest prostitutes in the district.

Katie’s story was fiction but could have been true. There was no oversight of the indenture system, and children bound out to the lowest bidder for their care often endured abuse. Also, it was not uncommon for prostitutes to be married. Life for women was precarious during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it was just as likely that a prostitute was married to a decent man as a horrible man. Life was dangerous for the women and homeless children who lived there, and I tried to be true to the history of the district.

PAK—From reading the book, you get the sense that 1920s Buffalo was a bit like the Wild West. How much of that is true, and how much is it an invention of fiction?

RH—Buffalo was an affluent city at that time, and most of the areas were safe commercial, residential or recreational spaces. The Canal District/Dante Place was an exception. Even in the 1920s, the nightlife was dangerous there. It would have been risky for a black man to go beyond the block typically occupied by African Americans in the district (as my character Jasper did).

The story of Edward Maes is actually that of Edward Obertean, a former Buffalo patrolman who infiltrated the Klan under the direction of Mayor Schwab.  He was presumed to be the spy who stole the membership records. Obertean was pursued by Klansmen to Durham Street, where he was shot and killed on the street.

The story of Granny Annie and her relationships with Konrad Seidel and Reiker Bernhardt was entirely fictitious.

PAK—Because of the futility of our sports teams and nine-month-long winters, which are followed by that other Buffalo season—road construction season—I feel like we Western New Yorkers have this collective inferiority complex. But books like yours and others are making me rethink that. All the changes the city has gone through and continues to go through now make me think we have this really rich and unique history. Do you believe that is true as well?

RH—Yes, I do.  North Buffalo has the landmarks of a once-great city, including Delaware Park, the Buffalo Zoo, the Buffalo State Asylum and Forest Lawn Cemetery.  Established throughout the nineteenth century, these landmarks were considered to be fitting for Buffalo’s stature in the country. A drive down Delaware Avenue, once dubbed “Millionaire’s Row,” hints at the vibrant city that hosted the Pan American Exhibition in 1901. Other great institutions, like the Buffalo Botanical Gardens, the AKG, the Olmsted Park System, and the Colored Musicians Club (just to name a few), point to a city that valued art and culture. I feel like we still do.

PAK—This is the eighth book in the series. Besides the setting and recurring characters, is there a common thread that connects the books?

RH—There are a few common threads throughout the Orphans and Inmates series. History is full of ordinary people doing their best to get by, and most are better off for a little help along the way. Also, even in horrible places, good people can be found. I think the stories also lean into the idea that sometimes we are connected to our ancestors in ways we don’t understand. Perhaps through past lives, or through shared experiences handed down to each generation.

PAK—What is next for Maude Travers?

RH—That’s an excellent question! I am about 5,000 words into a ninth book in the Orphans and Inmates series, and so far, Maude has not indicated she has a story to tell. It’s worth noting that the first book, Orphans and Inmates, did not include her. It took place entirely in the nineteenth century and did not involve any communication with spirits beyond the veil. All of the other books seemed to organically include characters from different time periods that come together one way or another to move the story along. I am not sure why Maude has been silent, but it’s fairly early in the writing; she may yet show up!