With Archangels Of Funk (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Andrea Hairston is giving us a third opportunity to hang out with Cinnamon Jones, the main character of her novels Redwood And Wildfire and Will Do Magic For Small Change.
In the following email interview, Hairston discusses what inspired and influenced this Afrofuturist story.
Photo Credit: Micala Sidore
For people who haven’t read any of these stories, or the earlier interview we did about Will Do Magic For Small Change, who is Cinnamon Jones, what does she do, and what happens in the novels Redwood And Wildfire, Small Change, and Archangels Of Funk?
Cinnamon Jones is a scientist, artiste, and hoodoo conjurer living in the Massachusetts of my mind in an alternate present or near future after Water Wars have scrambled the world. Disruptors and nostalgia militias roam the roads wreaking havoc. Invisible Darknet lords troll the internet solidifying power. Cinnamon, her Circus-Bots, and dogs (one cyber-enhanced) are part of a community of Motor Fairies, Wheel-Wizards, and Co-Ops trying to hold on to who they’ve been while coming up with the next world. Old lovers and cutthroat tech rivals show up unexpectedly and Cinnamon has to reckon with epic fails, a messy past, and threats to her community as she forges a future that can hold us all.
Cinnamon Jones first appeared in Will Do Magic For Small Change as an adolescent in the mid 1980s. In Archangels Of Funkshe’s wheeling toward sixty. Her grandparents, Redwood and Wildfire, (from the turn of the 20th century novel, Redwood And Wildfire) and great aunt have died. Cinnamon inherited the farm they had in Western Mass. She also inherited a yearly community celebration they organized, the Next World Festival. Cinnamon is not sure she can keep it all going.
Archangels Of Funk is also the name of a play you wrote. Is the novel an adaptation of the play?
The novel is not an adaption of that early play. The title for both comes from a poem I wrote about James Brown and the funk music of the 1960s and 1970s. The Afro-funk-tastic spirit of that music, of Mavis Staples, Patti LaBelle, Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra, the Funkadelics, Sly And The Family Stone, Chaka Kahn, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin guided me as I wrote the novel. I mean, it is get up and dance your demons into the dirt and let the spirits ride you music.
So, where did you get the idea for Archangels Of Funk?
Since I finished my first novel, Mindscape, in 2001, I have been writing about a family haunted by ghosts and graced by spirits. I wanted to get at how the past worked on us in the present and took us to the future — even a past people tried to erase or deny. I wrote Redwood and Wildfire about Cinnamon’s grandparents living at the turn of the 20th century to understand the specific family history. I wrote Will Do Magic For Small Change to find Cinnamon’s early life in the 1980s. In the back of my mind was always the near-future legacy of this family.
As I began writing Archangels, too many people — young, old, and middle-aged — were dystopia weary. It seemed that much of what we’d sweated and died for was being undone. We faced a mountain of life-or-death work with no time to do it, an ocean of extinction-level problems but only a spoon with holes at our disposal. Then Covid hit. Folks were afraid of the future. Archangels Of Funk finds Cinnamon afraid she has let her grandparents down. They struggled to conjure a better world, a good future. And what is she doing with that legacy? Hope is an action. She has to find her way out of no way.
In the interview we did about Will Do Magic For Small Change, when I asked about the genre of that novel, you said, “I write the book. Other people try to define it genre-wise. I am not invested in strict genre mappings.” But then you added, “Afrofuturism works for me.” Does Afrofuturism work for Archangels Of Funk as well?
I am an Afrofuturist in league with Indigenous-Futurists. Stories that have been erased, stolen, or hidden call to me. Writing speculative fiction, I let African and Indigenous ancestors talk to the future. I always call on hoodoo and physics to create my story universe. So Afrofuturism works for everything I write.
So what do you see as the biggest influences on Archangels Of Funk, both literary and non-literary?
Influence is an intriguing word. I am probably influenced by everything I read, see, and hear. Art that I love inspires me, makes me want to create, challenges me to envision a world and bring it forth. The work of Guillermo del Toro inspires me, particularly Pan’s Labyrinth and Shape Of Water. TV series that have also been inspiring: Person Of Interest, Fringe, Orphan Black, and Humans. A documentary about the 1969 Harlem cultural festival: Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) featured great performances of Afro-funktastic music and interviews with the artists and the audience. A blast from the past. When Black Panther dropped, I saw it several times. I couldn’t get enough of a bunch of black folks in a mythical comic book masquerade centered on Africa and the diaspora. I wrote an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “It’s Our Time: The Women Of Wakanda.” [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/time-women-wakanda/]
As we’ve been discussing, Archangels Of Funk is part of a series that includes Redwood And Wildfire and Will Do Magic For Small Change. But is it the third book in a trilogy, or the third book in an ongoing series?
All three novels are stand-alones. You don’t need to know what happened in earlier novels to appreciate the later ones. If you have read more than one book (in or out of chronological order) there are Easter eggs to enjoy. I didn’t plan a series. But I wanted to write about how the ancestors talk to the future. These books have given me an opportunity to explore that.
Finally, in the Will Do Magic For Small Change interview, when I asked about adapting that novel into some other format, you said it would work best as a TV show. Is the same true for Archangels Of Funk?
I think Archangels could work as a movie or a TV show. The story is dramatic; easily told with actions, images, and dialogue. There are amazing production design possibilities. There’s a great Festival to stage, lots of mystery, romance, and adventure. Plenty of juicy roles for the actors and the soundtrack would be awesome. This would probably work for a game as well. The best format is the one that has the best production team who can script and design the magic and power they discover in the book.
