How I Write History -- Patrick Phillips, author of “Blood at the Root"

An Interview with Patrick Phillips

W&M: Blood at the Root tells the story of a county in Georgia that drove out all African-Americans in
the early twentieth century.  How did you learn about it?  And what challenges did you face in writing it?

Patrick Phillips: I first heard the story of Forsyth’s racial cleansing when I was seven years old, from kids on the school bus. My parents had moved to Forsyth from Atlanta, Georgia, and as a new-comer to the county I asked my classmates why there were no black people anywhere. They told me that “a long, long time ago” a white girl had been raped and killed in the woods not far from my house, and that afterwards whites banded together and drove the entire black population out of Forsyth.

I never forgot that story, and had always wondered about the real events that lay behind it, which I have tried to finally tell in Blood at the Root. The greatest challenge I faced in writing the book was finding primary documents and first-hand accounts of something that happened more than a hundred years ago. It turns out that the truth was know-able, but to tell it I had to first assemble documents scattered all over the south, and spend many hours interviewing descendants of the Forsyth refugees. Researching the book felt like a real-life detective story, and I became obsessed with finding clues no one else had ever seen.

W&M: You’re a professor at Drew university.  How do you balance writing with your university responsibilities?

Patrick Phillips: That’s a great question! I love teaching at Drew, and feel enriched by my time in the classroom. But of course, books don’t write themselves, and while I sometimes wished that a new chapter would magically appear on my hard drive, it never happened.

Instead, the real magic that helped me finish the book was a sabbatical leave from my teaching duties, and a grant from the Mellon Foundation’s “Arts and the Common Good” program, which helped pay for plane tickets, rental cars, and hotel rooms in Georgia. Without the time off, and without Drew University’s support for my work as a writer, I could never have finished the book. ...