An illustration of a Black woman with short hair, glasses, and a smirk on a purple background
Jen Pearson

As a kid, author and TV producer Attica Locke spent so much time on the road between her hometown of Houston and the East Texas communities where her relatives lived that she later started writing novels centered around US 59. The first in the award-winning Highway 59 series, Bluebird, Bluebird (2017), introduced readers to her complex, multilayered protagonist, Darren Matthews, a Black Texas Ranger who’s investigating a murder on the bayou. It’s currently in development with Universal for television, while the third and final installment in the series, Guide Me Home, was published earlier this month. It finds Matthews coming out of retirement to investigate the disappearance of a college student. US 59, of course, plays a major role.

“There was a period of time during my childhood where every other weekend I was in Lufkin,” Locke says. “I spent summers there with my grandmother, and I had people in Corrigan, in Marshall.” She created curated playlists to listen to for each book in the Highway 59 series. She named her latest playlist “Bell’s Ringing” after Matthews’ mom, Bell (see sidebar).

In addition to her novels, Locke was a writer and pro­ducer on the hit Fox series Empire and was awarded an Emmy nomination for her work as a co-executive producer on the 2020 Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere, based on Celeste Ng’s bestselling book and starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Along with her sister, Tembi, Locke wrote and produced the 2022 Netflix series From Scratch, a tearjerker based on Tembi’s bestselling memoir about losing her husband to cancer. Locke has lived in Los Angeles for many years now, but she hasn’t forgotten where she comes from. “There is a way I carry myself, or that I think about Hollywood,” she says. “It’s through the lens of a Texan.”

TEXAS HIGHWAYS: What made you move out of Texas?
ATTICA LOCKE:
I went to Alief Has­tings High School in Houston, which [in the early 1990s] I think had almost 4,000 students. It was such a big school, so I felt like for college I wanted something new. I wanted to forge out on my own. Because I was interested in Hollywood, I had this idea I would end up in New York or LA. The vibrancy of Austin’s film community wasn’t quite there yet. I think Slacker had just come out, but that was very early, and I don’t think Robert Rodriguez had made anything yet, so it didn’t occur to me that I could have a life in film or television in Texas. So, for college I went to Northwestern in Illinois.

TH: What’s your family’s history in East Texas?
AL: Both of my families, going back generations, were rural, agricultural people. They were farmers. They’ve gone on to become educators, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and engineers, but I’m lucky that my family have been landowners since not that long after the Civil War.

TH: That area deeply informs your work, specifically your novels. What stands out about it for you?
AL: There’s a kind of plainspokenness. And it sounds so cheesy, but what matters are core values: kindness, warmth. Is this gonna mess with my crops this year? Are my kids gonna live? All the rest is just hoo-ha and gold lamé and shininess. There’s a rootedness and down-to-earthness, and that helps me not take Hollywood and the publishing world all that seriously. The parts of my life that feel the most real are my family—and when I go home to East Texas, where all my people are from. There is a sense of knowing who I fundamentally am that I don’t experience anywhere else.

TH: How did the Highway 59 series start?
AL: Twenty-something years ago, my very first screenplay that got attention, funnily enough, was a version of Bluebird, Bluebird, which I later turned into Bluebird, Bluebird the book. It was a script that I went to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab with. It didn’t have the Darren Matthews character in it, but it was the same little town and a crime. So, the first thing I wrote that sounded so wholly in my voice was about a little East Texas town. And then I started writing novels, and it just felt natural. East Texas is a rural fantasia.

TH: Do you come back to Texas to work on your books at all?
AL: When I was researching for Heaven, My Home, the second book in the Highway 59 series, I went to Caddo Lake. My dad went with me because I didn’t want to stay in a cabin on this crazy-looking lake by myself. I was too chicken. We went to pay for our little cabin, and you had to go down to this little bait and tackle shop and pay the guy in cash. When the guy came out, he had on overalls and there may have been a tooth or two missing, and I was like, “Oh, no.” My dad was like, “Hey, how you doing, man? I like those boots.”

TH: Your dad’s a charmer.
AL: My dad will do these things; he’ll throw out a little test, and whatever he gets back is whatever you get back. On that same trip, when I was leaving town, somebody I do not know paid for my lunch. I went to pay and my server said someone else had paid for my meal. I can be hard on people whose politics I think are cruel, but when you get deep in rural East Texas, there is a sense that it is me and you and the elements, and we’re gonna figure this out.


TH: What are some East Texas standouts?
AL: You would be remiss to not see the area around Caddo Lake. It is one of the most evocative places I have ever seen in my life. It’s like being in a movie; you feel like Bonnie and Clyde are going to come out from hiding. It’s the lake itself but also the town, Jefferson. Jefferson looks like a baby New Orleans. There was a time when Jefferson was bigger than Dallas, before railroads came and changed everything. But Caddo Lake will make you see God. How is a lake so big that it’s in two states? There are islands in the middle of it. How is one part open water and pontoon boats, and the other part is forests with Spanish moss? It’s amazing. You can eat at Big Pines Lodge on the lake and get fried alligator. I didn’t get that, but you can.

TH: What’s something that might surprise people about you?
AL: I have an extensive cowboy boot collection. I probably have over 20 pairs, and I keep them in their boxes. I don’t wear them in the rain. They’re my special things. My dad always bought his children cowboy boots coming up; that was just his thing. Literally standing in the boots is a way to remember who I am and where I come from. It’s in my gait, how I walk, how I stand.

TH: What are you working on?
AL: My sister and I entered into a deal with Universal Television, so we’re always meeting with writers and reading projects we might want to develop. There’s one that’s a romance—a family drama set on a Napa vineyard—and another is an adaptation of the Highway 59 books. It’s busy, but I feel so fortunate. It’s fun to work with my sister. It’s a blessing beyond measure. 

From the October 2024 issue

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