When I first imagine Jersey, I knew I wanted to write about an "outsider," a character with no group to call his own, a noir version of "Casper the Friendly Ghost"--a nice guy with a good heart and overwhelming odds stacked against him. I experimented, played around, and came up with a social outcast: a bartender at an underground speakeasy. In the next draft, I made the tender a biracial albino and passed the pages around to a couple of fellow writers. The reaction was more than encouraging. One said, "Yes, yes, this is it, keep going!" The other agreed, and then told me a story about an African-American albino classmate from grade school.
"We used to call him Snowball," he said. I could see that my friend felt bad about the epithet. I thought: just think of how bad Snowball felt.
I also knew I had my character.
I began writing in earnest, a process that took me into the world of albinism as well as Prohibition. I spoke with doctors, geneticists, and eye specialists. They helped with the science, but as you're probably realizing by now, these books are more about Jersey's emotions than his chromosomes. (I also found out that persons with albinism preferred to be called just that: a person with albinism--not "an albino." This, of course, relies heavily on the context of the conversation surrounding the phrase. Such political correctness was not followed in 1931, the year Blind Moon Alley takes place, and therefore, is not found in the novel. To be true to Jersey and the time period of his story, it is also not found when referring to him in this article.)
Unbelievably, I didn't fully understand the extent of the battle that both Jersey and I were fighting until I finished the novel and started shopping it. Right out of the chute, I contacted a well-respected agent who responded--BEFORE he knew anything about my novel--"Don't send me any albino stories." What?! I quickly realized the agent meant "evil albino" stories. He had put up the roadblock because he was being flooded with such submissions, many of which were probably indicative of "The Da Vinci Code Effect."
The bias is more insidious-and more widespread-that one might think. The National Organization of Albinism and Hypopigmentation (NOAH) has tracked such characters and documented sixty-eight films from 1960 to 2006 containing evil albinos. For the record, most of these villains are not portrayed as bad guys who happen to have albinism. It's worse than that. In many of these films, the viewer is expected to know these characters are evil because they're albinos. I imagine you know a few of these films. I'll also bet you can't name one albino hero.
Luckily, I found the right agent, Elizabeth Evans, a passionate literary mind ready to go to bat for Jersey. And she did, tirelessly and enthusiastically, until she found Dan Mayer at Seventh Street Books.
And so Jersey lives.
Now, all he needs to overcome the bias is a group of readers-people who are ready to appreciate him along with his warts, his self-doubt, and his frailties.
That's where you come in.
Take a moment and get to know Jersey. He's easy enough to spot: he's the albino behind the bar, ready to pour you a shot of moon.
