Q: What inspired you to write this book?

A: Even before college, I'd been asking myself questions about identity, and what it meant to be African American. For a lot of black people, especially of my generation, one of the situations we often come up against is another person, black or white, questioning our authenticity as a black person. A certain, "blacker-than-thou" attitude. Plus I was becoming more and more frustrated by the limited way African Americans were portrayed in the national media. To me it seemed the farther we moved from segregation and the civil rights era, the more the definition of what it meant to be black was changing. I wanted a fuller definition of what people meant by that term, and a fuller picture of what it means to be black.

Q: You traveled all across the country, for six years, conducting over two hundred interviews. How did you even begin to decide where you would go and who you would talk to?

A: There were a number of places I knew I wanted to visit because I was always curious about black life there: places like Alaska and Bangor, Maine, and Minneapolis, home of the artist formerly known as Prince, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, reputed home of the Aryan Nation. For other places I simply looked at the map and thought: I wonder what black life is like in, say, North Dakota or Salt Lake City? According to demographic maps and the U.S. Census department, black people live all over the nation, and I wanted to encounter them for myself and see what life for them was like in these places we don't normally assume an African American presence. And for a number of places I visited I just trusted in serendipity: I let the wind take me where it saw fit.

As for the people I spoke with, I found that one person often led to ten and the ten to a hundred. Often I'd go to the local library and do some research on interesting locals, and often the local newspaper would be profiling someone while I was in town. I usually wound up with a list of people I wanted to speak to that was longer than time would permit.

Q: Many writers have written on the black experience in America. What do you feel differentiates your book from those that came before?

A: The last book I could find written in the same vein--a black person traversing the entire country and speaking with other black folk about their lives--was John A. Williams's This is My Country Too, published in 1964. Of course a number of people had written about black life in certain regions, especially the South; or about black folk in a particular city. But I had not seen any by another African American that attempted to create portrait of black life outside the well-worn areas we watch on the TV news day in and day out, or read about in the newspapers or see on the cover of Time. I took Zora Neale Hurston seriously when she said: "For various reasons, the average struggling, non-morbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America.

Q: Did you meet with any resistance from people you wanted to interview? Generally, what did most of the people you spoke with think about this book?

A: In the main most people were more than happy to sit down with me. Again, most of the people I encountered would be what the media would refer to as "ordinary people." Though I found all of them extraordinary in some way. Nonetheless, these were people who weren't usually given the opportunity to voice their thoughts and hopes and fears to a complete stranger, and to a person who took them seriously. Generally we wound up talking longer than I could have imagined.

As for the idea of the book, I was surprised that most of the people thought what I was attempting was a new idea, and were surprised by my approach, and thought it high time that the definition of black America be broadened.

Q: A couple of questions about your title. Why did you decide to call this book Walking on Water? The book is subtitled, Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. What do you think the biggest changes in how we view race will be in the next century?

A: The title comes from an incident that occurred off the Georgia coast in about 1801. At about that time the United States Government made the importation of slaves from abroad illegal. Nonetheless, slaves were still smuggled into the country. One of the places these smugglers used was the then underpopulated Golden Isles off the coast of Georgia. On one of the ships, a group of Ibos successfully carried out a mutiny. A leader of the group then said: The water brought us here, the water will take us back. Now as to what happened next the record is unclear. Perhaps some of those men and women drowned. In one magical account by the novelist Paule Marshall they actually walked back! But for me this was a compelling metaphor for the current state of black America. As a group African American fought the Powers That Be and won. The question is then, What next? Whether we can or cannot, the faith of being able to do something like walk on water is a powerful one.

That metaphor is particularly relevant, I believe, for black folk today. To me that includes a great deal of faith and work. And by extension I see it as a call to disentangle ourselves from the excuse of "race" and begin to look upon one another as culturally diverse, but the same, as more similar than different, and to put aside the silly, destructive, hateful, war-mongering language of pathology and superiority.

Q: You met a young white man on your trip who insisted, quite convincingly, that he was black. Can a white person be black?

A: To me this goes to the roots of the idea of what it means to be black in America. This was a young white man--by his features and skin color and hair color, you would figure him to be a descendent of the Vikings. Yet he had grown up from a very early age as the son of a black family in Brooklyn, and though it was not an easy experience, by and by, he could not see himself as being anything other than what they were, the people who cared for him and knew him. He had been immersed in African American culture from the time he was practically a toddler. Do I, who grew up in the cradle of the black South, and who have the same features of folk from Ghana and Nigeria, have any more right to that same affection and love of culture that he had? His case pointed out to me how what we call black has so little to do with skin color, and more to do with culture and ideas and, on some level, affirmation and love.

Q: What surprised you most at the end of your journey?

A: I was surprised to discover how my vision of home had altered, which is the cliche for all travel writers, but it holds so much truth. Never in my wildest dreams did I suspect that I would be ending my book with a discussion of the Internet, but in the end it makes perfect sense. At this moment in the history of our nation we are all questioning ideas of our identity, and it made perfect sense to add to that discussion how our culture is changing and how technology is effecting that change.

Q: As we head into the next century what needs to change about how we define "Race"?

A: In truth, I believe "race" is a tired and antiquated idea that should be put out to pasture. No one has ever successfully defined the concept in scientific terms; anthropologists and biologists will probably never ever agree. From a human and a social stand point it clearly does more harm than good, and as America becomes more of a nation, and achieves more and more of it's lofty goals, the idea of "race" will not--cannot--find a place. I think its a term best left in the 19th Century. We should not welcome it in the 21st.