When I told author Susan Straight that I was born at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Fontana, California, a short drive from her lifelong home of Riverside, she told me a story about a relative who worked at the original cinder-block hospital in the 1950s. She used the same warm, personal approach throughout our interview over Zoom, during which she referred to her neighbors by their first and last names, and detailed how their families arrived in the heart of Southern California’s Inland Empire.
It’s this intimate relationship with place, storytelling, and history that defines Straight’s literary world of freeways, first responders, lowriders, and high school sports teams. In her latest and 10th novel, Sacrament, a COVID-impacted San Bernardino takes center stage. The book focuses on the lives of three nurses—Cherrise, Larette, and Marisol—who are moved closer to the hospital during the global pandemic to care for patients, and the families they leave behind to do this.
The nurses are frontline saviors. They attend to characters like Chencho, a car enthusiast and unwitting vector of the coronavirus, whose wife asks his nurse, Larette, to sing a tune that she hoped Chencho would hear, despite his coma. They’re not perfect—scenes of nurses smoking between shifts repeat like a chorus—but their sense of duty amid the pandemic is palpable as they navigate familial relationships from quarantine one text message at a time.
In the novel’s inciting incident, Cherrise’s daughter, Raquel, suddenly goes missing, miles away in the Coachella Valley, where she was sent to stay with relatives to avoid infection. An old friend and highway patrol officer with a deep secret, Johnny Frías, is called to help bring her home.
Straight showcases a SoCal where lowriders cruise within funeral processions, garnering the same respect as the pope’s security convoy, and cultural traditions pass down the knowledge of which songs best soundtrack the cars’ journey.
There are a lot of characters from your most recent novel, Mecca, in Sacrament. How quickly after finishing Mecca did you begin working on this manuscript? Were you thinking about a two-part, double novel?
I knew when Mecca was done that I wanted to write more about four characters—Larette and Grief, [their son] Dante, and, of course, Johnny Frías. But it was Raquel [Cherrise’s teenage daughter] I began with; I wrote a story about her being so lonely and hot out in Oasis. She’s with the sister of the character from Mecca named Sofelia, who is married to someone from Louisiana and lives on the Torres-Martinez Reservation.
I published my first book, Aquaboogie, in 1990, and some of the same characters in Aquaboogie are in these books too. One of my favorite writers is Louise Erdrich; she’s been writing about the same people since the beginning.
I live three blocks from the hospital where I was born. I can see the hospital from my back window. I’m always [thinking], How did people get here to SoCal? How do people get to Pomona, Fontana, Rialto, Bloomington? And once they got here, what food or language did they bring?
Aquaboogie is named after a Parliament song. I feel like music is a critical part of your writing. Like the radio show, The Art Laboe Connection, referenced in your books—the one time I got to be on the show, I dedicated Mary Wells’s “What Love Has Joined Together,” which also opens Sacrament.
No way! When did you make that? Who are you dedicating it to?
It was before [Laboe] passed, maybe 2015. I shouted out my mom.
I grew up listening to the dedications. You’d hear Betty from Madera calling in for her husband, Spider in Delano, every night for like eight years. That’s a huge community—like a million people heard you say that you were dedicating Mary Wells to your mom.
Growing up here, music was our whole lives. Everyone had a boom box. Your dad would be carrying the Dodgers game in his pocket with the transistor radio.
The language of the Dodgers, of our music—I don’t think the rest of America will ever really understand the way SoCal works, do you? I mean, I’m trying! In this book, I really wanted to double down and try to meld all that in with our specific culture.
Like, the funeral [scene] was a big deal to me. That funeral passed my house.
One of my favorite quotes from Sacrament is from that scene of lowriders cruising to the funeral: “Everyone in the cars knew this song. From the oldest ones to the teenagers riding beside their dads or uncles. Nothing would change in this world, cars or songs or clothes or love—except the ones who are gone.”
There’s a million layers of culture, but that world, I think, is one of the most beautiful. It’s like a religious experience because of what it means for the culture.
If you could give an Art Laboe dedication to one character in Sacrament, who would it be for and what song?
The old-school national anthem is “Don’t Let No One Get You Down” by War. That’s what I listen to every single day because I miss my brother, I miss all my friends. I lost 30 to 40 people to COVID. When people are like, “COVID seems so long ago,” I’m like, “Not for us.”
I would probably send “Don’t Let No One Get You Down” to Chencho. I think Chencho is going to feel bad for the rest of his life, so I would send that one to him.
From the nurses to the younger characters, the pandemic impacts everyone throughout the book.
There were traveling nurses on my block who walked by my house every night. I would take them Rice Krispies Treats. Everyone was banging pots and pans for the nurses, but no one was like, “What did you do last night?” And this woman’s like, “I hurt my back because it took three of us to turn over this guy. He weighed 300 pounds.” They told me some stories you just wouldn’t believe. That’s where all that came from, just listening.
They were these women that I always thought of as smart and kind, but also really perceptive; they would look at someone’s face and know what they needed. I wanted to be that kind of person.
Music is offered like a sacrament throughout the book, but there are other moments where there’s this strain to maintain connection with the people and things you love in a time when everything feels torn apart.
I don’t want the book to be about death. I want it to be about the sacrament of what it means to lose somebody and what it means to be able to say goodbye to them. But also, what does it mean for those kids?
I really loved writing about Zoom. I was teaching on Zoom, and it was so inequitable. My Wi-Fi would go out constantly, and the students were like, “Professor Straight, it made us feel so much better that your Wi-Fi went out!” They were sometimes in a house with five or six other people, and they kept their screens black.
That’s when I started writing about what Cherrise felt being the mom, but also what Raquel felt being the daughter. They’re separated, whereas other people were like, “I love COVID, we’re doing dance routines,” and Cherrise and Raquel are like, “I’m sorry, no dance routines here.”
All of that was in my mind when I was working on the book.•
José Vadi is the author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens, from Soft Skull Press. He lives and writes in California.
