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740. In the Canebreak part 1

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The background for this story was told last week.

740. In the Canebrake part 1

It was a long, cold afternoon, with spits of snow that were slow melting. There wasn’t any green left in the grass; it was all the crackly brown of late fall. The year was 1838; the month was somewhere in that no-man’s land where October slides into November on a path slippery with sleet.

Titus’s mare was holding out, but he was treating her with extra care since she had lamed up a week earlier. Somewhere ahead of him the main body of the displaced Cherokees was moving westward, but he didn’t know how far behind them he was. He had been riding after rumors, picked up at wood cutters’ camps and isolated cabins since he left eastern Tennessee. Now he was tangled up in a canebrake, following a narrow, muddy trail that paralleled one of the many tributaries of the Tennessee River. It wouldn’t be long now until he reached the Ohio — he thought. He hadn’t been really sure of his location for days, and the low overcast sky didn’t help any.

He pulled up at a familiar churring sound, followed by a slithering in the leaves. Canebrake rattler, probably. Titus had lived around snakes all his life, but he had never gotten to like them. Even worse were cottonmouths. They didn’t even have the decency to warn a man before they struck.

It was getting on dark, and the fog was rising from the stagnant waters beyond the trail. He was two days hungry and there wasn’t a scrap of food in his saddlebags. Pretty soon his horse would not be able to find her way ahead, but there was no place big enough or dry enough to spread a blanket. The tall canes around him seemed to close in as the light failed.

He could smell the swamp. He thought of waterhorses and the sluagh, and all the other fairy creatures his Scottish mother had told him about. Those weren’t comfortable thoughts for a night this dark and cold, on a trail this uncertain, at the approach of All Hallow’s Eve.

Something erupted from the brush at his side and hurled itself scrawking into the air. An egret probably, or maybe a heron, but when he saw it for a moment silhouetted against the moon, it became a boobrie, come all the way from the lochs of the highlands to haunt the Scottish half of his soul.

Then he saw the light, faint, almost luminescent in the distance. Perhaps the light of . . .

Titus took hold of his imagination and put it firmly away. What he needed to worry about tonight were not creatures designed to frighten children, but men with guns and knives, and the intent to do a traveller harm.

He eased forward; the sound of his horse’s hooves was swallowed up by the soft ground. There was a spot wide enough for a simple camp, and somebody had managed to find enough dry wood for a fire.

Then the mare stepped into a puddle. It was a small sound, but the figure by the fire vanished. First he was there and then he wasn’t, and he didn’t leave even a hint of movement in the canes.

Titus froze in place. His rifle was in a scabbard at his knee, but pulling it out now might cause the trouble he was trying to avoid. He hallooed the fire in a low voice, but got no answer.

Titus kicked his mare in the ribs and started forward, pausing at the edge of the firelight. He called out, “How about welcoming some company. I’ve been riding all day and this is the first wide spot in the trail I’ve seen in hours.”

Still no answer.

“I’m not going on in the dark. You might as well come out, unless you plan to stay squatting in the mud ’til morning.”

Still nothing, and a shiver ran up his spine. He wished he hadn’t been thinking of bogles. Then a voice out of the darkness called, “Titus?” It shook him; he had expected almost anything except someone who knew his name. “Is that you, Titus Young?” the soft voice repeated.

In answer, he kneed his horse and rode further into the light of the fire. The hidden voice said, “You scared hell out of me.”

“You didn’t do my heart any good either, Cotton.”

A man of middle age came out of the canebrake and Titus swung down to walk up to the fire. Even though they had known each other most of Titus’s life, they didn’t shake hands, because Cotton was a slave.

Or had been. The fact that he was alone in the dark, not far from the Ohio border suggested he had run away. That left a lot of questions. Titus had been told that the Cherokees were allowed to take their slaves with them, and Cotton had been with Bullfrog since he was a boy.

Cotton was the one who had taught Titus most of what he knew about hunting, fishing, and tracking, and just keeping alive in the hills and the swamps. That counted for a lot, but Bullfrog and Salali were the Cherokee couple who had adopted Titus when his parents died. Even if Chief Ross had told them to do it, and even if Bullfrog hadn’t paid much attention to him afterward, Titus still owed them both a debt of loyalty.

Titus asked, “Why are you here? What happened to Bullfrog and Salali?”

“I’m sorry to tell you, Titus,” the older man said. “I stayed with them as long as they were alive.”

“Go on.”

“Salali was sick all summer. By the time we left, she had no business traveling, but the soldiers didn’t give us any choice. She died two days along the trail.”

“And Bullfrog?”

“He was hurt bad inside when Salali died. He rode all day, he ate, he laid under his blanket at night, but I don’t think he ever slept. After about two weeks, he died too.

“The soldiers didn’t want to give us time to bury him, so I carried him out of camp in the middle of the night. Those soldiers weren’t much. It wasn’t hard to avoid them. I found a nice place under a pecan tree and buried him, same as I had buried Salali. When I finished, I stuck the shovel in the ground like a gravestone and started walking north. I was already out of the camp and there was no reason to go back.”

this story concludes next week

739. Half-breeds, again

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Half-breeds, again

I’m not into things that go bump in the night, but if there were ever a holiday that calls for the telling of stories, it would be All Hallows Eve. This was first posted during the Halloween season of 2019. It is a scene that was planned for a historical novel, but that novel was never written. Today I’ll tell you why the novel never came about, and show you a scene that did.

This was originally posted a decade ago, over four days. This year I will squeeze it into today, next week, and the week after. That will finish just before Halloween.

Of all the novels I’ve written in my head, but never on paper, Titus Young is the most complete. I know who my protagonist is, I know his antecedents, and I know his offspring. Titus Young is the middle book in three well plotted but mostly unwritten generational historical novels which carry members of his family from Pennsylvania to the Cherokee lands of Tennessee, and finally to Oklahoma.

I would write them all if it weren’t for money. Money? Yes; I could write five SF novels in the time it would take me to research and write one lengthy historical, so I can’t afford Titus Young or the other two. Simple but sad.

Titus Young himself was a half breed — half Scottish and half German, that is. I assume that the term half breed is offensive now; I certainly haven’t heard it in years. During my childhood it was in common use especially in Oklahoma, formerly known as Indian Territory.

Nevertheless, now that I’ve gotten your attention, I will switch to mixed race to avoid offending modern sensibilities.

Titus’s Scottish mother met his German-speaking Moravian father and they married in the unwritten novel Nativity. They moved from Pennsylvania to south-eastern Tennessee to be missionaries to the Cherokees. Moravians often did that. Titus was born there and the Youngs became respected for their compassionate work. When Titus’s parents died during an epidemic, John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokees, himself mixed race Scottish and Cherokee, arranged for Titus to be adopted by one of his relatives. Thus Scottish-German Titus became legally Cherokee, without a drop of Indian blood.

As a young man, Titus took a flatboat down the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers with a load of cargo for New Orleans. His boatmates were two white brothers. They sold their wares in New Orleans, but on their return up the Nachez Trace a disagreement led to a lifelong feud.

While in New Orleans, Titus met and courted a beautiful young Italian girl. Actually, she had an Italian father and a Natchez Indian mother, but she so hated her Indian heritage that she chose to pass as Italian. On a later trip to New Orleans, Titus met her again and they married. They returned to Tennessee where they opened a store.

Some years later, the events leading up to the Cherokee removal occurred. When the soldiers come to round up the Cherokees, Titus was away. His old enemies informed the soldiers that Titus and his wife were Cherokee.

Titus’s wife was half Indian, but no one knew that. She was believed to be Italian, and Titus was Scots-German, but Titus was an adopted Cherokee and she was married to him. That was enough for the soldiers. She was taken away with the rest of the tribe.

This irony of this left her with much soul-searching to do as she experienced the horrors of the Trail of Tears, and saw those horrors inflicted on her husband’s adopted people.

Titus returned, found himself a fugitive, found his enemies in possession of his business, wrought a bit of revenge, then fled. He headed west, following the path on which the soldiers had taken the Cherokees. While he was on this journey, he came across a runaway slave named Cotton, whom he knew from when he was a boy, and that scene formed 2019’s Halloween posts.

—<<>>—

In the 1830’s, America was full of half-breeds (to use the then contemporary term). Even more appear in this story than I’ve presented so far. A lot of them were passing for white, and making life hard for the half-breeds who weren’t passing. Gay people didn’t invent the idea of being in the closet. We’ve always had closets.

Over the course of  years, I have written about race in all it’s permutations. Those posts will be gathered together in a book called . . .

Your Redneck Granny has a Secret

. . . which is presently scheduled to be published early next year, some time between MLK Day and the end of Black History Month.

735. In the Middle

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I grew up in a firmly Republican household. Democrats were fools and maybe pinkos. (It was the fifties.) Black marchers in the deep South were just outside agitators from the North.

Watching people being firehosed for asking to be treated as humans convinced me that the last part was wrong. Just observing the world convinced me that the first part was wrong.

But it didn’t make me a Democrat. Just because X is wrong, that doesn’t mean Y is right.

My background does make me want to scream when some talking head says that were are “so polarized, more than we ever have been.” Really? Perhaps they should read a history book. America has always been polarized. We even fought a war over our polarization back in the 1860s.

When my parents hated Democrats, and Democrats probably hated my parents, they were just being the same kind of abrasive American we have always been.

So I have chosen to be neither an Elephant nor a Donkey, just a stubborn schmuck who listens to both sides.

Let me put that in the fewest possible words:

Every opinion has another set against it.
Learn only one opinion, and you think you know everything.
Learn the other and you find yourself right back to knowing nothing.

As Spock said to Kirk, “The answer probably lies somwhere in the middle.” But where in the middle? That’s the hard part, and it is up to you to figure it out.

That is, unless you want to stamp a Donkey or and Elephant on your forehead and stop thinking altogether.

733. American Peasants

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The semiquincentennial has passed. The fireworks are all over and the futile attempts to summarize 250 years in an hour are mostly over. 

America’s 250th birthday was too big an event to capture in a post, so I didn’t try. Instead, here is my American story — a thumbnail view of the last 150 years of my own family.

We were American entrepreneurs.

We were American peasants.

Both statements are true. The three generations I know well were part of capitalist America, with all its potential for success and failure. We (my grandfather, father, and I — until I escaped to college) were also farmers, which placed us at the mercy of the weather and of market conditions.

My father, if he were alive today, would be 100 years old.

My paternal grandfather, if he were alive today, would be 152.

My age? Never mind, but the three generations of us have seen a lot of history.

Between them, my paternal grandparents had twelve children. The first died in infancy, the last was stillborn. That isn’t a bad record for a time when most diseases were incurable. The eldest surviving children were mostly married and on their own by the time the youngest arrived.

My grandfather came to Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory. So did my grandmother. They married there in 1902; Oklahoma became a state in 1907.

Their first house was without plumbing or running water. That was typical. Like most people of that era, they were farmers. Thirty years later they survived the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, largely because they lived in the far north-eastern part of the state, on the edge of the Ozarks, which had less drought and fewer dust storms.

They lived their lives on a family farm. That is a phrase that brings a feeling of nostalgia to people who have never lived on one. It is actually an institution which survives on unpaid child labor.

When World War II began, their three youngest children — my father along with his older and younger brothers — were ripe for the draft. The eldest of the three volunteered, my father was drafted, but given a brief deferment to get in my grandfather’s crops for that year, and the youngest was drafted as soon as he was old enough.

They all returned alive. Their military stories are worth telling, but at another time.

Back from the war, my father married quickly. My parent’s first house was a converted chicken coop. Before the great expansion of suburban housing began, anything that had four walls and a roof was fair game for returning GIs. My father bought a milk truck and drove a route for the next several years, saving his money and buying dairy cows, which he housed on his brother’s farm.

Forget a city milk delivery cart, drawn by a faithful horse. Forget the stainless steel behemoths that you see on today’s roads. In those days, milk was transported in 10 gallon cans which were stored on the farm in a frigid water bath. Each milk can, with contents, weighed about a hundred pounds. They were picked up daily from each farm by milkmen who hoisted all of them manually, one by one, out of the cold tank, carried them outside to their refrigerated truck, hoisted them by hand to the high bed, then drove the the next farm. When the load was complete, they drove them to Tulsa and unloaded them, still by hand. It was a brutal business. 

After four years my father sold the truck and we all moved to a house (you would call it a shack) on my uncle’s farm. It had no plumbing, just an outhouse, and our water came from a milkman like my father had been.  He picked up milk from my father’s and uncle’s combined herd every day. When he unloaded his truck, he rinsed out one of the milk cans and filled it with city water. The next day it came back with the empties; we placed it on the counter in the kitchen. It provided 10 gallons a day for all uses.

No one paid for the water and no one paid the milkman for bringing it back from town. It was just a kindness among people during hard times.

After four years of living on my uncle’s farm and growing crops on rented land, we moved again, this time to our own place. It wasn’t much, and it was rented, but we worked together to fix it up. I did what I could; I was seven.

When I was eleven, I started working every day, twice a day, in the dairy barn. That continued until I was nineteen and went off to college. I also spent every day of summer driving a tractor, as well as many days in spring and fall. I once calculated that in winter I worked the farm about 35 hours a week, and in summer, closer to 50.

About the time I started working, we bought the farm from its owner, with a bank loan of course.

For about eight years, my father had my full, free labor. By the time I was fourteen I could drive a tractor as well as anyone and I competed with grown men to prove I could carry as many sacks of grain or fertilizer as they could. 

That’s the way boys grow up on a farm. Childhood? I didn’t have much of one, but I didn’t feel particularly cheated. I was a man at fifteen, and that was enough.

Still, I wouldn’t do it again for a billion dollars.

I left the farm in 1966 and, for reasons having nothing to do with this post, I only returned for brief visits.

The Great American Lie is that if you work hard enough, you will succeed. My father sought success and won it, to a degree. That is the entrepreneurial part of my family story.

Things didn’t go quite as well after I left, and then his life of immense labor finally caught up with him. His health failed. He could no longer do the work it takes to run a working farm, and there was not enough income to hire someone to take his place. Or mine. He could no longer pay the bank loan.

The bank took the farm.

Bill Gates and Elon Musk notwithstanding, that is the normal end of a business, or a farm. It is especially true when the children want out.

After a life of work and sacrifice, everything is lost when a man’s strength runs out — a peasant from the middle ages would have understood the situation perfectly.

732. Rebecca Wasson

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O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I
Gave all of our strength and love!

The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of America is nearly upon us. Great things have been done by great people, but I always find myself more interested in those who never made the news, nor the history books. Edgar Lee Master’s must have felt the same way, to judge by his book of poems Spoon River Anthology.

The people that spoke from that town’s cemetery, through Master’s pen, a century ago, have a lot to say to the rest of us. I am particularly moved by Rebecca Wasson, a hundred years old, remembering in her quiet room, and waiting for her husband’s return, which can only come at her very end.

Rebecca Wasson

Spring and Summer, Fall and Winter and Spring,
After each other drifting, past my window drifting
And I lay so many years watching them drift and counting
The years till a terror came in my heart at times,
With the feeling that I had become eternal; at last
My hundredth year was reached! And still I lay
Hearing the tick of the clock, and the low of cattle
And the scream of a jay flying through falling leaves!
Day after day alone in a room of the house
Of a daughter-in-law stricken with age and gray.
And by night, or looking out of the window by day
My thought ran back, it seemed, through infinite time
To North Carolina and all my girlhood days,
And John, my John, away to the war with the British,
And all the children, the deaths, and all the sorrows.
And that stretch of years like a prairie in Illinois
Through which great figures passed like hurrying horsemen,
Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Webster, Clay.
O beautiful young republic for whom my John and I
Gave all of our strength and love!
And O my John!
Why, when I lay so helpless in bed for years,
Praying for you to come, was your coming delayed?
Seeing that with a cry of rapture, like that I uttered
When you found me in old Virginia after the war,
I cried when I beheld you there by the bed,
As the sun stood low in the west growing smaller and fainter
In the light of your face!

728. Wildlife in the Land of Fire

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Today is Wednesday, my regular posting day, June 3, 2026. Scheduled in eight hours was 728. Covers, promised last week.

Something timely has come up to shove it and the next few posts down the pipeline by a week. Two things actually, one benign and fun, the other a bit jarring.

I live in the foothills of the Sierras, at about the thousand foot elevation. It is the level that they call the heat zone. I once heard another resident say that where we live, even the rattlesnakes carry canteens. We moved here decades ago to get out of the crowded central valley.

It rains about twelve inches during the winter. Everything is green and lush while the Eastern states are under snow, but from May until October there is no rain. Not a drop. The grasses go brown-golden and crackle in the sun, like tinder.

We came here for the space and the wildlife. Buzzards circle every day. They are quite beautiful, since their odd red heads are hidden by altitude. Occasionally there are bald eagles circling with them, and often red tail hawks, crows, and geese.

On the ground, there are wild turkeys. A few years ago a flock came frequently to our place, to loll beneath the shade trees in the heat of summer. One year an injured adult stayed on our property all summer, recuperating, then disappeared in the fall.

Recently, turkeys have been scarce at our place, but a few days ago a new flock, three adults and about a dozen babies, started coming through. We’ve missed having a personal flock of turkeys.

That is the benign and fun thing. The other is fire — not benign and not fun.

Every summer there are fires, often large, often close by, sometimes on our doorstep. Yesterday, it happened again, and once again we dodged the bullet.

About two in the afternoon, I heard aircraft flying low overhead, and the phone rang with an evacuation alert. We jumped into the car, to be ready for a quick retreat. From the end of the driveway we could see a black cloud of smoke on the next road over. We drove around the twisting roads to visually triangulate the center, pulling off from time to time to let fire crews go by.

It was a small fire by California standards, but just the kind that can spread devastation measured in square miles if allowed to grow. There was a small spotter plane circling high overhead, a helicopter shuttling back and forth to a nearby lake to drop hundreds of gallons of water onto the fire and a larger plane divebombing loads of fire retardant between the flames and nearby houses. The retardant plane is what you see in the photo above.

That’s where I live — full of wildlife, beautiful, dangerous, and often quite lively. When I finish this post, I’ll drive over to see the details. All the roads into the area were closed off by fire crews yesterday.

As nearly as I can tell from Google Maps, the fire was about a half mile away.

723. Humanity

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Humanity

When it becomes too lonely to be “I”,
All the “I”s become “we”.
That is the beginning of culture.

Being “we” creates “them”.
That is the beginning of war

There were no blacks until white men created them.
They were just people of a darker complexion
on another continent, going about their lives.

Then they were captured,
bound, transported, and reborn in another land.
Abused, held down, tormented, and therefore feared.

Made into a new people.

It didn’t matter that they came from the Bushveld or Karoo,
The Swahili Coast or the Congo, Kalahari or Natal . . .
White people mashed all the Africans into one lump
and called them n—–.

We don’t use that word any more,
but we use the same thinking.

There were no Indians until the whites arrived.
No Native Americans, either.

(Native Americans!
Named after an arrogant map maker,
instead of a mistake made by an Italian
working for the Spanish
who never did know where he was.)

Before European explorers came
There were Apache and Blackfeet, Cheyenne and Dakota,
Hopi and Kickapoo, Kiowa and Mi’kmaq,
Osage and Paiute, Quapaw and Chippewa.

Hundreds of little groups, at war with one another.
Each the center of their own universe,
until they became one people in the eyes of the Europeans.

But that’s not all.

There were no Whites in Europe, either.
They didn’t become Whites until they reached America.

In Europe they were French and Polish,
Italian and Greek,
Russian and Romanian,
English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish,
Gypsies and Danes.

They hated each other,
They fought with each other, they killed each other.
There was no unity in Europe either.

“Unity” came everywhere
when the little groups became bigger groups,
usually against their will.

It happens on our side,
It happens on their side, too.
And then we fight.

Do we have to wait for the flying saucers to land,
and give us a common enemy?

Will it take that to force humans
to become humanity?

717. Don’t Start at the Beginning, Part Two.

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Last week I said you should buy a copy of Flint, by Lous L’Amour, and have it in hand as I take you through the first five pages. I have left out more than I have provided, so you need the original. Don’t read this and think you have read L’Amour. Now let’s begin —

Flint, Chapter 1, Paragraph 1-3  =>  It is given to few people in this world to disappear twice but, as he had succeeded once, the man known as James T. Kettleman was about to make his second attempt.

If he did not succeed this time he would never know it, for he would be dead.

When a man has but a few months to live, he can, if he so wills, choose the manner of his going, and Kettleman had made such a choice. He was now on his way to a place of which he alone knew, and there he would die. He would die as he had lived — alone.

If that doesn’t grab you by the lapels, I don’t know what it would take.

Be sure to read the paragraphs I don’t provide. The ones I am giving you are just landmarks.

Paragraph 6 => There were five people in the car. The lights were dim, the passengers lay sprawled in uncomfortable sleep. The train rushed westward through the cold, clear night, carrying the man steadily toward his final destination.

First who he is, now where he is. Next we will get a glimpse of his love interest and his antagonist, both of who will appear later in the novel. Read on . . .

Paragraph 10-14 => The country outside was invisible. The windows had steamed over, and the train moved as if through an endless tunnel.     (I am trying to maintain the letter and spirit of the copyright laws, which allow short excerpts, so you will have to have a copy of Flint to read the longer sections.)

Now we know where he is going, and that the place is intimately familiar to him. If you are a fan of the genre, you also know that it is a place you want to spend the next few hours. In a different genre, it would be different place.

Paragraph 15-23 =>      Next in your copy, but too long to reproduce in this post, is the essential flashback that establishes Flint’s deep background. This gunfight is a classic of the genre, but it is told briefly since it exists to establish character and motivation. There will be other gunfights to bring the book to its necessary conclusion. This is a Western, after all.

In another genre, say a romance, this might be be an early or failed romance to set up THE ONE in the closing pages.

Paragraph 24 => In the instant of silence that followed the shooting they heard the click of a drawn-back gun hammer, and every head turned. “He was my friend,” the youngster said, and he started shooting.

This is a triple set-up. First it establishes Flint’s relationship to the man who is killed. This will be fleshed out later in the novel. It also shows Flint’s gun skills, and finally it sets-up an essential mistake of identity, when “Kettleman” is later thought to be the legendary hired killer Flint.

Paragraph 27-28 => The train whistled, the lonely sound trailing off across the wind-swept plains. Kettleman got out his pipe and lighted it. His two bags and haversack were at the back of the car. When he opened that door there would be a moment when the cold air might awaken the others, but he would be gone.

Up to a point he had planned every move, but once arrived at Flint’s old hideout there would be nothing to do but wait. Some time ago his doctor had told him he would not live a year, and most of that year had passed.

The next five paragraphs are skipped just to speed the process. Of course you will read them in that novel in your other hand.

Paragraph 33-34 => There had been more than fifteen hundred dollars in Flint’s pockets when he died on that rain soaked Kansas hillside, following the shooting at The Crossing. The boy who was to become James T. Kettleman had sixty dollars of his own, which he used to buy an outfit of store clothes in Kansas City.

He travelled to New York City and sold his four horses for an additional four hundred dollars. With this stake he started in business. It was more money than either Jay Gould or Russel Sage had started with.

Again, some paragraphs are skipped.

Paragraph 41 => In the fifteen years following that night at The Crossing he had built his small stake into many millions, making many enemies and no friends in the process. He married a wife who tried to have him killed, and had no children.

That last sentence is a masterpiece of brevity. It tells a little, but leaves volumes unsaid. It leaves us dying to know more about this woman. When she shows up more than half-way through the book, we will find that she has been worth waiting for.

Paragraph 43 => Thirty years earlier, when he was two years old, he had been picked from the brush near a burned wagon train, where he had been overlooked by raiding Comanches. There were no other survivors. Nothing remained to tell who he was, and those who found him had no interest in learning. During the next four years he was handed around from family to family and finally abandoned on a cold night in a one-street Western town.

Having established Flint as a youth and as a grown man, L’Amour finally tells us about the very early life which set him on his path.

Paragraph 47-49 => The dry grass bent before the wind, and seed pods rattled in the brush along the right of way.

James T. Kettleman was ended, and the man who had borne that name, making it feared and respected, stood now where he had stood so many years before, without a name. He was now a man without a past as he had been a boy without one.

“Good-by,” he said, but there was nobody to say the word to, and nothing to remember.

<< == >>

So now we are five pages into the novel. I dare you — or any reader — to stop now.

There is a lot to be learned in these few pages about grabbing your readers, whether you like Westerns or not. And if you didn’t get a copy of Flint to read, causing you to miss 90% of what the rest of us learned, aren’t you sorry now?

Of course you can still go get a copy. This post will still be here. Just type Syd Logsdon 716. Don’t Start at the Beginning, Part 2 into your browser.

716. Don’t Start at the Beginning, Part One.

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Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The Bible starts that way but you shouldn’t. When I say that, I am assuming that your are or want to be a writer.

The days of beginning at the beginning of a story passed a couple of centuries ago. Now we begin in medias res, which is Latin for in the middle of things. Then we fill in with flashbacks, as needed.

It’s quite an art, and it is often done badly.

In a recent Christmas movie, two young women were standing on stage at the Grand Ole Opry. One said, “I can’t believe I still get nervous before a live show.” The other replied, “You’re Suzie Smith, country western star, and I’m your manager. You’ve got this!”

Awkward, awkward, awkward.

You need to get your story going at full speed, then introduce the necessary background early so your reader or viewer doesn’t close the book or change the channel before being properly hooked. It’s a skill that takes time to master.

AI devours ten thousand reports in order to learn how to produce one report. Writers read a thousand novels before they are ready to write one, starting it in medias res. I am about to offer you a novel that should be on your list.

The novel is Flint, by Lous L’Amour. It doesn’t matter if you are a fan of westerns or not, this is business. You can learn from any genre, and this novel is a masterpiece at grabbing the reader by the lapels in the first sentence and never letting him escape.

In the first five pages, L’Amour introduces his character, paints a compelling picture of his surroundings, tells you that his character is dying (he isn’t, but he thinks he is), shows the girl who will later be his love interest, as well as the man who will be his future enemy, tells Flint’s origin story (it’s a good one), tells the story of his life so far, and introduces the woman (who happens to be his wife) who will bring him no end of misery.

But here is a twist. Before I tell more, I’m going to give you a homework assignment.

You can buy Flint in many new bookstores, in many used bookstores, or you can go to Amazon and find it new, used, as kindle, or as an audiobook. Get a copy and have it handy on March 11th. Then I will walk through the first five pages with you.

I can’t compress five novel pages into one of these posts, and it would probably be illegal anyway. Also, I’m not ChatGPT. If I am going to use another author’s novel, I will expect him (or his estate) to get at least a few pennies.

Of course, you may be reading this post years from now. The same rules apply. Get a copy of Flint and then go to the March 11, 2026 post.

Join me next week, same time, same place,
with a copy of Flint in your hand.

715. Pettus Bridge, a fable

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Once upon a time, there was a lovely young woman. Unfortunately, she was black, enslaved, and living in Alabama. The year was 1815.

Her owner was just back from fighting beside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. He was a hero.

His wife didn’t think so. She had been running the plantation all the time he was gone. She hadn’t enjoyed that, but she enjoyed having him home again even less. In bed, he was quick and crude, and after three weeks his wife moved into a different bedroom.

A week later, he found the lovely young black woman in the fields. He ordered her to take off her clothes and lie down on her back in the shade of a tree. Ten minutes later he was on his way again.

Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Nineteen years later, the hero’s son caught the daughter in the fields and did the same thing to her that his father had done to her mother. Nine months later, another lovely black girl-child was born, but now things had changed.

The plantation was failing. The hero’s son had become too fat to chase women, even slave women, and too drunk most of the time to miss the chase. The plantation was sold, the slaves were broken up and scattered. The girl-child stayed with her mother a few years, then was sold to a plantation south of Birmingham. When she turned seventeen, she was sold to a brothel.

When she was twenty-four, she gave birth to twins — but not identicals. One she named Flo; it had been her mother’s name. The other she named Cécile, since the father had been a Frenchman. She thought so, anyway.

The blood of Cécile’s white father, and grandfather, and great grandfather were strong in her makeup. He nose was small, her skin was pale, She would be a great addition to the brothel when she grew up. Flo had inherited the other side of the genetic lottery.

Both would remain slaves. Both were black, Cécile’s white looks notwithstanding, since the doctrine of that day was the one drop of blood was all it took to make you black.

Little Cécile was a favorite of all the men who came to the brothel. When her head was only up to their elbows, she had already learned how to lean against them, smile up at them, and laugh like she didn’t have a care. She earned coins that way and she kept them hidden. She listened to what they talked about as they waited their turn upstairs, and she remembered. She stored everything away in her finely tuned mind and she planned. She learned about Birmingham, but more importantly she learned about Memphis from a traveler who came often. Soon she knew all the street names, where blacks lived, and where they didn’t.

When she was fifteen, she ran away. Two months later, she was in Memphis. Her name was Celia, now. Celia White, because she had a sense of humor. Her name was White, and she was white, because she was intelligent enough to know that that was the only way to survive. Her husband never knew. Her children never knew.

Celia had eight children. Every time a child was born, she was in mortal fear that the child would have dark skin and kinky hair, but it never happened. When one of Celia’s grandsons had a black appearing child, he beat his wife for her infidelity, since the child clearly could not be his. Celia said nothing.

When Celia was 53, her husband moved to Selma, Alabama. Within a year most of the children and grandchildren had followed. Now Celia was only seventeen miles from the town that held the brothel where she had been born. She said nothing.

Celia’s mother was emancipated in 1865, but Celia never contacted her.

Celia had emancipated herself already. While the others traded slavery for Jim Crow, Celia had made herself white. Her emancipation was real, and she had no intention of jeopardizing it.

Celia live to be 71. They buried her in Selma, in a cemetery that black folks couldn’t use — but she did.

She had eight children, forty-seven grandchildren, and one hundred six great-grandchildren. Most of them remained in and around Selma, and many went into law enforcement.

In 1965, Celia would have been 116 if she had lived that long. She never saw her mother again after she ran away from the brothel. She never saw her twin, Flo, either. For most of Celia’s life, Flo was alive and in the area, having children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, just like Celia, but they never met again.

On March 7, 1965 near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Celia’s great-grandchildren, thinking they were white, brutally attacked Flo’s great-grandchildren who knew that they were black and always would be.

Behold, America, clubbing itself to death over the myth of race.