Spanning across multiple generations, follows the family of an enslaved African girl, Yetunde, who has made a great sacrifice in fear of what awaits her in the New World. The deal that Yetunde makes is a deal that touches her family for generations to come, calling the Devil to them in their greatest time of need. Rickey Fayne’s debut is an unforgettable tale, filled with rich tradition and Black history that strengthens the central theme of redemption.
Nicole Ransome: The Devil Three Times is your authorial debut. It follows multiple generations of a Black family in Tennessee being visited by the devil, who’s looking for redemption. Where did you draw inspiration for your story from?
Rickey Fayne: I’ve always loved big, intergenerational epics. Seeing how the events in one generation affect their descendants has always interested me, so I knew early on that I wanted to follow one family over time. As for the Devil, I’d been working on the novel for a little over a year when, on a whim, I reread some of Zora Neale Hurston’s folklore and found a brief anecdote about a man who tears his shirt on a fence post and blames the Devil for it. The Devil, after overhearing this, begins to cry and tells the man through his tears that half the things people blame him for aren’t his fault. At first, the Devil was only going to appear in one character’s story, but as I was drafting other chapters, he started popping up in other places. So I decided to try and tell his story.
What was the intention behind setting the plot around the redemption arc of this specific family and also the Devil himself?
When I was a kid, my great-uncle would joke about how mean my grandfather used to be. I couldn’t believe this, because to me, my grandfather was the nicest, quietest man in the world. I couldn’t ever remember him raising his voice to another person—to a wayward hog, yes, but never to another person. But then I asked around and heard all these stories about things he used to do before he gave up drinking. Ever since then, I’ve been curious about how and why people decide to change. So, in a lot of ways, writing this novel was me imagining what this kind of transformation would look like at different points in time.
The story follows a family over the span of 175 years. When writing this story, was there a character whose background you found the most compelling?
Probably the Devil. Growing up in the church the way I did, I was taught that there was only one way to interpret his story. I haven’t been to church in a long time but, even still, when I first started to think of the Devil as a sympathetic figure, it felt a little, I don’t know, dangerous. But once I pushed that, it really opened things up for the other members of the Laurent family. There’s something about finding a way to identify with the most maligned figure in Western culture that allows you to look at everyone’s actions with a little more compassion. If there’s hope for the Devil, there’s hope for everyone. When I was kid and I first learned about segregation, it was taught to me in a way that made it seem far removed from my own experience. It was history, ancient history, that we were well past. But then my dad told me a story about accidentally cutting the tip of his finger off in shop class and being rushed to a doctor—only to be denied care because he used the “white” entrance. And later my grandmother told me that her parents were sharecroppers and that her grandparents were enslaved. My hope is that, by following one family from slavery to the present, readers will understand that we’re not as far away in time from these points in history as we would like to believe.
Debut author Rickey Fayne unpacks the intricacies of redemption, generational trauma, and more
"The Devil Three Times" explores the redemptive arc of the Devil as he attempts to act as a guardian angel to a Black family.
