EPB 004:

This past winter, as we prepared Motherless Children for printing and publication, we asked Hal about  its inspiration and his process. Confined to self-quarantine in his apartment, in April 2020 he finally set about writing the family saga that he had been contemplating for a quarter of a century, inspired by his life back home on Long Island in the 1970s immediately after his mother’s premature death.

How much of Motherless Children is true?

It’s a lot of memories from home blown up into myth, mixed with some story ideas I’ve had for decades that are more about growing up and becoming aware in America generally. I sort of appropriated my family’s history and used it to shape a wider tale about mid-20th-century America. 

But I knew I had a good story to tell even when I was a teenager. When I left home for the first time in 1978 to attend art school in Boston I found out my family sounded positively exotic to my new friends and acquaintances. That’s what young people do when they first become friends, ask about each others family; do you have brothers and sisters, what’s your dad do? That kind of thing. Anyway, when other kids, even teachers, asked me those questions and I’d answer, I saw I had a silent and attentive audience within minutes. 

And that wasn’t even the melodramatic stuff. 

But when I started writing stories a year or two later, when I arrived at SUNY Purchase, I started with the little adventures I remembered from home. At twenty, I couldn’t really wrap my mind around it too well. But as the years went on, I began to formulate a big story that was and was not the story of my actual family. On the one had, it started from the real: a man, my dad, losing his wife in his mid-forties and having to deal with four kids between the ages of seventeen and eight. As they say: you can’t make this stuff up. Instant drama. But I did make a lot up as the years went on. Nevertheless, the layout is for real: this extended family with cousins on either side, grandfather around the block, and the marriage into another neighborhood family.

I morphed different people together to form characters. Billy Fulton has certain experiences I myself had later, in the 80s and 90s. But his personality is a mix of one of my brothers, one of my cousins, and a fair amount of whatever pirates and rock stars I was excited by as a kid.

What about the title?

Motherless Children is an old black blues standard, written by Blind Willie Johnson back in the 1920s. Lots of players have covered it and covered it differently. I first heard it in a version by Eric Clapton that he recorded in 1974. I very much responded to it as a kid who’d lost his mother a few years earlier. Particularly the lines, “father will do the best he can / but there’s so many things that he can’t understand…” Rightly or wrongly, that’s how I’ve always conceived of my family’s adventures in the 1970s; all of us dealing with dad as he dealt with adjusting to the new situation, a motherless household. It could be funny at times, despite the obvious heartbreak. I often thought he had an expression on his face when he looked at us like; “who are these kids? Where did they come from!”

Is ten-year-old Joseph, the celebrated liar, you?

Of course! But he’s someone else too. I was way more shy than Joseph is. Still, I was a storyteller from early on. And I lied when I thought I had to, when I knew I’d done something I shouldn’t have. By all accounts I was a terrible and clumsy liar. It never worked. I’m still a bad actor.

Here, though, in the script, since I was taking real memories, which after all might be inaccurate, and reshaping them into different, bigger stories, I wanted to portray the questionable accuracy of any tale. A lot of characters tell stories in this screenplay. The fact is what they’re remembering might be a perfectly subjective impression. Not literally true at all. But there’s a truth that gets conveyed and is enacted in everyday life—a common idea of decency, respect, regret and shame.

Is that Joseph’s fascination with The Odyssey of Homer?

Odysseus was a teller of half truths too. It’s a running theme through the whole poem. The man of twists and turns. He’s disliked by some characters because of it—he’s a politician in a sense. But he gets things done. He gets home. I thought the ten year old Joseph—who seems to have read Moby-Dick too, for instance—would have been intrigued by Odysseus. The kid is essentially making up the legend of the Fulton clan as he moves through the story. But he’s simply a witness too. Sometimes an unreliable witness. But certainly a poet. A bard.

Why are they called the Fultons rather than the Hartleys?

That’s the name of the street we grew up on, South Fulton Avenue. I didn’t want it to be perceived as straight autobiography or an exact history of my family. The characters and the situations are just different enough to warrant giving them a different name.

Are there any exact portraits in this?

All the characters, they’re sort of a mix of different personalities. The young couple who get married when they’re already pregnant, that I wove together from details of two couples in the family. As a teenager I was kind of stunned at the weight of responsibility they were taking on. Young, still without a trade, no money… But both couples are still married with grandchildren of their own! An amazing achievement I think. Maybe the most exact portraits are Ruthy and Marie, my aunts, in real life Edna and Lorraine. I didn’t try much to change the way I remember them. I heard their real voices in my head while I was writing the dialogue. And my little sister doesn’t get much airplay here. Over the years, the story came to center on the eventual confrontation between Billy and his dad. So I had a lot of stories I had to leave out. Jim Fulton is often quite like my dad. But in some ways not. I think I got him pretty acurately the way he was at work, though, on the job. 

And you did that work yourself, ironworking, to pay for college?

Yes. During the summer and winter beaks from school. My dad was very concerned about the cost of my college education. It took him a while, but he finally got up the nerve to just come out and tell me I should come be an apprentice. This was 1981. I didn’t know anything about the work. I was afraid I was too skinny, not tough enough. He was standing in the hallway near the kitchen, half-shaven, lather on one whole side of his jaw, getting ready to go to a wake or something. He told me the work wasn’t about being tough. You just had to keep your eyes open, learn some knots and a few tools, and try not to get hurt. 

Did you manage that?

I guess I did. I didn’t kill myself. The first day was a blur. The script pretty much tells that the way it was. I learned about the bolts. Carried them around. Hoisted them up and down. I’ve never slept better than that summer of 1981. I’d get home, shower, lay down with headphones on to listen to Talking Heads or Bowie or whatever and I’d be fast asleep before the first song ended. Next thing I know it’s five in the morning and the old man is calling from the foot of the stairs to wake me up for work again.

There is a lot of technical detail described about the process of erecting a building in steel. Were you taking notes at the time?

That first summer I worked, I was fortunate that my older brother, Pat, was also on the job, working in the raising gang for my dad. He lived elsewhere by then so I didn’t see him regularly. So, on days when we got rained out, we’d go to a bar, drink beer, and talk about ironworking. I had lots of questions and Pat loved explaining. He not only liked the work, he was interested in the whole engineering of it. He made a good carreer out of ironworking and only recently retired. One rainy afternoon in a bar somewhere around East 53rd Street he told me the story I re-tell in episode five of the ball getting stuck at the top of the derrick. I wrote it all down when I got home. I invented a lot of new details as the years went by and added to the tale. But Pat has read the script and says that, although there are some unrealistic details to the incident, it is dramatic!

How long were you working on the script?

In my head, for twenty-five years. I told it, out loud, from beginning to end to my wife at the time, Miho, more than once as early as 1997 or 1998. But I never wrote it down. It was always growing and changing as I retold it. I did write some scenes and an outline around 2004. By then, I started to bring in the wider world. Things I experienced and witnessed in my thirties, for instance, were retrofit back into 1971. And my reading of history would always suggest new perspectives. 

Was there an issue like the one that divides Jim and Billy in the script?

Yes. I was dating a young woman in the nineteen-eighties who was black and I brought her home. He reacted badly. I didn’t see him or anyone in the family for almost a year—which was intense for me, having grown up in such a big, tight, extended family. I believe he came to regret his racist outburst very quickly. But he was never able to apologize directly—to me or, more importantly, to this young woman. He made other gestures to demonstrate, to me at least, his effort to change. But it was always something that never got said. He could be a hot-head. Blow up and then immediately regret what he’d done. And I’m very much like that too. There are attitudes and regrets that the father in this story embodies that are mine rather than my dad’s.

Do you have hopes that it will be financed and produced?

I’m not holding my breath. But I know it’s a good read. And if it’s out there in the world and excites some corporation, well, maybe something will happen. This is not the kind of thing that can be made on a small independent budget. It would require going into business with a corporation of some size. I’m just happy it’s down on the page, at last, and able to be read. 

Purchase Motherless Children here.

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