My grandmother used to give me medicine that she had mixed up herself, who knows what was in it, but then you would feel better! Having been raised by a Southern grandmother and my Southern mother, I really do believe in the “old folks remedies” as we used to call them, because there was truth to it. I came upon this huge book in the library full of pictures of plants and what their traditional medicinal uses were and where you could find them, what kind of illnesses they treated. There were so many healing women–and men–at the time because of course people weren’t going to doctors. I started reading about how black women did this kind of thing at the time. I’m interested in that, in a non-professional way, and it was cool to examine the roots of it…pun not intended. I actually liked seeing Madge work with the roots and create these salves and do the healing. Throughout the book, those individuals who were trying to heal their families act as metaphors for the country trying to heal itself.Īfter I had Balm attached to the manuscript I thought “that really fits, I like that.” And also, of course, you mention Madge whose work is in roots and tonics and salves and healing solutions. What I was trying to do, rather than talk about the country and our national family having been split apart by this war and the issue of slavery, was talk about individual families and the rifts in those individual families. Then I ended up really liking the title, because it was a book about healing and reconciliation. We needed a placeholder when we turned the manuscript in and my agent said “I think we should call it Balm,” and I said okay. In Balm, Perkins-Valdez drops us into the bodies of her three main characters–Madge, Hemp, and Sadie–and we walk closely alongside them as they explore how to deal with loss, community, love, family, and most importantly, survival during a period in history that had shaken the nation to its core.Īctually, the book was titled by my agent.

Again, Perkins-Valdez shakes things up by allowing us to witness these characters movement through a place not known for its depiction in Civil War narratives: Chicago.

She continues to provide innovative historical narratives with Balm, which follows three distinct characters as they try to piece together their lives immediately following the Civil War. Instead, we followed these slave women to a resort in Ohio, our expectations of the traditional narrative shaken. Wench, her best-selling debut novel, looked at the lives of slave women–but Perkins-Valdez took them off of the oft-used setting of the Southern plantation. Dolen Perkins-Valdez is known for work that uses historical settings to examine complicated issues of humanity, relationships, race, and class.

Dolen perkins valdez