Avery Cunningham was destined to be a storyteller. Even at a young age, she would stand on a stepping stool in her childhood kitchen in Jackson, Tennessee, and just orate what she now calls “stream of consciousness tales.” People would filter in and out, and Cunningham would keep telling her stories. “I would do this for hours,” she says. “And I guess that’s the clearest representation of the type of person I am and how I’ve always been this person who wanted to tell stories even if no one was listening.”
Except people are ready to listen to Cunningham’s stories. At the beginning of 2022, she sold her debut novel to Hyperion Avenue on proposal, a rare feat for a debut author but, as Cunningham assures, more common than one might think. “I honestly wish that more people talked openly about it, so writers don’t feel this incredible pressure to have written the perfect book right out of the gate,” she says.
She didn’t have years to sit and ponder. She had a deadline, and a full-time job at Southern College of Optometry’s student services. There were late nights with “big dead eyes” stretched open to the glare of the computer screen. There were two-hour-long walks with her Bernese mountain dog, Grizzly, while she devised her story’s structure. And there were visits to Memphis coffee shops and hotel lobbies where she wrote and wrote and wrote, and occasionally looked up to watch those around her, the way they moved, the sound of their voice, could they fit a character’s description?
“They don’t tell you when you’re in a writing program where you have all of this time built in to discover your craft that the challenge is working on this incredible craft and art — these really soul- and time-eating pursuits — while also trying to be a constructive member of society,” Cunningham says. “And that’s a challenge but also that’s part of what it means to be a working novelist right now. … I love that part. I didn’t love it at the time when I was up at one o’clock in the morning, but I love that part of the writing experience and it helps it feel a bit more real.”
This was, after all, what Cunningham had been working towards, what she’d gone to undergraduate and graduate school for at DePaul University in Chicago, and on January 30th, she will celebrate the launch of her novel The Mayor of Maxwell Street, a historical drama about the Black elite in 1920s Chicago.
ON MAXWELL STREET
Avery Cunningham’s book doesn’t open with the glitz and glamor you’d expect from a 1920s drama — that comes later. Instead, a prologue settles the reader in a dilapidated plantation in Alabama, a sign of the Old South, where a white woman falsely and maliciously accuses a Black man of rape, a tragedy that history is all too familiar with. Yet, this is not the story at the center of Cunningham’s novel, though it’ll reveal its relevance as the plot unravels. The prologue, ultimately, serves as context, a contrast for the unfamiliar yet vibrant aspect of American history that has seldom been honored or explored in media.
Within The Mayor of Maxwell Street, the daughter of the “wealthiest Negro in America,” Nelly Sawyer, finds herself the premier debutante of Black society after the sudden death of her only brother, and immediately, she is whisked off to a number of social engagements as part of her coming-out, much to her chagrin. She has her secrets, though — for the past year, she’s written as an undercover investigative journalist, reporting “the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people living in the shadow of Jim Crow.” Nelly’s latest assignment: to identify the head of an underground crime syndicate, the so-called Mayor of Maxwell Street. Soon, she enlists the help of the mysterious low-level speakeasy manager, Jay Shorey.
So, yes, there’s glitz and glamor, guns and gangsters, speakeasies and soirees in this novel that seeks out life’s contradictions and doesn’t shy away from its harsh realities. At once Cunningham’s Chicago is alluring, dazzling even, yet its underbelly is foreboding, her characters under the pressure of “the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the Black upper class, and the violence of Prohibition-era Chicago.”
“I wanted to honor that era,” Cunningham says. “And I tried to be as historically accurate or representative of the place and the time and the people as I could. But of course, I also didn’t want to attempt to match Fitzgerald’s style or [Nella] Larsen’s style or any writers that were really prevalent during the ’20s. Because it was a different time, a different place, and different readers. So I just hope that my own voice kind of came through but also still managed to honor as much of the historical accuracy as possible.”
THE MAKING OF THE BOOK
“I’ve called myself a writer for pretty much as long as I’ve been aware of written language,” Cunningham says. “And historical fiction has always been what I’ve enjoyed. … One of my first novels ever, or technically a novel — it’s buried somewhere in a box from when I was 13 years old — but even that first experience of novel writing was set in medieval France. And so I love the research aspect of historical fiction. I love how history is so often stranger than fiction or stranger than what we think reality might be. And there are already so many amazing stories nestled in the past. And through historical fiction writers can really bring all of that to light and expose new readers and new people to the stories and kind of really honor the lives of the past.”
In 2020 and 2021, mainstream media began to incorporate people of color in historical settings that traditionally excluded them, Cunningham says. The Netflix series Bridgerton, for instance, cast Black men and women in roles of British aristocracy during a period when slavery was central to Britain’s economy. “I think that there was a hunger with stories like Bridgerton — that yes, thank you for the representation, but also let’s not pretend that this didn’t already exist in its own community,” Cunningham says. “Instead of trying to rewrite a history that never tried to include us in the first place, maybe acknowledge the history that really did exist at the time and all of its seriousness and all of its wealth and joy and happiness. … I was really hungry for a story that made Black Americans the primary narrative.”
Through books like The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, and Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham, Cunningham says she was awakened to the truth of Black wealth and all the facets of Black history in this country. Some of the historical figures she read about during her research even make appearances in her novel. “I wanted to make sure that people could read this book and know that these people could exist,” Cunningham says. “This is not is not a fantasy. This is not someone trying to create some kind of alternate history. These individuals, even though they may have not gone through the specific trials or the experiences, existed in this world. And my hope is that people might [look up] Robert Pelham [a journalist] or The Chicago Defender [the African-American paper Nelly writes for] … and learn about this whole different side of life they may not have realized existed in the first place.”
At the time of her research, Cunningham also happened to be reading The Great Gatsby. “It really is such a fascinating tale of wealth and intrigue and kind of the corruption and the artifice of the American dream. And I thought that was a narrative that was really prime to the Black experience, one never really seen through any kind of diverse perspective.”
Cunningham’s novel was almost a Gatsby retelling, she admits, but as her story took shape, it became less and less like it. “Over the course of the writing process, it became … [about], more than anything, the kind of the sacrifices that people were forced to make when challenging the status quo in this country, especially during times when that status quo is changing,” she says. “And we’re living in a very similar time where the status quo not only in this country but truly across the world is shifting dramatically, and still to this day people who seek to challenge that status quo … are facing terrible backlash. So I felt like it was truly reflective of the times that we’re living in now and that we might be living in future years.”
“Everything informs everything else,” Cunningham adds. “That’s one of the fascinating things about historical fiction, that you may be researching a certain time or certain place, but everything that you’ve learned or absorbed from every time period or past experience is informing that time or that place because people change, people move around, people who represent different communities relocate and change that community.”
In fact, prior to working on The Mayor of Maxwell Street, Cunningham had been working on a novel centered around Memphis hoodoo. “So this city was very much still in the back of my mind because of all that research and work I’ve done on Memphis during the 1920s,” she says. “And it did feel like, as I did more research, there were so many similarities between the two cities and the experiences of the two cities that just rounded it out in a way that I really hadn’t anticipated. … So, I think living here and writing this story really informed the entire process and gave the entire soul of the book something more rich and meaningful.”
TO DEBUT
Today, Cunningham revels in “all of the emotions, every emotion that one could ever possibly feel” as the launch of her debut approaches. “It’s strange,” she says. “And I talked to a lot of writers who go through a similar feeling that even though you’ve put so much work and time into a story or a book — it’s something that you really love and believe in and are passionate about — there’s still this sense of almost like an impostor syndrome. Like, how am I worthy of being the one to tell this story? Am I the appropriate person to tell this? Should someone else who’s more educated, who’s more experienced, who has more talent — should they be the ones to honor these characters?
“It is super exciting, and I’m so honored that this story gets to be kind of my start in this career professionally. And I think it was a professor of mine who I was talking to and they said that every person’s individual experience is important and that every story that is told is important. Even if someone else tells a similar story to The Mayor of Maxwell Street, it’s still incredibly valid because it would be derived from their experience. So it does kind of uplift you to think that because of who I am, who my parents are, who my family is going back 300 years, that makes this book particular and specific and unique. So it’s not a question of am I worthy to tell this story? It’s bigger than just me.”
Cunningham continues, “The wonderful thing also about art is that you will find your audience that really sees themselves in your stories and you eventually learn and accept and really revel in the fact that you’re writing for them. You’re not writing for the world. You’re writing for the people who maybe need this more than even you do.”
But two readers’ opinions have mattered more than others’: those of her parents. “They both were very supportive and they said they really liked it. That’s it. As long as they think it’s good, then it doesn’t matter.”
The Mayor of Maxwell Street is available in hardcover and paperback for preorder wherever you buy your books. Avery Cunningham will celebrate the launch of her novel with a “Meet the Author” event at Novel in conversation with Tara Stringfellow, author of Memphis, on Tuesday, January 30th, 6 p.m.