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Go shoppingMelissa Katsoulis’s book Telling Tales explores literary hoaxes from before Christ to the modern day, taking in such celebrated fakers and fakes as Thomas Chatterton, Ern Malley, the Hitler Diaries and James Frey. The following extract deals with “Margaret B. Jones”, a mixed-race foster child from the wrong side of the tracks who penetrated the heart of one of L.A.’s most notorious gangs. Or did she?
If the LA gang memoir Love and Consequences had been for real, it would have been a very significant book indeed. For the first time, a mainstream publisher would be enabling a female gun-runner and drug dealer for the notorious Bloods to tell her story. At times, Margaret B. Jones’s memoir of growing up a hustler was almost too painful to read: it told of how she, a half Native-American, half-white child from a very poor family had been removed from her parents as a five-year-old when she had turned up to school bleeding from sexual wounds. Then, under the auspices of her overworked foster mother ‘Big Mom’ in South Central LA, she had fallen into the gang culture, seeing it as a way to gain money and respect in a fractured and abusive community. In interviews prior to the release of her book, Jones told – in an African-American lilt, and peppering her speech with words like ‘homies’ – that ‘the first thing I did when I started making drug money was buy myself a burial plot’. She also spoke movingly of her fosterbrothers Terrell and Taye who had also fallen into the thug life.
As soon as review copies were distributed, America’s literary press began heaping praise on the brave young writer who was risking serious retributions by exposing the intricacies of gang life. The Oprah Winfrey machine got behind the book too, praising it in O Magazine as ‘a startlingly tender memoir’; the New York Times called it ‘humane and deeply affecting’ and Entertainment Weekly recommended it as a ‘powerful story of resilience’. This was exactly the response the book’s publishers, Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin, had anticipated, and it seemed that the first print run of 19,000 copies had not been so ambitious after all.
Jones’s editor, Sarah McGrath, had been working on the manuscript with its damaged young author for three years before its eventual publication in February 2008, initially having been approached by the agent Faye Bender while she was working at Simon & Schuster. McGrath was so enamoured of the plucky young Margaret that when she moved to Penguin she arranged for Jones’ contract to be transferred with her, so the two women could continue working together. Throughout this period, Jones consistently impressed her editor with her desire to get her story out at all costs, and to communicate not only the pain and danger but the unbreakable bonds forged in the crucible of gang warfare. ‘She would talk about how she didn’t have any money or heat,’ recalled McGrath, who, along with her colleagues at the publishing house ‘felt such sympathy for her’. Their sympathy was augmented by the fact that Jones was a single mother, striving to make a better life for her young daughter than that which she had endured. And when the time came to crank up the publicity machine in the months leading up to Love and Consequences’ release date, affecting photographs of the pretty, brunette author were distributed to journalists.
Other pictures were made available to the press too, such as the one of Jones with straightened hair, hoop earrings and tight white t-shirt, sitting on a wall in a rough area, every bit the care-worn homegirl; and of her holding up a bandana in the blood-red hues of the gang with which she was affiliated. But it was an image of her posing with her young daughter, eight-year-old Rya, which would bring about her abrupt fall from grace. When the picture was published in the New York Times it was immediately spotted by a woman called Cyndi Hoffman, who recognized the faces in the picture. She recognized them because they belonged to her sister and niece. And far from being a juvenile gangbanger from the streets of South Central, her sister was the privileged daughter of wealthy, loving, white parents who had raised her in a smart district of the San Fernando Valley.
She was not called Margaret B. Jones, but Margaret ‘Peggy’ Seltzer. And instead of having learnt about the world in crack-houses and stolen cars, she had been educated at the exclusive Campbell Hall, an Episcopalian private school in North Hollywood. Hoffman told all this to McGrath at Riverhead Books in a phone-call she felt duty bound to make as soon as she realized what he sister was doing.
McGrath was astounded. Having been outed by her own flesh and blood, there was nothing much Seltzer, now living in Oregon, could do. The media were chasing her for a statement, but initially had to make do with some words from her mother, whose defence of her apparently well-meaning daughter turned on her having been caught up in the drama of other people’s lives.
Eventually, a tearful and apologetic Seltzer herself agreed to talk to the press in a telephone interview in which she explained that during her years working in the voluntary sector to help combat the evils of gang violence, she had collected and in some way assimilated the experiences of her friends on the street.
Seltzer’s unmasking came just days before she was due to embark on a publicity tour to promote Love and Consequences to readers all over America. The tour was hastily cancelled, the 19,000 copies of the book were recalled, and Penguin’s imprint Riverhead was left not only with egg on its face but with a genuinely hurt editor. There was no way a book so explicitly autobiographical could be quietly re-issued as fiction, and there is no way certain members of the African American community will ever forgive this poor little rich girl for aping their language, lives and stories and very nearly getting away with it. However good her intentions might have been.
Extracted from Telling Tales by Melissa Katsoulis, published by Constable.
Melissa Katsoulis is a journalist and writer. She has written for the Times, where she also worked on the books desk, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Tablet, and Ham & High. She lives in London.
