No Crystal Stair (40 page)

THE AUTHOR

L
ike Ann Elizabeth Carter, Eva Rutland grew up in a middle-class black family in segregated Atlanta, Georgia, and moved west when the United States Air Force transferred her husband to California in 1952, where she lives to this day. Bill Rutland, the inspiration for
No Crystal Stair's
hero Robert Metcalf, began his civilian career at the all-black Tuskegee Army Air Field during the Second World War. Eva and Bill married in 1943, raised four children, and remained together until Bill's death in 2005.

Eva Rutland began her writing career in the late 1940s with articles about her children that appeared in
Ladies' Home ,journal, Woman's Day, and Redbook.
In 1964, she compiled these stories into a memoir entitled
The Trouble with Being a Mama.
It was republished in 2007 under a new title, When We Were
Colored: a Mother's Story.

Eva, now over 90 years old, hates when her family advertises her age because, as she says, “I'm trying to pass for thirty-five and get me a young boyfriend.” She went blind at age fifty but continues to write with the aid of a voice synthesizer on her computer. She has published more than twenty novels. Most of her books are Harlequin romances, and she misses her husband because “he gave me my best lines.”