Bestselling Gloucester author on race, class relations in the South
S.A. Cosby’s ‘Razorblade Tears’ follows his ‘Blacktop Wasteland’
KING AND QUEEN — By his own accord, Shawn Cosby grew up “dirt floor poor.” He remembers the hard times of heating the house by opening the stove door and watching his family work long hours just to keep food on the table.
But he also remembers the good times. When he looks back on the years, he said, they are some of his fondest memories. From after-church potlucks with friends and family to reading dime-store crime novels by lamplight, it was these experiences, he said, that helped shape him into the author he is today.
“There are moments that are dispiriting, but there’s also moments of happiness and joy, and I think a lot of people don’t understand that,” Cosby said. “When you come from a rural area, when you come from a poverty-stricken background, you’re not miserable every day.”
Cosby lives in Gloucester; he and his wife manage a funeral home in King and Queen County. As for his family tree, its roots are nestled deep within Tidewater.
With relatives scattered across the Eastern Shore, he has a family history rich in life but also marked with oppression, turmoil and resilience.
As one of the first regions settled by outsiders in the country’s history, Tidewater saw some of the first ships carrying enslaved people to the country. For Cosby, his home is just a few dozen miles from the former capital of the Confederacy — a city that did not see all of its schools and businesses desegregated until the 1980s.
As a Black Southerner, Cosby said, it has not been easy navigating the world around him — but, in the same regard, he said he’d come to blows with anyone who talked down about the South.
“The misconception is that everybody in the South is a neo-Confederate apologist or their backward, ignorant and uneducated,” he said. “So I really fight against that stereotype, both from a class perspective and a racial perspective. The history of the South involves more than just classical white Southerners.”
While Cosby said it is important to have constructive conversations in order to better everyone, it’s important folks realize there are diverse communities within oppressive spaces, working against all odds to improve them.
So Cosby is tackling these issues through prose. A natural storyteller with an eye for detail, he crafted his novel “Blacktop Wasteland” — a crime story centered on a Black Southerner who has decided to make one last getaway heist to provide for his family.
With rave reviews from several literary giants, the book last summer topped The New York Times bestseller list and was an Amazon best book; it also has been optioned to be made into a movie. This past weekend it was named best hardcover novel by International Thriller Writers.
While the novel serves as a classic crime novel filled with excitement, Cosby said it is also a social commentary on what it’s like to be poor, Black and Southern in America.
For Cosby’s characters, their lives are not that different from those of the everyday folks he’s come to know in the area. The fictional town is an amalgamation of Gloucester, Mathews, and King and Queen, he said.
“Listen, when you’re a Black man in America you live with the weight of people’s low expectations on your back every day,” Cosby writes in the novel. “Think about it like it’s a race. Everybody else has a head start and you dragging those low expectations behind you.”
Throughout his career, Cosby said he has overcome obstacles not only within the confines of a classist, racist system, but also within the literary community. “Wasteland,” told a story many believed no one would read.
Cosby said several publishers turned down his books solely because he told Southern stories — a genre few have ventured to truly tackle and in which even fewer have told of Black experiences.
“It was just there wasn’t that much interest and if there was interest, it was only from one perspective,” Cosby said.
When Cosby stood up for the Southern experience to a listener during a crime and mystery panel discussion, he got the attention of a Flatiron Books publisher — a chance occurrence that changed his career forever. Flatiron published “Wasteland” and, now, “Razorblade Tears.” In the new novel, the fathers of two slain men join forces to get revenge: Their sons — one Black, one white, and married to each other — were gunned down in a holdup at a Richmond wine store. The fathers, both of them ex-convicts, otherwise seem markedly dissimilar. (A Wall Street Journal reviewer describes this novel as “a double-barreled action saga that brings to mind the mayhem of early Dashiell Hammett and the bedlam of vintage Sam Peckinpah.”)
Cosby has released two other novels, “Brotherhood of the Blade: The Invitation” and “My Darkest Prayer,” along with a vast collection of stories.
Despite his success, Cosby said his biggest accomplishment is hearing from folks about how they’ve been moved by his storytelling.
“It’s so much fun to go pick up a loaf of bread and the cashier knows who I am and knows my mama and knows my brother and knows that I’m a writer and is behind me 100%,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier because it’s their stories that I’m telling. If I’m able to share that with a wider audience and a larger part of the world, then I know I’ve done my job.”