A.D. Nauman Takes Readers on Coming of Age Journey in the Jim Crow South in 'Down the Steep'

In Down the Steep, Chicago author, A.D. Nauman, takes us into 1960’s Virginia during the Jim Crowe era and tells the story of young Willa McCoy, a 13-year old girl who deeply admires her father, a member of the Klan, but comes to learn the reality of what he actually stands for. Nauman elaborates, “So in the book, Down the Steep, there are two families… the McCoy family is the main family. They have four kids and that’s the family in which the father is a Klansman. The other family is the Swansons… they are a young couple with two young daughters… the man is a minister, he’s taken a job at the church in this fictitious town. So they are from Minnesota, they are northerners, who come down into the area for a job opportunity… they’re trying to be a positive force in the civil rights movement… but they don’t spend all their time working on the civil rights issue…” As far as where the title comes from, Nauman explains that the phrase, ‘down the steep,’ was taken from a verse in the Bible. She said, “…this is the Bible verse in which, it’s a parable, in which a man appears who is possessed by demons and Jesus comes to him and calls the demons out of the man and sends the demons into a herd of swine, which is nearby, and the swine lose their minds being possessed by this evil and run down the steep, or down a steep place… and drown themselves in the water at the bottom of the hill….” To Nauman, this is comparable to those individuals who hold on to racism, sexism, or feel some other form of hatred, and how much that hate affects and consumes them. “…it’s self destructive, it’s hurting ourselves, and that’s where the title came from is that Bible verse.”

The idea for Down the Steep was inspired by Nauman’s own family and childhood. While the story is a historical fiction, a few of the facts were picked up from her family history. “My father was a minister, my mom grew up in Minnesota, they moved to this small town in Virginia during the civil rights era, and we were living there. We lived there for about four years and then moved back to Tidewater. I mostly grew up in Tidewater… every now and then, through the years, my mother would say to me, ‘There were Klan members in that church,’ and that’s all she’d say and that sort of sticks with someone in their head and honestly, one of my earliest childhood memories is of a Klan march, so my positionality in this book is of that little girl in the Swanson family… we have that family history and it was sitting with me for many decades and I started to get a bit nostalgic for the Tidewater area… I thought it would be fun to write about Tidewater and I actually began writing this book during the second Obama administration when people were going around saying, ‘Oh, we’re in a post-racial society. There’s no racism anymore…’ and I felt like, you know, I don’t think that’s true. I’m feeling a little undercurrent of racism and sexism here in our culture despite Obama’s presidency.”