“We Always Find A Way”: Stanley Patrick Stocker on Turning the Difficult Parts into Art

by Michelle Meredith

Stanley Patrick Stocker is a lawyer by trade, but has been a writer all his life. Even at a young age, he knew it wasn’t a question of whether or not he would become a writer: it was a matter of when. “It’s something I knew I’d always do,” he says.

His first short story publication “The List” was published in Kestrel’s 2019 Winter issue and was awarded the PEN America Dau Prize for Emerging Fiction. It was published in the Best Debut Short Stories anthology for 2021. He is currently working on a novel set in Mississippi, an excerpt from which was published in the first issue of Susurrus in 2021. 

I sat down virtually with Stocker to ask him about his approach to writing and his sources of inspiration while writing stories and characters in and of the South. Something that stands out immediately is Stocker’s dedication to storytelling. Throughout our conversation, I hear his steady and confident persistence. His novel, for example, is the result of twenty years of work—writing, researching, and following his curiosity wherever it leads. His journals are full of gems he finds along the way. He tells me about a quote from Isak Dinesen he reminds himself of regularly: “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” 

He also keeps a quote from Bonnie Friedman above his light switch: “Successful writers aren’t the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.”

“I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and I’ve lived in Maryland and D.C. for thirty years, so though I didn’t grow up in the South, I’m curious about the South,” he says. Stocker’s curiosity is vividly apparent in his writing, and leads him to create vibrant, deep, and complex characters—in “The List” as well as in his novel.

“Most Black folks can trace their families to the South, so I learned about the all-Black towns that sprouted up across the South after the Civil War,” Stocker explains. His novel is set in one such town: Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The city was established by formerly enslaved people as an independent Black community in 1887, and remains a predominantly Black city today. “This was a town that flourished up until the bottom fell out of the cotton market . . . It had its own bank, own thriving social networks, a vibrant community. I wondered, what was that like? So I set [the novel] there. As I wrote, I started weaving in parts of my own story. The most significant of those details is that like the main character in the story, I lost my mother young, and my father was not a daily part of my life after they split up. So it was the melding of those things that I was curious about. What was it like to live in an all-Black town, all-Black community, with all the tensions of reconstruction and having become free people? What kind of lives were they trying to build for themselves, and what kind of pressures were they under?”

Stocker wanted to immerse his personal story into the story he explored for his novel in a way that was “seamless.” Part of that process, he explains, involved spending some time in the Mississippi Delta region—specifically Mound Bayou and Parchman Farm, the former penal farm that operates today as a maximum-security prison, and which has maintained its reputation for harsh living conditions and inhumane treatment of inmates. The farm operated within “a larger economic system” at the time, Stocker explains. “People just congregating on a street corner could get arrested and sent to Parchman Farm. And the people who arrested you would get paid for having arrested you, and then the inmates would be farmed out to plantations to work those farms.” 

Through his writing journey, Stocker seems to have tapped into what he calls “a persistent question”: how do people find joy amidst hardship?

“Whether it’s free people in an all-Black town or men who are imprisoned, how do they still find joy in their lives?” Stocker asks, noting, “Because we always find a way.” 

In his research about what life was like for the enslaved, Stocker says, “I was astounded how even in the midst of that hardship, people still fell in love, of course; people still got married, they still had friendships, they still had family relationships they tried to maintain as much as possible. . . . Yes, we’re enslaved. Yes, this is terrible, but even in the midst of that, we’re going to find a way to find joy and express ourselves. And of course the greatest expression of that was escape, but not everyone could escape.”

In his novel excerpt, “Son of God, Son of the Earth,” Stocker presents this question in Henry, a cook at Parchman Farm. Before being imprisoned, Henry works in Jackson, Mississippi, as a chef, and he experiences a spiritual epiphany shortly before the events that lead to his imprisonment. Cooking is his way of pursuing his truest self as “the son of God and son of the Earth” despite his circumstances: 

. . . he labored, not for the superintendent, not for the State of Mississippi though it was the State through the superintendent that had provided the tools that Henry put to his use.

No, Henry worked for himself and for the feeling that cooking gave him. 

“I wondered, how would [Henry’s epiphany] manifest itself?” Stocker says of this element of the story. “He was a cook on the outside, and when he’s at Parchman he has the opportunity to be a cook then. And I thought, that’s what he would do. He would take the tools that he does have.” 

‘And that’s what I think so many Black writers, whether in the South or not, are grappling with. What does love look like in action when Black folks are together or when Black folks are in the midst of really difficult circumstances? How do they use the resources they have to make their lives better and to express love to one another? That’s what the men at Parchman Farm were doing. They were expressing love for one another.’

I ask Stocker about how Henry’s meals—the product of his dedication to pursuing his full humanity in prison—impact the other characters in the story. Particularly, I’m interested in these lines about what Henry’s food does for his fellow inmates: 

To some it was home, to others escape, to others still the absence of any feeling at all. His food provided a respite for the men, a place where they owed no one and no one owed them—a thing of incalculable value at a place like Parchman. Those who ate knew a grace they could not name; they knew only that they would return to his table and be grateful for it.

“You know how mothers can often cook something, and you can almost taste the love in it?” Stocker asks, smiling. “That’s what I wanted to portray. This was [Henry’s] way of loving those men that were around him. He wasn’t a talkative man, he’s not someone who would praise you. Even to Samuel, who’s the main character—he says very little by way of praise to Samuel, but he loves Samuel in looking out for him, and he loves his fellow inmates through the one thing he can do. He can’t free them, he can’t return them to their families, but he can love them through the gift of food.” 

The ways that his characters love each other amid hardship is something Stocker pays close attention to in his writing, and it’s a delicate process. “We have to be careful when we’re talking about this,” Stocker says. “We’re looking at the full humanity of people. Some people will read narratives [of enslaved people] and say, ‘Well look, they were singing to each other across the river, they were dancing during corn-shuckings, so they must have enjoyed being enslaved.’ Of course that’s not true. But what is true is that life during those times, and sometimes now, life in America for African Americans is really hard, but it’s not only hard.”

Stocker recalls Irving Howe’s review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which Howe deems the work a failure for not “spending more of the book complaining about what it meant to be a Negro in America.” Ellison’s response was something along the lines of, “Our lives are as rich and full as anybody else’s.” 

“You can’t reduce Black life in America to hardship, because it’s more complicated than that,” Stocker continues. “And that’s how some of the events in the story came about, because there’s always that tension. There’s a reason they built all-Black towns—so they could protect themselves and control their own economies, as a way to have an enclave that focused on what they could do for themselves. . . And that’s what I think so many Black writers, whether in the South or not, are grappling with. What does love look like in action when Black folks are together or when Black folks are in the midst of really difficult circumstances? How do they use the resources they have to make their lives better and to express love to one another? That’s what the men at Parchman Farm were doing. They were expressing love for one another. The cook did it through his mentoring of Samuel; he did it through his cooking meals for the men, and the men did it for themselves when they were singing the work songs across the fields.”

Jazz, blues, religion, and so many other beautiful things that have come out of the Black experience in America are “what I love about  Black art, Black storytelling, Black music,” Stocker says. “It’s people making a way out of no way.”

In Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” for example, Stocker explains, “If you isolate the words, it’s pretty bleak. But you listen to the music, and the way he tells that story, and you get both at once. You get the pathos of [the speaker] having lost his beloved, but you also get the joy and the art of telling the story itself. And that, I think, is the genius of Black Southern writers and creators. The way they turn the difficult parts into art.”

Stanley Patrick Stocker (he/him) is a writer and lawyer in the Washington, DC area. He has received the 2021 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize for his story published in Kestrel: Journal of Literature and Art. His work has also appeared in Middle House Review. He is the recipient of a 2019 Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. He can be contacted at stanleypatrickstocker.com.