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The Story Behind the Story |
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The Nightingale's Song | Seen By Moonlight | Work-in-Progress |
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| Coming Jan. 2004: Seen By Moonlight
Pre-Order Seen By Moonlight
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One of the most frequently asked questions I get is "why do you write about the Civil War era and Reconstruction?" History, as taught in schools, is too often bone-dry texts of dates and treaties and battles, all of it somewhere back then, and most of it seemingly irrelevant to an eight-year old, or a sixteen-year old. But when you hear chronicles of back then, told to you by a relative who was either there, or who heard the stories from their parents, then back then becomes placed in a family context and it is no longer irrelevant. I came into my love of the South easily and naturally. I know her faults and her beauties which gives depth to my love of region and country. The 1960s saw the Civil War Centennial —a Big Deal in Virginia, where I lived at the time; they were also the explosive years of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war protests of Viet Nam, and I was at that age of poised-upon-adulthood where one is seeking answers to all the big questions. How to reconcile those stories of chivalry and glory and Southern honor that I'd heard through my childhood with the on-going racial problems of this nation and the graphic pictures of men at war that appeared nightly on the news became one of those big questions—one that still intrigues me. My Southern-based historicals are love stories, but I wanted the love story to unfold in a society that was complicated and complex, where racism and prejudice existed and was an integral part of my characters' lives in some form or another. A society where hard moral choices have to be made, no matter the ethnic background of the character, and those choices have consequences that affect both the plot and the character. My maternal grandparents married in 1917 and set up housekeeping in Northern Virginia. He was Roman Catholic. She was of a line that could be traced back to the 1600s--old families, some of whom qualified as FFV. However, her mother had married, post CW, a second-generation German with the surname Einstein. The combination of Roman Catholicism and a Jewish surname was too much for the local Klan clavern. My grandparents woke up one morning to a typical KKK warning: a cross on their front yard. Gordon and Maggie of TNS are pure fiction, but I wanted to do a post-war story and the Klu Klux Klan was a natural for the plot. Okay, I have to admit GONE WITH THE WIND and TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD are two of my all-time favorite books--no surprise, I suppose, given what I've written above. I wanted to do a Southern based Civil War story--and was terrified of the idea. How does one follow GWTW? Well, one doesn't. I played around with basing the male protagonist loosely upon my great-grandfather's story ... but it took off on its own and become something else. Royce Kincaid is a fictional character, but his war service is patterned after that of John Singleton Mosby and Turner Ashby. Turner Ashby was killed in 1862. Colonel Mosby was wounded several times, but he survived the fighting, disbanded his troops about ten days after Appomattox and took off to the mountains while he negotiated with Washington for a parole rather than the arrest warrant that hung over his head. Even after he achieved his parole, he was arrested several times. His wife made a personal visit to General Grant in Washington for an end to the harassment. Mosby took up the practice of law and became a staunch Republican. Many years later, he served in Grant's administration as envoy to Hong Kong. It is possibilities that fascinate a writer of fiction. Royce Kincaid's story plays out, not as a mirror of Mosby's, but as a what-if question. What if an officer of a guerilla-style cavalry unit had surrendered his troops instead of disbanding them? Would he have been arrested? Charged with treason? Convicted and hanged? The possibilities were real--and how would those possibilities have affected the woman who loved him? The concurrent problem I faced with this book--one that kept me static for a long time--was how to be true to the African-American experience during those tumultuous years. When I finally decided that the only way to do it was to try to write something, hoping I could fix it if it felt wrong, Clarence walked onto the page as a Presence. His story needed to be told, and he deserved a love interest of his own. Of all the characters I've created so far in my books, the slave woman Patsy was the most difficult, and the one of whom I think I am most proud. She's a strong woman; one I'd love to have as a best friend. I like to believe that in the alternate universe where fictional characters reside, Annabelle Kincaid and Patsy Hallston are best friends. By the time I reached the conclusion of Seen By Moonlight, I was convinced that the secondary characters, John DeShields and Olivia Sherwood were the stuff of a great love affair. I wanted to tell their story, but John informed me that he was going to Mexico and Olivia wasn't invited. I'm well into this book, but I still don't know why John took of for Mexico, although I do know why he came back. The question of the moment is: will Olivia forgive him for abandoning her? |
While growing up in my grandparents’ house in Northern Virginia, this picture hung in a place of honor in the living room. There was much consternation among the great-aunts who visited frequently (to gaze at the photo, I suspect) that ‘Papa” had been so proud to own a new overcoat in the closing days of The War Between the States that he wore it for the studio portrait and thereby, covered too much of his Confederate gray uniform.
When Colonel Mosby visited the Thomson family long years after Appomattox, he may have patted my grandfather on the head; the Colonel and his lieutenant may even have shared a few war stories after dinner with the passel of Thomson children sitting on the floor at their feet. I doubt those children heard anything more than the amusing tales: old soldiers talk to other old soldiers, they don’t share the truth with those who have not been there. So what’s a writer to do? I know something of Ned Thomson's war service and it has been fairly easy to research and corroborate many of his exploits. I know his brother, George, was attending college in the North when war broke out and chose to enlist in the Union cause. I know Ned went to Mexico after the war--but nobody ever told any stories about why he went there, or what brought him back to Virginia, or even when he returned to his home state. Both the oral chronicles and historical record remain silent on the years between 1865 and 1876, when Edward Thomson married Lucy Green. They raised a family of eleven children; my grandfather was their ninth child. As a writer, I'm
curious. If I wrote factual history texts, I'd be up the creek with
the dearth of material for the silent years and overwhelmed by the amount
of material available for the war years. But I write fictional love
stories within a historical context, and the greatest question for a
fiction writer is 'what if?' |
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