I don’t like coffee, but I find myself repeatedly seduced by it anyway. Especially when I am trying to write. It could be the weight of its warmth, its smell a sister smell to that of book pages, the ink from leaky ballpoint pens. I like to write in cafés, by hand for first drafts, with a coffee I know I won’t finish warming me through the tumult of creation. It is a rope that will pull me back up out of my own head.
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And so I found myself in a café that was just right for writing—not too noisy, not too crowded, plenty of natural light, open windows so I could occasionally nuzzle the summer air with my cheek—taking a sip of a macchiato that was already beginning to make me queasy. The caffeine unsteadied my hands as I carefully wrote, in the top left corner of my notebook page, “begun July 1st, 2019,” and then, dissatisfied with my handwriting, ripped out the page and did it again.
And by writing it I’d made it so: I had officially begun writing O Sinners! But the process of creating this book did not, in reality, begin there, on the first of July. It had, in fact, begun back in February of 2019, as all of my books do, with research.
I began to build on my first question about the anger of this generation: what can impotent anger do to a person?
I had heard Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son before, but I had never truly listened to it. I had mostly associated it with truck commercials, the beer-soaked floors of the few frat parties I’d attended in college, drunken white guys careening into each other and screaming along, living in some nostalgic space that I, a child of Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Roberta Flack, did not understand or relate to. However, hearing the song in its entirety, and really listening to it, sparked a curiosity in me. It was evocative of its time, of counterculture and youthful anger. And I wanted to know: what was this indignation, and what did it do?
I stuck with music at first: Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, The Doors’ The Unknown Soldier, Nina Simone’s Backlash Blues, Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Pete Seeger’s Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, Richie Havens’s Handsome Johnny, and many more. These songs, as I actively listened, were more than songs. I could feel the sixties and early seventies in them; I could feel the pulse of a generation still living in the shockwaves of the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Medgar Evers. A generation staring into the maw of the Vietnam War.
I began to investigate the Vietnam War, particularly the experiences of Black soldiers in the first war with a fully desegregated Army. My appetite for information, the thing that always threatens to trap me in the research phase of my novels, was awakened. It was only at this point that a story began to form in my head, as I hungrily consumed anything related to the war, from firsthand accounts from both American and Vietnamese soldiers, to both documentaries and narrative films about the war, to fiction written by veterans. I began to build on my first question about the anger of this generation: what can impotent anger do to a person? What happens when a young person comes of age in violence, in disenfranchisement, in inequity? Could it psychologically mutilate them? Could it make them act out their rage in complex ways, as seductive but ultimately maladaptive as my attraction to coffee? And so the cult leader of O Sinners!, Odo, was conceptualized.
Odo, who in the book, begins as one of four Black soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, is a question, the central question of this book. As I began to flesh out his character more, I was still in the deepest part of my research into the Vietnam War. One spring morning, I was at my usual café, my half-finished coffee resting next to me on the table—I’d gotten maybe four sips in and knew I would probably drink no more. I could feel my stomach beginning to protest against the caffeine, and I had now been sitting for an hour; a coffee that had gone cold is intolerable to me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that I was being watched. It was an older man who I saw nearly every time I came into the café. He was a regular, just as I was. He often sat down with a newspaper, pausing frequently to chat with friends—other older folks who seemed to live in the neighborhood—who’d stop by to say hello.
I was used to people being curious about me with my laptop, my notebook, my bag of books. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw the man stand up and begin to approach me. I was flattered when he mistook me for a college student (my college graduation was long past). When I explained what I was doing, and what I was researching, his face lit with interest, and he sat down across from me. “You know,” he said, “I fought in that war.”
Hyperaware of the traumas of war, it hadn’t occurred to me to seek out veterans to talk to about their experiences during the Vietnam War. I assumed they might not want to talk about it, particularly to me, a rather introverted stranger. So I consider it a massive stroke of luck that that older gentleman was willing, even eager, to spend the morning talking to me about his experiences during the war. He graciously answered my careful questions. He spoke about the dread of being drafted, the chaos of battle, the culture shock he experienced as a white guy from Virginia suddenly becoming a brother in arms to a diverse range of other young men.
About halfway through our conversation, one of the man’s friends stopped by as usual. He was eager to talk to me too—he’d been too young to get drafted, but he remembered friends and family members who hadn’t been too young; he remembered how some of them didn’t make it back home.
The version of me who was spontaneously cracked open by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son, who’d become ravenous for knowledge, was both gone and still there, fossilized.
Before I moved out of my old neighborhood, I’d see these two men around quite frequently. The man who I knew from the café would regularly ask me how the book was coming along. Over the years, he saw me get a puppy, then a boyfriend, then a fiancé. At certain points during our conversation that morning, I could see a liquid softness building around his eyes, and then with military sharpness, he’d blink it away. I still think of him and his friend often.
In the midst of my research in the Vietnam War, I began researching cults, religion, and extreme beliefs. My approach to this research was the same as my approach to researching the war: I consumed everything I could get my hands on. Fiction, nonfiction, documentaries, narrative films, religious texts, secular texts about religious texts, testimonies, songs, sermons, and recorded religious services.
I dove into the structure of religion so that I could write my own. The nameless. Which, though its fictional members insist it is not a religion, contains all of the components thereof: a soteriology (or, a means for salvation), a theology (a rationalization that includes a supreme being), an anthropology (an explanation of human nature), an epistemology (a source of sacred knowledge), a code of ethics, cultic practices (or, symbolic behaviors like rituals), a temporality (a religious reframing of time), and a cosmology (a religious reframing of the universe and its meaning). All written out in detail in the very same notebook into which I carefully wrote, and then rewrote, “begun July 1st, 2019” just a few months later.
A little less than a year after that summer day, I’d have a completed draft of O Sinners!, still, at this point, being called “The Vietnam Book,” although it was and is about far more than Vietnam. I’d soon meet the man who would become my husband, and, eventually, the father of my children. I’d be living in the midst of COVID at its height, the introvert in me loving working from home while the humanitarian in me grieved. I’d meticulously type up my handwritten draft, editing as I went, and I’d marvel at the delicious, mighty tragedy of time, the way it moves swift and sumptuous as mud, creating and destroying as it goes. The version of me who was spontaneously cracked open by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son, who’d become ravenous for knowledge, was both gone and still there, fossilized. What could anger do? I’d wanted to know. What could it destroy, and what could it create?
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O Sinners! by Nicole Cuffy is available from One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
