A Yonder Piece From Here

                                                     Making sorghum syrup In researching this novel, it didn't come as such a surprise that most women in the early 20th century were saddled with an inordinate amount of often dirty, strenuous, and downright dangerous labor.  Women worked with chemicals like lye and boric acid, handled open laundry fires and sizzling stoves (while wearing dresses too easily caught in the flames), hauled water and lifted huge sacks of flour and meal, handled raw meat, and were constantly threatened by snakes, scorpions, and other critters as the worked in their           fields   and gardens.  Women from the middle and "lower classes" also worked outside the home as seamstresses, servants, and factory attendants.  As Leola pu...

I believe that one carries the shadows,  the dreams,  the fears, and the dragons  of home  under one's skin... --Maya Angelou Two weeks ago, after 20 years away, I returned to Texas.  Last time I was there, in fact, was to bid good-bye to my father's mother, Ruby Jewell Johnson Moyers, aka my grandma, Mimi.  (Whose childhood in Indian Territory I am saving for another book.) My trip this time served a three-fold purpose: To attend a memorial service in east Texas for my aunt, who'd died a few months ago; to introduce my teen-aged daughter (on spring break) to an important piece in our family history*; and to do what I call "open-air research." Even knowing I wouldn't have much time to stop at libraries and museums, at this point in my writing process, I felt a deep need to be where my story had taken root. As we drove from east Texas toward Dallas one day, my daughter and I stopped in the small town of Waxahachie, where N...

When she was about 12, my grandmother's father, aka Papa, lost his arm to a sawmill blade.  I think it was Nana herself who described to me the one detail she remembered from that day: How Papa's coworkers burst into their house and heaved his bloody body onto their kitchen table. How the blood dripped everywhere. No kid would forget that moment, and its description stayed with me, too, eventually becoming the inspiration for an Walnut shell basket, whittled by my great-grandfather, Andrew Davidson early scene in my book: It happened too fast even for Leola to drop the half-peeled apple and knife. Too fast for Mama to move away from the window, where she’d gone to see what the racket was: Cart wheels on packed earth and men shouting and boots a-clattering across the porch. Too fast, even, to open the door, for the men from the mill kicked it in themselves, Dell Meeker and Ralph Newsom hefting Papa’s body onto the kitchen table, scattering the beans Mama’d ...

11-yr-old cotton picker, 1911 Growing up, I spent many summers and holidays on my grandparents' farm in northeast Texas.  Nana and PawPaw Joe's house, built by his grandfather, was surrounded by cotton fields.  Cotton was King in the south at one time, and still was an important crop when I was a child. I remember walking through the fields, the black earth crunching beneath my feet, "petting" the fluffy cotton sticking out of the prickly bolls, even taking some plants back home to New York for show-and-tell. PawPaw Joe's family had owned land in Blacklands Texas for a long time. They were far from rich, but they weren't "dirt poor," either.  They had plenty of that rich black earth to go around. Nana, on the other hand, endured serious financial hardship into her young womanhood. Though her father, Thomas, was a teacher, it wasn't a well-paying field, to begin with, and schools were usually closed through much of harvest season--which...

If you were Caucasian and lived in the South c. 1919, you were probably a white supremacist.  How could you not be? From your birth, you would've absorbed the messages, played out in the very routine of daily life, that you were better for the accident of being born a particular race, one assigned a mythic claim to higher intelligence, heroism, and all-around Best in Show.  ( Mythic applying as well to categories of "race" itself, proven by the very racially-complex results of my own DNA test.) Popular song from 1899,  capitalizing on the longstanding "humor" of black children  as "alligator bait." Now that I'm writing the novel only from Leola's POV, I've realized this story can't be told unless bigotry plays a major role. It certainly did in the lives of all four of my grandparents, and their parents before them. As an adolescent, my father's father attended a famous lynching in Paris, Texas, during which whit...