In “The Reformatory,” Tananarive Due turns to one of the darkest chapters in Florida’s history: the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, a reform school where countless children—many of them Black, orphaned, or poor—suffered extreme abuse or died under mysterious circumstances. One of those children was an ancestor she never knew she had. The crippling angst of even talking about what happened to her great-uncle, Robert Stevens, kept the brutality of what he experienced a family secret until someone alerted Due to his fatal stay at the Dozier School for Boys.
Silence has been a coping mechanism for Black families for generations. Due, however, not only addresses his tragedy but finds a way to honor the lives of so many whose names will never be known—humanizing their existence on this earth. She deposits elements of vindication that they never experienced in real time, helping them fight in ways that were out of reach and unknown.
Countless children were murdered and unacknowledged. Bodies were hurled into unmarked graves. Survivors, she recounts, still feel the pain. They utter it in conversations: “It still hurts.” It was not her goal to recreate every horror that took place there. She wanted that history to pulse beneath the surface of her fiction—shaping the story’s tension and truth without overwhelming it. For Due, the challenge was balancing that with imagination, acknowledging the pain without exploiting it.
“I had to mute it. I couldn’t write it as horrible as it really was,” she admitted. “That was one of the reasons it took me so long to write this book. The research just traumatized me as a witness. There were stories from real life I would not have dared put in this book. Horror ceases to be entertainment when it pierces too closely to the truth of history.”
To honor those lost boys, Due turned to the power of the supernatural. Balancing truth with compassion and empathy, she channels the atrocities through the supernatural. By weaving ghosts into “The Reformatory,” she could honor the children who died at the Dozier School without reinforcing the trauma. The spectral elements became her way of transforming pain into remembrance—shifting the story’s focus from the violence of their deaths to the persistence of their spirits and the world beyond.
For Due, “The Reformatory” is more than a ghost story—it’s an act of healing.
“Without being spoilery, I think it’s fair to say that the entire reason I wanted to write this book was with an eye toward healing,” she said. “There’s absolutely no way I would’ve wanted to spend that many years researching a nonfiction story that had this terrible ending. I wanted to revise history—period.”
And in this way, the story uses ghosts to mute the bone-deep pain, bringing a sense of power to those who were so disempowered.
Due grew up seeing grassroots, sacrificial protest to racial injustice as a way of life. It’s no coincidence that her work is steeped in social consciousness—she was born into it. Her parents, Patricia Stephens Due and John Dorsey Due Jr., were front-line activists in the Civil Rights Movement, leaders who risked their lives and careers for freedom. Her father was a Civil Rights attorney.
“My late mother, Patricia Stephens Due—and I named my older girl protagonist after her using her middle name, Gloria—she was my North Star for ‘The Reformatory,’ ” she said. “My father, John Dorsey Due Jr., had a character named after him too.” Her mother’s courage left a permanent mark—physically and emotionally. “My mother was the one who in the 1960s had been lying down in front of sanitation trucks, leading marches, and getting tear gassed,” Due recalled. “She wore dark glasses the rest of her adult life because she had sensitivity to light after being tear gassed in 1960.”
Art as Activism
When Due was young, she asked her mother if it was acceptable to be an artist rather than an activist. Both of her sisters are lawyers. The answer would shape her destiny. Civil rights activists did a lot of serious, dirty work. She grew up exposed to the NAACP, sharing that most of her family vacations were at NAACP National Conventions.
Through her participation in the NAACP’s ACT-SO (Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics) program, Tananarive Due discovered how profoundly exposure to the arts could shape a young person’s path. Surrounded by other Black students from across the country who excelled in writing, science, and performance, she realized that achievement could take many forms—and that creativity itself could be a form of power.
Winning a gold medal for her original poem “I Want to Live” affirmed her voice, but what stayed with her most was the collective energy of expression and excellence. ACT-SO not only validated her as a writer—it opened the door to understanding that art could serve as activism—a way to speak truth, challenge injustice, and imagine new possibilities for the Black experience. Through that program, she saw that storytelling and self-expression were not separate from the freedom struggle but extensions of it.
“My mom told me something I’ve never forgotten,” she said. “In the 1960s, the NAACP invested a lot of time and resources into the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch because they knew the power of representation. She had come of age as a civil rights activist at parties hosted by Harry Belafonte. She had seen the activism of Sidney Poitier and Mahalia Jackson. She knew that artists were not separate from the movement—they were just a different piece of the movement. So she gave me explicit permission that artists matter in moving the needle forward.”
That wisdom solidified Due’s understanding that art is not an escape from social responsibility—it’s an extension of it.
“The Reformatory” reimagines justice through horror noire. Due teaches the history of Black horror at UCLA and has penned many books on the subject. Black history is often laced with atrocities of injustice. Carrying the torch her parents lit, Tananarive Due proves that in the right hands, art isn’t just reflection—it’s revolution.
“I think it’s an artist’s responsibility to tell their truth,” she reflected. “Not everyone comes from an activist sensibility, but if you can tell your truth about what it is to live, that helps us move forward. The only malpractice of an artist is not to tell the truth.”
Spokane Public Libraries hosted a virtual event with Tananarive Due on Oct. 23.
Spokane Public Libraries hosted a virtual event with Tananarive Due on Oct. 23.