There is no such thing as historical fiction, at least not from the standpoint of the stories being real. It is better to think of the genre as real events described in a less staid or stiff manner. This is certainly the case with two historical fiction novels that deal with segregation in the US in the 1920’s. Wild Women and the Blues and The Paradox Hotel share one big thing in common; The world the characters live in is anything but fiction. In fact, places, main events, and many documents are easily looked up to check their authenticity. The Paradox Hotel in Portland, Oregon was a real place and its use as living quarters for African-Americans, to the point of exclusion in other parts of the city, is accurate. Easily confirmed are the various local statutes and newspaper quotes that begin each chapter and show how unwelcome people of color were in the state, from the founding of the Oregon constitution, through emancipation, and into the 20th century.

Wild Women is set in the Southside of Chicago in the 1920’s. The jazz club Dreamland, the showgirls, the competition with the Harlem Renaissance, even the film maker mentioned and the shows at Dreamland are all historically accurate. The Great Migration and how fluid some of the movement between the deep south and cities in the north was also very real, as was the overt racism of the north, a Jim Crow setting without the name.
For some readers the systematic racism of the country is easier to understand through these pieces of fiction than reading an historical narrative. The characters are an amalgamation created by research from the writers and other experiences and stories they were exposed to. While the names of the main characters are definitely not real, the experiences they have are representative of the time period.