A Yonder Piece From Here

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...

     I was a teenager when my grandmother, aka "Nana," began to develop dementia.  She'd been a sweet, proud, incredibly resourceful woman, and it was hard--especially as an adolescent-- to deal with her frequent forgetfulness and odd behaviors.  But what really made an impression on me was they way she would suddenly stare into an empty corner, crying out for her long-lost father: Papa!  Come back, Papa!  Please!        These Ghost Papa episodes brought to light a family history I hadn't known: The story of my grandmother's difficult coming-of-age in rural east Texas in the early 1900s, one that involved financial and physical hardship, the Spanish Influenza epidemic, and the disappearance of her beloved father when his family needed him most.  It's a story not only of loss, but a betrayal that still traumatized my grandmother--and left its mark on me, too.      There's the old adage, ...