I grew up in a rural part of southeastern Illinois. My father was a farmer. My mother was a teacher. My childhood was racially monochromatic. I, and everyone around me, was as white as white could be.

My first memory of interaction with a Black person came when I was four years old. My aunt was dying in Washington D.C., and my parents and I rode a train so we could see her. The train took a slightly southern route, passing through West Virginia and Virginia toward its end. That’s where I began to play with a little girl, who happened to be Black. I distinctly remember we were sitting on the floor of the train car—she at her mother’s feet, and I at mine—and we were playing with a crayon and a Dixie drinking cup. I’m sure we were making up some scenarios as we played, but what they were I can’t recall. What I’ve never been able to forget is when something caused the girl’s mother to snatch her up. “Don’t you play with that white boy,” she said.

This was my first experience with the complicated layers of race relations in our country, and it’s a moment that’s stayed with me all these years. All I knew at the time was I’d been having fun playing with this little girl, and then there was some sort of tension in that train car, and I sensed, though I couldn’t have articulated this, then, that it had something to do with the fact that I was white.

I was a shy boy who knew the discomfort that came from having people stare at me because I was in some ways outside the norm. My mother was 45 when I was born; my father was 42. I was the only child of older parents, and one of those parents—my father—had lost both of his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. He wore prosthetic hands, or, as he called them, his hooks—two steel prongs curved like a question mark. I remember the way people would look at us—sometimes with fear or disgust and sometimes with curiosity—when we were out in public. We weren’t the family people expected to see. We weren’t like them. My parents were old enough to be my grandparents. My father was disabled. We simply didn’t fit into what most people thought of as “normal,” and because we didn’t, we were considered suspect. I didn’t know any of that at the time, but I knew the feeling of being somehow “less than”—a feeling it took me years to overcome, to understand that being different may indeed mark us, but it need not define us.

On the train, I crawled up onto my mother’s lap, and I closed my eyes, so I wouldn’t have to look at the girl and her mother. I distinctly remember how I felt—embarrassed, ashamed, because something about my white skin in proximity to the girl’s dark skin had become problematic. I’ve had years and years to try to unpack that moment. I’ve never forgotten how much I was enjoying the company of this little girl. I still remember the conical wax Dixie cup with what looked like blue notes on a musical staff around the top, and the squiggly lines we’d drawn with our crayon. I finally fell asleep in my mother’s arms, and when I woke, the girl and her mother were gone.

I don’t remember asking my mother anything about why the girl’s mother had reacted the way she did. I don’t recall saying anything to my mother about it at all, and I never heard her telling the story to anyone. It was something that happened, and I soon put it out of my mind. At least I thought I did.

Years later, I began to write my first novel, Quakertown. The novel is based on the true story of the forced relocation of a thriving Black community in Denton, Texas, in the 1920s. Of course, my imagination intersected with the facts of that true story. I created characters and situations that occurred only in my mind. One of those situations involves a romance between a white man and a Black woman. Their relationship ultimately can’t overcome the challenges it faces from both the white and the Black communities.

I’m not sure I ever thought of the memory of my experience with the Black girl on the train while I was writing the novel, but it’s there in the final product, as is the story of the love I felt for a certain girl when I was eighteen, a girl, who like the Black girl on the train, eventually vanished from my life. That girl, Cathy, was sixteen, and, as often happens with teenagers, she ultimately turned her attention elsewhere. When I wrote the story of Kizer Bell and Camellia Jones, the interracial couple from Quakertown, I was tapping into my own story of young love. Maybe I was trying to make that story come out on the page the way I thought it should have in real life.

And oddly enough, seven years after the publication of Quakertown and nearly thirty-four years after Cathy said goodbye to me, we found our way back to each other and have been married now almost eight years. What’s even more remarkable is the fact that Cathy, who never knew the identity of her biological father, has discovered through DNA that he was a Black man. All those years ago, she and I, like Kizer and Camellia, were involved in an interracial romance, and we hadn’t even known it.

This may be too simplistic to say, but I truly believe it. Deep down, people are people. No matter our differences in ethnicity, religious or political belief, social class, sexual orientation, etc., at heart we want similar things. We want love. We want comfort. We want financial stability. We want family. We want to feel we matter. When the Black girl’s mother on the train told her to stop playing with “that white boy,” I felt I didn’t matter at all. I felt tossed away. I felt ashamed to be who I was. I don’t blame the girl’s mother for what she said, even though I have no memory of what must have happened to make her say it. I can only imagine the complications presented by a four-year-old white boy at play with a Black girl of similar age on a train traveling through southern states in 1959.

This is all to say, I believe writing is an act of empathy. No matter the identities of the characters I create, I try to understand why they do what they do. I try to feel what it must feel like to walk around in their skin. Seven years ago today, I read from Quakertown to a large audience in McKinney, Texas, as a part of Black History Month. I was nervous, but soon I found myself involved in a kind of call and response. I’d read a line, and someone from the audience would say, “Amen.” I’d read another line, and someone else would say, “Yes, Lord,” or “Oh, yes,” or “You got that right.” Afterwards, at the book signing, a Black woman said to me, “I hope you don’t mind me saying that listening to you was like listening to an old Baptist preacher.” I took that as a compliment. Something about my book had touched on some aspect of her experience, and for at least a few moments, we stood on shared ground. What more could a writer ask?