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A Q&A With Cavis Adams, Author of "Granddaddy"

MarketingNewAuthors.com (MANA) welcomes Cavis Adams to the MANA Family. A Minneapolis firefighter and medical interpreter, Adams has released his first book titled, Granddaddy.

The story details the dashed hopes of a young African American couple from the South who move to Minneapolis. After experiencing disillusionment up North, and their son, who experiences a “spiritual rebirth” after visiting his grandfather in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandfather is granted a lifetime of memories after fearing he would forever be a mere memory himself.

MANA asked Mr. Adams questions about his book, what inspired it, and the advice he would give to new writers.

MANA: Briefly describe to readers what Granddaddy is all about.
Cavis Adams (CA): Granddaddy is a story about a young “Negro” couple who leaves the South during racial unrest and hostility (during the onset or blooming of the Civil Rights era). The couple goes North, like so many blacks of that era, in hopes of escaping the hardship and hostility and to search for a better quality of life in the form of job opportunities. The couple becomes disillusioned after discovering that the North has its own branding of hardship, and life in the city is affecting them and their Northern-born son in negative ways.

The decision is made to send the child back down South to spend part of the summer with his grandfather—a sharecropper, very humble and dated in material progress, but without limit in life and lessons. The child has a real “spiritual rebirth” here in this enriching bosom of nature and fundamental values.

Even as the child has grown from this experience; for both parent and child alike there are lessons to be learned. Problems do surface, but the deepest solutions can be rediscovered through traditional roots. Above all this, there is the miracle of Granddaddy himself, who is granted a lifetime of memories with his grandson, even after fearing he would forever be a mere memory himself. The moral of the story could be said to look to traditional values and morals as a source of deep-rooted solutions to the increasingly superficial problems that come with modernity.

LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT FROM GRANDDADDY