photograph by andrea fenise
Avery Cunningham
Avery Cunningham has been a storyteller for as long as she can remember. Longer, actually; she has to take her mother’s word that she has been telling stories since she could string together a few words.
Cunningham’s mother tells the story of how her daughter “used to stand on this kitchen stool and just orate to invisible people, and tell these very long Greek tragedy-esque stories to no one in particular,” says Cunningham, Memphis-based author of the new novel The Mayor of Maxwell Street (Hyperion Avenue).
“That was the first time I really understood that these stories, these ideas, these worlds I was building could exist outside of myself,” she says. “Pretty much from that moment I decided that this was something I wanted to do, someone I wanted to be. That’s guided my personal, professional, career trajectory ever since.”
So she’s reached this point, with a debut novel on bookstore shelves and on Book-of-the-Month lists. Among the whirlwind of writing, editing, publishing, marketing, social media, media interviews, and more, the author admits that the reality of being a published author almost didn’t feel real at first. Cunningham also wanted to keep up her momentum and continue writing. Her next book hasn’t been officially announced yet, but it’s already in the works.
“This was a reality of the 1920s. This level of antagonization and oppression and the shadow of Jim Crow hung over America. I wanted to shock the reader out of thinking this was going to be a fun romp through Prohibition-era Chicago.” — Avery Cunningham
Before the reader turns their attention toward Cunningham’s bright future, though, The Mayor of Maxwell Street deserves some attention. The novel takes place in Prohibition-era Chicago, in 1921, and follows wealthy young debutante Nelly Sawyer, whose familial connections make her the star of Chicago’s Black society. Courageous and ambitious, Nelly has also been working undercover as an investigative journalist, and her editor assigns her the unenviable challenge of unmasking Chicago’s vice lord, the so-called “Mayor of Maxwell Street.”
Nelly’s path eventually crosses with that of Jay Shorey, a young man whose story has taken him from the South to Chicago’s swankiest speakeasy.
Cunningham deftly balances the interplay between subgenres in the novel, crafting a narrative that at times subverts expectations, even as it sometimes rewards them. The Mayor of Maxwell Street is a work of historical fiction, but it is just as much a love story, even as it is also a mystery and an examination of the nation’s history. For a debut author, for any author, it’s the literary equivalent of riding a unicycle across a highwire while juggling chainsaws. Somehow, Cunningham pulls off this trapeze act, and the reader is all the luckier for it.
With its smattering of subgenres and its trips from the peaks of glitz and glamor to the lowest valleys of grit, The Mayor of Maxwell Street is a prime example of the warning not to judge a book by its cover. That was by design, Cunningham says. The book’s cover jacket promises the decadence of the 1920s, but the book’s prologue opens on mold, termites, and decay in White Pine, Alabama. There, young Jay Shorey (or Jimmy, as he is then known) is confronted with a moment of racial violence that forever changes the trajectory of his life.
The novel’s prologue hits the reader like a splash of cold water. Cunningham says she wanted to make sure the reader was awake, and she succeeded. “I didn’t want his beginning to be shrouded in this wonderful mystery. I wanted the readers to know where he comes from and why,” the author says.
The Alabama scene, though it is far away from Chicago society, makes a perfect opening for The Mayor of Maxwell Street. In Jay’s flight from Alabama to Illinois, the Great Migration is evoked. And the way Jay’s moment of liberation is intertwined with a history of violence reminds the reader that the good and bad of a situation cannot always be easily untangled.
“This was a reality of the 1920s. This level of antagonization and oppression and the shadow of Jim Crow hung over America,” Cunningham says. “I wanted to shock the reader out of thinking this was going to be a fun romp through Prohibition-era Chicago.”
That being said, there is much of what the reader would expect to find from a fun romp through 1920s Chicago, but Cunningham didn’t want to pay a dishonest homage to the romance of the time, which meant she had to make sure to acknowledge the reality. To deny the truth of racial violence would be to write a fantasy instead of writing authentically.
Cunningham’s writing, both the story and her powerful prose, is authentic. She succeeds in crafting an entertaining piece of fiction, and in examining a pivotal moment in American history. “When you feel like you’re on the edge of something greater than yourself,” Cunningham says, “these moments where everything changes for almost everyone very instantly, moments of history that feel like they’re on the cusp of something — those are the ones I’m drawn to.”
