In junior high we two black girls were forced to attend after- school dances where we stood by

In junior high we two black girls were forced to attend after- school dances where we stood by the wall for the entire time Nobody would ask us to dance, and we knew they wouldn’t It was excruciating but, in a sense, it was our job. Being part of the African-American middle class was about making progress. Moving into this beautiful neighbourhood with its fabulous ponds, where we could ice-skate in winter and play football in yards, was part of that progress. Her parents moved to rural Stamford, Connecticut, when she was six Her father, a dentist, is still in practice there. Her mother, a psychiatric social worker, died from complications of surgery when Allen was 12.

Apart from her fifth and eighth grade years, when there was one other girl from a desegregated family, Allen was the only black girl in her public (as in “state”) school classes.”I was a normal American kid,” she says, “except that I was a black kid growing up in a white environment. I could only do that as a novelist.” Asked if her book was going to be the source text on Valaida Snow, Allen replies: “I’m probably the source text, but the book is not.”Allen was born in Boston, the oldest of three children. After she had read her portion, the history professors were fairly sniffy.”One of them said to me, ‘It is history, you know.’ If I’d done all this work and research, why didn’t I make the book part of the legitimate canon? But there were huge holes in her life. As a historian or biographer I could not have created a childhood for Valaida or amended her letters from prison.

“Since I was a small child, the biggest high for me has always been the challenge of discovering a new place, a new fact, or something which was just surprising.” Part of the way through her first draft, she was invited to do a reading at Harvard University, where she had graduated in art history. You just have to sit there, day after day, with that out-of-focus microfilm and read every single inch’.”By her own admission, however, Allen is addicted to research. To play with rhythm and sentences, to go through different levels of consciousness and explore my characters in ways you just can’t do with a film.”Allen’s book is an imaginative work of fiction – albeit based on her painstaking research in Europe and America. “The book is my own speculation on how Valaida might have evolved to what she became.”In an American newspaper library, trawling through the Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, Allen met a man who was writing a biography of Sammy Davis Junior “He asked me if there was an easier way to research I told him, ‘No. “I still think of chapters as scenes, but writing a novel is a totally different craft. I didn’t write the book with the intention of it becoming a film, because I wanted to do all the things you’re not allowed to do when you’re working on a screenplay. It’s a life so ripe for a blockbuster movie that I’m curious to know why this former Hollywood screenwriter – the first African-American female member of the Director’s Guild of America – has put herself through the hoops of writing a novel instead of producing a film script.”Screenwriting gave me a sense of structure,” she answers.

She had far more raw talent than Madonna, but people who saw her on stage said she was an amazingly charismatic performer who had this way of distancing herself from the audience.”Allen has brought to life an extraordinary woman working in a predominantly male world. What mattered to me was trying to make some sense of what it felt like to wear wonderful gowns, or having to step into an outfit which was musty with someone else’s sweat. For somebody like Valaida, who cared so much about her appearance, how did she cope in 1942, when she was in a Danish prison, having to wear prison uniform, and use a comb which couldn’t possibly get through her hair?”In the segregated Thirties, Valaida Snow’s name was rarely out of the black newspapers. “As a performer, she always looked fabulous.”
Allen’s novel describes both the glitz and the degradation of a woman who “lived large, blazing a trail with charismatic energy and inimitable style” In her book, she writes a lot about clothes.