Nightcrawling A Novel by Leila Mottley
KNOPF
Dear Reader, Welcome to Oakland. This is a world of young Black kids searching, the rhythm of feet to sidewalk, the shadow of a streetlamp hovering over a lit up road and all it contains. I wrote this book as an ode to precarious and vulnerable teenage Black girls, the ways we seek to care and fight and love, and still find ourselves adultified, unprotected, unseen. Nightcrawling is a word of many meanings, one not validated by the dictionary, but nevertheless real, much like the lives and hopes this book contains. A book full of streets I have grown up on and walked for as long as I can remember, streets that are transformed at night, crowded with people similarly undefinable and vibrant. Nightcrawling is about lurking in the corners of a city, as Black kids are known to do, and finding ways to survive. It is about the oppositional forces to survival: a justice system that targets the people of this world and makes seemingly simple things hard. I hope this city, these characters, these streets become a small fraction of your image of our country and that you come to love and appreciate them like I do. Leila @leilamottley
Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. A recurring element in Nightcrawling is the imagery of water, from the swimming pool in Kiara’s apartment complex to the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. What do these bodies of water represent to Kiara and how do they manifest themselves in her emotional state throughout the text? Returning to the first and last pages of the novel, how does Kiara’s perception of the pool change?
2. Which images of Oakland stand out to you most? How do development and underdevelopment contrast each other within the city? Could your own hometown be described in this way?
3. In the absence of parental figures, Kiara must piece together her own family, reflecting, “Mama used to tell me that blood is everything, but I think we’re all out here unlearning that sentiment, scraping our knees and asking strangers to patch us back up” (page 32). Does Kiara succeed in creating a chosen family? Who are the members and how do they support one another?
4. What are the different degrees of success and survival that Kiara sees in the characters around her such as Alé, Cole, and Uncle Ty?
5. Nightcrawling is interspersed with flashbacks to moments in which Kiara felt connected with her big brother, Marcus. Is Marcus a good brother? How do these flashbacks differ from the Marcus who interacts with Kiara within the timeline of the story? In what ways does he support Kiara and in what ways does he fail her?
6. Describe the circumstances that lead
8. On page 130, Kiara describes watching Camila dance and realizing that she is not as free as she thinks she is. How does the protection Demond provides Camila parallel the protection the police department provides Kiara? Is either woman really safe or free?
9. Compare Kiara’s father’s experiences with the Oakland Police Department as a Black Panther to those of Kiara and the sex workers she encounters. In what ways are their experiences similar and in what ways are they different?
10. Do you think it is important that the story is written from a first-person perspective? How would the novel be different if it was told by a character other than Kiara?
11. Despite their strained relationships with their mother and father, do Kiara and Marcus inherit any of the behaviors and personalities of their parents?
12. Describe your impressions of Marsha and the development of her relationship with Kiara. What steps must Marsha take to gain her trust? In what ways can Marsha see Kiara, and in what ways is she blind to her experiences?
13. How did your perception of Kiara and Alé’s relationship shift as the novel unfolded?
14. What is the significance of Marcus’s choice to bail out Cole instead of himself? Were you surprised by his choice? Why do you think he made this decision?
15. During her testimony for the grand jury, Kiara repeats, “I was a child” (page 263). Why is this important for Kiara to recognize?
to Kiara’s nightcrawling.
7. On page 82, Kiara reflects, “Houses give away all their secrets at the door. Dee’s is full of scratches. Mine doesn’t have a working lock no more.” Do you see symbolism in Kiara’s unlocked door? Over the course of her story, how does she attempt to find and/or create safety for herself and Trevor?
16. How did you react to the grand jury’s verdict? 17. Read or listen to a few poems by Leila Mottley. As you reflect on the novel, what elements of her poetry do you notice being incorporated into Nightcrawling?
Recommended Reading The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
Dear Martin by Nic Stone The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
There There by Tommy Orange
Once On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Push by Sapphire
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon American Street by Ibi Zoboi
Photo: Magdalena Frigo
Q&A
The lyrical language and rhythm of NIGHTCRAWLING has the undeniable touch of a poet. How has your background in poetry influenced your writing style and process? Poetry has taught me to value rhythm and cadence in prose, something that I think I center as a writer more than I would have if I wasn’t also a poet. In my writing process, I think a lot about the ways that language can mimic emotion and energy in a scene and how I can use poetic language as a tool to bridge the distance between action and feeling. I find that one of the most powerful things about storytelling, particularly in novels, is how it can make us invest in people who may not be “real,” and one of the
most powerful things about poetry is how it can cut straight to the center of our inexplicable human feelings. When these two things are intertwined, a story can be made that much more potent for the reader. I definitely also wanted to push back against the narrative that Black people and specifically Black teenagers don’t have stunning, complex interior worlds. Using a lyrical internal monologue for Kiara, I hoped to show that the way she thinks is incredibly vibrant and devastating and unique. As a writer, it’s important to me to allow my characters to be as nuanced and layered in their interior lives as some of the white narrators that the literary canon has historically praised (like Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) and poetic language is part of how I attempt to achieve this.
Kiara’s harrowing experience is inspired by a number of cases of police sexual exploitation in the Bay Area. How did watching these cases unfold as a young teenager shape your understanding of what it means to be a young woman of color? They gave me a profound connection to the experience of being vulnerable and unprotected. A lot of us women of color experience a kind of abuse that others do not. I started to think about how police sexual violence is representative of the way we treat teenage Black girls. I wanted to tell a story that gave agency to us as young people, as women, and as Black people who are particularly vulnerable to this type of violence.
Q&A Continued...
What do you hope readers will take away from Kiara’s story? This is always a really hard question for me to answer. I write my books trying not to think about anyone at all reading them. After the first draft of Nightcrawling was finished, I went back and thought about who Kiara would want to tell her story in this way to and approached it with that lens. Because I believe Kiara would want to tell her story to other young women of color who she believes might understand her, I focused on what I would want young Black girls who read Nightcrawling to take away, which is the message that the world will ask to grow you up before you are ready but you are deserving of a childhood and the right to be seen as fragile and soft and you are also deserving of protection and a protection that goes beyond what the systems of this country have set up for people who are not you.
That’s where I started when contemplating the reader, but I also recognized that for every one young Black girl reading Nightcrawling, there are probably ten other readers who will not come from that place, and I hope that those readers are pushed to think about the ways they are complicit in the lack of protection for young Black girls and the silence around sexual violence in conversations around policing. I hope readers come to an understanding that we all want to be afforded the right to safety and I don’t mean that in the sense of police protection. Safety often means having access to our basic needs so we have the ability to desire more. Safety means being able to be a child when you are a child, and being able to receive care when you are in need of it. I hope that readers reflect on their own relationships to power and to these systems and also to humanity and childhood and, in the end, that a connection to these characters has an impact on the reader’s life, no matter who they are or where they come from.
In a sense, NIGHTCRAWLING is a love letter to Oakland, which is practically a character in the book. Talk about your hometown and what you find so special and inspiring about it. I love Oakland. Probably a lot of people who have only ever lived in one place and whose identity is intertwined with that place feel similarly about their hometowns, especially in places like Compton, Detroit, south side Chicago, and other cities and neighborhoods that have been demonized in the media. I feel protective of Oakland, partly because I feel like there’s no me without Oakland and I have such an undying love and appreciation for the ways this city has raised me. It’s a unique place, with roots in a Black revolutionary tradition while also being a western coastal city. It’s a metropolis but we don’t have skyscrapers and we have countless trees; it’s a fairly large city but everything shuts down at ten p.m. In my experience, Oakland people are just more radiant across the board than anywhere else I’ve been (granted, I haven’t been to very many places), and the arts scene is spectacular. I wanted Nightcrawling to capture the essence of a city that can be difficult to describe without having felt it. In the media, Oakland has a reputation for either being a “hot new city” or a dangerous city. In the face of displacement, I wanted to write a book that was an ode to Oakland, a city that is not new and is so much more than this binary allows it to be, a city that has existed and still exists beyond the ways in which the white gaze views it. I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up here and I hope Nightcrawling gives Oakland the credit it’s due.
What To Do When You See a Black Woman Cry by Leila Mottley stop. hum a little just for some sound just for a way to fill us up it is streetlamp time all moon-cheeked black girls are mourning a wailing kind of undoing Don’t mistake this as a tragedy it is holy Don’t mistake this as a glorious pain we hurt. Don’t tell me it will be alright. make me a gourmet meal and don’t expect me to do the dishes after. Don’t try to hug me without asking first if i slept last night if i need some jasmine tea and a bath in a tub deep enough to fit my grief and if i say i want a hug Don’t touch my hair while you do it Don’t twist my braids around your fingers or tell me my fro is matted in the back from banging my head on the wall of so many askings you think we are sobbing for the men, but we are praying for the men their favorite sweat-soaked t-shirts we are screeching for our thighs for our throats and our teeth-chipping for the terror and the ceremony and the unending always of this sky. so if i let you see a tear fall if i let you see my teeth chatter know you are witnessing a miracle know you are not entitled to my face crack head shake sob but i do not cry in front of just anyone so stop. hum a little just for some sound just to fill me up