On May 9, 2024 I gave a book talk at the Hale County Library in Greensboro, Alabama about my 2 most recently-published books, White on Black: Thinking about Race in a Small Alabama Community and Remembering My Forebears: The Turbervilles of Greensboro and the Mays of Hollow Square and Sawyerville, Hale County, Alabama. I threw in mention of my forthcoming book Sawyerville, Alabama, and the Earlier Communities of Erie and Hollow Square: History and Reminiscence, for I view each of these books as part of a trilogy.
The title for my talk was Why I Write. I had composed a neat outline of what I wanted to say and printed it out in large type to keep me on course. And guess what, that train leapt off the tracks shortly after I began. I don’t think I embarrassed myself and I do think the audience was entertained. Or so I hope.
The title for my talk was Why I Write. I had composed a neat outline of what I wanted to say and printed it out in large type to keep me on course. And guess what, that train leapt off the tracks shortly after I began. I don’t think I embarrassed myself and I do think the audience was entertained. Or so I hope.
in But having that outline, why not write down the speech I sort of meant to give? I can always use that in the future, if such happens again.
So why do I write?
How often have you thought, “Why didn’t I ask Grandmama that?” Or your father, or your great-aunt, or your elderly cousin. In a way I am motivated to write to answer the kinds of questions that years from now folks might wish that they had asked me. That is a major reason that I tell the bad stuff as well as the good stuff, for too often it is the bad stuff that is lost and that later folks wish they knew. Did that uncle kill himself or was it accident or murder? How many mixed-race kin do we have, and how did that come about? Did you know about my older sister who died when she was born?
A by-product of this is that remembering and writing it down makes me remember more, and somehow that too is a good thing.
A related matter. In my White on Black book in the chapter entitled “Witnessing” I refer to the Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in which a person going to a wedding is stopped by a wild-eyed man, the mariner of the title, and told a story. The mariner is compelled to recount his tale, and the wedding guest is compelled to listen. Both in their own way are witnessing. The mariner himself is witnessing in 2 senses of the word: he has seen events and now he must relate them.
I have experienced, seen, heard certain things during my life. I feel that I must bear witness to all that I can, to tell some future party about it. I am compelled.
You have witnesses at trials. They tell what they saw or know. But it is a truism that witness testimony is unreliable. Memory is tricky. We think we remember something, but what we remember is the last time we remembered the event. A copy of a copy of a copy, with the possibility of errors compounded along the way. That is why lawyers go over a witness’s testimony many times before the trial, to try to shape that testimony to the best advantage of the client.
I have strong memories that I believe are factual, but I find myself wondering whether what I recall is a dream or an embroidery from what I heard way back when.
Here’s an example. When I was in my early teens my father took me aside and told me that his mother’s brother (never uncle, never named) was a deaf-and-dumb man who had been placed by the family in the care of a Black woman. They lived together on the family farm, and with her he fathered several children. After his death the mother and the children moved to a city up north. This was serious. This was gospel. But it was not the true story. A newspaper account from 1905 reports that Walter Kinnaird, the only one of my grandmother’s brothers who lived to adulthood, had been shot and killed at the age of 35 by the 73-year-old Allan Wilson, a deaf-and-dumb man on whose farm Walter lived. Great-Uncle Walter lived for 4 days before expiring and gave detailed testimony to the authorities about the incident but claimed not to know why he had been shot.
I believe that my father believed that what he told me was true. But in 1905 he would have been 6 or 7 years old. He likely heard whispers and bits and pieces and put together in his mind what he thought was true. Questions abound. Did Uncle Walter live with a Black woman with whom he had children? Or did the deaf-and-dumb Allan have the Black mistress and children? Why did Walter live on Wilson’s farm? What was the motive for the shooting? Was the Black woman part of that motivation? The novelist at work in me can’t help but toy with the incident and what is not known.
I am convinced that the greater truth that my father wished to impart was that I had Black relatives. He thought I should know that. It was more convenient to use an old story to do so, for I suspect that he did not want me to know that I had a Black first cousin who was a regular customer in his store who had lots of kids. Push the incident back in time and let the offspring thereof be far away.
So why do I write?
How often have you thought, “Why didn’t I ask Grandmama that?” Or your father, or your great-aunt, or your elderly cousin. In a way I am motivated to write to answer the kinds of questions that years from now folks might wish that they had asked me. That is a major reason that I tell the bad stuff as well as the good stuff, for too often it is the bad stuff that is lost and that later folks wish they knew. Did that uncle kill himself or was it accident or murder? How many mixed-race kin do we have, and how did that come about? Did you know about my older sister who died when she was born?
A by-product of this is that remembering and writing it down makes me remember more, and somehow that too is a good thing.
A related matter. In my White on Black book in the chapter entitled “Witnessing” I refer to the Coleridge poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in which a person going to a wedding is stopped by a wild-eyed man, the mariner of the title, and told a story. The mariner is compelled to recount his tale, and the wedding guest is compelled to listen. Both in their own way are witnessing. The mariner himself is witnessing in 2 senses of the word: he has seen events and now he must relate them.
I have experienced, seen, heard certain things during my life. I feel that I must bear witness to all that I can, to tell some future party about it. I am compelled.
You have witnesses at trials. They tell what they saw or know. But it is a truism that witness testimony is unreliable. Memory is tricky. We think we remember something, but what we remember is the last time we remembered the event. A copy of a copy of a copy, with the possibility of errors compounded along the way. That is why lawyers go over a witness’s testimony many times before the trial, to try to shape that testimony to the best advantage of the client.
I have strong memories that I believe are factual, but I find myself wondering whether what I recall is a dream or an embroidery from what I heard way back when.
Here’s an example. When I was in my early teens my father took me aside and told me that his mother’s brother (never uncle, never named) was a deaf-and-dumb man who had been placed by the family in the care of a Black woman. They lived together on the family farm, and with her he fathered several children. After his death the mother and the children moved to a city up north. This was serious. This was gospel. But it was not the true story. A newspaper account from 1905 reports that Walter Kinnaird, the only one of my grandmother’s brothers who lived to adulthood, had been shot and killed at the age of 35 by the 73-year-old Allan Wilson, a deaf-and-dumb man on whose farm Walter lived. Great-Uncle Walter lived for 4 days before expiring and gave detailed testimony to the authorities about the incident but claimed not to know why he had been shot.
I believe that my father believed that what he told me was true. But in 1905 he would have been 6 or 7 years old. He likely heard whispers and bits and pieces and put together in his mind what he thought was true. Questions abound. Did Uncle Walter live with a Black woman with whom he had children? Or did the deaf-and-dumb Allan have the Black mistress and children? Why did Walter live on Wilson’s farm? What was the motive for the shooting? Was the Black woman part of that motivation? The novelist at work in me can’t help but toy with the incident and what is not known.
I am convinced that the greater truth that my father wished to impart was that I had Black relatives. He thought I should know that. It was more convenient to use an old story to do so, for I suspect that he did not want me to know that I had a Black first cousin who was a regular customer in his store who had lots of kids. Push the incident back in time and let the offspring thereof be far away.
| But I want to bear witness to Ed Johnson and his children. Now that we know for certain his parentage many of us May cousins have embraced his children. We appreciate the opportunity to do so and we appreciate how well so many of them have done in life. So, I witnessed, and I bear witness. A third reason I write is for the mental challenge of composing a work and the sentences and paragraphs within. Old folks like me are supposed to use their minds, and I find this more satisfactory than solitaire and word games at my computer. After I compose and |  |
edit a work (and editing is a long process complicated by my lazy fingers at the keyboard, my macular degeneration, and the thinning of my retina), I then face the challenge entering it in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Yes, you can purchase assistance in that, including the editing and the cover preparation, but doing so myself is part of the challenge that is useful for my aging brain. And cheaper.
And the fourth reason is the pleasure that I get out of the whole process. Oddly, the writing and editing and publishing process becomes something like a drug: I’m hooked. And that reminds me of that Ancient Mariner referenced above. Sometimes I compose a sentence or even a paragraph or come up with an image or connection that gives me particular pleasure.
What is not significant is the financial or critical success of this work. It is a hobby, really, something I do for myself. It is strangely liberating to write what I want without having to please anyone else or earn money from my labors. I am fortunate that although my monthly income is modest, I am able to live modestly within those means and still have a bit left over to invest and don’t have to rely on my writing for financial support.
But it does make me happy when the occasional reader reports pleasure in the work. That is money in my emotional bank. A few friends from my New York years seem to take particular pleasure, and several of my kin claim to do so as well. I am especially happy when Black friends like my work, for often I deal with material not pleasant to them.
In the family memoir I wrote, “You’ve all heard the old expression ‘warts and all.’ Well, this is not quite that. Too much emphasis on the warts and you don’t notice the good stuff. But I have not avoided the warts entirely, and I believe my examination of them is restrained and judicious. I hope that I am ending up with a fairly decent and fairly honest set of pictures of the Turbervilles and the Mays without being cruel or offensive. Certainly my intent has been to be kind.”
Although some may disagree, I believe that I have kept to that intent. Yes, I have told some hard stuff. Most of the time I wrote about my parents, their siblings, and their parents. Usually I avoided discussion of my cousins except in a few cases when I believed the story would be incomplete without such mention. This was especially true in my accounts of Uncle Stephen and Uncle Freeman, but even then most of those I mention are dead. The nice thing about writing about the dead is that they can’t shoot you!
What the dead do is haunt you. I have been haunted by my kin all my life. It interests me that in writing about some of these people I find that thinking about them and setting down what I remember about them has given me greater empathy for them, more than I ever thought I would have. Take the first cousin whom my mother described as “crazy and mean with it.” I avoided her from the time I moved home in 1989 until her death. Yet thinking about her life, her parents and their problems with alcoholism and religious extremism, the mental and physical abuse she suffered during her marriage, I find myself not so much forgiving her but at least understanding her a bit better. Sympathy seeps in. Even for her last-born son who shot and killed his 2 teenage sons and then himself I find just the tiniest touch of empathy.
Thinking back I find that there is really only one person in the family account whom I consider a monster, for I believe the woes described just above trace back to her. Maybe one day I will be a better person and find empathy for her as well. We’ll see. Or at least I will
And the fourth reason is the pleasure that I get out of the whole process. Oddly, the writing and editing and publishing process becomes something like a drug: I’m hooked. And that reminds me of that Ancient Mariner referenced above. Sometimes I compose a sentence or even a paragraph or come up with an image or connection that gives me particular pleasure.
What is not significant is the financial or critical success of this work. It is a hobby, really, something I do for myself. It is strangely liberating to write what I want without having to please anyone else or earn money from my labors. I am fortunate that although my monthly income is modest, I am able to live modestly within those means and still have a bit left over to invest and don’t have to rely on my writing for financial support.
But it does make me happy when the occasional reader reports pleasure in the work. That is money in my emotional bank. A few friends from my New York years seem to take particular pleasure, and several of my kin claim to do so as well. I am especially happy when Black friends like my work, for often I deal with material not pleasant to them.
In the family memoir I wrote, “You’ve all heard the old expression ‘warts and all.’ Well, this is not quite that. Too much emphasis on the warts and you don’t notice the good stuff. But I have not avoided the warts entirely, and I believe my examination of them is restrained and judicious. I hope that I am ending up with a fairly decent and fairly honest set of pictures of the Turbervilles and the Mays without being cruel or offensive. Certainly my intent has been to be kind.”
Although some may disagree, I believe that I have kept to that intent. Yes, I have told some hard stuff. Most of the time I wrote about my parents, their siblings, and their parents. Usually I avoided discussion of my cousins except in a few cases when I believed the story would be incomplete without such mention. This was especially true in my accounts of Uncle Stephen and Uncle Freeman, but even then most of those I mention are dead. The nice thing about writing about the dead is that they can’t shoot you!
What the dead do is haunt you. I have been haunted by my kin all my life. It interests me that in writing about some of these people I find that thinking about them and setting down what I remember about them has given me greater empathy for them, more than I ever thought I would have. Take the first cousin whom my mother described as “crazy and mean with it.” I avoided her from the time I moved home in 1989 until her death. Yet thinking about her life, her parents and their problems with alcoholism and religious extremism, the mental and physical abuse she suffered during her marriage, I find myself not so much forgiving her but at least understanding her a bit better. Sympathy seeps in. Even for her last-born son who shot and killed his 2 teenage sons and then himself I find just the tiniest touch of empathy.
Thinking back I find that there is really only one person in the family account whom I consider a monster, for I believe the woes described just above trace back to her. Maybe one day I will be a better person and find empathy for her as well. We’ll see. Or at least I will
 | My earliest writings, begun when I was 50 and had moved home from New York, were fiction. Siren Song, my first, is based on the old tale I heard as a child about the Erie Mermaid, a strange creature captured from the river and imprisoned by the people of the old town of Erie in the early 1800s. People got sick and died, and the creature was released. But the town itself died from the effects of imprisoning that creature. I had been thinking about the creature ever since I was a child and pondering what it was. In my time of greater leisure I settled upon that tale as the hook for a meditation about love, sex, death, sorrow, mourning, yes, everything including the kitchen sink. Like so many first novelists I threw everything on my mind into it. I look back on it as my bit of juvenilia. But I also look back on it with some pleasure. It served a purpose in my life, and especially in what I have referred to as exercising my grieving muscles before I needed them. There are sentences and even |
paragraphs that I like. I am proud of the way that I dealt with a major secondary character’s death. I like how I show the eruption of a threatening creature from the water from 2 different viewpoints, first from the gaze of those watching, and after a long flashback from the gaze of the creature as it leaps into the air. Frozen moments capturing movement. I like most of Uncle Bart’s journal, which really is the heart of the book. I like the idea behind inserting Bart’s transcriptions of old Waterfolk tales for children in his journal, but I have decided that the execution thereof leaves much to be desired and slows down the narrative. I do like the odd device I use to indicate Waterfolk speech.
And yes, you can create juvenilia when you are in your 50s. I think when you write your first novel you are always a teenager.
And yes, you can create juvenilia when you are in your 50s. I think when you write your first novel you are always a teenager.
| My next novel, A Howling in the Night, was much simpler. This was my attempt at a poetic horror/suspense novel. Basic structure is simple. Two narrators in alternate chapters, and gradually we realize that one of them is the alter ego of the other. The main character is not aware of the other, but the other is very much aware of the main character. This allows me to do things which I think are funny. I assumed that the reader would catch on, but I did make it explicit mid-novel. The werewolf novel meets Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But then that novel is really a werewolf novel, is it not? An interesting thing happened when I reached what at the time I thought would be the mid-point of the novel. I decided that more would be less, and I elected to jump directly to the end. A few more deaths and a few more poetic descriptions seemed unnecessary. I think I was right. Here endeth, at least for now and not counting a couple of short stories, my career in fiction. |  |
I started writing about things I remembered from my youth and my time in New York and my life after returning to Alabama. I wrote about books I had read and movies that I watched. I wrote about family. Some of these I self-published, although several of those earlier works have been withdrawn. Along the way I assembled many these writings into one long chronologic work, a memoir about my family and my life. Then I met Madison Smartt Bell, author/teacher/literary agent. As a writer he is probably best known for his trilogy of novels published between 1995 and 2004 about the Haitian Revolution. He taught creative writing and began acting as a literary agent to help get his students’ work to the attention of publishers. He was accompanying photographer Andrew Moore, noted photographer, on his trip through the Alabama Black Belt taking picture of people and places in that region. His task: compose an essay to accompany the photographs in the published work, Blue Alabama. They heard some of my tales and impressions and were interested in using some of them in the essay. I made the text of that long memoir available to Bell, and in fact he did use some of it.
Bell seemed to like my writing and was willing to act as agent for me, but he suggested that since I was an unknown (well, in the larger world), it would be difficult to get the work published in its entirety. He suggested that I cut out everything except the material involving racial matters. I considered it, tried it, and realized that whittling down was not enough. The material require further writing. A lot more. Eventually that rewrite of this material became White on Black: Thinking about Race in a Small Alabama Community.
Bell seemed to like my writing and was willing to act as agent for me, but he suggested that since I was an unknown (well, in the larger world), it would be difficult to get the work published in its entirety. He suggested that I cut out everything except the material involving racial matters. I considered it, tried it, and realized that whittling down was not enough. The material require further writing. A lot more. Eventually that rewrite of this material became White on Black: Thinking about Race in a Small Alabama Community.
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I extracted the family material from that memoir and other writings and wrote 2 slim volumes, one about the Turberville family of my mother and one about the May family of my father, which I self-published. Along the way I began to realize that really they were one story instead of 2, and I combined and rewrote them, adding more material and photographs, ending up with Remembering My Forebears: The Turbervilles of Greensboro and the Mays of Hollow Square and Sawyerville, Hale County, Alabama.
Why that long subtitle with all those place names? Simple. Having them there meant that I didn’t have to use them in the 7 tags allowed by Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.
Due for publication June 1, 2024 is my slim volume Sawyerville, Alabama, and the Earlier Communities of Erie and Hollow Square: History and Reminiscence. In a way that forms the final volume in what might be called my “Sawyerville Trilogy.” I think I have said pretty much what I want to say about the matters included. At least for now.
Why that long subtitle with all those place names? Simple. Having them there meant that I didn’t have to use them in the 7 tags allowed by Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.
Due for publication June 1, 2024 is my slim volume Sawyerville, Alabama, and the Earlier Communities of Erie and Hollow Square: History and Reminiscence. In a way that forms the final volume in what might be called my “Sawyerville Trilogy.” I think I have said pretty much what I want to say about the matters included. At least for now.
That memoir? I had written it with a certain degree of circumspection, being coy or totally ignoring certain matters. I decided to go back to it and add more of the stuff left out. No, not everything, but a lot more than was there originally. More truth.
Because much of the memoir involved the community of Sawyerville and the Pickens family of Umbria Plantation, I inquired at the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of South Alabama ion Mobile whether they might be interested in a digital copy. I chose them because they already house a major collection of materials on the Pickens family and Umbria. They were pleased to accept it for that reason but also because other aspects of the memoir fell into areas in which they are specializing. I have agreed that after my death it can be made publicly available. It makes me especially happy that my modest work can join that collection because it just so happened that when I was about 15 years old I was at Umbria when those archives were removed from the attic by someone who preserved them.
So what next? Well, there’s this piece. I’ve also got essays started on the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the act of dreaming, and memories of my 2 friends Greg and Bill. I’m big on getting a topic and a paragraph or so and saving to work on later. I think I would like to revise my short story “Bottle Found on Chinkapin Hill” for possible publication, and I’d like to finish a short story about the ghost of an enslaved man who sits on the porch with and chats with a descendant of his enslavers. No, it’s not at all like the famous Dickens ghosts. I am toying with the idea of another story that would involve Mr. Frank, a wandering scissors-sharpener who in the late 1930s turned up at Umbria wishing to sharpen scissors for food and lived there for the next 7 years.
Probably no more novels and no more full-length works like White on Black. My next published work, if at all, will likely be a collection of miscellaneous essays. There’s so much more that I want to write about! Vietnam movies that are not really about Vietnam. The revised version of The Cotton Club, so much better than Francis Coppola’s original cut. Tales about certain friends no longer with us. The pleasures of growing old (somebody has suggested that would be a short one, but maybe not). Why Heaven’s Gate is one of the best movies ever made. The particular pleasures and drawbacks of having to read eBooks. No doubt more to write about than time available.
But I’ll soldier on . . .
[More images from the book talk, enlargeable with a click. And do notice how attractive our library is!]
Because much of the memoir involved the community of Sawyerville and the Pickens family of Umbria Plantation, I inquired at the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of South Alabama ion Mobile whether they might be interested in a digital copy. I chose them because they already house a major collection of materials on the Pickens family and Umbria. They were pleased to accept it for that reason but also because other aspects of the memoir fell into areas in which they are specializing. I have agreed that after my death it can be made publicly available. It makes me especially happy that my modest work can join that collection because it just so happened that when I was about 15 years old I was at Umbria when those archives were removed from the attic by someone who preserved them.
So what next? Well, there’s this piece. I’ve also got essays started on the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the act of dreaming, and memories of my 2 friends Greg and Bill. I’m big on getting a topic and a paragraph or so and saving to work on later. I think I would like to revise my short story “Bottle Found on Chinkapin Hill” for possible publication, and I’d like to finish a short story about the ghost of an enslaved man who sits on the porch with and chats with a descendant of his enslavers. No, it’s not at all like the famous Dickens ghosts. I am toying with the idea of another story that would involve Mr. Frank, a wandering scissors-sharpener who in the late 1930s turned up at Umbria wishing to sharpen scissors for food and lived there for the next 7 years.
Probably no more novels and no more full-length works like White on Black. My next published work, if at all, will likely be a collection of miscellaneous essays. There’s so much more that I want to write about! Vietnam movies that are not really about Vietnam. The revised version of The Cotton Club, so much better than Francis Coppola’s original cut. Tales about certain friends no longer with us. The pleasures of growing old (somebody has suggested that would be a short one, but maybe not). Why Heaven’s Gate is one of the best movies ever made. The particular pleasures and drawbacks of having to read eBooks. No doubt more to write about than time available.
But I’ll soldier on . . .
[More images from the book talk, enlargeable with a click. And do notice how attractive our library is!]
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