"Flournoy's characters feel authentic because they are complicated and messy, but also because they speak like real people. Sometimes — as when one of the characters, David, is talking to his mother's neighbor, who lives on the street on the East Side where the Turners grew up, and says "I seen Troy Turner a couple weeks ago" — they speak in AAVE, or African-American Vernacular English. And sometimes — as when David is talking to nearly anyone else — they don't. And here is where Flournoy has become a quiet revolutionary of craft, because this is not the way you're supposed to do things in literature: If a character drops his G's at the end of gerunds, he always drops his G's at the end of gerunds; there's no going back and forth.
"That's not how people talk though," Flournoy says. "I think part of the reason it feels normal is because it's a book in which every single black person has their own sort of relationship with AAVE. Some people use it all the time, some people use it less of the time. But it really just comes down to instinct. It has to do with what you imagine a character sounds like. When Lelah talks to [her daughter] Brianne, she does not really employ AAVE, because she wants Brianne to go out in the world and not employ AAVE. Which in my very liberal, I guess, opinion, you're giving Brianne a handicap. She won't feel comfortable communicating in other spaces. I'm very happy I know how to code switch because even though some people may say that I don't always sound right doing it, I can communicate in a lot of spaces."...
Flournoy is matter-of-fact about working within the system. "I've had wonderful experiences, but that doesn't mean that it was not a host of white women. I just got the right mix of them who cared, who didn't want to put me in a box. But if the deck had been shuffled any other way something else might have happened.""
https://www.buzzfeed.com/doree/america-is-ready-for-angela-flournoy?utm_term=.xsD8g7Vld#.fa7YDNnR9
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