Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Donna Hermans

Donna Hemans interviews Plum, who, in her novel, Tea by the Sea, spends seventeen years searching the daughter taken from her at birth. 

Tell us a little about yourself. 

My name is Plum Valentine. I live in Brooklyn with my husband and two daughters, and work as a lab technologist.  

Tell us a little about your job. 

I work in a hospital lab and run tests that help your doctor figure out what is wrong with you and what organs in your body are functioning well, whether your cholesterol is too high, if your kidneys are functioning properly, if your body is making too much or too little of an enzyme. 

How did you fall into that line of work?

My mother was a nurse, so I was always aware of medical things. But growing up, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a historian or an archaeologist. I wanted to learn about how people lived in the past and restore old houses. I wanted to find all the little buried artifacts that tell everything about a person’s life. But I guess I’m doing that in a different way. Instead of digging around in the dirt and cleaning up old artifacts and old houses that our ancestors left behind, I’m pulling stories from people’s body.

Yes, you are right. I never thought about it that way.

I sort of fell into it. After I finished high school in Jamaica I came back to Brooklyn and I had to find something to do. Life didn’t go the way I had planned. And studying to become a lab technologist was one of the easier choices. 

You spent some of your childhood in Brooklyn, yes?

Yes, my teenage years. I finished high school in Jamaica.

How did you come to attend high school in Jamaica?

I got into a little trouble as a teenager. Well, not me really. My cousin got into trouble and my parents were worried I would get into trouble too. So they took me to Jamaica and sent me to a boarding school there so I could get away from the bad influences in Brooklyn. It’s the sort of thing immigrant parents like mine threaten their children with. “If you don’t behave, I’m sending you back home so you can learn some discipline.” Only difference was my parents followed through on the threat. They didn’t even tell me they were sending me away. They took me to Jamaica for summer vacation, made school arrangements in secret and left me there. 

Where in Jamaica did you live? 

I lived with my aunt in Discovery Bay. It’s a little town on the north coast, about an hour or so from Montego Bay. Her house was about a mile from the beach, and when I was at her house I would walk down to the beach and spend my mornings there. I would love to go back to that beach now, and sit under one of the gazebos, watch the sun come up and see the sun reflecting on the water. Just me, a cup of tea, the sea breeze and the sound of the waves.

Sounds heavenly. What brought you back to Brooklyn?

I had a baby right after high school. Things didn’t work out with my child’s father. Whew. That’s an understatement. The truth is, he took my child away from me. And I couldn’t find him. I had nothing. No money. No job. No longterm plan. So I came back home to my parents in Brooklyn with a plan to get my life back on track. 

That is a lot to go through. 

Yes it is. It is a lot for any mother. 

Tell me more about that. How did he take your child and why?

Well…we were young…He just…

Is it still difficult to talk about?

Yes, it is. It’s not the sort of thing you get over easily. Every day I look at my girls and I worry about them being taken from me. You never let go of that fear that they could be taken from you in an instant. Sometimes, just sitting on the train I worry about a random person’s baby and what could happen to that child. No matter what happens, it’s always at the back of your mind. 

Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. Let’s talk about something else that you love. You mentioned teas earlier. What is your favorite tea?

Anything with fruit—orange peel, lemon, sorrel. Some people call sorrel hibiscus. Sorrel is the traditional Jamaican Christmas drink. Every Jamaican household has a few bottles of sorrel at Christmas time. You take the dried petals and steep it in hot water with grated ginger overnight. Strain it, sweeten it and add some rum. That’s the way we drink it at Christmas. Cold. Now, I prefer it hot. Just the sorrel, a little ginger and a little sugar. If I have dried orange peel, I add it as well. 

Tea is comforting. It keeps me going when I am stressed. And every herb or bush tea serves a healing purpose. So I get two things from my teas—comfort and healing.

I could talk about food all day. I cook when I am stressed about something. I make elaborate dinners for my family. Curried shrimp. Curried goat. Rice and peas. All the Jamaican foods my mother cooked. That, too, comforts me. 

—

Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novel River Woman, winner of the 2003-4 Towson University Prize for Literature. Tea by the Sea, for which she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature, is her second novel and will be published on June 9^thby Red Hen Press.  Her short fiction has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, and the anthology Stories from Blue Latitudes: Caribbean Women Writers at Home and Abroad, among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Maryland.  For more information visit https://www.donnahemans.com/.

TEA BY THE SEA

From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces a mother’s circuitous route to finding the daughter taken from her at birth.

A seventeen-year-old taken from her mother at birth; an Episcopal priest with a daughter whose face he cannot bear to see; a mother weary of searching for her lost child: Tea by the Sea is their story—that of a family uniting and unraveling.

To find the daughter taken from her, Plum Valentine must find the child’s father who walked out of a hospital with the day-old baby girl without explanation.

Seventeen years later, weary of her unfruitful search, Plum sees an article in a community newspaper with a photo of the man for whom she has spent half her life searching. He has become an Episcopal priest. Her plan: confront him and walk away with the daughter he took from her.

From Brooklyn to the island of Jamaica, Tea by the Sea traces Plum’s circuitous route to find her daughter and how Plum’s and the priest’s love came apart.

Buy Link: https://redhenpress.org/products/tea-by-the-sea-by-donna-hemans or https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781597098458

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews