The Reformatory: A Novel
The Reformatory: A Novel
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Tananarive Due on The Reformatory: A Novel
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A phone call, a forgotten grave, and a name no one rememberedThe book began with a death that happened seventy-six years before Due sat down to write it. She was already deep in fresh grief when a call from the Florida State Attorney’s office in 2013 introduced her to a great-uncle her family had entirely lost track of, a fifteen-year-old boy who died at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, the real Florida reform school at the center of the novel.
In 2013, only months after we buried my late mother—and losing her remains the biggest personal horror of my life—I got a call from the Florida State Attorney’s office. For the first time, I learned that my mother had an uncle named Robert Stephens who died in 1937, at the age of 15, at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida.
After attending meetings with Dozier School survivors and spending time with the investigative journalism and memoirs that had already documented the school’s abuses, Due arrived at a reason specific enough to sustain a seven-year project. The historical record had preserved Robert Stephens’s death in a few bare facts. What it had not preserved was him.
And the whole point for me of writing The Reformatory was to give him a better story. He had been forgotten by his own family. I don’t think my mother knew that her father had a brother.
Due ruled out nonfiction early, in part because survivors and investigative journalists had already produced their own accounts of Dozier. But the deeper obstacle was that she could not separate the project from the loss that had prompted it. She wrote about that knot publicly, in a Medium essay, while still years away from finishing.
grief is the reason it has taken me this long to write this book. But grief is also the reason it exists.
How she wrote it
Ghosts as a shield, a deadline that COVID made realThe Dozier School’s documented record of beatings and deaths was extensive enough that reproducing it scene by scene would have made the novel something other than a novel. Due needed a form that could hold historical atrocity without collapsing into an archive of suffering. She found it in the ghost tradition her genre already made available.
I wanted to use ghosts as a way to honor the violence and killing that happened there, but in a way that would not feel as triggering as trying to pick out those stories.
The ghost framework also solved a practical problem. Survivor interviews and memoirs had given her accounts she chose to keep entirely off the page, incidents she described as too overwhelming to render directly. The ghosts let the violence be present without being staged.
The manuscript accumulated slowly across more than five years. Due has said she considered abandoning it more than once. What finally converted the project from long-term intention to daily obligation was a specific fear, arriving in spring 2020, that she might not survive long enough to deliver the book at all.
I finally, because of COVID–when I was fearful that I might actually die without finishing the book after I’d been working on it for more than five years–that got me serious.
That fear translated into a concrete system: a daily quota of five to seven pages and a progress chart on her wall.
One structural worry ran alongside the entire drafting period. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, also set at the Dozier School, was published in 2019, and Due was concerned enough about the overlap to contact Whitehead directly on Twitter. His answer turned on a single word.
I’m telling you, if he had said that this was magical realism, like Underground Railroad, that might have been a wrap for me, to be perfectly honest. But he said, no ghosts, my friend.
The personal thread
Her mother’s name, built into a characterPatricia Stephens Due, the civil rights activist who co-wrote a memoir with her daughter and whose death in 2012 set the whole project in motion, never appears in The Reformatory by name. But she is present in it. Due built a direct line between her mother and Gloria, the older sister who fights from outside the reformatory to free Robert, the twelve-year-old protagonist.
My late mother’s middle name was Gloria—Patricia Gloria Stephens Due—so whenever I wondered what Gloria should do next, I just asked myself ‘What would Mom have done?’
The discovery of Robert Stephens arrived at the worst possible moment to absorb new grief. Due has spoken about the compounding effect: her mother had apparently been unaware that her own grandfather had a brother, which meant the loss of that knowledge and the loss of her mother were now inseparable. The novel existed in the space where those two losses met.
There were so many times I wished I could change the history of the real-life Robert Stephens, dying so young in an unmarked grave at that horrible place. They said he was stabbed, but I believe there’s dishonesty in some of those records. And that’s not too far-fetched, because when you have complete control over an environment like that, you get to control the narrative.
On what the book is wrestling with
One school in 1950, one system still runningDue set the novel in 1950, a decade she knew from the civil rights research she and her mother had done together for their memoir. But she was writing toward the present. The Dozier School, in her conception, is not a historical aberration; it is an early node in a system whose structure persists.
I really wanted this novel to be in conversation with the present, where the United States flirts with having the highest incarceration rate in the world, or about 20 percent of the world’s prisoners.
In an early interview conducted while she was still drafting the manuscript, Due described how she distributed the book’s evil. The warden is the most visible villain, but the architecture of the institution is designed so that his particular cruelty is not required to keep the machine running.
The criminal justice system is the antagonist and it comes up in many forms—from the warden, who’s the most outwardly evil character, but there’s this benign evil running through the whole system, even when people are polite they’re pulling you into this horrible oven machinery.
The book also pushes against a specific kind of comfort that historical horror can offer its readers: the idea that atrocity happened elsewhere, under different people, and is now documented and sealed. Due has said she chose fiction over statistics precisely because she needed readers to feel the argument, not just accept it.
I also wanted to write The Reformatory to help people learn about the lineage of today’s criminal justice system and how much of that past remains embedded in its practices... Most people are more moved by storytelling than by statistics.
That lineage argument explains the ghost framework from another angle. The ghosts of Dozier boys in the novel are literally unable to leave the grounds. They are not metaphors for historical memory; they are the institutional machinery, still holding its captives.
Horror that takes history seriously can tip into lecture, and Due was alert to that failure mode. Writing a book about a real place where real children died and still expecting readers to experience it as horror required her to keep the genre’s obligations intact.
Horror creators who are over-earnest about history sometimes forget that horror, by very definition, is supposed to be entertaining. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
The boy in the unmarked grave, and the system that put him thereRobert Stephens did not just die at Dozier in 1937. He vanished from his own family’s memory so completely that his niece, who spent her life fighting for civil rights and co-wrote a memoir about that work, apparently never knew he had existed. Due has described the stakes of that erasure as inseparable from the novel’s purpose.
And the whole point for me of writing The Reformatory was to give him a better story. He had been forgotten by his own family. I don’t think my mother knew that her father had a brother.
The historical record on Robert Stephens is thin and, Due believes, manipulated. The facility that killed him also wrote the account of how he died, and she does not trust that account. That skepticism is built into the novel’s structure: a twelve-year-old boy named Robbie Stephens whose story the institution would have erased, recovered through fiction because nonfiction cannot recover what was deliberately destroyed.
There were so many times I wished I could change the history of the real-life Robert Stephens, dying so young in an unmarked grave at that horrible place. They said he was stabbed, but I believe there’s dishonesty in some of those records. And that’s not too far-fetched, because when you have complete control over an environment like that, you get to control the narrative.