Nuremberg, Mississippi follows a Black tradesman and the white attorney who represents him as they challenge a legal system whose rules appear neutral on paper but produce injustice with ruthless consistency. Why did you choose to focus on the quieter mechanisms of Jim Crow rather than primarily on its most overt violence?

The overt violence of Jim Crow is well documented, and it should be. But I was interested in something that can be more difficult to recognize: the way injustice becomes routine.

A system does not have to obviously unjust in order to produce unjust results. Sometimes the language is neutral. The paperwork is correct. Everyone follows procedure. Each individual decision can even appear defensible when viewed by itself, yet when you step back, the outcomes are remarkably consistent.

That is what interested me as a storyteller. In the novel, the State’s power is often exercised through permits, curfews, employment, administrative discretion and delay. Henry can lose his livelihood without anyone explicitly saying, “We are doing this because you are Black.” As the novel puts it, the injury is “cumulative, ordinary,” which is precisely what can make it difficult to see.

That also reflects something I wrote about in the Author’s Note. I grew up hearing generational conversations — and sometimes experiencing the silences surrounding them — about the ways law could shape everyday life without publicizing what it was doing. Some rules were written, while others were simply expected to be understood.

The most frightening system isn’t necessarily the one that constantly announces its cruelty. Sometimes it is the one that can produce cruelty while allowing everyone participating in it to believe they are simply doing their jobs.

Henry understands from the beginning that challenging the system may endanger his livelihood and family. How did you develop this particular kind of courage?

Henry’s personality is based on my father’s. He isn’t fearless, and he isn’t looking to become a martyr. He has a wife, children, a business and responsibilities. He understands exactly what can be taken from him.

That is what makes his courage meaningful.

Henry’s courage is primarily a refusal to disappear. There is a moment early in the novel when officials offer him an easier path: comply, relocate and come back later. Instead, he insists that the rules mean what they actually say. The retaliation that follows is bureaucratic rather than spectacular — his permit is suspended, work disappears, equipment access is lost and credit dries up. Yet he still refuses to sign.

Later he explains his decision very simply: “I chose not to disappear quietly.”

That sentence probably comes closest to defining Henry for me.

His courage isn’t based on believing he will win. It’s based on reaching the point where living with the wrong becomes more difficult than accepting the consequences of confronting it.

I think history contains many more Henry Logans than we know — ordinary people who never became famous but decided there was one thing they would no longer pretend not to see.

One of the book’s central questions is whether “I was following the rules” can ever be a sufficient moral defense. How would you answer that question personally?

Following rules may explain someone’s actions. It does not necessarily justify them.

That distinction is really the bridge between Nuremberg and Mississippi in the novel — or Nuremberg and America. The principle that fascinated me about the Nuremberg trials was the rejection of the idea that obedience itself absolves responsibility. My question became: What happens when we apply that principle not only to history’s most obvious atrocities, but to ordinary institutions and ordinary people?

That is much more uncomfortable.

Most people don’t think of themselves as participating in injustice. They think they’re processing paperwork, enforcing policy, applying precedent or doing what their profession requires. In Nuremberg, Mississippi, that is exactly how the machinery works. The people within it can sincerely believe they are behaving professionally while collectively producing an outcome none of them wants to claim responsibility for.

The novel eventually describes systems as being animated by people who believe that compliance absolves them of authorship.

I don’t believe it does.

Rules are necessary to an ordered society, but conscience cannot be outsourced to them. At some point each of us remains responsible for asking not only, “Am I permitted to do this?” but also, “Is this right?”

The novel continues beyond the court’s judgment to examine what happens afterward. Why was it important not to treat a legal decision as the end of the story?

Because court cases end much more neatly than consequences do.

I deliberately called the final section of the novel “Aftermath.” The judgment occurs in Chapter 29, but the book continues for more than a dozen chapters after that. That structure was important to me because I didn’t want the courtroom to become a false finish line.

Henry goes home after the ruling and realizes that virtually nothing about his daily life has changed. There is no apology, no restoration and no instruction that the practices he challenged must stop. If he walks outside after dark, the same rules can still find him. What has changed is that something previously unnamed has finally been made visible in the legal record.

And that raises another question: What is the value of making injustice visible if the people and institutions responsible for addressing it simply move on?

The aftermath also allowed me to explore consequences that no judicial opinion could remedy — what the case did to Henry, Helen and their children, and what Silas had to do with the knowledge he acquired. Henry’s fate doesn’t neatly settle those questions. In some ways, it transfers them to the next generation.

That is one of the larger ideas behind the novel. Justice and remedy are not necessarily the same thing. A court can close a case. A clerk can file the paperwork. An appeal period can expire.

But history doesn’t necessarily close the file when the legal system does.

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