Author Ravi Howard has settled in Mobile with his family after publishing his debut novel, “Like Trees Walking,” which tells the story of the 1981 lynching of Michael Donald through the eyes of a fictional 18-year-old undertaker named Roy Deacon.
Howard, who was born in Montgomery to a mother from Mobile and a father from Daphne, says the Mobile Bay area had long felt like a second home even though he left Alabama after high school. He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and graduate school at the University of Virginia, later working a range of writing jobs, from travel writing to sports television, before turning to fiction full time. He won the Hurston/Wright College Award for a short-story version of what would become “Like Trees Walking.”
That path — from award-winning story to full-length novel — traces the way much first fiction is built. The Hurston/Wright Foundation, named for Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, has recognized emerging Black writers for decades, and the college award Howard received for the short version of the Michael Donald story gave him early validation for material that would take years to complete as a novel. The undertaker’s perspective at the center of the finished book grew from the same instinct: telling a story the whole city knew through the eyes of one young man whose work placed him beside the dead.
A Childhood Memory Turned Into Fiction
Michael Donald, a 19-year-old Black man, was abducted and killed by two Ku Klux Klan members in Mobile in March 1981, a case that later led to a landmark civil lawsuit bankrupting a Klan organization. Howard says he was in first grade when the killing happened and remembers hearing about the case and the trials that followed as he grew up.
Unlike other chapters of Alabama’s racial history he had read about, he says, this one occurred within his own lifetime, which pushed him to blend personal memory with research and imagined scenes for the novel.
The case’s aftermath set it apart even in a state accustomed to civil rights reckonings. Donald’s mother filed a civil suit against the Klan organization responsible, and the resulting judgment — a verdict that held the organization itself liable for the killing — forced it into bankruptcy and became a template for using civil litigation to dismantle hate groups. For Mobilians of Howard’s generation, the case unfolded not as distant history but as local news: the manhunt, the trials, the civil verdict, all playing out in the city’s own courts and newspapers while they were in school.
That proximity shaped the novelist’s choices. History’s record of the case preserved the outlines — the crime, the perpetrators, the lawsuit — but not the texture of ordinary Black life in Mobile in those years: the funeral homes, churches, neighborhoods and family routines against which the tragedy landed. Fiction, Howard has said in discussing the book, could restore that texture, and the figure of the young undertaker — an occupation that runs through Black Southern community life as caretaker of the dead — gave the novel a way to stand close to the loss without standing inside the courtroom.
The novel’s title draws on scripture, the language of mourning and endurance that runs through the Black church tradition in which the story’s characters live. That register — biblical, elegiac, grounded in funeral home and sanctuary — places the book in the company of Southern fiction that treats the dead and the grieving as the community’s center of gravity. For readers in Mobile, the world the novel renders is recognizable even where the characters are invented: the streets, institutions and weather of the city are the same ones they have lived in, which is why the book has been received locally as a portrait as much as a story.
Settling Into Downtown Mobile
Howard says he has been encouraged by momentum in downtown Mobile, pointing to renewed interest in the city center rather than only the newer retail corridors. He credits Mobile Arts events and programming at the Museum of Mobile with giving residents affordable ways to engage with the city beyond tourist-driven draws like Mardi Gras and football.
The observation reflects a shift residents of the city have watched take hold block by block — the reopening of the city center as a place to live, gather and attend cultural events rather than merely work. For a writer who returned to the city of his mother’s childhood, the civic infrastructure matters in practical terms: readings, museum programming and arts events are where a book about the city’s history meets the readers who lived adjacent to it.
Writers with Howard’s biography occupy a particular position in a city like Mobile. Neither fully outsider nor native — raised away, rooted by family — they can see the place with the double vision that fiction requires: the intimacy of a second home, the objectivity of someone who left and came back. His return with his own family, to the city his mother came from, closes a generational loop that he has described as central to why Mobile became home.
Next Up: A Novel Rooted in Nat King Cole’s Alabama Childhood
Howard is now working on a novel drawing in part on the Alabama roots of Nat King Cole, who was born in Montgomery in 1919 before his family moved to Chicago while he was still young.
Cole’s birth in Montgomery places him in the long line of Black artists who left the Deep South as children — part of the great migration that carried families north in search of work and safety — and carried the South with them into American music. His family’s move to Chicago, where he would grow up to become one of the most beloved singers and pianists of the 20th century, makes him a natural subject for a writer interested in how Alabama childhoods echo through lives lived elsewhere. The novel continues Howard’s pattern of finding large American stories with Alabama at their root.
Howard says Mobile and Baldwin County audiences have been supportive of the readings he has given locally over the past two years, though he does not expect to schedule more public appearances until the new book has a firm release date. The local reception matters for a writer whose first novel put the city’s hardest history on the page — readers in Mobile approached “Like Trees Walking” not as an outside account of their history but as a family story told by one of their own, and their embrace of the book’s readings has anchored Howard’s connection to the community he now lives in.
The pause in public appearances until the new novel nears publication is the standard rhythm of a working novelist’s life: the years between books are for drafting, and readings resume when there is a finished work to read. Until then, Howard’s public presence in the city remains that of a neighbor rather than a visiting author.
The Gulf Coast, Five Years After Katrina
Reflecting on the Gulf Coast’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina, which had reached its fourth anniversary at the time of the interview, Howard said the region has a responsibility to consider what could happen if similar damage struck Mobile, and to support efforts that keep Gulf Coast culture alive going forward.
His point drew on what Mobile residents had watched happen one hundred miles to the west. Katrina’s storm surge devastated the Mississippi coast in August 2005, and its lessons — about levees, evacuation, insurance and the fragility of coastal communities — were studied intently along Mobile Bay, where geography exposes the city to the same Gulf. Four years on, the recovery on the Mississippi Gulf Coast remained incomplete, and the question of whether Mobile had absorbed the lessons was an open one for planners, emergency managers and residents alike.
The cultural half of Howard’s warning is the half most often left unsaid in preparedness planning. A region’s culture — its music, food, dialects, festivals and family traditions — is as exposed to a catastrophic storm as its buildings, and rebuilding it receives a fraction of the attention and funding that infrastructure commands. Howard’s argument is that keeping Gulf Coast culture alive is itself a form of recovery work, the thing that makes a rebuilt place the same place, and that Mobile, with its centuries of accumulated tradition, has as much at stake as any city on the Gulf.
For a novelist whose work is rooted in the region’s memory — one book excavating a trauma the city lived through, another imagining the childhood of a Montgomery-born legend — that sense of stewardship is the through line. The stories of the Gulf Coast, Howard suggests, survive only if the people who live them keep telling them, and his decision to tell them from Mobile is his own contribution to that work.