"Women of the Post" Celebrates Black Women Saving Democracy
A Q&A with author Joshunda Sanders about her WWII novel about the 6888th Central Post Battalion
I’m back, and there are a LOT more of you subscribing than when I last posted. I’m so amazed and grateful. Welcome to this space, and thank you so much for being here!1
So. Since I last posted, we’ve gotten more than halfway through 2024. Did anything interesting happen this month?
I kid. I’m still processing everything that’s happened, and I’m still here to focus on WWII novels. But watching a Black woman take front and center stage in the fight to save democracy has been thrilling—and it’s made me all the more thrilled to share this recent discussion with Joshunda Sanders, an author and executive communications leader who writes Black Book Stacks and whose novel, Women of the Post, just came out in paperback this month.
Women of the Post, a 2024 Gotham Prize finalist, follows the 6888th Central Postal Battalion (the Six Triple Eight), the only all-Black, all-female unit deployed overseas during World War II. The Six Triple Eight was responsible for tracking and delivering correspondence between American soldiers on the Western front and their loved ones back home. Women of the Post gives voice to American heroes whose story is long overdue to be honored—and I’m honored that Joshunda took the time to answer my questions.
Joshunda, thank you again.
1) I’ll start with the end of your book, for two reasons: (a) no reader should skip your author’s note, which details the exhaustive research you put into this book; (b) to learn more about your inspiration for it. You credit a National Archives photo of the Six Triple Eight featuring its leader, Major Charity Adams, for helping inspire you to write the novel. I’m always fascinated by how visual images move people to write. Can you elaborate on how and why that specific photo inspired you?
I love this question. It feels to me that the National Archives has a giant gap with regard to imagery around Black women and especially Black women at work; certainly I can’t remember another photo that I’ve ever seen that showed Black women in military uniforms standing at attention with Black women leaders standing before them. The photo stunned me for these reasons, and I immediately wondered about Maj. Charity Adams and her second in command. I wanted to understand the stories that had brought all of these women together. Their faces are so serious and resolute. I needed to learn more about all of them, and their journey as a unit.
(2) The novel opens in 1944 with the protagonist, Judy Washington, with her mother in the Bronx Slave Market—a street corner where white housewives would go to hire (at exploitative wages) Black women to clean their houses. How did you decide on that particular moment and place as Judy’s starting point?
The most compelling stories for me as a reader are those that make explicit at the very start what the stakes are for the main character and why anyone should care. The infuriating moments early in the book describe Judy’s very tangible need for more money, but not just money, but dignity. She is in search of ways to care for herself and her mother that don’t make her feel like a slave, and there are just no options. I also was surprised to learn about the Bronx Slave Market, as someone who is deeply interested in Bronx history as someone who grew up here.
(3) The novel’s told from multiple points of view, not just Judy’s–all Black female characters, some taken from real life, all from different backgrounds and parts of the United States. Did you know at the outset that you wanted to tell the story from multiple POVs, or did that develop as you researched more of these women’s stories?
Telling Women of the Post from multiple perspectives was something that emerged in the writing and editing process. A lot of it was informed by the letters and the storytelling that I imagined they could do. Some of the structure from the epistolary correspondence seemed to naturally flow once I could understand the three separate voices that formed the novel’s foundation.
(4) The novel depicts the 6888th’s mission to track and deliver correspondence to and from soldiers on the frontlines—and letters to and from the characters themselves play a critical role in the novel. Your novel stresses just how important the 6888th’s mission was to U.S. military morale. Is the importance of letters in that time as a source of human joy and connection something you felt needed to be underscored more in 2024 than if you’d been writing this novel, say, 30 years ago? Or would the need to emphasize the importance of letters—and therefore also the 6888th’s heroic efforts to deliver them to soldiers—have been the same, particularly since the American historical record has chronically overlooked and undervalued Black women’s work?
I believe that handwritten letters have a level of timelessness that make them increasingly unique and rare in our world. I want to say they’re like clocks or old watches, but even those pieces can degrade in a way that paper and ink won’t. Letters are such enduring, reliable sources of connection, storytelling and craft–a direct line from one heart to another–that I do believe it would have been important in any era to underscore their extraordinary value. But it’s also true that the work of these Black women to restore those connections in wartime needed to be lifted up, and not just their work, but their own connections and stories, which are available in our national archives to some extent. But we just never really talk much about their inner lives, their families, their motivations. There’s a way in which the inner and intimate lives of Black women, authored by them, are not included in the narratives of American history, and I wanted to share those in particular, to make the incomplete and overlooked narratives as authored by Black women more completely seen.
(5) The novel doesn’t shy away from the unrelenting racism these characters experienced from white Americans before, during, and after their service. I won’t give spoilers about what happens to your characters, but each has to confront the understandable question of whether to go back to America—which, at least some Black WWII veterans chose not to do. How did you think through what you wanted these characters’ endings to be?
The predominant thought I had here was that I sort of loathe stories where Black women have to suffer, grieve and lose all the time. I love to see Black women win, flourish and have deep love and joy – I am that woman, I know those women, I just don’t see many of them in fiction, and so I wrote them. Of course, we know, in real life, there are all these barriers to Black women flourishing and being well, but reading – even about fictionalized truths – should be inspiring and entertaining. So I wanted them all to be satisfied with their decisions, to be rewarded as much as they could be, with the lives that had now been shaped by their courage to do a hard, unsung thing.
(6) How many living survivors of the 6888th are there today? Do you know what, if any, efforts have been made since your work on the book to preserve their stories?
It’s a great question. On the details of living survivors and the other aspects of preserving the stories of the 6888th, I took a sort of Edward P. Jones approach once I had gotten to a certain point in my research. Jones, the author of The Known World and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, completely made up the Virginia town that his beautiful novel is based in, but there were pieces of real history in there – the bulk of it, though, is from his imagination. I did not interview surviving members of the 6888th or their relatives for a lot of reasons, mainly because of time and money constraints, but also because I wanted to imagine what I did not know and could only dream of. I have heard from some relatives that I nailed it, which is incredible to me.
(7) Are you inspired to write another WWII novel, or is there another project on the horizon you’re excited for?
I am working slowly on another novel that I have wanted to write for many many years, and it’s exciting to put pen to paper again. I’m one of those superstitious writers who doesn’t like to say much more about my current writing until it’s done, but I’m really really excited about it.
(8) Netflix is airing a film based on the 6888th this year, starring Kerry Washington. Are you planning to watch?
I am! There are also other books about the 6888th, and a beautiful documentary, and I believe a Broadway play in development. There are thousands of narratives, movies and stories about the white male veteran experience during World War II but in American military history writ large, so I believe the more stories and perspectives we can offer about the Six Triple Eight, the better.
And a special shout-out to anyone who may have recently found me through either The Books That Made Us or as a fellow Fug National over at Go Fug Yourself (and of course, the amazing women behind GFY, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, also have their own Substack over at Drinks with Broads). I’m in awe of those spaces as communities for book nerds, so if you found me through either of them, it’s a huge compliment!
I just wrote about them myself. Two of them that I know of were from my home state, North Carolina